Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  I arrive in Clarksdale several hours after sundown. After dropping my things at the company’s headquarters, where I’m given lodging, I go for a walk. Just across the railroad tracks is Red’s Juke Joint. I find a seat and listen to slide guitar by a bluesman named for a fruit—Watermelon Slim. I take it as a good omen for tomorrow’s hunt.

  In the morning, I meet with Quapaw’s founder, John “Driftwood” Ruskey, and with Mark “River” Peoples, who will be my guide. We look over maps of the Mississippi and various water trails and pick the course that’s most likely to turn up pawpaws. John can’t guarantee I’ll find any along this stretch, but says it offers as good a chance as any, since pawpaws favor higher elevations. I want to correct him, but then remember that this isn’t the Appalachians; elevation is relative. In the Mississippi Delta the high ground is at most about three hundred feet above sea level. And in a flood ecosystem, these bluffs are like islands, the only well-drained soil where a pawpaw might survive. Foraging here will be different.

  Before we go out on the river, I want John and Mark to know what these pawpaws taste like. Maybe the flavor will give them an idea of why I’m going to such lengths—or it may just further confound them. I have three small pawpaws from Dale Brooks’s orchard to share. Ellis, or Brother E, walks in as I’m slicing. He is the Quapaw’s driver. None recall eating or seeing a pawpaw, but John remembers sitting on his mother’s piano bench as a boy in Colorado as she sang the old folk song. John was one of eight children, and in each verse she’d place a different child way down yonder. Brother E, a gardener himself with a plot of Sunflower riverfront in okra, corn, tomatoes, and more, is the next to try some. He grew up out in the country, and liked to hunt and fish. “Always on the creek,” he says, and thinks he might have seen them before. “I think my mother called them little small bananas.” Brother E is quiet, and deliberately tastes every morsel. “Let me hit it one more time, I’ma tell you what exactly it tastes like.” He takes another scoop. “It’s between a banana and an orange. Got a little mango in it,” he says, and chews, and thinks some more. “That’s a good taste.” He puts the spoon down, licks his fingers. After a moment he smiles. “I’m going to be all up and down that river looking for some pawpaw,” he laughs. “Me and the Quapaw, looking for pawpaw.”

  As we launch the boat, a red bat flutters about the edge of the water. Mark is the first to notice it, and takes it as a good omen, which brings the omen tally up to two. We paddle out of the Quapaw Chute and on toward Island 63. The river is wide, and the current strong, but it’s serene and welcoming too—we’re paddling the great American river like it’s no big deal. In less than an hour we arrive. The island is draped with long, sandy beaches. Under the bright-blue sky, this could be the Florida Keys. Low water levels expose terraced slopes formed by receding water, steps we use to enter the island. We tread through poison ivy, Virginia creeper, and various thorny bushes. We see the river’s ubiquitous cottonwoods, willows, patches of persimmon, and cottonmouths. Mark has an eye for snakes—he spots them before either of us approach them, or he lets me know after I’ve stepped over one. Like me with my eye for pawpaw, Mark has learned to see snakes and other critters. Frogs, the snakes’ dinner, hop about before our feet, as do crickets and beetles. We see a solitary swamp rose mallow in full bloom, and I am fooled time and again by persimmon leaves, wanting for them to be pawpaw. But after a few miles we turn back to our boat and continue paddling down the Mississippi.

  Mark Twain, like Daniel Boone and George Washington, is another iconic American figure whom pawpaw boosters like to say enjoyed pawpaws. He was certainly aware of them. Recollecting his youth, Twain wrote in his autobiography, “I know how the wild black-berries looked, and how they tasted, and the same with the paw-paws, the hazelnuts, and the persimmons.”31

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, of course, took place on this river, and on the same banks Mark and I are now exploring. Early on, Huck and Jim had eaten berries and “borrowed” a chicken. “Mornings before daylight I slipped into corn-fields and borrowed a watermelon, or a muskmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind,” Huck said. And if pawpaws had been in season, he and Jim would have eaten those too. But Twain knew better than to write that all of the river’s bounty was ripe at the same time. Huck and Jim picked crab apples and “p’simmons,” but dropped them because “crabapples ain’t ever good, and the p’simmons wouldn’t be ripe for two or three months yet.”32 Nor the pawpaws.

