South Toward Home

by Julia Reed

  My father and his business partner Barthell Joseph remained staunch Handy defenders until its demise (I am betting that its seven-dollars-a-fifth price tag had a whole lot to do with their loyalty, but they also really liked it—the last present I got from Barthell before he died was two cases of half gallons, for which I was grateful). But my mother made the switch to Dewar’s years ago. I recently sampled the half gallon I keep stashed in Barthell’s memory, and I now understand why, though I owe the good Mr. Handy a lot for nurturing my love of a whiskey that saw me through many trying times and even more delightful ones.

  There was one other thing in the Percy essay that bugged me. He said he thought of Scotch drinkers “as upwardly mobile Americans, Houston and New Orleans businessmen who graduate from bourbon about the same time they shed seersucker for Lilly slacks.” Ouch. I know a lot of people in Houston and New Orleans, but most of them aren’t exactly businessmen in the strict sense of the term, so I asked my good friend Will Feltus, who does this sort of thing for a living, to tell me who exactly does drink Scotch. A bourbon drinker from Natchez, Will had just finished studying a Nielsen Scarborough 2016 survey of two hundred thousand booze consumers, and the first fact he delivered was a shocker: A whopping 61 percent of the respondents (American adults over eighteen) reported not drinking any distilled spirits in the last thirty days. My first thought was that we people in Mississippi did not endure (the admittedly not very hard) hardship of living in a dry state so that other people would not engage in their God-given right to drink freely, without any encumbrances or inhibitions. The second was that no wonder this country of ours is so messed up—how the hell else are you supposed to keep Percy’s noxious particles and the general trauma of everyday existence at bay without the odd nip?

  Of those who did imbibe, it turns out that Scotch drinkers are not “upwardly mobile” but more “upscale,” full stop—better educated and more likely to have an AmEx card. They are also way more male than female, tend toward the middle politically (bourbon drinkers are further to the right), and mostly live and drink in the mid-Atlantic and Pacific states. The rest of the info is as you would predict. Bourbon remains more popular in the South (especially Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas) than anywhere else, but not by all that wide a margin, maybe because all the women are drinking vodka. There was also the finding that 42 percent of Scotch drinkers will also drink bourbon but only 20 percent of bourbon drinkers will drink Scotch. This bears out what I’ve always liked to think: that we Scotch drinkers as a class are more open-minded, more diverse and willing in our appetites—equally at home listening to, say, Noel Coward’s “I Went to a Marvellous Party” or the Kentucky-born Loretta Lynn singing “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind).” It’s certainly true that these days I would not turn down a swig of Pappy or even a modest glass of straight-up Blanton’s, but I’ll remain ever true to the amber elixir that warms both my blood and my heart. And I’m in good company. When the young Winston Churchill covered the Second Boer War as a correspondent for the Morning Post, he took along roughly $4,000 worth of wine and spirits, including eighteen bottles of St.-Emilion and another eighteen of ten-year-old Scotch.

  Stone-Ground Killer

  Everybody knows that food—or, more to the point, its consumption—can kill you, especially if you happen to live in the South. Seven of the ten states with the nation’s highest adult obesity rates are below the Mason-Dixon Line, usually led, alas, by my own home state of Mississippi. (I swear, at this point our license plates should just sport the motto “First in fatness, last in literacy”.) Not surprisingly, most of those same states have the country’s highest premature death rates. Leaving aside the slightly more complicated issues of violent crime and poverty that also factor in, we are really adept at eating ourselves to death.

  It’s not always our fault. I covered Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign in 1996 and over a period of about six very long months, I listened to at least a hundred speeches in which he pledged to make the country safe from E. coli, the sinister bacterium that can lurk in raw vegetables and undercooked beef. In this post-9/11 era of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and God knows what else, that actually seems sort of sweet, but it’s a real deal. Despite the former president’s best efforts, thousands of people still get sick and some even die each year from E. coli. And then of course there are botulism and salmonella. In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which keeps track of this stuff, reported the largest botulism outbreak in forty years when twenty-five people were stricken at a church potluck in Ohio. The cause: a tub of homemade potato salad. Five years earlier, more than two dozen people came down with salmonella poisoning after dining on rattlesnake cakes at a restaurant called The Fort in Morrison, Colorado, but it seems to me they were asking for it.

