Pawpaw

by Andrew Moore

  I travel next to Bryson City, North Carolina, a small, vibrant, Main Street community just ten miles west of Cherokee on the Tuckasegee River. I walk into a bakery and ask the owner-baker about pawpaws. It just so happens that she recently made pawpaw bread. She grew up in the area but never heard of the fruits until recently, when the woman who babysits her son gave her a bucketful. “I think it’s more of a country thing,” she says. “Stuff that you don’t get at the grocery store and you don’t really eat if you live in town, if you don’t grow it.”

  Western North Carolina, when it comes to pawpaws, is similar to the rest of the country. American Indians are likely to know pawpaws with the same frequency as other rural Americans—if they’re growing on their property, or where they hunt and fish, then they’re likely to come across them and know about them. If not, chances are they won’t. “To me it certainly represents that unobtainable fruit,” says ethnobotanist Steven Bond. “It’s kind of this charismatic fruit that people have heard about, they’ve read about, they’re in songs, they’re in stories, but very few people have ever had one.” In Oklahoma, where so many Native Americans were forced to relocate, pawpaws were found in the easternmost sections of the state. The farther west tribes were relocated, the less likely they were to have pawpaws around. According to Steven, in places like rural Oklahoma, the fruit is hardly forgotten, even if nobody talks about it. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite,” he says. “Where you don’t tell people about where you harvest pawpaws, because there’s so damn few of them you don’t want to be in competition.” It’s in this context that David Cozzo offers to take me to the biggest, and perhaps only, pawpaw patch on Cherokee lands in North Carolina.

  Kituwa is the ancient Cherokee mother town. On this site, an earthwork mound built more than a thousand years ago still stands. Within the past decade, the property passed out of Cherokee hands, but recently the tribe has reacquired Kituwa, and its approximately three hundred acres are now a Cherokee community farm. Here, along the Tuckasegee River, is likely the only pawpaw patch within the Qualla Boundary.

  Cozzo gives me a tour, shows me the hay grown for cattle, fields of corn, the October beans, and some of the largest cushaws and healthiest squash plants I’ve ever seen. Kituwa’s current groundskeeper, a young man named Johi, approaches us on a tractor. We tell him what we’re looking for, and he says jokingly, “Ain’t no pawpaws down there.” He’s well aware of what pawpaws are. “He’s a country boy,” Cozzo offers as explanation. Johi adds, “It’s a staple of the people. . . the people that’s in touch and who know what to eat.” (He then shows Cozzo a cellphone picture of a wild berry, for help with identification. “I was going to make jelly out of it,” he says.)

  Cozzo leads us to the river. There’s an old homesite, evidenced by a brick chimney: It’s all that remains of the home. But according to Cozzo, the plants growing here are evidence enough of former habitation. We’re standing in a large grove of pawpaws. The patch begins near the chimney and spreads to the river and down the bank at least a hundred yards. Because it’s found nowhere else in the boundary, Cozzo believes the original tree was planted here by human hands, or grew from a discarded seed. “Another thing is the spicebush,” he says. “You almost always see this by an old cabin site. Almost always. And it’s called feverbush, too. So this was medicine you kept by your door,” he says, pointing to the spicebush, “and this was food you kept by the door,” pointing to the pawpaw.

  We look in the grass and shake several trees for ripe fruit, but the harvest is at least a week away. “Don’t worry,” Cozzo says to Johi, “Andy won’t be around when the pawpaws are ripe.”

  — CHAPTER NINETEEN —

  NORTH AND MIDWEST

  James A. Little claimed to have planted the nation’s first “regularly laid” pawpaw orchard in Danville, Indiana, more than a hundred years ago. “The trees had been planted in hills similar to techniques for growing melons,” Little wrote. “Five or six seeds were protected by barrels, which provided shade to young seedlings for two years.”1 His methods remain sound today. I’ve come to Danville on a Midwest Tour de Pawpaw. And while I was unable to locate Little’s former orchard, I did find a pawpaw tree in one Danvillian’s backyard. The tree’s owner was outside, and so I stopped and asked her about it. She’d never even eaten from it. I encouraged her to try some, and offered to eat the first bite.

