Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  Farther east, on the Coal Heritage Highway, US 52, is Kimball, West Virginia. Outside the town’s only restaurant—Ya’sou Restaurant and West Virginia Grocery—Sylvester Edwards sells heirloom tomatoes, zucchini, and other vegetables. Edwards is a retired stonemason, but has farmed his entire life and now does it full-time. He was born and raised in western North Carolina and grew up eating pawpaws. He’d just recently moved to McDowell County, West Virginia, and in addition to the farm stand gives away produce at schools. “When I first moved here, I went looking for pawpaws and didn’t find many,” he says. “They’d been eradicated pretty much, and it used to be a staple here.” In this county, the small kudzu-choked towns are struggling as coal production declines. Edwards and his fellow farmers want to demonstrate the possibilities of agriculture. “There’s three small farms here now,” he says, “and we’re producing a lot of food.”

  In the 1920s, J. Russell Smith published Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture. His work, and his phrase, would later inspire the term perma­culture, and his writings promoted terracing and tree crops as a sustainable way to farm without accelerating erosion and environmental degradation. “Smith’s ideas may well have represented—and may still today represent—the only sustainable way to practice agriculture on the hillsides of the Appalachian Plateau,” writes Paul Salstrom.16 Of the pawpaw, Smith wrote, “This is a native American tree of great beauty . . . [and has] the great advantage of having foliage that seems to be abhorred by all animals.”17 In Farming Appalachia, another of Smith’s publications, he wrote that the pawpaw and other tree crops have “demonstrated themselves as being good yielders, hardy, and capable of growing without the plow,” concluding that an “agriculture that is adjusted to both the market and the producing environment is bound to bring prosperity.”18

  Later this fall, Sylvester Edwards is putting in five hundred trees at his Creekside Farm. “We want to put at least twenty trees of pawpaw around the fringes of the orchard,” he says. In Panther, Mr. Bailey warned that if folks don’t look after the pawpaw tree, it’s going to be gone. Here in Kimball, Edwards is doing his part.

  The Hatfield and McCoy feud is probably the best-known bit of history associated with the West Virginia–Kentucky border. Beginning around 1865, the two families conducted revenge killings of each other’s clans for nearly thirty years on either side of the Big Sandy and Tug Fork Rivers. And it just so happens that three McCoy brothers were tied to several pawpaw trees and shot to death by the Hatfield clan. The event has come to be known as the Pawpaw Tree Incident, and a Commonwealth of Kentucky historical plaque marks the site.

  We visit the marker, near Buskirk, Kentucky, just over the river from Matewan, West Virginia. A number of pawpaw trees still grow in a thicket by the river. Tourists drive the Hatfield and McCoy Trails, stopping here to read the plaque and imagine the execution. Some may know, but many others likely wonder—what’s a pawpaw?

  On July 8, 1755, during the French and Indian War, a group of Shawnees attacked the Draper’s Meadows settlement near present-day Blacksburg, Virginia, killing at least five. Five more settlers were taken captive, including a pregnant Mary Ingles and her two sons. The Shawnee and their prisoners marched for a month back to their village at the banks of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers. On the third day, Ingles gave birth to a child. As a prisoner, Ingles was put to work sewing “check shirts” and making salt. It is one of the most notorious incidents of kidnapping on the early Appalachian frontier.

  In October, Ingles made her escape. Along with an “elderly Dutch woman” she walked through more than eight hundred miles of wilderness. Their journey began near the mouth of Big Bone Creek—approximately fifty miles below Cincinnati—along the Ohio, Kanawha, and New Rivers. As she later told her son, Ingles and the Dutch woman subsisted on walnuts, hickory nuts, wild grapes, and pawpaws. Ingles was eventually reunited with her husband, and had four more children. She would live sixty more years, until she died at Ingles Ferry, Virginia—which she and William founded in 1762—at the age of eighty-three. The New River along which Ingles Ferry was established, the same river Mary Ingles followed to her freedom, would have been lined with pawpaw trees, as would the floodplain, cleared for the new town and for planting corn. It’s unknown whether Ingles ever again enjoyed pawpaws, walnuts, hickory nuts, or even grapes. For Ingles, they would have been the food of freedom, or a reminder of captivity.19

  We drive across West Virginia on US 60, the Midland Trail. Much of the route follows the course Mary Ingles took as she and the old Dutch woman fled their Indian captors in Ohio. In Cedar Grove, in a lawn across the street from the historic Little Brick Church, an enormous pawpaw tree—forty feet or more—is dropping large ripe fruit. They’re rolling down the hill, so I feel okay gathering several for the road. The pawpaws Mary Ingles found may have been just as good—but they were likely hard to enjoy.

