Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  I drive to Mountain View, home of the Ozark Folk Center. I stop for lunch at a local restaurant, and just outside my window is a lone, four-foot pawpaw tree. It has broad, long, beautiful leaves. Lunch is ham and beans, corn bread, black-eyed pea salad, and fried okra. I brought a pawpaw in with me, and spread it on the corn bread. Although my pawpaw is not dried, as the historical citations state, I imagine it tastes similar to what the Iroquois, among others, would have eaten.

  At the Village Apothecary, Linda Ottum makes lye soap. “I grew up in northeast Arkansas, the flatlands, and there were pawpaw trees there as well,” she tells me. “So it’s not just an Ozark thing.” I ask, but she doesn’t know of any local trees where I might find some fruit. “You know, people, if they find their little mushroom patch, they will share mushrooms with you, but they’re not going to tell you where they got them,” she says. “And it’s much the same with pawpaw. And in fact the only time that I remember having them, my dad, he’d been out hunting and he brought one home.” Evidently Ottum’s father was aligned with Pfister’s second category of Ozark eaters: those of wild game and wild fruit.

  Pawpaws and hunting often go hand in hand. For centuries, nocturnal hunters have sought out pawpaw and persimmon trees because raccoons, opossum, and other animals can be found here eating their fill of the fruits. Author Jesse Stuart wrote, “I knew where the pawpaw patches were. I went to those places for opossums.”54 In 1883, an article titled “An Arkansas ’Possum Hunt” stated, “We started up the creek bottom into the paw-paw and persimmon thickets, and soon the dogs opened.”55 And a 1908 article declared “the Piedmont Region the natural paradise of the nocturnal huntsman” thanks to the spring and summer fruits, including “the toothsome paw-paw,” adding that the “fat and greasy opossum is the prime object of the night-time hunter.”56 But even in daylight, the two can be paired. As a hunter in southwest Virginia once told me, while squirrel hunting in a massive pawpaw patch, “The squirrels would come in to eat pawpaws, and I’d eat pawpaw, and get my limit of squirrels, and sit there and eat pawpaws all day.”

  I continue to explore the village and enter Doris Panicci’s leathercraft shop. From behind the counter, Doris sees what I’m carrying and cries out: “Pawpaw!” I’m encouraged and ask what she knows. “I know they used to make my mama sick every time she ate them, but she ate them anyway. Where I lived in Indiana, it’s called Hoosier bananas. Live in Arkansas, call it Arkansas bananas. So, you know, they’re just a banana anywhere you go.” Doris lives nearby in Sugar Hill, “back in the boonies, five mile off the blacktop,” where she and her husband settled after a few decades of traveling in rodeos. She left home at sixteen to be a trick rider, and picked up leatherworking on the road. “If somebody wanted some leatherwork done there wasn’t anybody handy to do it, so I just started doing it myself.”

  She continues, “Pawpaws, it’s, I don’t know, maybe an acquired taste for some people. I’m not a big fan—my mother just, she knew where they was at and how to get them and everything.” Doris was raised in Brown County, Indiana, in the hill country south of Indianapolis. “She had gallbladder problems—I discovered many years later—and I think that’s why it upset her, because it’d make her sicker than a dog. But she’d eat it anyway. She’d just crave it. ‘Oh, it’s time for pawpaws!’ She was just obsessed with them.”

  Doris’s mother never cooked with pawpaws. “There was always so many people around that ate them and used them that I don’t think there was any saved to can or anything like that,” Doris says. “In fact I guess that they probably are a little delicate as far as canning.” She’s right, as far as my experience goes. It’s rare that a canned pawpaw product—jam, jelly, or otherwise—retains the positive attributes of the fresh fruit. “But persimmon pudding,” Doris says, “I’m about like that what mom was with the pawpaws—I make persimmon pudding every year for the holidays, and I’m the only one that eats it.”

  While I’m talking to Doris, several other visitors arrive. The first is Scott, the village blacksmith. “Hey, Scott, what do you know about pawpaws?” Doris asks. “They taste good,” he says. I ask if he knows of any trees nearby. “Not anymore,” he says. “All the ones I grew up eating as a kid have been bush hogged, cut out.”