  While pawpaws are absent from his most famous work, the fruit does figure elsewhere in Twain’s writing and life. According to Albert Bigelow Paine’s biography, the buried treasure in Tom Sawyer was inspired by a real-life adventure of the young Samuel Clemens and friends. Once the site of the treasure was located, Twain’s boyhood friend Tom Blankenship—the inspiration for Tom Sawyer—“sat down under the shade of a pawpaw-bush and gave orders,” which amounted to digging all day long. There was no treasure to be found, but the next day Blankenship had a dream that the gold was under “the little pawpaw-tree” where he’d sat and slept most of the day away.33 And in another of Twain’s works, the short story “Which Was the Dream?,” two characters hail from the fictional town of Pawpaw Corners, Kentucky.

  During Twain’s lifetime, rural Americans were as familiar with pawpaws as ever. In his book Twain’s Feast: Searching for America’s Lost Foods in the Footsteps of Samuel Clemens, Andrew Beahrs writes, “In Twain’s day wild things were at the heart of American cooking; they took pride of place alongside garden tomatoes, apple cider, and fresh corn. But that would be true only until people turned their faces from the things they loved—until they had let them slip.”34

  A long paddle brings us past several islands whose sandy banks are colored a faint pink. One of the islands looks like a willow savanna—flat and sandy, a wide bluff above the Mississippi. It will make a perfect campsite. But before we set up camp, we continue our pawpaw hunt. Throughout the island are depressions made from the river’s rise and fall; it reminds me of a miniature ridge-and-valley landscape. In high water, the valleys are pools teeming with fish, snakes, turtles, and so on. Today, in the absence of water, the mud is dry and cracked. Baked alligator gar skeletons are caked in mud, and our feet sink an inch or two with each step. We see snakes, mulberry trees, cottonwood, even a wild squash in bloom, but no pawpaws.

  We reach the end of the island and turn back, hugging the west bank this time: mulberry, willow, cottonwoods. The willows are adapted to the river with its seasonal if not daily rise and fall. In high water, when sediment piles up against the tree’s trunk, burying its former collar, new adventitious roots can emerge. Unlike the willows, pawpaws would soon die if submerged in this much water—as they did in Dale Brooks’s flooded orchard. Indeed, pawpaw is often found growing along rivers, not in them.

  We make a small fire to ward off mosquitoes, and sit, watching the river go by. The sun sets over the fields of Arkansas. Barges pass with increasing regularity, to be filled at riverside grain elevators. Earlier, we saw trucks unload their soybeans, corn, and other products. And now in just a few minutes those crops will be carried on.

  Before we left Clarksdale, John Ruskey told me about the wild edibles Quapaw often finds on river trips, such as Juneberries and mulberries. Tonight our food is domestic: turkey sandwiches, watermelon, and a tropical mangosteen. But wild food was once an abundant source of activity on the Mississippi. Fishermen trolled the rivers and sold to local townspeople, and fruit and vegetable ships went up and down the Ohio and the Mississippi. Farther upriver, in 1845, Captain Bill Rollins piloted a boat down the Mississippi, headed for New Orleans. “Cairo [Illinois] was nothing then but a pawpaw thicket, and there was but one house there, a little shanty on stilts away back where you couldd’t [sic] see it from the river,” he recalled. “When a boat landed there the natives would swarm down and offer for sale pawpaws like apples and such things might be offered now.”35 There were many people in an
d on the river then, but Mark and I saw no other people today, just steel vessels, barges, and trucks.

  In the morning we head for Melwood Lake, the western oxbow of the river’s former course. We paddle up the chute to the entrance of the lake, here and there dodging airborne Asian carp. As we approach the north bank of the island, on the Arkansas side, I notice a greater diversity of trees, including sycamores, representing a higher canopy above the willow growth of the mucky bank. We land and tie to a leaning tree. I hike ahead of Mark. The bluff is high, a good sign that it could support pawpaws. This is the highest elevation we’ve encountered and I’m excited. I wrestle through poison ivy and prickly brambles again, and spot it from afar: what I’m hopeful is a thirty-foot pawpaw tree. There’s even a colony of what appear to be suckers beneath. I was fooled by wishful thinking yesterday, by persimmons and mulberries, so I run closer to be sure, not wanting to holler back to Mark just yet, crying wolf again. But as I approach it I’m sure: We have found our Mississippi pawpaws.