  Just after Kanawha Falls, we cross over a bridge and come upon a parklet and a roadside waterfall maybe twenty stories high. There isn’t a tremendous flow of water, but the geology here is stunning—a near-perfect semicircle has been cut from the hillside; it looks like a massive outdoor shower. To make the scene even better, pawpaw trees are growing in the woods. As we’re walking out, I spot bright-orange fungi on a log in the water. It’s chicken-of-the-woods (Laetiporus sulphureus), the one mushroom I’m able to positively identify—and the one mushroom I repeatedly come across while hunting pawpaws. Each year, when pawpaws are ripe, the chicken-of-the-woods is out. I add it to the late-summer list—pawpaw, goldenrod, and chicken-of-the-woods.

  At camp, we cook up the mushroom with a little beer. We eat grilled cheese and avocado sandwiches (items we “foraged” at a grocery store on the Midland Trail). And for dessert we eat one of the best pawpaws we’ve had all year. I realize plant breeders name fruit with a bit more discretion, but we’ll go ahead and call ours the Cedar Grove.

  In the morning, I speak with a roadside produce vendor near Summersville. He says there aren’t pawpaws on this side of the mountain, but near Tioga, where he’s from, they are plentiful: He ate so many as a kid he doesn’t care for them anymore. But he still has fond pawpaw memories. “Now, my mom made a pawpaw pie back in the ’80s—the best pie I ever ate in my life,” he says. A niece had been visiting from Detroit, and while they were out riding four-wheelers, the pawpaws were out and ripe. “My mom made that pie—it had something else in it, I don’t know whether she put lime in it—but that was the best pie I ever ate in my life.”

  He continues, “Now, down on the Elk River, they’re a nuisance. But in this part of the country, they don’t grow.” Which is fine. Because Braxton County, to the Elk River—where my grandparents were raised—is where we’re headed.

  It’s humid and overcast as we follow the Little Birch River toward Sutton. A billboard asks, DO YOU DIG GINSENG? From the interstate there were no signs of pawpaws, but on this narrow two-lane road the landscape returns to the tropical-looking composition we saw in southern West Virginia: namely, umbrella magnolia and pawpaw. It feels as though we’ve once again entered a dark, Appalachian rain forest.

  We park on the brick-paved Main Street and go for a walk. A few people are outside doing yard work, and some folks are seated outside at the Cafe Cimino eating a late breakfast. There’s a former Gothic Revival church that’s been converted to an art studio. Other storefronts house a quilting shop, a co-working space, and in one window, a collection of sculptures. Courthouse Square honors Revolutionary War soldiers buried in Sutton as well as locals who served in World War I. The Elk Hotel—once owned by my father’s cousin Willard—is quiet, though through the window I can see a drum set. The Draft House, at the corner of the hotel, is quiet as well. Three men are seated in a vacant lot, talking.

  A few years ago, when I asked my grandmother, who was born and raised in Sutton, about pawpaws, she didn’t recall eating them, but she quickly broke into “Pickin’ up pawpaws . . .” At eighty-two
there were many things that were hard for her to remember, things I wish I had thought to ask earlier.

  My uncle Barney, however, can vividly recall one particular encounter with mountain food in West Virginia. Uncle Barney has spent most of his life in a wheelchair. So when, as a boy, his uncle asked him if he liked ramps, it seemed like a strange question. Of course he likes ramps, they’re very helpful for getting in and out of buildings. The next morning, his uncle fixed him a plate of scrambled eggs and ramps—with a generous extra helping of the pungent wild leeks, on account of Uncle Barney’s enthusiasm for ramps the night before. Barney ate the entire plate, but has never willingly eaten another ramp since.