  Scary as all that sounds, the subject at hand is not food contamination or even consumption; it is food, specifically grits, as deadly weapon. This past summer, for example, a Maryland woman was charged with second-degree assault for pouring hot grits on a man as he slept and then beating him with a baseball bat. To me, this raises the question of what exactly constitutes first-degree assault, but I digress. The incident was not the first time someone used grits to settle a score. Last year, a Florida man named Edward Holley was charged with attempted murder after dousing a man with grits, covering 30 percent of his body with second- and third-degree burns. Apparently a dispute had taken place the night before, so when Holley saw the victim on his front porch the next morning, he told police he simply grabbed the nearest weapon, “a pan of grease and grits” cooking on his stove.

  It turns out that grits attacks are something of an established trend. In Louisiana, especially, folks seem to always have a batch simmering at the ready. A year before the unrepentant Holley attacked his neighbor (he allegedly told police, “If you’re going to arrest me, then just arrest me now, ’cause next time I am going to kill him”), a New Orleans man was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery after he poured boiling grits on his wife and beat her with the pot for good measure. Three years before that, a woman in nearby Boutte was arrested for pouring what police described as a “huge pot” of hot grits on her boyfriend while he slept. In an especially ill-timed move, he’d made the mistake of telling her he wanted to break up before repairing to bed.

  To be fair, grits are not the only food or food-related weapon in the food pantry arsenal. When I first started spending time in Louisiana in the early 1990s, I heard tales of irate wives scalding their husbands with boiling red beans laced with lye. The citizens of Florida are apparently more partial to beef. In 2009, police arrested a Central Florida woman for beating her disabled boyfriend in the head with a raw rib-eye steak after he requested a dinner roll rather than the slice of bread she had served him. Just a few days earlier, in Port St. Lucie, a man was arrested for shoving a hamburger in his girlfriend’s face at a restaurant called Dick’s. Food can also be involved in slightly less direct but no less lethal ways. In Cleveland, Ohio, an overweight woman killed her boyfriend by sitting on him while he was facedown on the sofa.

  Still, you can’t beat grits for access, convenience, and hot and sticky effectiveness. The most famous grits attack, which occurred in 1974, involved the great soul singer Al Green. Green was brushing his teeth in his Memphis bathroom when a jealous female fan, whom he had unwisely invited to his house, poured a pot of boiling grits down his back, causing third-degree burns and months of hospitalization. Though Green likes to put distance between that harrowing incident and his becoming an ordained Baptist minister two years later, I can’t believe there’s no correlation. Either way, Green is still as soulful as ever and his mostly musical services at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis are not to be missed. The attack on the singer also proved inspirational to his colleagues. Usher made use of the grits incident in “Truth Hurts,” and in “Everything,” Method Man raps, “Trust me, I’m hot as they get, like Al Green getting hit by a pot of them grits.�
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  The proliferation of assaults by grits gives a whole new meaning to the term packing heat (not to mention white-hot), but there’s more than one irony here. First of all, the great majority of grits sold in America are made by Quaker Oats, which as early as 1877 registered as its trademark with the U.S. Patent Office “a figure of a man in ‘Quaker garb.’” Quakers, otherwise known as members of the Religious Society of Friends, are a famously nonviolent group—though it must be said that wielding some grits is one way to get around their refusal to bear arms. Also, it turns out that the actual consumption of grits is good for you. Not only are they usually gluten-free, but they also have fewer fat grams than oatmeal.