  I shake a few trees, hoping for a cascade of ripe fruit, but the mild summer means nearly all of it is still rock-hard. A few unripe ones fall, casualties of an aggressive hunt. Animals have picked through some of the ones we find, but discarded them; raccoons and opossums also prefer ripe fruit. As we pick through our few fallen fruits, two or three of the fig-sized ones, when squeezed, give just the tiniest bit. In a few days these will ripen. We’ll bring them home to Clarksdale for the Quapaw crew.

  We paddle seven miles back to our take-out point. The heat has returned to the delta. There are few other boats out—just a man dropping fishing nets on the other side of the river, and a barge—but Mark says that’s beginning to change. For several years now John has been working on the Rivergator: Paddler’s Guide to the Lower Mississippi River, a mile-by-mile description of the Lower Mississippi. It has information on where to camp, where good sandbars are located and at what time of year; when the Juneberries are ripe; when to tie up at Helena, Arkansas, for the King Biscuit Time Blues Festival; and maybe now a revised edition will include where to find pawpaws. We reach the boat ramp, and Brother E greets us at the landing. He walks down, singing, “Pickin’ up pawpaws, put ’em in a basket . . .”

  A short distance above Vicksburg, Mississippi is an island called Paw Paw. I forget how I first learned of its existence, but I immediately wondered if it was covered in wall-to-wall pawpaws, how long ago it was named, and by whom. Paul Hartfield, of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, has graciously offered to take me out in his boat to see the island. An invertebrate biologist, Hartfield has worked to save several Mississippi River species from extinction, including the interior least tern and the pallid sturgeon. He knows a thing or two about pawpaws as well.

  Compared with the Quapaw canoe, we’re traveling at light speed. We stop to check on a population of least terns nesting on a sandbank, and then quickly cruise to our destination. Paw Paw Island is as lush as any of the islands I’ve seen this trip—and its elevation is just right for the trees. As I suspected, there are a lot of them—tall solitary trees, and dozens of thick patches. Paul then takes me farther up the Paw Paw Chute, which is much narrower than the broad Mississippi, with willows, cottonwoods, and other hardwoods hanging over the water. “You could be in the jungles of Belize,” Paul says over the roar of the engine. We see a number of alligators on sandbars, diving underwater as we encroach on their comfort zones; a five-foot timber rattler glides on the water’s surface; herons and cranes launch from the shore.

  Paul wants to show me something unique. We hike up a small bluff, and there are a number of large pawpaw trees throughout the hilltop. But Paul is disappointed. Land managers have recently brush-hogged the property. “This was a dense, solid corridor of pawpaws,” he says. “I thought I was about to knock your socks off. Could have taken you in the woods down yonder and found this many.” Now and then landowners do consider pawpaw a weed tree, and as late as the 1980s various government agencies recommended eliminating the tree by any means at the manager’s disposal.36 Still, this pawpaw savanna is an impressive showing, and the trees they’ve left behind are quite large, several more than twenty feet tall. If they survive future brush hoggings, the cleared canopy might even give these pawpaw trees an advantage.

  We find some fruit, all of which is rock-hard. We wanted badly to find ripe fruit. I warn Paul that underripe fruit can make you sick and then proceed to break one open anyway. There’s a bit of soft white pulp in the center. We both taste it, careful not to consume too much, scraping the hard pulp like a cup of frozen gelato.

  The island, it turns out, has been known as Paw Paw Island since at least 1835. During and after the Civil War, Paw Paw Island held camps of freed slaves,37 and at least one Union soldier died of wounds here in 1863.38 That same year, the Union bought a gunboat, then stationed in St. Louis, which was renamed the Paw Paw. It’s unclear whether the ship was named for the island, for someone’s hometown (Paw Paw, Illinois, Michigan, or Kansas?), or for the fruit itself.