  The second visitor is a tourist from Baton Rouge. “I heard of pawpaw but never ate it,” she says. I tell her I’ve got ripe fruit to share, from, of all places, the experimental orchard in her hometown. “Oh, good for you,” she says. “I mean, I don’t eat just anything that hangs on a tree. No nutria, no pawpaw, no alligator.” She laughs, good-naturedly I think, at both her joke and me and my pawpaws. “I hope you enjoy it,” she says. I figure she would fall into Pfister’s meat-and-potatoes category.

  The Ozark folklore surrounding pawpaws is the most colorful on record. Vance Randolph’s wonderful collection Ozark Folklore and Magic, published in 1946, captures this:

  Catfish and men, it is said, are the only living creatures known to eat pawpaws; dogs and even swine turn from them in disgust. However, though it is almost proverbial that catfish are “plumb gluttons for pawpaws,” I have never seen a hillman use them as bait. “Fish that’s a-feedin’ on them things,” an old man told me, “aint fit to eat nohow.” It seems very odd that these fellows eat pawpaws themselves with every sign of relish but regard fish that have fed upon pawpaws as unwholesome. Personally, I do not believe that catfish have any particular fondness for pawpaws . . . But the catfish-pawpaw legend is heard the length and breadth of the Ozark country, and is repeated even by second-growth hillbillies in the cities.57

  In the Ozarks, as elsewhere, pawpaws were used medicinally. In her book Ozark Pioneers, Missourian Vickie Layton Cobb writes, “Pawpaw leaves were bruised to make a poultice to treat bee stings and snake bites. Doctors were scarce in the early days so the early settlers had only Mother Earth and prayer to turn to when there was sickness in the family.”58 And even into the late nineteenth century, pawpaw was still used by Ozarkians as cordage. An 1897 feature article, published in St. Louis, profiled local fishing techniques and described a handcrafted gig: “The gig consisted of a yellow pine shaft twelve feet long with a three- or four-pronged barbed fork, or metal gig, on one end and a leather or paw paw bark loop for the hand on the other. This weapon was hurled like a spear at the fish.”59 The 1917 Journal of Heredity article that announced the winner of the national pawpaw contest also wrote of the tree’s versatility to Arkansans: “Dendrologists invariably describe it as weak, soft, and worthless, but W. T. Coleman, of Bono, Ark., writes that he knows of a house in which all of the rafters and joists are made of papaw, and that in earlier times it was much used for barn logs.”60

  Pawpaws were also associated with darker purposes. “The pawpaw tree is well known to be connected with witchcraft and devil worship, and even a gray-and-black butterfly (Papilio ajax) is looked upon as ‘strange’ because it is so often seen fluttering about pawpaw trees,” Vance Randolph wrote. “People near Goodman, Missouri, tell me that there is some direct connection between pawpaw trees and malaria, but just what this relation is I do not know. Pawpaws are becoming rare in many sections where they were formerly abundant; this is regarded by the old-timers as a bad omen, perhaps a sign that the end of the world is at hand.”61

  Randolph wrote of many witch conjures practiced in the Ozarks. “Out in the woods at midnight [a witch master] bores a hole in the fork of a pawpaw tree, and drives a wooden peg into the hole. Once, despite the protests of a superstitious hillman who was with me, I pulled out one of these pegs and examined it. The end was covered with beeswax, in which several long hairs were imbedded. There was a circle of what appeared to be dried blood higher up on the peg, and the auger hole contained a quantity of fine sand.” Randolph wrote of a similar “conjure” used by “cuckold husbands . . . primarily intended to deal with women who ‘talk the Devil’s language.’” There were other, more direct ways of detecting a witch, including adding “a bit of
pawpaw bark to her tobacco.” A witch would grow deadly sick, while “an innocent woman is not affected.”62

  Ozark pawpaw lore was quite voluminous. Randolph reported that if a person was dying, Ozark temperance workers recommended placing a pawpaw in their hand: “If a drunkard, not knowing of the ‘cunjure,’ can be persuaded to eat this pawpaw, he will quit drinking in spite of himself.” Randolph knew of one woman, who upon learning she was dying, called for a pawpaw. “She held the fruit for a moment, then asked that it be fed to her youngest son after her death. This was done, but the boy was still a booze fighter the last I heard of him.” In Jasper County, Missouri, Randolph knew two sisters who went deep into the woods and bent several pawpaw twigs, “tying them fast in the bent position with twisted locks of their own hair. Relatives of these girls told me that this had to do with an unsatisfactory love affair in which both girls were involved.” Randolph also reported that if the dead “can’t rest in their graves, are somehow inclined to loiter about redbuds, pawpaw trees, and haw bushes—though why they should be attracted to these particular plants nobody seems to know.”63

  In addition to conjures and superstitions, pawpaws were also featured in song. “Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch” is the best-known pawpaw tune—and more famous than the fruit itself. But it’s not the only one. “Way Down Yonder” is sung by schoolteachers and young children, with an accompanying game. “Sweet Rose Marie,” on the other hand—collected in the Ozarks by Vance Randolph—is for adults only.