  Continuing to explore Sutton, we drive down Old Woman Run, which parallels the road’s namesake body of water. Houses line the holler between the road and the creek, and the hills rise steep on either side of us. There is little light here. All of a sudden, at the Sutton welcome sign, pawpaws appear in the understory. Excited—these are the first I’ve seen in Sutton—we are checking the fruit for ripeness when a man calls out from his driveway, “I’ve been watching them there, they ain’t quite ripe yet.” The man was born near Sutton, he tells us, but moved to Centralia, West Virginia, when he was young. He remembers pawpaws growing in amazing abundance in the river bottom there. “My gosh, there was a whole grove of them, they was just standing there—pretty nice trees,” he says. “We used to go down there when they get ripe and eat them things till our belly ache.” He spent many years “working away.” When he came back to Sutton years later, he says it had changed, many of the old-timers gone. In high school, he delivered groceries. “I knew everyone on Main Street.” He still eats pawpaws, as he did when he was younger. I ask him about the Moores—he remembers Willard, and his daughter Susie, who now lives elsewhere.

  My grandparents moved away from Sutton in the 1950s. My grandfather joined the army and was stationed in Germany (where my father was born), in Taiwan (where another son was born), and elsewhere. They’d return to West Virginia to visit for brief stretches, but would not live here again for any solid length of time. They’d left the Pawpaw Belt behind.

  At Flatwoods, just outside Sutton, there’s an Amish bulk foods store and an adjacent farmers market. The market has been getting calls for pawpaws, but has no one to bring them in. One man working here says he knew of pawpaws growing up in Clay County, “all along the riverbank, all down there.” One of his grandmothers would make pawpaw breads and such things. “No recipes,” he says, “just a dollop of this, dollop of that.”

  Leaving Sutton, I’ve learned that pawpaws were once quite familiar, that people knew where to find and cook with them; some continue to watch for their ripening. Although I can’t say for certain whether or not my family ate pawpaws, with Braxton County firmly seated in the Pawpaw Belt, I know the odds are good that they did.

  — CHAPTER EIGHTEEN —

  CHEROKEE

  I came to Cherokee, North Carolina, to look for pawpaws in the Great Smoky Mountains, to speak with tribal members here, and to learn if anyone still goes pawpaw pickin’. Ahead of my trip, I received mixed signals: “Probably lots people in Cherokee still eat pawpaw,” I was told, but just as often, “Well, pawpaws aren’t a big thing around here.” So to sort it out I drive south, get a motel room at the junction of US 441 and the Oconaluftee River, and spend several days on the pavement and in the woods.

  I meet Jerry Wolfe, a well-known tribal elder and Beloved Man (an official, and rare distinction among the Easter Band of Cherokee Indians), at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. He recalls seeing a pawpaw tree just once. “I never tasted it,” he says, “but they used to tell me it’s good to eat.” This particular tree was in the national park, and his late wife had spotted it while out driving. They stopped the car and got out to inspect the tree, its leaves, and its curious fruit. For whatever reason, his wife knew it when she saw it and called out, “Oh, a pawpaw!” “It’s been quite a number of years,” Jerry says, “but I haven’t seen it since. I’ve looked for it, whenever I’m passing or fishing up in there, but I think it died.”

  Similarly, at the Oconaluftee Indian Village, a man told me, “Our aunts and uncles always talked about them. When I was a kid, I remember eating them, and now there’s none around here.” And at the Cherokee Farmers Market, I met a grower who was well acquainted with wild foods, including black cherry and elderberry, and even recalled making chestnut bread, but who had little to no experience with pawpaws.

  David Cozzo works for the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians’ Extension Office’s RTCAR program—the Revitalization of Traditional Cherokee Artisan Resources. The program works to preserve and cultivate the natural resources needed for traditional Cherokee basket making and pottery, but also wild foods, including cutleaf coneflower, licorice root, and ramps. According to Cozzo, RTCAR’s ethnobotanist, the only wild pawpaws in the area grow near old homesteads. “I don’t see them in the woods on a regular basis,” he says. “But people move stuff around a lot. And pawpaw is definitely one of those plants. So if they’re here, they’ve been put here.”

  The idea of moving plants is nothing new. Native Americans have done this for centuries. The Iroquois, for example, are thought to be responsible for the pawpaw’s presence in Ontario, Canada, and western New York. In 1610, French explorer Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix wrote that the Iroquois of New France obtained pawpaw from the “country of the Eriez,” an Iroquoian group living south of Lake Erie.1 Indeed, when you look at the map of the pawpaw’s native (or naturalized) range, the US Department of Agriculture’s illustration shows the fruit all but disappearing north of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. But pawpaw is common throughout Ohio, even north of its supposed terminus in Pennsylvania. Pawpaw grows in two of Pennsylvania’s Lake Erie counties, as well as Ontario, Canada, and into western New York, where it is found, except in isolated cases, only in the state’s lakeside counties—the former core sites of the Five Nations. Pawpaw is not the only example. Earlier records also show a concentration of black walnut occurring at Iroquois/Five Nations sites—a tree, like pawpaw, with a more southerly range.2

