My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  I like pineapple because, at worst, you look a little jaundiced.

  Most cities have snow cones, or snowballs, or snoballs; for some reason shaved ice and poor spelling and grammar seem entwined. I do not write much about grammar here because one reader actually told me that, since I was now writing for educated, middle-class people, I should try not to sound like I fell off a hay wagon. But that is another story.

  In New Orleans, a city I lived in for just a few years but will never exorcise from my soul, there seems to be a steady supply: There is a fine snowball stand on Plum Street, not far from Loyola and Tulane. But the proverbial granddaddy of them all, Hansen’s Sno-Bliz, still leans on Tchoupitoulas Street.

  Hansen’s, at the corner of Bordeaux Street, is thought to be the oldest in the country. The story goes that, in 1939, Ernest Hansen saw a man shaving ice from a cart and thought he could do it cleaner and better. He invented a machine that shaved fluffy ice, his wife devised the sweet syrups, and they sold snowballs under a chinaberry tree.

  Katrina closed the long-standing location on Tchoupitoulas Street, and the Hansens (both in their nineties at the time) died soon after. But as New Orleans emerged, their granddaughter reopened it with the same methods, the same recipes. People who say change is good are ignorant of a great root beer snow cone.

  I am glad such places survive, for I doubt seriously if I will get through this life without a few more bad days. I can’t even get through McIntosh.

  THE IMPOSSIBLE TURKEY

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: November 2011

  I am going to write a letter to the editor of this magazine. I am going to type with ill intent, use all the wicked prepositions and strident punctuation I know, and give these people a piece of my mind. If gas were not $19 a gallon, I’d drive to corporate headquarters and get ugly. I mean it—somebody hold me back.

  I would not be this upset on my own behalf. But these people have hurt my mama’s feelings. And not just this year. This has been going on for decades, right about this time every holiday season.

  It has to do with turkeys. My people cook the best turkey in the whole turkey-eating world. “It’s tender, and it tastes good,” said my mama, who, with my Aunt Jo and Uncle John, have cooked 99% of the turkeys I have consumed. That should be enough. It is enough.

  I start to think about it around this time of year, every year. I start to visualize it. For about four decades, they used the same pan, the one Aunt Jo won in a raffle at Coleman’s Service Station in Jacksonville, Alabama. The bird, usually furnished by someone’s employer in lieu of an actual cash bonus during the holidays, came from the oven half submerged in butter and juices, and cooked—because we country people are terrified of half-done poultry—through and through. And then cooked maybe a few minutes longer, just to be sure. That bird naturally tended to fall apart, but since it fell into butter, no one really cared.

  I never even thought about what they looked like. To me, to us, they were beautiful. Then, it happened. Two years ago, Mama stood looking at another thoroughly cooked, wonderfully seasoned, heavenly aromatic bird, and sighed. “Well,” she said, “it don’t look like the ones on the magazine.” She meant the almost annual spread of an immaculate turkey in Southern Living.

  Those turkeys were, to be honest, things of beauty. They were luscious, plump, and cosmetically perfect. They were not just browned, they were golden brown. The skin was unbroken, wing to wing, leg to leg, gizzard to...well, where they hide the giblets. Sometimes, they even wore little white turkey booties on the end of drumsticks. (I am sure those things have a name, but danged if I know what it is, and I wouldn’t admit it if I did.)

  It was as if the turkey was actually posing, posing on an impeccable tabletop, with real cranberries sprinkled around. I told my mama her turkey was beautiful, because it was, and always will be. I told her not to give those tarted-up show turkeys another thought.

  Then, we feasted. There was cornbread dressing, the best I have ever had—my Aunt Jo always says she ruined it with this mistake or that mistake, but it is always perfect, dense, the kind of thing you can cut a slice from at one o’clock in the morning two days later and eat cold, all by itself. There were the best mashed potatoes in the universe, and pinto beans, seasoned with big chunks of ham. There were hot biscuits and cabbage and carrot slaw—because country people do not celebrate anything worth celebrating without slaw—and cranberry sauce, the kind that makes a sucking sound as it slides out of the can. (We do not abide any cranberry sauce that does not make a noise.) There were green beans, pulled from the garden and canned by my mama months before, and my favorite thing of all, a kind of creamed onion, cooked slowly in an iron skillet in bacon grease, softened by adding water. And, in case we were a tad short of carbohydrates, there was a big pot of macaroni and cheese.

