Long Time Leaving (14 page)

Lewis Hyde argues in
Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
that neither the talent nor the product of an artist is a commodity. It is a gift. The trick—the neat trick, as lives of artists all remind us—is to keep
body and soul together long enough to bear this out. How about nonartists? Give to the arts until it hurts, I suppose, and cling to the faith that you are not pounding sand down a rathole.

Beyond that: Love somebody (not an artist, would be my advice).
^*
But to what extent is earthly love a gift? “Would you still love me if I weren't the fine governor of the great state of Louisiana?” asks Paul Newman as Earl Long in the movie
Blaze.
“Would you still love me,” sensibly responds Lolita Davidovich as the stripper-artiste Blaze Starr, “if I had little tits and worked in a fish house?” (Once, in Baltimore celebrating the World Series, I squirted Silly String, loop, loop, around the real Blaze Starr's by-then-almost-overwhelming décolletage, although I didn't know her personally, and she seemed pleased; but that's just lagniappe.)

You know how the song “The Glory of Love” goes: “You got to give a little, take a little, let your poor heart break a little….”

A
little? Measured
heartbreak? Bo Schembechler, then the football coach at the University of Michigan, once told me that playing the game the way it's meant to be played requires “a certain amount of abandon.” Talk about neat tricks. When Sonny Liston, the doomed heavyweight fighter, was asked how hard he had hit a man on a given occasion, Liston replied, “I didn't have no gauge.”

Neither did my mother.

T
hese days people worry so much about their hearts that they don't eat hearty. The way folks were meant to eat is the way my family ate when I was growing up in Georgia. We ate till we got
tired.
Then we went “Whoo!” and leaned back and wholeheartedly expressed how much we regretted that we couldn't summon up the strength, right then, to eat some more.

When I moved to the Northeast, I met someone who said she liked to stop eating while she was still just a little bit hungry. I was taken aback. Intellectually, I could see it was a sound and even an admirable policy.
Lord knows it kept her in better shape than mine did me. I just thought it was insane.

We have only so much appetite allotted to us in our time on this earth, was my feeling, and it's a shame to run any risk of not using it all. People I grew up with wanted to get on out beyond their appetite a ways, to make sure they used all of it. They wanted to
get fu.ll.
They
intended
to get full. If a meal left them feeling just a touch short of overstuffed, they were disappointed. I knew a man once who complained about little Spanish peanuts because they never added up to enough to give him any reason to quit eating them till they were all gone, and then he was still up to eating some more. “I can't get ahead of them,” he said.

But eating right is not just a question of quantity. Primarily it's quality. It's not letting any available good taste go unswallowed. The people I grew up with didn't just take a few of the most obvious bites out of a piece of chicken and then decide abstractly, “I have, in effect, eaten this piece of chicken.” They recognized that the institution of fried chicken demands a great deal of chickens, and my people felt honor bound to hold up their end. They ate down to the bones and pulled the bones apart and ate in between the bones and chewed on the bones themselves. And the bones that weren't too splintery they gave to the dogs, who were glad to have them. (Unless they're overbred, dogs are essentially Southern.)

Eating is like reading and writing. A book ought to be something that a person can read the way a person is meant to eat chicken: something with plenty of unabashed and also intimate flavor, ruddy and deep-dyed flavor, flavor hard to separate from the structure, flavor that is never really exhaustible. (Even the dogs don't get the last of it, because they eat too fast.)
Getting all the good of it
should be the determination of a reader (new school of criticism, maybe?), as well as an eater. And a writer as well as a cook should be determined to get plenty of good—more than necessary—into it.

Eating also goes hand in hand, so to speak, with talking. Folks I grew up with talked while they ate, about what they were eating. When several sides and generations of a family of such folks sat down together around a table, with ten or twelve generous platters of food in front of them, they sounded like this:

“…and us to thy service, amen.”

“Pitch in.”

“I don't know where to start first.”