  A few weeks after our trip, Paul returned to this same spot along with John Ruskey and the Quapaw Canoes crew, to lead a wildlife expedition. He wrote to me in an email: “Paw paws were ripe on Paw Paw Island this weekend. Introduced about 50 people to the taste of this neat fruit! Thanks for getting me to pay attention . . . I am now a confirmed pawpaw nutcase.”

  I rejoin the trace just outside Natchez, where at the edge of the city I find an indoor farmers market. Inside, tables are piled high with watermelon, sun melon, okra, and tomatoes, and coolers stocked with cowpeas, field peas, butter beans, and more. While I’m browsing, a young woman in a tie-dyed T-shirt brings in several bags of muscadines. Ella Henderson, who is running the market today, remembers just one man who sold pawpaws back when the market was located downtown, but that was long ago. I eat one of her homemade sweet potato cakes and then drive through town.

  Natchez, Mississippi, is a beautiful city with a collection of Spanish, French, English, and American architecture; it’s situated on a bluff that overlooks the Mississippi. In Domestic Manners of the Americans, Frances Milton Trollope’s 1832 travelogue, she described the scene: “The town of Natchez is beautifully situated on one of those high spots. The contrast that its bright green hill forms with the dismal line of black forest that stretches on every side, the abundant growth of the paw-paw, palmetto, and orange, the copious variety of sweet-scented flowers that flourish here, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert.”39

  Though the view is impressive, I don’t spot any pawpaws, and in my travels in and around Natchez there appears to be a dearth of folks familiar with them. I’ve stopped frequently to ask about the fruit, but there have been no leads at various gas stations and restaurants, not even at the Tomato Place, a colorful produce-stand-meets-roadside-attraction featuring smoothies, fresh produce, a deli menu, even potted fruit trees for sale. I can imagine that in just a few years pawpaws could be sold here, in smoothies, or maybe even the trees themselves, but not yet. And maybe deeper in the country, near Bophumpa Creek, there’s an old woman or a young boy, eating pawpaws right now. But a stranger like myself would never know.

  Almost one hundred miles away on the other side of the river, I meet Jerry Dedon at Louisiana State University’s Ag Center. Though retired, he is busier than most, tending a large vegetable garden and a several-hundred-tree orchard, and managing several acres of a neighbor’s land—which largely consists of attempting to control the feral hog population. Although Jerry had heard the word pawpaw all his life, he’d never tasted one until coming here for a tasting hosted by the Southern Fruit Fellowship. “When I first tasted the pawpaw, I fell in love with it,” he says. “It was just like eating egg custard.”

  Jerry soon after ordered more than three hundred dollars’ worth of grafted pawpaws. The trees arrived bare-root, and each of them promptly died. So he planted seeds and started grafting his own. He continues to raise hundreds of seedlings each yea
r, donating them to his friend’s nursery in Walker, Louisiana. “I just want everybody to have a pawpaw tree, so I give them to him, and he sells to people who want them,” he says. “I used to give a lot of pawpaw trees away, but I find that people aren’t really as enthusiastic as I am about it. I’ve given many a pawpaw tree away and two years later, they say, ‘Oh, it died in the pot before I could plant it.’” Jerry is undestandably more selective now. He has sent seed to interested growers in nearly every state, and as far away as England and Hungary.

  While other amateur growers dabble in controlled crosses, looking for the next best cultivar, Jerry says, “My research is strictly off the tongue.” He supports others who are breeding for bigger fruit with few seeds. “But my objective?” he says. “If it’ll make it from the tree to the refrigerator, then I’m happy.”

  LSU, on the other hand, once partnered with Neal Peterson’s Pawpaw Regional Variety Trials (RVT), whereby Neal sent out seed and budwood for the experiment to learn how his advanced selections (among other cultivars) would fare in southern Louisiana. We’re now standing in the orchard, and even though it’s just nine in the morning, the recent cool weather is long gone and the Louisiana heat and sun are beating down on us. The condition of the orchard has worsened dramatically since Jerry’s first visit, and it clearly breaks his heart. Hurricanes, we will later learn, have done the most damage to the trees, which are unable to withstand harsh winds in an open orchard setting.