by Andrew Moore
If he plants again, Dale will hill the pawpaws higher. I spoke with an Ohio grower who has also suffered losses due to flood-prone sites, and he plans to dig swales and mounds in order to direct and capture water away from the surviving pawpaws. But for Dale to have gone from three hundred to a couple dozen trees is an incredible loss and, given the time it takes for pawpaws to reach mature fruiting age, a considerable investment of time and resources. I ask whether or not Dale plans to replant his orchard. “I’ve got to do one thing or another,” he says. “I got to change my listing on the website if I’m not going to.” And perhaps his email handle too.
Fruit typically begins ripening in Dale’s orchard around the tenth of August. But this summer has been exceptionally cool, and although it’s late August only one or two pawpaws have dropped. There does happen to be one waiting for us in the kitchen, however. It’s an Overleese, “one of my favorite flavors,” Dale says. Like he usually does when a visitor comes to taste pawpaws, he cuts it in half and eats the first spoonful. “I don’t want the first pawpaw that you eat not to be good,” he says. “Only thing that would make it better would be Dairy Queen vanilla. Pretty decent.” I’m given the green light. I take a bite, my first of the season. I hate to disagree with Dale in his own home, but I think it’s just fine on its own.
Earlier in the day I visited Old Decatur, admired its bungalows and live oaks, and drove into downtown. While sitting on a bench, eating a red pepper and onion burger (a local specialty), I noticed a sign for the Decatur Farmers Market, which happened to be today. I followed the signs to the railroad tracks where it’s held every Saturday and arrived at the tail end of the 2013 Watermelon Festival; three vendors remained.
Although Anna Hallmark was born and raised in northern Russia—“near the Arctic Circle”—she’s now an expert grower of heat-loving crops: Piled on her table were fresh golden figs, fig preserves, and star-and-moon heirloom watermelons. Anna had heard of pawpaws, read about them on the Internet, but never seen or grown one. I’d hoped to have pawpaws to share at all of my impromptu stops—a Johnny Appleseed–inspired dishing of pawpaws—but since I hadn’t found any ripe fruit in Kentucky, I had none to share with Anna. Instead I loaded up on fruit for myself.
Figs, like pawpaws, are delicate. Consider the following description from the California Rare Fruit Growers: “Figs must be allowed to ripen fully on the tree before they are picked. They will not ripen if picked when immature . . . Fresh figs do not keep well and can be stored in the refrigerator for only 2–3 days . . . Because of losses in transport and short shelf life, figs are a high-value fruit of limited demand.”6 Sound familiar? Yet despite these demands, figs represent a significant commercial crop. In a given year, the state of California alone produces more than thirty-eight thousand tons of figs, 90 percent of which are dried, cooked, or otherwise processed.7 So why should transportation and shelf life be any more of a barrier to pawpaws? As an industrial crop, pawpaws—which do not lend themselves to drying—could find a similar niche in the form of frozen pulp. A second model for figs is to sell them at local markets, as Anna Hallmark does in Decatur, Alabama. Pawpaw growers like Milton Parker and Derek Morris in North Carolina, Ilze Sillers in Kentucky, and Stanton Gill in Maryland are already doing the same with pawpaws—their fruit is sold at farmers markets, and in some cases local food co-ops and grocery stores. And then there is a third, less business-oriented model for pawpaws and figs: home consumption. Figs are grown and eaten, in the South and elsewhere, as a backyard fruit with no design on sales: They’re meant to be eaten, and eaten shortly after being picked, perhaps right under the tree. Or they’re cooked into a jam or cake, wrapped in prosciutto, placed on a cracker and eaten with cheese—however the individual likes it. And it’s not unlikely that from backyards, perhaps right under the tree, will always be the most common way Americans eat their pawpaws. But that, of course, still requires more people discovering that they can.
Although Dale Brooks spends a considerable amount of time describing pawpaws to his fellow Alabamians, pawpaws were once better known in the state. Indeed, they were once thought to remedy teething pain and even, by at least one individual, to cure gonorrhea. Published in 1958, Ray B. Brown’s collection of folklore and superstitions, Popular Beliefs and Practices from Alabama, contains two pawpaw-derived remedies. Both came from Lamar County, in northwest Alabama. The first was told to Brown by Mrs. Ora Jordan, a housewife from the town of Vernon: “For teething get nine papa seeds, string them and let the child wear them around the neck.” According to Brown’s notes, Mrs. Jordan had either used the remedy on her own child, or had been treated with it as a girl.
