by John T. Edge
The students had read Gandhi. They knew of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Boycott. The question was quite simple: why couldn’t they take a seat beside their fellow white citizens and order a cup of coffee, a slice of cake? “It was put up or shut up time,” McCain later recalled. “We were compelled to take an extra step to do something … and that ‘do something,’ as the world knows, turned out to be the sit-in movement … the tactic of well-mannered, well-dressed, courteous, polite kids just sitting there, well it just left people perplexed.”
On Tuesday the four students returned, accompanied by more than twenty others. On Wednesday there were nearly eighty students in attendance. By Thursday more than 100 students gathered in protest at the lunch counter, including a handful of whites. Within two weeks, students in eleven other cities would launch similar protests.
Nearly six months passed before the Greensboro sit-ins came to a close on the afternoon of July 25, when three black Woolworth’s employees were served at the previously segregated lunch counter. Though the Civil Rights Act of 1964, with its provision for nondiscriminatory practices in public accommodation, was still nearly three years away, the initial blow had been dealt, the first chink in the armor of restaurant segregation exposed. One year later, the New York Times would declare that the Greensboro sit-ins were the spark that, combined with “stand-ins at theaters, kneel-ins at churches and swim-ins at beaches,” defined the “proportions of a national movement.”
Today the Greensboro Woolworth is closed, the lunch counter enrobed in dust. Though a small section of the actual counter and four stools has been acquired by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the store remains almost wholly intact. On a recent visit, as my heels clacked on the marble floors and my eyes swept wide to take in the enormous length of the fabled lunch counter, I talked with Hurley Derrickson, an official with Sit-In Movement Incorporated. “We hope to have our International Civil Rights Center and Museum open here,” he told me. “One of my favorite features will be a Hall of Civil Rights Leaders similar to the Hall of Presidents at Disney World. I can imagine Gandhi introducing King, who introduces one of the Greensboro protesters. There will also be a lunch counter, of course, where you can order food similar to what the protesters ate. Or should I say you can order food similar to what they would have eaten?”
132 SOUTH ELM STREET / 336-274-9199
Harrels
**Garfield Cromartie** Liver Pudding Maker
For those in need of a definition, liver pudding is the peculiar Carolina puree made of pork parts and cornmeal (some use rice). The product varies from region to region, and though there are no hard-and-fast rules, it can be argued that the farther north you travel, the more cornmeal you will encounter, and the closer to the South Carolina coast, the more likely you are to find rice.
Liver pudding is first cousin to the scrapples of Virginia and the Eastern Seaboard, kissing cousin to souse and head cheese. It is, in the most indelicate of terms, a mixture of every part of the hog but the squeal, and North Carolinians of a certain vintage can’t get enough of the stuff. And legion are the North Carolinians who can’t get enough of the pudding that Garfield Cromartie has been stirring up since the 1930s.
Born in 1916, Cromartie is the grand old man of liver pudding makers. “I grew up watching other folks make it,” he tells me, his eyes glinting from thin slits set deep in a wizened black face. “We grew corn, tobacco, cotton, and cucumbers on the farm, working on shares, and I started traveling around to kill hogs for folks during the winter. I would show up, scald him, cut him up, and make the pudding, souse meat, and cracklins and then move on.”
* * *
“
Now I’m just piddling, making a bit for these people. Ain’t nothing to it.
”
* * *
Unlike some brands that give off a canned-cat-food smell at twenty paces, Cromartie’s liver pudding is subtle, sophisticated even, with a consistency not unlike paté. I tell him as much and he scoffs, “Now I’m just piddling, making a bit for these people. Ain’t nothing to it. I got my seasoning set in my head and that’s what I use, a little bit of salt, black pepper, red pepper, sage …”
When the Moore family opened a retail outlet for their Clear Run Farms back in 1994, Cromartie came on board to teach them the fine art of pudding making. “He’s trained me how to make it his way,” says Joan Moore,” but there are a few things he still won’t let me do. He’s got his own paddle for stirring the meat and his own ways. I follow him as best I can.”
HIGHWAY 421 AND 41 / 910-532-4470
Lexington
LEXINGTON’S BARBECUE FAMILY TREE
“You could eat at a white-owned barbecue restaurant,” Calvin Trillin once wrote. “But that’s kind of like going to a gentile internist. You’re not playing with the odds.”