  It comes as no surprise that grits have been co-opted by those with violent intent. They’ve always been enormously versatile. The best cheese grits dish I ever made was the result of dumping leftover odds and ends from a cheese platter, including a creamy Cashel blue, into a simmering pot of them along with a generous pinch of cayenne. This was at the very late end of a raucous evening when everyone needed a bit of a blotter for the booze (another healthy and excellent use of grits). So with that in mind, and in an attempt to restore the reputation of the humble grit as something good for the body and the soul, I offer up this recipe for grits cakes. They’re terrific as a base for pretty much anything from duck étouffée and sautéed shrimp to a chunky tomato sauce, and they are a tasty replacement for English muffins in eggs Benedict or Sardou. The versions on the menu at the Manhattan restaurant Maysville come topped with a dab of bourbon mayonnaise and slivers of country ham and are so heavenly they might even tempt the understandably grits-shy Reverend Green.

  Grits Cakes

  MAKES ABOUT 10 SMALL CAKES

  Ingredients

  2 cups milk

  2 cups water

  1 tsp. salt

  2 tbsp. butter

  1 cup stone-ground grits

  ½ cup grated sharp cheddar

  ¼ cup Parmesan cheese

  Pinch cayenne pepper

  Vegetable or other flavorless oil

  Flour

  Preparation

  In a saucepan, bring the milk and water to a boil; add the salt and butter. Whisk in grits and reduce heat to a simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, until grits are done. (This should take at least 30 minutes, depending on the grits.) Remove from heat and stir in cheeses and cayenne.

  Oil a shallow 9-inch baking pan and pour in grits, spreading evenly with a spatula. (The grits should be about 1 inch thick, or a little less.) Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm. Cut in squares or triangles, or use a 2½- to 3-inch biscuit cutter to make rounds. Dredge lightly in flour.

  Pour ½ inch of oil into a large nonstick skillet set over medium-high heat. Add the grits cakes and fry until golden and crispy, about 2 or 3 minutes on each side.

  Drain on paper towels.

  Part Four

  The South in All Its Glory—Or Not

  The South by the Numbers

  In 2011, Parade magazine put out an issue with a cover story called “America by the Numbers: Fun Facts from the 50 States.” Once again, the South was shunned. We were glaringly absent from the top rankings in the Physical Activity, High School Graduation Rates, and Recent Dental Visits categories. None of our cities was voted best for online dating or bike culture; we are not the most vegetarian friendly nor do we eat the most fruits and veggies (Vermont, not surprisingly, took that honor). We don’t give the most to charity and we don’t get the most sun. Shockingly, we do not even have the most strip clubs, but Richmond did come in at number three among the most tattooed cities. The South was hardly mentioned in the rest of the article except for the Sleepiest States category (West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida ranked one, two, three, and five, respectively) and the Cosmetic Surgery category. But even that was weird. The South Atlantic states get the most buttock implants, while South Central states go for the most hair transplants.

  To recap: According to the portrait painted by Parade’s “Fun Facts,” we are a region of sleepy, tattooed, but slightly vain people who try to cover up our baldness and want bigger butts. Okay, they didn’t come out and say it quite that way, but I found myself wishing they had dug a little harder to come up with a few more fun facts for us. They could have said, for example, that we have the most state dogs and the most state horses. Everybody can claim a state flower and a state bird, but only twelve states have official horses and eleven have dogs, and ours are unquestionably the prettiest.

  In Louisiana, there’s the noble Catahoula leopard dog, for example, who not only can have gorgeous white-blue eyes but is also tough enough to catch and pen wild cattle and hogs. By contrast, the Massachusetts dog, the Boston terrier, has cute ears but is pretty much good for nothing. All our dogs do stuff. Texas’s beautiful and highly intelligent Blue Lacy, which originated in the state, can herd livestock, tree game, and run traplines, while South Carolina’s adorable Boykin spaniel is an excellent small hunting dog with the added benefit of not rocking the boat while on the water. Likewise, Virginia has the American foxhound, Maryland has the Chesapeake Bay retriever, North Carolina has the Plott hound, and if the state legislature would get off its collective ass and finally vote on the thing, Georgia would have the ever lovable and highly useful golden retriever. Finally, we have the really cool distinction of having the only two state bats in the country, the Virginia big-eared bat and Texas’s Mexican free-tailed bat.