  SWEET ROSE MARIE

  In a pawpaw patch when the pawpaws were ripe,

  I was loving sweet Rose Marie,

  When she said, If you have a hot pawpaw

  I’ll let you tickle me.

  I laid her down in the cool, cool shade

  Beneath a pawpaw tree,

  I tickled her once and I tickled her twice,

  And she said, Let’s make it three.

  She grunted and giggled, she twisted and wiggled,

  She said, Oh my, oh me!

  I thought she was going to toss me up

  To the top of the pawpaw tree.

  Of all the sweet girls that I have loved

  There was none so dear to me,

  There was none could tickle me half so well

  As darling Rose Marie.

  The years have come and the years have gone,

  Father Time has played hell with me,

  ’Twould do no good to meet Rose again

  Beneath the pawpaw tree.64

  The song was collected by Randolph in 1948 and published in his book Blow the Candle Out: “Unprintable” Ozark Folksongs and Folklore. It came from a manuscript copy belonging to Mr. J. C. Edwards. Randolph notes, “Almost certainly a private poetic effusion, not traditional, it has not been collected elsewhere.” But how different the pawpaw’s reputation would be if it were more associated with the tickling of Sweet Rose Marie than the game of lost little Susie.

  I leave Mountain View and head for the Buffalo National River. I exit the highway, and en route to my campsite I pass the ruins of Rush, a former zinc-mining town. Its residents would have picked and eaten pawpaws, and at the general store, where mail was collected, marriages were performed, and goods bought and sold, for a month each year pawpaws would have been available.

  A park ranger visits the site, and we make small talk. He has never eaten a pawpaw—“I’m not from the South,” he says—but he has noticed the trees throughout the area. I give him one to take home.

  Before the sun sets, I go for a swim in the Buffalo River and gather hickory nuts from the woods. Not far from here, in 1916, a man named J. V. Waters camped on the banks of the Buffalo at Roughedge Hollow. “We stretched a wagon sheet over a pile of pawpaw limbs to sleep on,” he wrote. “I fished with a cane pole and a live minnow.”65 Tonight I’ll sleep atop a sleeping bag on the ground, which isn’t much padding but sounds more comfortable than a pile of pawpaw limbs. This will be my last night on the road, and I want to eat a final pawpaw. I’ve been on the verge of proclaiming Enough is enough, I’ve had one too many pawpaws this year, but this latest one tastes like melon and is all-around great.

  — CHAPTER SEVENTEEN —

  APPALACHIA

  I came to Pikeville, Kentucky, to see pawpaws for sale at the county farmers market. Although I arrived this morning just after nine, the fruit is gone. Denver Newsome has sold out. Luckily, it turns out they’ve not gone far, just ten feet over to the cab of a pickup loaded down with cushaws. The truck, and now the pawpaws, belongs to Bill Hughes. “He’s the pawpaw man,” Denver says.

  Bill, who is wearing a broad straw hat, offers to show me how to eat one. “Just get the inside out of there, and eat ’em,” he says, breaking it in half. “That there’s a ripe one.” He gives me the other half and we squeeze out the pulp. “A lot of people, they call it a Kentucky banana!” he says with a hearty laugh. “That’s the first one I’ve had in two years. They’re hard to find. They grow out in the hills, wild, and the bigger timber smothers them out.” Bill was raised out toward the Virginia line. “Growing up, that was a delicacy,” he says. “Of course, there used to be a whole lot more out in the hills than what there are now, because it’s cleared out. But they’re good for you.”

  Bill asks if I’ve ever heard of cushaws, and I respond with how I once read an essay by Fred Sauceman about Appalachian growers preferring cushaws to other squash because of their crooked necks. Loyal Jones, retired director of the Berea College Appalachian Center, told Sauceman: “If you were growing those big old pumpkins on one of these hillside cornfields, it might come loose and roll down and kill somebody, but those cushaws, they won’t roll. They’ll hook around a cornstalk or something and stay in the field.”1 Bill says they simply taste great. But as much as he loves cushaws, it’s apparent they don’t elicit in him the same level of excitement as the wild pawpaw; the former he has mastered in cultivation, the latter remains elusive.