“Mmmmm-
m.
”

“Big Mama has outdone herself tonight.”

“Well, I just hope y'all can enjoy it.”

“I BLEEVE I COULD EAT A HORSE.”

“Would you look at them tomaters.”

“Hooo, don't they look good?”

“Now, Tatum, slow down.”

“You let that child enjoy himself.”

“You'd think we didn't feed him at home.”

“He didn't get 'ny snap beans! Lord, pass that child some snap beans!”

“Lilah, how 'bout you over there? You need
something
more. Butter-beans!”

“Ooo, land, naw, I'm workin’ on this corn.”

“Come on, just a dab.”

“Well, you talked me into it.”

“Mmmmm.”

“Awful early, to be gettin’ this gooda corn.”

“Euline, would you send that okry back around?”

“Look at me, just aputtin’ it away.”

“I'M EATIN’ LIKE A FIELD HAND!”

“Little more tea, to wash it down?”

“Mm-m, these greens!”

“ANYBODY WANT ANYTHING?”

“I will have one more heppin’ of that squash, if nobody minds.”

“It's so
goooood.”

“Little cornbread, to sop that juice?”

“One
more moufful of ham, then I do have to stop, sure 'nuff.”

“Look at all that chicken left! Have a little more there, Ferrell.”

“Where would he put it?”

“And just a spoonful of that gravy, to put on my peas.”

“Ferrell! We didn't raise you to put gravy on your peas!”

“Celia, now you let that child eat the way he likes it.”

“Mm. Mmm.
Mm.
”

“More rolls, anybody?”

“I think this is all I can hold.”

“You better eat some more of this good chicken!”

“No'm, I got to save room for pie.”

“There's
pie
? All this and
pie
?”

“Now, Neety, you know good and well we wouldn't let y'all go back home and tell folks we didn't serve you any pie.”

“Look
at that pie.”

“What is
in
this pie?”

“This pie is so goooood.”

“Ah-mmm,
m.”

“How do you get your crust to do like this, Big Mama? My crust won't do like this to save my life.”

“Aw, I've
had
your crust. Your crust does fine.”

“Mm, m, m.”

“Mmmmm-
m.
”

“Well, I have eat myself sick.”

“Mm-
hm.
Wadden 'at goooood?”

“I don't think I could …touch …another …bite.”

“I'M 'BOUT TO POP!”

“Mm.”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Them tomaters was specially good.”

“Got plenny more now, I could slice right up.”

“Ooooo, no. I'd die.”

I
remember the first time I had lunch in the Elliston Place Soda Shop, in Nashville, Tennessee. It was my freshman year at Vander-bilt University, spring of 1960. That morning in
Understanding Poetry,
the anthology we used as a text in English, I had encountered a poem by Wallace Stevens entitled “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters.” I didn't understand it. It was bleak, spare; a “hard” sunless sky, dry leaves scraping across frozen ground, a “rusty” crow with a malicious eye—I had never eaten possum (have since, of course), but I knew sop (pot likker) and I knew taters (everybody knows taters), and I couldn't see that this poem had anything to do, even negatively, with down-home country eatin. It was like seeing an old neighbor of yours pop up in a movie acting like somebody else.

I asked Professor Bennet to explain “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” to me. He said he didn't understand it either. Which didn't seem to bother him. He was a highly educated man, and yet he had accepted that
there were things he would never get. I didn't get
that.
I was a good reader; I saw no reason why I couldn't get everything. I knew there were things that my parents would just as soon—would prefer, in fact—that I not get, but I hadn't come to college to stay within those parameters. Had I?

It stuck in my craw, that poem. The most interesting thing that had happened to me in my freshman year was the realization that poetry wasn't fancy, lah-di-dah writing, it was writing that had been simmered down to a mingling of essentials, like my mother's beef-stew gravy. (Which died with her, twenty years later.) And the thing was, I could tell that this “Wallace Stevens poem was good, somehow. I just couldn't tell anything else about it.