  What impact did Native American plantsmen have on the stock of wild pawpaws? The following is pure speculation, but consider: Some of the best-tasting and most prolific pawpaw patches today are found in southern Ohio, where the Journal of Heredity’s prizewinning Ketter fruit originated, as well as several other notable fruits from the same contest. This is the same region where Ohio’s ancient mound-building cultures are known to have eaten great quantities of pawpaws, and where, more recently, the Shawnee celebrated the Pawpaw Moon: a;si-mini-ki-sTwa (a? · ši mini-ki · šowa).

  David Cozzo first tasted pawpaws in eastern Kentucky and quickly came to love the fruit; he now has a pair of trees planted at his West Asheville home. When he first moved to western North Carolina, he lived out in the country near the tribal boundary. Once, while out exploring, he found a pawpaw grove growing beside a wet cove. He also heard of another isolated pawpaw patch growing on top of a mountain. Both sites, Cozzo believes, exist because someone planted them.

  In the 1950s, anthropologist John Witthoft came to western North Carolina and conducted an ethnobotanical survey within the tribe’s Qualla Boundary. Although Asimina triloba was in fact rare, and an insignificant food product, the Cherokee did use a specific term for the plant: disûnki. The word was an opaque proper name that could not be translated. Disûnki meant only “pawpaw.”3 However rare it may have become in the modern Cherokee landscape, not long ago it was known by at least a few.

  Historically, of course, the Cherokee Nation was much larger, expanding far beyond the current boundaries and beyond North Carolina. In places as far north as Kentucky, early European colonists noted the Cherokee using nets and ropes made from the inner bark of pawpaw. Further, archaeological digs have indicated that pawpaw fibers were likely used in clothing and footwear, as well. I check at the museum, and a
cross the road, at the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, to see if I can find traditional crafts that utilize the pawpaw’s inner bark. On display are beautiful, intricate baskets made from white oak and river cane. But nothing with pawpaw, which couldn’t be used if it couldn’t be found.

  Eve Miranda, who works with Qualla Arts, has never made a pawpaw basket, but her family has used pawpaws medicinally for many years. “We mix it with autumn olive and make a punch out of the combo to fight prostate cancer,” she wrote to me in an email. “Both ripen in our area relatively close together in time and so it makes it easier to gather, processing one and then gathering and processing the other, then combining.” Miranda lives farther east, outside the Qualla Boundary.

  I am not the first to wonder about pawpaw cordage. Doug Elliott—an author, storyteller, naturalist, and humorist in Union Mills, North Carolina—also read about the pawpaw nets and baskets. When he and his wife, Yanna, found a broken pawpaw tree, “she snatched that bark right out of my hands and she amazed me as she crocheted those natural inner bark fibers into a beautiful round doily-like thing,” Elliott writes on his website. “That same crocheted piece she made that day is now hanging on a wall in our house which overlooks a pawpaw patch on the banks of Chalk Creek in Rutherford County, NC.”4 Elliott himself has also made pawpaw rope and even a pawpaw whip.

  Pawpaws are less common in the southern Appalachians than they are in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. But they are here. The Foxfire magazine and book series—based out of Rabun Gap, Georgia, not considerably far from the Qualla Boundary—included a chapter on wild food plants in their third volume, with several recipes for pawpaws: baked pawpaws (“bake in skins; serve with cream”), pawpaw pie, pawpaw bread (“add pawpaw pulp to nut bread. It gives bread a lovely rose-red color”), and pawpaw flump, or float (“beat up pulp with egg white and sugar like an apple float”). “All the plants mentioned grow easily in, and are native to, our part of the mountains, and were used traditionally in the ways noted,” the editors state. “Any recipes that turned up whose actual use we could not verify with our older contacts were simply left out of the chapter.”5 Farther north, the Appalachian American Indians of West Virginia published a cookbook with a recipe for pawpaw pones—a cornpone mixed with pawpaw pulp and other dried fruits. But pawpaws are absent in the cookbooks of Johnnie Sue Myers, a Cherokee food writer who lives in Cherokee. Which, again, drives home that there aren’t many pawpaws within the Qualla Boundary. Baskets can’t be woven, pies can’t be baked, if the materials don’t exist.