  Before I arrived, Denver, a former schoolteacher, had picked a bag’s worth, about six pieces of medium-sized fruit, and sold them to Bill for just a dollar. In parts of eastern Kentucky, the price of pawpaws has increased very little in the past century. Denver also grows and sells several varieties of apples, Asian pears, and the beloved half-runner beans. For the next few weeks he will continue to pick and sell pawpaws; a second vendor will offer pawpaws the following week, picked from the woods behind her house, and so there will be two pawpaw vendors at the Pike County Farmers Market.

  Pikeville-based food historian Mark F. Sohn included a few pawpaw recipes in his 1996 book, Mountain Country Cooking: A Gathering of the Best Recipes from the Smokies to the Blue Ridge. Of the pawpaw bread, Sohn writes, “Farmhouse cooks living in the [Shenandoah Valley] made a banana bread like this for generations, and cooks living farther south and in the damp valleys of the Ohio River make the bread with pawpaws.”2 In A Taste of Kentucky (1986)—a collection of folklore and foodways—Letcher County resident Molly Banks is credited for her pawpaw pie recipe. However, the author notes, “Paw paws are most commonly eaten raw and plain rather than cooked.”3 In eastern Kentucky, pawpaws are not just a roadside, river-bottom tree—they’re often planted prominently in front yards, ornamentation in the edible landscape. Denver himself long ago saved seeds from a pawpaw and raised the tree in his yard—the one that produced today’s bag of fruit.

  Denver brought the pawpaws today because a woman had requested them. “Now I’m the pawpaw woman,” she told him, “And you bring me them pawpaws as soon as you get them.” Last year, Denver brought her a bushel’s worth. This year she has competition. Denver hid this morning’s pawpaws behind a basket, but Bill spotted them, and, well, “Finders keepers,” he says.

  “I know where a patch has been producing pawpaws now for forty years,” Denver says, adding that he and his father used to hunt them. “I would stroll for miles to find a pawpaw patc
h.” And once someone located a quality patch, they weren’t likely to divulge its whereabouts. “Now, just like that man over yonder”—Denver points to Bill—“he would just about hold you up with a pistol if you got pawpaw!” Right on time, Bill strolls over and calls out, in character: “You ain’t getting my pawpaws! Who do you think you are?” And so again, Denver allows: “He’s a pawpaw man.”

  Bill complains about not finding as many pawpaws as they used to. Both men cite the expanding tree canopy as detrimental, but perhaps it’s just that those in the know aren’t sharing. “Have you heard of a morel mushroom?” Denver asks. “How many people will share their information, or knowledge, of where those are? If somebody lives a hundred miles away and just visits every now and then, Bill would share with them—he’s more goodhearted than I am,” Denver jokes. “But I don’t believe I would take all my next-door neighbors to my secret pawpaw patch.”

  As a teacher, Denver taught his students to sing “Way Down Yonder.” I ask if the children knew about the fruit in the song. “Oh, Lord, yes—they knew what a pawpaw was!”

  The night before, my travel companion Jon and I stopped in Charleston, West Virginia. Through the heart of downtown runs Capitol Street, a pedestrian-friendly avenue lined with trees, strings of hanging lights, and welcoming Victorian storefronts, one of which belongs to Ellen’s Homemade Ice Cream. For the past several years, Ellen’s has offered pawpaw ice cream, made from the front-yard fruit of Charlestonian Aileen Wren. And it’s one reason why I believe Charleston is ripe to follow in the footsteps of Athens, Ohio. Like Athens, Charleston is surrounded by millions of pawpaws. Bars and craft breweries already brew and sell unique regional beers—a pawpaw ale or saison would fit right in. And at the café in Taylor Books, where regional history and writers are celebrated, and whose live music acts are often rooted in Appalachian traditions, an item such as pawpaw crème brûlée, say, would not be out of place. Charleston even has a pawpaw legacy—in the early 1900s, Charleston grower L. Swartz had an orchard of one hundred trees,4 and fruit was sold at the former Patrick Street market district as late as the 1940s.5 And at new city farmers markets, pawpaws are still occasionally sold.