Trillin almost got it right. In the Deep South, where black pitmasters reign, their abilities linked to those bleak times of slavery, his words ring true, for even if the barbecue joint is white-owned, you can be sure that in most cases, there has been a black hand on the pit shovel, a black arm flexing to heft a load of oak into the firebox.
But here in the Up South, where plantations were fewer and the slave population smaller, barbecue has always been different. Here the tradition of barbecue stands dates back as far as the early years of the last century, and the best restaurants of the modern day are still, for the most part, run by white men, heirs to a legacy of open-pit cookery done in the hollow back behind a courthouse when the county magistrate court was in session, or in a fallow field come corn-shucking day.
Among present-day proprietors of Lexington-style barbecue spots, most folks look to Sid Weaver when talk turns to the past, for he is believed to have been the first man to cook barbecue commercially hereabouts, when in 1919 he erected a tent at the corner of Center and Greensboro streets in downtown Lexington. At first he opened only when the Davidson County Court was in session, but in time he erected a more permanent structure of timbers and tin with a canvas top. Beneath his feet, he spread wood chips and sawdust to soak up the grease from the pits. His sister-in-law, Dell Yarborough, and wife, Vergie, stirred up the slaw and Worcestershire-spiked sauce.
By 1923 there was competition for the court day barbecue trade when Jesse Swicegood, a farmer from a nearby community, opened his own stand just across the way from Weaver’s. In his self-published book full of wonderful oral histories, Barbecue, Lexington Style, veteran pitman Johnny Stogner tells us that the two men’s “wood piles were adjacent to one another.” By 1938 Weaver retired, selling his business, which was by then located in a block building, to a gentleman named Alton Beck, though he continued to run a virtual barbecue stand from a pit in his backyard until his death in 1948. Swicegood also retired in 1938, selling his business to a native of Shelby, North Carolina, named Warner Stamey, who, further complicating matters, hired Weaver’s sister-in-law, Dell Yarborough, to make the slaw and sauce.
Today, there are more than twenty barbecue stands in the 17,000-person town of Lexington, and I would make a strong argument that, though the family tree may be tangled and the lineage unsure, you could trace every single one of them to those rickety tents first erected by Weaver and Swicegood so very long ago.
LEXINGTON BARBECUE
From the road, Lexington Barbecue looks like an oversized dairy barn with a six-chimney nuclear reactor tacked onto the backside. Morning, noon, and night, wisps of blue billow forth from those stacks, an infernal torrent of sweet hickory and oak smoke. The interior is as plain as mud. In a land of country-cute pig parlors festooned with gewgaws and whatnot, Wayne’s place is almost drab. The only decorations are a few paintings of old barns tacked to the pine-paneled walls.
The back end of the business where the fires burn day and night.
Locals still refer to this Piedmont institution by its original name, “Honey Monk’s,” in deference to proprietor Wayne Monk, who fi
rst fired up the pits back in 1962. You can usually find Wayne up front, scuttling back and forth between the kitchen and the counter, loading up the waitresses with paper trays piled high with sublime, coarsely chopped, smoked barbecue and sweetish slaw, tinted a ruddy hue by way of a good slug of vinegary barbecue sauce. Hushpuppies—crusty, creamy, and tasting of little more than corn and salt—come free for the asking.
I order a “brown” tray—chopped meat from the outside or “bark” of the shoulder, the smokiest stuff—polish it off in short order, and convince Wayne to take a few minutes to define for me what folks mean when they refer to Lexington-style barbecue.
“We use shoulders,” he says. “Further east you’ll see folks cooking whole hogs, but here it’s just the shoulder. We cook ours for around nine hours or so over oak and hickory coals. Slaw here is simple. Mine has vinegar, salt, pepper, sugar, and a few other things; I learned it from Mrs. Dell Yarborough, sister-in-law of Sid Weaver, the guy lots of folks think started it all. The sauce has a little tomato in it, while you wouldn’t be likely to see that in the eastern North Carolina. Oh, and hushpuppies, you gotta have hushpuppies. There’s not much else to say.”