  Now, those are the kinds of state stats I can get behind, but it must be said that a lot of our facts are not so fun—and certainly not by Parade’s wholesome standards. We have the most violent crime, the most guns, and the most shooting deaths. We have by far the lowest health rankings, which translates into the most heart attacks and cases of diabetes, the highest cholesterol, and a whole bunch of smokers (Kentucky smokes the most, with Mississippi not far behind). We have the least amount of binge drinking, which would be good news, except that there are no statistics that I could find for people who drink pretty much all the time.

  We are also the fattest people in America—Mississippi is the most obese state, followed by Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky. (Which begs the question: If we are already so damn hefty, what are we doing getting all those butt implants? Trying to keep up with the Joneses?) Not surprisingly, Vermonters, who chomp on all that healthy roughage, are among the skinniest, along with folks from Connecticut, Massachusetts, Hawaii, and Colorado.

  Parade got its fruit and vegetable consumption info from an outfit called America’s Health Rankings, but its research is sorely lacking in interesting facts like, say, who eats the most spaghetti and meatballs or who drinks the most Dr Pepper. I mean, I can make a pretty safe bet that we eat the most grits, the most barbecue, the most red beans and rice, the most boudin and andouille, the most perloos and pilaus, the most gumbo … I could go on. I tried really hard to find out who ate the most pork rinds, and I’m pretty sure we do, but we have some stiff competition from Ohio, where there is an annual festival and at least three producers. But what we do have are the only religious pork rinds.

  One of the many significant facts about us that Parade left out is that we go to church with way, way more frequency than anybody else. (Vermont is in the bottom ten on church attendance, so we’ll see how far all those leafy greens get them.) Anyway, an ingenious—or, more likely, just extremely pious—pork rind outfit in Tennessee has combined our love of the mighty rind with our love of the Lord. Bartlett-based Brimhall Foods makes a number of pork products, including Brim’s Pork Fatback Cracklin Strips, which are described as “fried-out pork with attached skin.” On their bags there is always a Bible verse, usually from John, so that it is possible to be munching on some pure pork while also being reassured that “God is light and in Him is not darkness at all.” The rinds from Ohio, let me just make clear, do not come with such added consolation.

  I have also never read of a case in Ohio—or anywhere else outside the South, for that matte
r—that involved bribery with pork rinds, which is another piece of evidence supporting my theory that we eat them more than anybody else. (If we didn’t like them so much they wouldn’t be successful bribe material. In fact, a lot of our more notable foodstuffs will do the trick—I once got out of a speeding ticket in Beulah, Mississippi, by bringing the justice of the peace a pecan pie from Sherman’s in Greenville.)

  Anyway, recently, in the town of Appalachia, Virginia, a small coal-mining town just miles from the Kentucky border, Mayor Ben Cooper and thirteen others were charged in a scheme that included buying votes with cigarettes, beer, and pork rinds. One of the cops booked with Cooper was also charged with pilfering prescription drugs and two guns from the evidence room, as well as recklessly handling a firearm when he used one of the guns to shoot himself in the leg at headquarters.

  Festive stories like these have got me thinking that if Parade made just a tiny shift in its attitude and general outlook, those Fun Facts cover stories could be a lot more entertaining—and still very informative. They would also be far more inclusive of our region. By using the Appalachia case alone, the magazine could have had a nice little package handily illustrating the South’s penchant for pork rinds, cigarettes, beer, and firearms, and if the pork rinds happened to be Brim’s, religion would have made the mix as well.

  Going Deep in Dixie

  In January 2012, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about a change in strategy at the St. Joe Company, the former timber and railroad outfit that’s one of Florida’s largest landowners. After the success of Seaside, the award-winning New Urbanist community founded in 1981 on the northwest Florida coast, St. Joe began working on its own master-planned developments, one of which, WaterColor, abuts Seaside and the other of which, WaterSound, is just down the road. Like pretty much everybody else in the luxury real estate business, St. Joe got slammed in the housing bust, and its new board of directors signaled to the SEC that it would be significantly reducing expenditures in the planned communities, which was the peg of the piece. Since I already knew that, I was about to turn the page when the last line of the story, written by a fellow named Robbie Whelan, caught my eye. The “area,” he wrote, “is often derided for its deep southern feel and muggy climate.”