  As I was leaving town I noticed a few pawpaws growing along a creek. I pulled into a Laundromat adjacent to the property and went to investigate. Hanging from a branch was one of the largest wild pawpaws I’d ever seen. It was thrilling. After several years of traveling to commercial orchards, of tasting the best pawpaws known to exist, I was still excited about wild fruit. And here they were—five of them, actually, uniformly large—just free for the taking. Or so I thought.

  A man walked toward me, chewing a mouthful of food, sandwich in hand. I can’t recall if he exited from the Laundromat, a parked vehicle, or somewhere else. A few feet away, a punctured archery target was affixed to a straw bale. “What are you doing?” the man asked. I told him the trees had caught my interest and that I was hoping to take a few photos. “Okay,” he said, “you can take a picture.” He finished chewing and continued. “We get a lot of weirdos around here, so when you see someone walking around your property, you have to ask.”

  I assured him I wasn’t a weirdo, just curious about pawpaws. I then asked if I could pick any ripe ones. “Do not pick the fruit,” he said. The pawpaws had been promised to someone else. He circled me, kept eye contact, and then repeated himself. “Do not pick the fruit.”

  Pawpaws are popular in Indiana. And of all the Insert-Your-Home-State-Here Banana appellations, Indiana’s is the best because it rhymes. The state even has a second nickname for the fruit: the Hoosier banana. In his 1905 treatise, James A. Little also wrote, “To us of central Indiana it is as familiar as the apple.”2 I’m aiming to find out why this is true of Indiana to a larger degree than neighboring states. Were there more and better pawpaws here? Did the settlers depend on wild foods for a longer period? Or is it simply because Indiana banana sounds so good?

  In Miami County, Indiana—which is named for the tribe and whose members (a number of whom still reside in the state) once ate pawpaws—is the ghost town of Paw Paw. The town was platted in 1847, but when a newly built railroad was built, it did not extend to Paw Paw and the town was deserted.3 Although the village of Paw Paw no longer exists in Miami County, Paw Paw Township, in Wabash County, boasts more than fifteen hundred residents. Pawpaws were noted and celebrated in these northern counties, as well as in southern Indiana. In 1859, a judge in the city of Evansville, Indiana, remarked that the pawpaw, “indigenous to our bottom-lands, yields more spirit to the bushel than any other fruit,” and that he had “contracted for one thousand bushels to distil [into pawpaw brandy] the coming season.”4

  “It was a dainty with many pioneers and the taste still lingers,” one historian wrote in the 1950s.5 President Benjamin Harrison, who hailed from Indianapolis, Indiana, was a famous pawpaw lover. When someone in the president’s circle suggested the pawpaw was susceptible to great improvement, President Harrison was irked. “The news offended the President,” the New York Advertiser reported, “because he thought it an insinuation that the paw-paw of his native State was not the most nearly perfect fruit in the world, which he knew it was.”6 There was also an old proverb, reported by the Courier-Journal in 1892, which I just nearly learned firsthand: “Deprive a Hoosier of his favorite fruit and he’s your enemy for life.”7

  In 1942, the book Songs of the Rivers of America attributed “Pickin’ Up Pawpaws” to Indiana’s Wabash River. Any number of rivers might have laid claim to the tune; nevertheless, to the Wabash it went. Like other American rivers, the Wabash was once a great highway. Between its port towns plied steamboats, flatboats, various fishing vessels, and houseboats. In The Wabash (1940), William E. Wilson’s literary portrait
of the river, he described the steamboat traffic and the colorful salutations boatmen gave one another. “‘Hello’ . . . they called . . . ‘Watcha loaded with?’ Then the captain—no matter what his home port, his destination, or his cargo might be—would step to the rail of the texas and wave his arm in response. ‘Fruit and lumber’” came one such response, “‘pawpaws and hooppoles!’”8 It’s quite an image: steamboats loaded with pawpaws en route to Indianapolis, Danville, Lafayette, and elsewhere.