Indeed he’s right. For those who ascribe to the less-is-more school of barbecue cookery, this is a pork palace of the highest order, and Wayne Monk is the crown prince of the pits.
10 HIGHWAY 29 & 70 SOUTH / 336-249-9814
HOW THE HUSHPUPPY JOINED THE PIG ON THE NORTH CAROLINA PLATE
While elsewhere in the South, hushpuppies—those little fried nubs of cornmeal batter—are thought of as a side dish best served with fried catfish or perch, shrimp or oysters, in North Carolina they are a fixture on barbecue restaurants’ menus. As a native of Georgia, where white bread and slaw, Brunswick stew, and maybe baked beans, are the traditional accompaniments, such a pairing left me scratching my head and wondering why.
Wayne Monk of Lexington Barbecue put me on the trail of the first man to marry smoked pork and fried cornmeal. “The story goes that Warner Stamey was the first man to start serving hushpuppies with barbecue around here,” he told me. “I worked for Stamey myself way back and I’ve always thought he was the first.”
In a later conversation with Johnny Stogner, author of Barbecue, Lexington Style, I refined my understanding. “Stamey was the greatest Lexington-style barbecue entrepreneur,” Stogner said. “He would travel around and talk to the old folks out in the country and see what they were up to, how they cooked. He picked up the hushpuppies from someplace down east, I’m sure of that. That was back in the early ‘50s. Now the hushpuppies had been popular in fish camps for a long time, but I’m pretty sure that by the time he brought them back up this way, there was a fellow already serving barbecue and hushpuppies down east, but I can’t recall his name. Mr. Stamey got around to a lot of places.”
Today, Stamey’s flagship restaurant in Greensboro is run by his son Keith and grandson Chip. Asked about how hushpuppies came to be on the same plate as barbecue, Keith said, “My dad was great friends with the fellow who ran a fish camp called the Friendly Road Inn here in Greensboro, and I’m pretty sure he picked up on it there. Back then they used a hand-cranked little device to make the hushpuppies, but now we use a donut machine with a little extension on the nozzle that cuts the hushpuppy donuts in half as they drop into the oil. I wouldn’t say my dad was the first, but I would say he was one of the first. Either way, I take after the old men of Lexington; I like my barbecue with bread.”
Lumberton
FULLER’S
The contributions of Native Americans to the Southern larder may be among the most overlooked aspects of Southern culinary history. Despite a tendency toward knee-jerk genuflection at the first mention of corn, modern Southerners are, for the most part, unaware of just what constitutes a traditional Native American meal. Perhaps that is because in a day when restaurants function as museums of home cooking there are precious few places where one can sample fry bread and venison, squash and succotash.
Sure, you can travel to the Tee Pee Restaurant on the banks of the Oconaluftee River in the Great Smoky Mountains, where on the first and third Thursdays of every month the restaurant offers “Indian Food Dinners,” derived from the Cherokee tradition, but the meal is better appreciated as an example of culinary voyeurism than immersion.
A better idea might be to light out for the town of Lumberton, epicenter of the land of the Lumbee Indians, a tribe with a storied history. Theirs is the largest tribe of Native Americans east of the Mississippi River, and the largest in the country not fully recognized by the federal government. Once known as the Croatan, the Lumbees are believed by some to have intermingled with English survivors of the Lost Colony in the 1580s and later with enslaved Africans. Though the town is chockablock with Lumbee-owned businesses, I know of no other restaurant that pretends to serve food of the kind savored in local homes.
As would befit a modern restaurant run by Native Americans, the daily buffet is a study in assimilation and adaptation featuring fatback and fried chicken, liver pudding, smoked pork ribs, and gleaming yellow strands of chicken and pastry. Collard greens and mashed rutabagas, steamed cabbage and green beans are also piled high. Come summer you can count on yellow squash, white corn, and fat butter beans. But the best thing on the buffet—indeed the single overtly Native American item served—is the fry bread: floppy disks of fried cornmeal that are just a tad greasy and pleasantly chewy.
I ask Karen Locklear, whose parents, Fuller and Delora, first opened the restaurant back in 1987, why there were so few dishes that I might identify as Native American. “This is what we eat at home,” she tells me. “You’re forgetting that what you might see as Southern, we see as Lumbee—things like squash and corn and greens. Our people have been here a long time. Our food is a reflection of that history, even our barbecue. We’ve been smoking meat forever.”