  My Uncle John said grace, with the dignity of ages. My mother’s beautiful turkey always falls off the bone. I eat a leg, and then a wing, unless my shirt buttons start to pop off. It will be that way this year. It will be that way forever, because it has to be.

  Now forgive me. I have a letter to write.

  HONOR THY MATRIARCH

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: June 2015

  Deviled eggs always make me want to cry.

  It happened again the other day, when my mother told me, “Look in the ’frigerator, hon, and see what we got,” and inside was a platter with about a hundred deviled eggs. I ate two standing up in the yellow glow of the open door, and then went where no one could see me, in case I made a fool of myself.

  It’s not that I cry over deviled eggs, themselves. They trigger a memory hard to live with, even after all this time. As my people would say, “some things just stand for things.”

  You will see when I am done.

  My grandmother, Ava, was our matriarch, but not in that solid, steel magnolia way you think about with Southern women. She suffered from mild dementia early, and in her old age suffered more. She required someone to watch over her.

  Yet every June, on her birthday, the whole clan gathered in her backyard to celebrate a life, to pay respect as she sat in her lawn chair in the shade of the hardwood trees. I can still see her, hair bound in a turban of some kind of manmade silk, pale blue eyes seeing nothing, everything, behind thick, yellowed glasses that had not been adjusted since Pearl Harbor. There was always a child on her knee. She could not, as she failed, be trusted to be by herself, but she could be trusted with a child.

  They honored her for what she had been, for the fact she lost a baby in the Great Depression from simple dehydration, in a time when poor people died from such things, but she saved seven others, saved them by doing without, herself. They honored her because she stuck by a husband who was a good man in almost every way, but drank, and the bottle took him down. And when he died she lost a little bit of her mind.

  They honored her for living through. They came in Vietnam-era Chevrolets and work trucks that rattled with logging chains and, in a few, rusted beer cans that had drowned sorrows they could no longer recall. This was a celebration, so grown-ups came in church clothes, though it was Alabama in summer so the men did leave their shirttails out. They came bearing fried chicken cooked in iron skillets and potato salad that did not come from a plastic tub. The Georgia people, as our kin across the state line were called, brought cases of Double Cola, which we considered exotic since you could not get them west of Carrollton. And three or four of the best cooks on this earth brought deviled eggs, speckled with black pepper or cayenne. It was the only time we had them, and so they always make me, as foolish as it is, and as I am, a little sad.

  It is not just that I miss her. She has been gone for decades now. It is the fact that, as she failed, I rarely went to see her. I lived from a duffel bag, always moving. I chased selfish things, chased prizes that, now, shine no more than the folded-up pieces of Juicy Fruit wrapper that the old woman used to hide, like jewels, in her room.

  Things stand for things.


  REQUIEM FOR A FISH SANDWICH

  Garden & Gun, August/September 2014

  I love fishing stories, which some people equate with lies. I do not believe this is always true. I think weird things happen when you step boldly off firmer earth, and commence to float. This is my new favorite.

  Jimbo Meador, outdoorsman, writer, and other things, was fishing the Yucatán about forty years ago. Not far away, a tiny man, a Mayan he believes, was fishing with a hand line from a tiny boat. Suddenly, the tiny man and his tiny boat went shooting across the water. The tiny boat did not have a motor.

  He had hooked a Goliath grouper, and it was taking him for a ride.

  “Like The Old Man and the Sea,” said Meador’s friend Skip Jones, who grew up, like Meador, not far from Mobile Bay.

  The tiny man hung on, and on, and on.

  Finally, he had his prize, and got the weary fish, hundreds of pounds of it, back to the dock.

  The tiny man ran a rope through the grouper’s massive maw and gills. “Tied it to a post,” Meador said, like a horse.