  Yet the Wabash and pawpaws go back even farther. During the Late Woodland period, a Native American group known as the Vicennes culture emerged in the Wabash Valley of present-day Indiana and Illinois. Evidence from sites near Terre Haute demonstrates a society whose economy was based on agriculture and supplemented by hunting and gathering. These Native Americans ate maize and beans, but also groundnut, hazelnut, wild cherry, and pawpaw.9 Surely, as I have discussed earlier, such skilled horticulturalists understood plant genetics in certain terms. But what Indianan Jerry Lehman is doing with pawpaws today—using nothing more than traditional plant-breeding techniques—is on a whole different level.

  I’ve come to Terre Haute—the self-proclaimed capital of the Wabash Valley—to meet Jerry Lehman, an amateur plant breeder of the highest order. A former president of the Indiana Fruit and Nut Growers Association, Jerry is the world’s preeminent breeder of American persimmons (having picked up the work of Jim Claypool) and has been working with pawpaw for the past twenty years.

  As a boy growing up on a farm in Berne, Indiana, Jerry spent all of his free time fishing on the Wabash. And while he went on to a successful career in electronics, Jerry never left agriculture too far behind, planting fruit trees wherever his work took him. After he retired, Jerry started accumulating property around his home, and planting trees. “You can take the boy off the farm,” he says “but you can’t take the farm out of the boy.”

  Jerry didn’t want a mere cornfield. “I wanted to get into breeding, and I was thinking of working with apples.” he says. “But the problem with apples is every state has a university that has got an apple-breeding program. And you can’t compete with that kind of thing.” Through the Indiana Nut Growers Association, Jerry met Jim Claypool, who was looking for someone to continue his work. “And I said, ‘Here’s something that I can do, and possibly contribute.’” And contribute he has. Jerry’s work with American persimmons has led to some of the largest, sweetest Diospyros virginiana anyone has ever seen.

  Although his first love is clearly persimmons—the road he lives on was even renamed Persimmon Lane—Jerry became interested in pawpaws too, and around twenty years ago he began growing them.

  When it comes to breeding, Jerry says it’s a crapshoot. “Just like Mom and Dad get together, [and] none of the kids look like Mom and Dad.” Except that with plants, he says, when you select two because you want to get the size of one and the sweetness of another, what you wind up getting is the smallness of one and the lack of sugar of the other. This may in fact usually be the case. But Jerry has had some great success. For each of the past three years a tree of his has won the contest for largest pawpaw at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival. And each year, the fruit has come from the same tree, a hand-crossed selection he has grown from seed. He shows me the latest fruit from that tree, which weighs in at 24.4 ounces. It’s a monster pawpaw, truly the largest I’ve ever seen (this time it’s absolutely true). I ask how he gets such large fruit. “Genetics,” he says. “It’s the tree.

  “There was a gentleman in Owensboro, Kentucky, his name was Sam Norris. He was an electrical engineer, but he was a horticulturalist by hobby,” Jerry explains, “and he wanted to develop a seedless pawpaw, which is a great goal. It’ll never happen—but, nonetheless, it needs to be tried.” Jerry collected material from Sam Norris’s experiments. “Are they seedless? No. But offspring seem to produce larger fruit. Something genetically has happened there to cause those plants to be larger-fruited.”

  Jerry is an exceptional plant breeder, but he faces the same obstacles that most pawpaw growers do: raccoons, opossums, and other nocturnal marauders. To keep the critters out, and to keep fruit from falling, Lehman ties mesh onion bags over the largest pawpaws on important trees, especially the one that regularly produces his prizewinning fruits. It’s a low-tech solution that works. Jerry also has a vision for an efficient pawpaw processor: washing machines. He describes to me how it would work, which involves repurposing and retrofitting a drum.

  “I have used a hand-crank honey extractor,” Jerry explains. “But the problem with the honey extractor, with the straight walls, as soon as you start to spin, the pulp and the seed spread up the wall and come out the top—where the washing machine has the lip on top to retain it. The extractor, the centrifuge, would sling that pulp out. And I think it would be a little bit more efficient than other machines.”

  I see the potential and offer that someone could use the basic design of a washing machine to build something new. Jerry, the practical midwestern farm boy, says sure, but sees no reason to reinvent the wheel. “Or they could, again, take the washing machine, because the tubs are perfect,” Jerry says. “I believe it’ll work.”