I decided to venture off campus for lunch. A block away from the campus was Elliston Place, where I found the Elliston Place Soda Shop. It is still there, with its neon ice-cream-soda sign out front. I revisited it for lunch recently and remembered that first time.

The Elliston Place Soda Shop is what is called today a “meat and three.” I wouldn't have called it that back in 1960, because “meat and three” wasn't a cultural term back then, any more than “good old boy” was. A good old boy was three words that came together every now and then, like “good old truck” or “good little ways.” The Elliston Place Soda Shop was a combination of a soda fountain, which you usually found in a drugstore, and a home-cooking restaurant, where it pretty much went without saying that you could get a meat portion and your choice of three vegetables for $1.95.

And you would know what you were getting when you ordered, say, squash casserole or candied yams or—well, take rice and gravy. It wouldn't be as good as my mother's rice and gravy, but it would be along the same lines, which is to say good, light, fluffy white rice, almost sweet in its clean unsaltiness, with good charcoal brown gravy, salty and slightly peppery, murky in a good sense, not in a bad sense greasy, made of flour and a little milk, I guess, and beef drippings.

In season, tender fresh yellow green lima beans such as I have never seen outside the Deep South to this day. In any season, turnip greens or collard greens. String beans cooked way down with pork so they were not at all fibrous anymore and yet had a chewy consistency by dint of which they gave a good account of themselves—deep down in there somewhere they were still green.

Cornbread. That would be in addition to your three vegetables. Here is something that tends to be lost sight of in Southern cooking when it
leaves the region: Cornbread ought not to be sweet.
^*
Or fluffy. Any more than a gravel road ought to be boggy. Cornbread is crunchy. And a little buttery, but you can always put butter
on
it: mainly it tastes and chews like
cornbread,
not like cake.

And your meat portion might be fish fried salty and cornmeal gritty, or chicken fried lightly, no greasy flaps of skin and no batter to speak of, just a flecky patina of expertly browned flour and skin.

Macaroni and cheese that wasn't just sticky yellow macaroni with a cheesy taste, it was marbled and layered like a trifle. Chewy orange, softer pale yellow, milky off-white, and noodles of a cleanness like the rice's in rice and gravy.

You find fewer and fewer meat-and-threes these days in the South. And, of course, not all of them were ever good enough to evoke my mother's cooking. The Elliston Place Soda Shop was, though. “Comfort food,” people call such fare today. That's condescending. Fiber-of-being food is more like it.

I love fine dining. But fine dining doesn't remind you of your grandmother, who would sit down at the dinner table and somebody would ask her, “Are you hungry, Mama, after all that cooking?” and she would say, “Well, I guess I can worry down a mou'ful or two,” and then she would pitch in as strong as the rest of us.

Or my mother's cousin Effie—no, I think it was Effie who always had to go to the bathroom when it was time to wash the dishes. Cousin somebody would always say no, she didn't want any watermelon, thank you, and then you'd offer her a bite of your piece of watermelon—which would be not a slice but a quadrant of a whole melon, because that way everybody was sure of getting some of the heart, the center, the very sweetest and least seedy part—and this cousin would come along and say, well, she guessed she would have just one
bite
of watermelon, and then she'd take your piece's very heart.

Anyway, I sat there in the Elliston Place Soda Shop, thirty-eight years ago, and ate a good lunch and decided I would get around to getting “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters” in due time.

I get it now, pretty much. Partly because I don't expect to get things
quite the same way I expected to back then. I don't expect cooking like my mother's anymore, either, so I wasn't too crushed to find when I revisited the Elliston Place Soda Shop recently that it wasn't as good as it used to be. I mean, it wasn't
bad,
but friends of mine in Nashville said yeah, it was a shame, they'd stopped going there lately—new ownership or something.

Actually I was crushed a little bit, way back down inside where I'm still green.