The second practice was recorded at a barbershop in Millport, where Brown collected a score of folk beliefs, attributed collectively to the “farmers and townspeople, mostly white . . . a cross section of Lamar County.” He was told, “If you will drink papaw-root [sic] tea, you will cure gonorrhea.”8 It is the only remedy given for the infection in the book, a collection of more than forty-three hundred practices and beliefs.
According to the USDA’s plant map, pawpaws are still present and vouched for in Lamar County. In fact, much of Alabama reports a wild or naturalized population of pawpaws. Whether the plant is still used medicinally, I cannot say.
There is much and diverse folklore associated with pawpaws. In 1946, Vance Randolph wrote that many Ozark farmers “say that it is a good idea to bury a bit of a cow’s afterbirth under a pawpaw tree, as this will cause her to bring forth female calves thereafter.”9 Also in the Ozarks, “The relatives of a murdered man sometimes throw pawpaw seeds into the grave, on top of the coffin. It is said that this ensures the murderer will be punished.”10 In eastern Kentucky, strings of knotted pawpaw bark tied to stumps were once thought to bring good luck.11 And at least one Kentucky ghost story involves pawpaws stolen from a graveyard. In east Tennessee, pawpaws were part of an herbal mix used to cure syphilis. The following text is quoted from Bill Henry’s 1981 profile of Alex Stewart of Hancock County, Tennessee:
Alex can make apple butter, molasses, lye soap, hero medicine, and good corn whiskey. He can card, spin, weave, or tie a broom. In his time he has rafted logs down the Clinch River, made and hunted with a cross-bow, gathered tanbark and tanned hides (including his kids’). He has dug wells, worked as a cook and a butcher, made musical instruments, and rived shingles. Alex has owned and operated three sawmills, invented the mussel box, an aid in finding Tennessee pearls, and with his foot-powered spring-pole lathe, he has turned out countless chairs, spinning wheels, and rolling pins.
Alex Stewart was a capable and prolific craftsman, self-reliant and hardworking. His “grandpap,” Boyd Stewart, emigrated to the United States from Ireland before the Civil War, and the family had lived at Newman’s Ridge ever since. Before long—among many arts—they learned to practice herbal medicine. And one such concoction, used to treat syphilis, included pawpaw root:
[Alex] believes the drugs now used to treat venereal disease merely arrest the condition; his medicine destroys the germ completely. For those who may want or need this medicine, the formula is: Poke root, Black root, Alum root, Paw paw root (get the fine ones which have small nodules or blisters on them), Rat’s bane (Pipsissewa), Black haw, Hemlock, Goldenseal, Bittersweet, Yellow root, Red dogwood bark, and Yellow dogwood bark. Combine these herbs (I don’t know the proper amounts) in three gallons of water. Steam, do not boil, until down to one gallon. The entire gallon must be taken to effect the cure.12
The Stewarts had been in the United States for three generations and had adapted to the region’s agriculture, manufactured the tools they needed and the instruments they wanted, and learned not only the names of the plants that surrounded them, but how to use them as medicine (the scope of Alex Stewart’s herbal remedies went beyond the recipe provided above). But I often wonder how many generations it takes to lose these skills, and the knowledge of these plants. How long did it take to forget
what to do with a pawpaw?
Leaving Decatur I drive through Muscle Shoals and into downtown Florence to see the Florence Indian Mound, at forty-three feet the largest of these ancient earthen structures along the Tennessee River. It’s a blip of green in an industrial zone. I sit on my rear bumper and eat a dinner that consists of a peanut butter sandwich with a side of Anna’s golden figs and fresh peaches. Although I’ve recently visited two pawpaw growers, I have little fruit. In addition to the one Dale and I ate, he was able to give me two more ripe ones, but I intend to share these with my river guides in the Delta.