  There was no electricity there, no ice. So they tied the live fish to the dock to swim, to keep, till they decided it was time to eat.

  Meador told it at lunchtime over fried chicken, since there was no grouper to be had. As the story hung in the air, as all good stories will, I was not thinking of hot weather in exotic places, or fish fights, or Hemingway.

  I pictured a five-gallon bucket of tartar sauce, and a hundred hamburger buns.

  Just how many sandwiches, I wondered, would that big ol’ boy have made?

  But it seems all the great grouper stories are old stories, now. The Goliath grouper, fished relentlessly, is a protected species, other types of big grouper have been sorely depleted, and the grouper sandwich seems, sometimes, more like a dream.

  I remember a recent birthday when all I wanted was a grouper sandwich. It was late summer, ninety-five degrees in the descending dusk. I had been waiting for two hours; you should not wait two hours for anything in this life except surgery, and at least then they have the decency to knock you out. As I waited, I sat on a hard bench in the humidity and watched children play in dingy sand and scream, which is to say they mostly just screamed. One little boy was flinging sand—I think it was mostly dirt—high in the air.

  Children are not wise enough not to look up, or close their mouths, when a dirt cloud falls.

  The restaurant had about the same seating capacity as Legion Field, one of those places on the Redneck Riviera where we, as a Southern people, have been conditioned across our lifetimes to sit and sweat into our aloe-vera-anointed sunburn for many, many hours for some fried and blackened seafood, all the while clutching one of those flasher-buzzy things in our slick palms, or anxiously waiting for our names to drift from a loudspeaker like Saint Peter calling us home. A restaurant in Destin, Florida, asks to keep your car keys, lest you run off with its priceless buzzer-flashy. I am not making this up.

  I recall that, down the bench, a young man with numerous eyebrow piercings and more tattoos than a harpooner from Moby-Dick was enthusiastically trying to suck the lips off a young woman with blue hair. I am pretty sure I sighed. I do not know why we submit to all this for a sandwich, even a grouper sandwich; I guess because we think that, when it comes, it will be hand delivered by a backstroking Weeki Wachee mermaid. But it never is.

  In such times, I often slink back into the past, into nostalgia, where the passing years have rubbed and buffed all the rough edges from things. I closed my eyes and thought of grouper sandwiches long ago, as the lovers slurped, and the children screamed.

  I will never forget my first. It was more than twenty years ago. I arrived in Clearwater, Florida, dead broke, except for rent money and some change in a pickle jar. I came to write for the Clearwater bureau of what was then the St. Petersburg Times, one of the great newspapers. I have always had a fascination with palm trees. The Gulf Coast seemed exotic, and still does; I don’t care how many snowbirds cross my path in black socks and Bermuda shorts. But by the time I paid for a concrete-block, one-bedroom apartment, I did not have money for furniture, or food. I lived three weeks on banana sandwiches, washing them down with cold water from plastic jugs my mother filled before I left home. Florida water, she knew, was not fit for drinking or even putting out a brush fire. I read a paperback copy of Lonesome Dove, twice, on a bare terrazzo floor, and listened to my stomach gurgle. After my first paycheck, reporters invited me to lunch for a grouper sandwich. The only fish sandwich I had ever had came in a sack with an action figure called a Hamburglar.

  My expectations were not high, but I was hungry.

  To this day, I do not know if it was the sandwich or the scenery. The sand of Clearwater Beach stretched wide and white to water the color of emeralds. Mermaids were everywhere. The place was called, I believe, Julie’s, one of many there known for their fish sandwiches, for grouper, and mahi. The grouper was grilled, dripping with cool, lemony tartar sauce and dressed with a thick slice of genuine, ripe, non-gassed tomato, an antidote for every pink, bad tomato I ever had. God ripened that tomato, just for me.

  The first bite was clean and not fishy, but the thing I remember most is the consistency, the flesh firm, thick, and meaty, with none of those gray streaks of nastiness that taste like fish gone bad. I would have them, over time, grilled, fried, and blackened, from almost every kind of grouper in the Gulf, Atlantic, and Caribbean. I remember whole days of my life better because of them. I loved them, me and everyone else, and I guess we loved them about to death.