  I leave Persimmon Lane and head toward the Illinois-Wisconsin border, where I will meet a grower pushing the northern limits of commercial pawpaw plantings. My view from the highway includes occasional woodlots and various crops, but most often just seemingly endless fields of corn. I remember, though, that this country was once as much a frontier as the storied peaks and hollows of Appalachia. In the early 1900s, poet Arthur Bryant described an early-spring morning, and the unspoiled Illinois country as encountered by early settlers:

  The pawpaw opens its dusky flowers;

  On green savannahs spreading far,

  Shows the varied phlox its brilliant star.

  The crane’s harsh note is heard on high

  As he floats like a speck in the azure sky . . . 10

  When I see the exit sign for Paw Paw, Illinois, I’m caught off guard. I knew it was here but failed to realize it was directly on my route. I take the exit, which deposits me into a sea of corn; coming off the highway, it feels like going below the ocean’s waves. As the fields give way to the village, one of the first homes clearly has town pride: They’ve planted a pawpaw tree in the center of their yard, and a hand-painted wooden sign identifies the specimen: PAW PAW TREE. There’s just the one, leaning against the power lines. I imagine the owners, tired of folks not knowing what a pawpaw tree was, planted it and painted the sign. “There, no more excuses.” Farther down the road, the municipal Paw Paw welcome sign even features a graphic of a pawpaw cluster, with one piece of fruit split open. POPULATION 870, ESTABLISHED 1882.

  The Pawpaw Tracker publisher Ray Jones also visited here on his own pawpaw road trip. Alice Zeman, a local historian, told him that “the pawpaw grove, from which the town received its name, was one of the largest in the area and included about 2,000 acres southeast of the present site of the village.”11 Paw Paw Grove, as it was once known, was located along the historic Chicago Road stagecoach line, which itself was created from trails the Potawatomi Indians had long used. Their route, no doubt, intentionally crossed through the pawpaw grove.

  The area around present-day Paw Paw, Illinois, belonged to the Potawatomi and other Native American tribes as late as 1833. A village in the county was known as Assiminehkon, which translated to Pawpaw Grove (which would become the Paw Paw I have just visited).12 Farther north, in DeKalb County, there is another Paw Paw Township.

  As elsewhere in the Pawpaw Belt, the fruit was once popular and beloved in rural Illinois. At the turn of the last century, pawpaws were sold at local markets. A Bloomfield, Illinois, newspaper reported in 1902: “Some of the grocery stores have displayed basketful of pawpaws. They are green pawpaws, which are not supposed to be particularly palatable or wholesome.”13 Even readers of the Chicago Daily Tribune were concerned with pawpaw
s. “Other calamities might be borne with comparative equanimity,” the Tribune reported in 1913, “but it is woefully depressing to learn that the pawpaw crop is almost a total failure this year.”14

  Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, and Illinois native, Carl Sandburg was also a pawpaw lover. In the 1930s, Sandburg made pleas for breeding “bigger and better pawpaws.”15 “American citizens are going to grow more pawpaws, eat them, and like it,” read a 1937 bulletin from Berkeley, California. “This is the decision of Carl Sandburg, poet, who announces he has made it his life’s mission. He insists he is going to make America pawpaw conscious.”16 Sandburg even became president of another North American Pawpaw Growers Association, a group unrelated to the current NAPGA, and about which little is known.17

  Near the southern Illinois village of Iuka, a particular pawpaw patch was for decades known as the best in the region. Neal Peterson once told me the story of an elderly man who recalled visiting that patch as a teenager in the early 1900s. It was a Saturday, and with chores finished, he and a friend decided to steal a neighbor’s wagon and mule, and headed for the pawpaw patch with a jug of whiskey. They ate pawpaws all afternoon, got drunk, fell asleep, and lost the mule. The incident passed, but the patch continued to be regarded by many as the best in Illinois. In the 1980s, the late Illinois plantsmen Joe Hickman knew these pawpaws, and referred to them as Mitchel. Although many experts believe the cultivar Mitchel, as it exists in the current trade, was mixed up somewhere along the line (due to mislabeled or mishandled scion wood, perhaps) and is not the same fruit Hickman and the mule-riding farm boys of Illinois once knew, the idea of Mitchel originated, and perhaps even still lives, in a century-old pawpaw patch somewhere near Iuka.