I’ve long wanted to see the Natchez Trace, so I drive toward Tishomingo State Park, just over the border in Mississippi. In order to cover a lot of ground on this short trip, I’ve been driving until late into the night, and setting up my tent in the dark. So usually when I wake up I have little idea of what it looks like wherever I am. This morning, based on how my shoulder feels, I know the ground is rocky. I step out of the tent and it’s confirmed: sand and rocks. I’m at the southwest extremity of the Appalachian plateau. In 1832, Robert Baird wrote a guide to Mississippi for eastern emigrants. “As a whole, Mississippi possesses a great quantity of excellent lands,” he said. “It was covered with a vast forest of oak, hickory, magnolia, sweet gum, ash, maple, yellow poplar, cypress in the swampy alluvial Mississippi bottoms, pine, holley, &c. &c. with a great variety of underwood, grape vines, paw-paw, spice wood &c.”13 Thirty years later, a geological survey of Big Bluff Creek in southeast Mississippi reported a “small fruited variety of the Pawpaw, together with Dogwood,” in the undergrowth of longleaf pine forests.14 Presently, according to the USDA’s plant map, naturalized pawpaws are vouched for in Tishomingo County, as well as the dwarf pawpaw, Asimina parviflora. But I won’t find any during my travels in eastern Mississippi. The trees are somewhere, but, as the Appalachians roll into the Mississippi hill country, they’re evidently harder to find.
At nearby Bear Creek Mound, artifacts from paleo-Indians date back to 7000 BC. The park is named for Chickasaw chief Tishomingo. The Chickasaw, whose language belongs to the Muskogean family, likely called pawpaw orko, just as the Muscogee, or Creek, had.
For decades, Mississippi was considered frontier. The Natchez Trace—now a historic scenic route that extends from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee—began as a series of interconnected Native American trails. Not long after the Revolutionary War, American settlers began interloping into Mississippi, and the trace became a well-known and well-used gateway. Yet in the early 1800s, the region was still Choctaw Territory. The new settlers raised corn, sweet potatoes, field peas, and enough cotton to clothe themselves.15 But they also ate from the wild—as the Choctaw had and continued to do—including grapes, persimmons, chinquapin and hickory nuts, plums, pokeweed, and pawpaws.16
The Choctaw descended from the Hopewellian and Mississippian peoples who had built the region’s mounds as far back as seventeen hundred years ago. And they had eaten pawpaws for just as many years—except, of course, they had an entirely different name for the fruit: umbi.17 The word lives on, quietly, in the name of a creek in Holmes County, Mississippi: Bophumpa Creek, spelled Boghumpa on earlier maps. “The first element is from Choctaw bok, ‘creek,’ while the second element may be from Choctaw umpa, ‘rain’ or umbi, ‘paw-paw.’”18 With pawpaws growing so frequently along waterways, it wasn’t uncommon for those rivers and streams to be named for the trees. Another example exists in Georgia, where the Ulco-fau-hatchee translates from the Creek to “pawpaw thicket river.”19 As they pushed west, American settlers renamed rivers and streams, sometimes using Anglicized versions of the Native American words. These names survive, famously, as the Mississippi, Suwanee, Atchafalaya, and so on, and in less celebrated streams like Bophumpa Creek. Other times, settlers gave entirely new names to waterways. Yet the settlers continued to name these rivers for their features, as their predecessors had. Thus the many Paw Paw Creeks and Rivers throughout the eastern United States were inspired by the same umbi and ulco that were celebrated by the Choctaw and Creek centuries before. The languages may have differed, but the naming traditions were alike.
North of Tupelo, I leave the trace and drive several hours to Oxford, Mississippi. I want to see the town, including William Faulkner’s famed Rowan Oak. Although I’m playing tourist, I also wonder if Faulkner knew of pawpaws, and if they grew in Bailey’s Woods, the ninety-some-acre forest surrounding his home. I know that other American authors were familiar with the fruit. Robert Penn Warren was born and raised in Guthrie, Kentucky—just north of the Cumberland River near the Tennessee state line. In his novel Flood: A Romance of Our Time, a filmmaker visits the fictional town of Fiddlersburg. A couple—creations of the filmmaker—frequent the town for “nutting and pawpaw expeditions,” among other pastimes.20 Walt Whitman also wrote of them, “I cross the hummock-land or through pleasant openings or dense forests . . . I see the papaw-tree and the blossoming titi,”21 as did Ohioan Sherwood Anderson, in his memoir: “We went together into the corn fields . . . We followed the winding of Coon Creek. We were in a little valley between low wooded hills. Pawpaws grew there.”22 June Carter Cash wrote that her southwest Virginia childhood was a “world of pawpaws, chinka-pins, and huckleberries.”23 In Wilson Rawls’s coming-of-age novel Where the Red Fern Grows, he sets the scene of eastern Oklahoma: “Behind our house one could see miles and miles of the mighty Ozarks. In the spring the aromatic scent of wild flowers, redbuds, papaws and dogwoods, drifting on the wind currents, spread over the valley and around our home.”24 A 1954 children’s book, written and illustrated by Palmer Brown, was titled Beyond the Pawpaw Trees; and set (and published) in West Virginia was the children’s book Decker Deer: The Miracle of Paw Paw Island. There are countless other references to pawpaws in poems, memoirs, and works of fiction.