  Most people, younger, have never had them the way they used to be. It was not, in fact, a fillet at all. It was a slab. “Three inches thick,” recalls Pete Blohme, a chef, owner of the landmark Panini Pete’s restaurant in Fairhope, Alabama. “I sure do miss ’em. Brings tears to my eyes, just thinking about ’em.”

  It did not look like fish, really, those sandwich fillets. There was no taper to the fillet, just an irregular, fat, square chunk, one of many fat, square chunks carved from something massive.

  “I was eight years old, the first time I saw one, and we had just moved to South Florida…Fort Lauderdale,” says Blohme, whose café au lait and beignets are a Saturday morning tradition in Baldwin County. His father had taken him to a seafood warehouse, a place where massive fish lay or hung, waiting to be cleaned and processed. Stone crab claws were piled on ice. But it was the grouper that fascinated him.

  “I saw grouper bigger than me… a hundred pounds, more. “They were huge.”

  “Beautiful,” he says.

  Then, he had his first taste.

  “It tasted like the ocean. A little salt, a little brine. It was like that smell,” that smell when you stand by the open water. “You take a bite, and go, ‘Aaahhhh…’ You knew where it came from.”

  Like the redfish, which became so symbolic in Louisiana cooking it was almost eaten into extinction, the grouper became shorthand for the beach, a vacation delicacy.

  “It was common,” Blohme says. “By the late 1970s, grouper was king.”

  They hung like great cows in the murky water, and would bite almost any bait, live or dead. In the 1980s, deep-sea fishing boats, on the Gulf and Atlantic sides, unloaded them like slabs of beef. By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, marine biologists warned that without careful management many kinds of grouper would virtually disappear. I know it makes me a hypocrite, since I did my part to eat them into oblivion.

  “I guess they fished all them big ol’ fat fish out,” Blohme says.

  Sometimes, I suspect the grouper inside the bun may be fooling me.

  The fillets are scrawny, and look like, well, catfish.

  “Sometimes, it’s that counterfeit grouper,” Blohme says.

  I was still a young man when I arrived in Miami the first time, almost a quarter century ago, to write about one of the most compelling places on earth. I have never liked mornings, but there was something about the morning light in Miami, something golden. I would get in
my ’69 Firebird convertible and rumble out to Key Biscayne, to a cool, dark bar at the Silver Sands motel. I would order a grouper sandwich for my 11:30 breakfast, and watch the European mermaids play in the calm, flat water. I remember the grouper inside the bun was good, fresh, real, and delicious, every time. It was Florida. I thought, in that cool dark, I had the best life a man could live, right then, right there. I know, I have buffed this memory. I know, nostalgia is a veil, a piece of colored glass. I know. But I had a fried grouper sandwich and onion rings for breakfast.

  Other people were staring at shredded wheat, and hoping to live forever. But I bet forever is a long time with shredded wheat.

  There are many kinds of grouper, most at one time either threatened or protected, in varying degrees of commercial appeal and distress. There are black, gag, red, yellowfin, yellow edge, red hind, rock hind, or speckled hind, and, of course, Goliath, easy to identify because they have been described as being the size of a Mini Cooper, and are prone to lurk under fish boats and eat hooked fish like Tic-Tacs. One tried to eat Cameron Diaz once, but that is another story.

  State and federal protections ebb and flow, ease and tighten, but people who grew up by the water say the grand days of grouper are over. Competing restaurants squabble—some even use DNA testing as proof—over who is serving real grouper. On the Alabama coast, it can be hard to find a grouper sandwich like the slabs of old, or one of any kind, though I did find one a few miles inland that tasted of cat food. Gulf Coast restaurants largely feature mahi, or use sutchi, triggerfish, or other fish as an alternative to grouper. In the Gulf, overfishing is not the grouper’s sole peril, since the Deepwater Horizon spill.

  Marine biologists have warned it may be years before the lingering impact of the disaster comes to light. For now, people here continue to celebrate the recovery, a return to normalcy. Sometimes, the past is not better. This part of our past may haunt us for a long, long time.