3201 NORTH ROBERTS AVENUE / 910-738-8694
Mt. Airy
SNAPPY LUNCH
Like a thousand other small town cafés scattered about the South, Charles Dowell’s Snappy Lunch is a simple place—dowdy even—outfitted with a couple rows of tight plywood booths and a trio of orange swivel stools facing a short counter. From a perch at the front window, Dowell, attired in his trademark white shirt, white apron, and white paper hat, can tend to the grill and watch the comings and goings of his neighbors as they walk along Mt. Airy’s Main Street. Next door, a couple of tourists on a pilgrimage to the hometown of TV icon Andy Griffith peer into the window of Floyd’s City Barber Shop, in hopes of catching a glimpse of Goober or Gomer or maybe even Otis.
“This place opened in 1923,” Dowell tells me. “Two brothers-in-law named George Roberson and Ben Edwards were the ones. I came along in 1943. Back then we used to have a beer joint on either side of us and our customers were almost all men. About all we sold were hot dogs, hamburgers, and bread burgers. No breakfast, no nothing. By ’51 I bought half of the place, by ’60 I had the other half. I guess that you could say that over the course of the past forty years, I’ve made this place my own.”
Inside, you’ll find the mythic Tenderator.
Truth be told, not only has Dowell made this place his own, but after years of grill work he has claimed his rightful rank in the Southern culinary firmament, alongside fabled fry cooks like Deacon Burton of Atlanta and Hap Townes of Nashville. His accomplishment? Nothing less than the reinvention of the pork chop sandwich, a longtime favorite of Southern trenchermen accustomed to wolfing down a thin, bone-in chop slapped between two slices of thin, cottony white bread.
Dowell starts with boneless loins of pork, feeding them through a device called a Tenderator, which, with its rotating spines, looks like a miniature version of an old cotton gin. Slide a slice of tenderloin in the top and it slips out the bottom perfo-rated and tenderated, the soft pink pork flesh billowing open like an accordion. “I found the thing in a restaurant supply house back around 1988,” he tells me, proving that the best Southern foods do not
always claim the longest lineage. “At first I didn’t buy it because I already had a cuber. In fact I went back three times before I took it home. Now I couldn’t do without it.”
Next comes a quick dip in a batter of flour, milk, water, salt, and sugar, and a baptism in a shallow pool of hot oil, where the thin beauties burble and spit until they reach a crusty brown. Served on a bun piled high with a slice of tomato, a smear of mustard, chopped onions, slaw, and chili, the pork chop flops out the sides like a pair of elephant ears.
Dowell plops a sandwich down in front of me and I take a bite. It’s among the best things I’ve ever eaten—and among the sloppiest. Dowell looks at me, sizes up the contentment in my face and says, “Wouldn’t you think that by now somebody else would have caught on to how you do this? I don’t want McDonald’s running me out of business,” he says modestly, “but this isn’t all that complicated.”
125 NORTH MAIN STREET / 336-786-4931
Raleigh
FARMER’S MARKET RESTAURANT
Come fall, the stalls at this state-run market are filled to overflowing with the bounty of North Carolina farms: bins of Beauregard sweet potatoes, flats of starburst squash, bushels of hen-peck mustard greens, and baskets of blue-top turnip greens. In the spring, farmers display pyramids of lustrous heirloom tomatoes with curious appellations like Crimson Cluster and Aunt Ruby’s German Green, White Queen, and Brandywine. By summer, there are watermelons by the score: yellow melons and rattlesnake melons, Crimson Sweets and Jubilees.
And no matter the season, you can rest assured that the on-premises restaurant—the one set in that unfortunate octagonal concrete guardhouse of a building by the front gate—will be serving the best of what’s fresh and local. On the day I visit, the cavernous dining room is packed. The few people not tucking into plates of chicken and pastry (known elsewhere as chicken and dumplings), or fat salmon croquettes flecked with bell pepper, are studying the barely legible mimeographed menu, debating the relative virtues of pork backbone with rice and fried chicken, navy beans and steamed cabbage, collard greens and stewed squash.