It’s a quiet Sunday morning when I arrive at Oxford. The crowds of returning students have yet to arrive at Ole Miss, and there’s just one other car parked at Rowan Oak. I walk under the alley of cedars. The only sound comes from my feet on the pebble walkway. I hike a trail into the woods and see hickory, sweet gum, oak, magnolia, many other trees and shrubs. It would be fine pawpaw habitat, but they are not here.
Later, I research Faulkner’s works. In the short story “Red Leaves,” a Chickasaw chief named Issetibbeha has died, and at his funeral, baked dog, succotash, yams cooked in ashes, and barbecue are served. According to local customs, Issetibbeha is to be buried with his most prized possessions, including the black slave who had been with him since boyhood. Not wanting to die, the slave flees to the woods. “He had run thirty miles then, up the creek bottom, before doubling back; lying in a pawpaw thicket he saw the pursuit for the first time.”25 After some time, the slave and his pursuers return to the funeral, his cruel fate accepted.
This is the only mention of pawpaws I have found in Faulkner’s works. According to the map he drew, “Red Leaves” took place in the Chickasaw region south of the Tallahatchie River, south of the fictional hunting camp of Yoknapatawpha County, inspired, no doubt, by his own camp.
Faulkner was not the first to imagine hiding out in a pawpaw thicket; in fact, there are many historical accounts of doing so. In the Ohio River Valley alone, there are numerous accounts of pawpaw shelters. In one story, a man was hunting south of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when he was pursued by Indians and jumped over a cliff. “He fell in a clump of pawpaw bushes and grape vines, which broke his fall and saved breaking his neck.”26 A few years prior, also near Point Pleasant, members of the Virginia militia hid their wounded in “an obscure place” following a skirmish and “substained [sic] them nine days upon paw paws.”27 According to a history by Charles Alexander McMurry, in 1788, when a group of settlers landed at the mouth of the Miami near present-day Cincinnati, “they ascended the steep bank and cleared away the underbrush in the midst of a pawpaw thicket, where the women and children sat down. They next placed sentinels at a sho
rt distance from the thicket, and having first united in a song of praise to Almighty God, upon their knees they offered thanks for the past and prayer for future protection.”28 In 1791, during a skirmish near Mingo Bottom, members of the Virginia militia were fired upon, and several killed. “The enemy were concealed in a ravine amidst a dense cluster of paw-paw bushes . . . The plan of the Indians was to permit the whites to advance in numbers along the line before firing upon them.”29 During the Civil War, two of Missouri’s enrolled militias were collectively known as the Paw Paw Militia. The militias earned the nickname because they comprised many Confederate sympathizers and hid out in the dense pawpaw thickets in order to avoid contact with Union troops—and then, come fall, subsisted on the pawpaw crop.
I leave the hill country and head for the Mississippi Delta. I’m spared the sweltering August weather that is typical—summer has been mild all across the United States, which is why Dale Brooks’s fruit was only beginning to ripen at a trickle. I don’t see any roadside pawpaw patches on US 61, the famous blues highway. In fact, there are few stretches of woods at all; fields of cotton, soy, and corn stretch to the horizon in a flat, wide-open landscape. The sky is big and when the sun sets below a whirl of clouds, they become a pile of pinks, blues, and whites.
Never having paddled the Mississippi, I thought it would be helpful to find local guides on the water. So when I saw the word pawpaw on a particular company’s website, I knew I’d found the right people. It wasn’t just a listing of the trees you might see on a river trip; rather, Quapaw Canoe Company’s website was filled with poetic descriptions of sections of the Mississippi: “Wild, a journey descending out of the Eastern Woodlands into the rich North American sub-tropical forest with scenes of Spanish Moss, Palmetto, Paw-paws, Yankopin, Fire Ants and Alligators!”30
