Twain's Feast (12 page)

One thing is clear: they’re not laboring to bring out the essence of raccoon, highlighting its unique flavor; raccoon is not something to be sliced thin and served as carpaccio. The cooks have already boiled the hell out of the meat. And now, by cutting away the pungent fat, they’re also stripping off most of what would probably taste really distinctive. Fat is a terrific carrier of flavor; one reason that many lean meats tend to “taste like chicken” is that when you compare, say, alligator tail and chicken breast, what you’re mostly comparing is the taste of unadorned lean proteins. In this case unadorned lean protein is the goal; the fat of swamp foragers like muskrat and raccoon isn’t usually classed with that of bacon.

Possum is a different story. De Voe wrote that the animal was usually “scalded like a pig,” only the hair removed with the skin left intact. And Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African-American poet and the son of slaves, wrote in his tongue-in-cheek 1905 poem “Possum”:

But raccoon tastes much stronger, and in Gillett they’ve insisted for decades on trimming it. “Yeah, the recipe changes
real
slow,” Frank says with a laugh.

“And you’re dead ten years before they take you off a committee,” Scott puts in.

“Hell—we got
servers
been dead five.”

I pull on gloves, pick out a paring knife, and find an empty space beside a table. Once boiled, it develops, raccoon fat is gluey enough to resist cutting. The trick is to get in under it and peel it off, almost like cutting the rind off an orange, removing as little of the dark meat as possible. We work through sieve after sieve, tossing stripped pieces of raccoon into aluminum roasting trays, the fat and vegetables into a big heap in the table’s center. When a pile is done, the men assume identical positions, feet firmly planted, arms straight, fingers stretched out an even eight inches from their coveralls as they face the bright opening of the farm shop, waiting for the next colander.

After the raccoon is stripped and put into the refrigerated trailer until tomorrow, and the pots and plastic sheets have been blasted with a high-pressure hose, out comes smoked pork and chicken, french fries from an outdoor fryer, and barbecue rice—the latter a much-loved local concoction of rice cooked with margarine, liquid smoke, chicken broth, and condensed chicken soup. We sit around the farm shop and eat, the farmers showing what seems a surprising level of concern about the cholesterol in the pork; a lot of these guys eat at the Paddy every morning, and frankly, having eaten at the Paddy, I wouldn’t put the pork in the top ten of local lipid concerns. Anyway, the pork would be delicious if my nostrils weren’t tainted by raccoon steam, which they are; but it’s good all the same, and the hospitality is better.

The football field of Gillett High School is a dead, January gray, the scoreboard standing but dark for years. Inside, the high-school gym is decked out and looking sharp, filled with long rows of white-clothed tables. Each setting has a souvenir plastic cup, a hat donated by a Little Rock businessman, and a plate already filled with candied sweet potatoes and barbecue rice. Along the tables’ center lines are paper platters of ham; beside each platter is a foil-lined paper bucket overflowing with raccoon.

First thing this morning, the trays of boiled raccoon went into a pair of giant, converted-propane-tank smokers not far from the farm shed. Along with the meat, each tray held an inch of Swanson’s chicken broth (which, as Heath put it, has about as much chicken in it as if a bird walked through water). Nearby, a bonfire roared on a girder-and-tire-rim frame that looked a bit like Fred Flintstone’s car. As embers fell to the ground, cooks shoveled them into the smoker, leaving them to smolder under the meat. After a couple of hours, the cooks drained the trays and poured over Little Pig barbecue sauce, a tomato-based concoction with a healthy dollop of vinegar. Then it all went into the coon warmer (a giant tank that once held red phosphate).

The crowd has been lining up in the January chill for better than thirty minutes; many of the men wear suits. There’s a sextet of young women from Little Rock wearing vibrant purple hats with dangling raccoon tails. One kid wears full coonskin regalia; his hat still has a face. There are women in evening dress or jeans, men in camouflage jackets and hunter’s orange. Lots of people have name tags left over from Blue Dog congressman Marion Berry’s pre-Coon Supper party (the local Methodist minister, Preacher Chuck, was good enough to bring me along, so I’m already half full of broiled wild mallard duck breasts with jalapeño peppers, cream cheese, and bacon, upon which I went to town). The seats are preassigned; once inside, everyone sits and eats without ceremony.

The only guy who ever suggests to me that raccoon tastes like anything else is emcee and self-described “Cajun coon-ass” Phil English. Raccoon, Phil says, tastes like eagle, which I’m almost sure he’s kidding about (for the record, an early expedition of the
Mayflower
passengers said that eagle was “hardly to be discerned from mutton”). Other than Phil, everyone just gives me a kind of sideways glance and says, “Tastes like
coon,
” or “Sure as hell not like chicken.” The women in particular are likely to announce, unprompted, that they’ve never tried it and never will. I sit and pick a leg out of a bucket.

To be honest, after the brining, boiling, smoking, and saucing, it’s tough to get at the raccoon’s real flavor. Much as I hate to admit it, the first thing that comes to mind is chicken. Not chicken breast, the dreaded, flavorless, protein-patty white meat—they’ve cooked the raccoon a lot, but they could have stewed it since September and not ended up with that. What it tastes like is an elusively gamy version of the super-dark and moist meat alongside a chicken’s spine. It has the texture of pot roast (or, I suppose, mutton), but bland pot roast, without any of beef fat’s unctuousness; again, there’s a gamier undertaste that I can’t quite bring to the front. When Eric cooked muskrat at Flowerdew, you tasted nothing but muskrat, absolute and pure; here there are layers of barbecue sauce and broth before you get to the meat. In the supper’s early days, the cooks would smoke it in skimmed broth from the stewpots instead of Swanson’s, and I wish they still did—if you’re gonna eat raccoon, you might as well taste the raccoon. “Bear I abominate,” Marryat wrote, but “rackoon is pretty good.” I agree enough to eat three pieces.

The Coon Supper program is much like that of any small-town athletic dinner; there are brief, four- to five-sentence testimonials to each kid, each with the same mix of joshing and flattery that brings me back to my own Connecticut high school’s football dinner circa 1990. The basketball coach takes the joshing further—too far, really, ripping into some of the kids with the stated intent of getting each to “play like he can.” In fact, the basketball coach is on fire, comparing himself twice to David and a minimum of three times to Custer (this, apparently, because other schools had the temerity to appear at athletic contests, as scheduled, with the intention of fielding a team). The anger makes more sense when he turns it on the assembled dignitaries, making a call to “any politician in earshot” to stand up for what’s right for the school.

Miss Arkansas follows, and is just a flat-out silver-tiaraed pro, speaking the perfect ergonomic and enunciatory distance from the microphone, obviously feeling that the coach went too far as she talks about how everyone just loves these kids to death. Then she plays an aria from
Carmen
on the flute—and does so pretty well, I think, considering the echoing and hollow PA system. Soon afterward a kid receives an over-under shotgun as a sportsmanship award; it’s given in honor of students killed in a traffic accident, recently enough that emotions in the room are still palpably raw. Then Governor Mike Beebe stands, pledging to fight for Gillett, but I don’t really totally believe him. The fire-spitting attorney general follows, endorsing the individual right to bear arms and the notion that the presidential oath of office should include “so help me God,” getting by far the loudest applause of the night.

Back in 2005 or 2006, there was an Internet campaign to stop the supper. You can still see one of the petitions at
thepetitionsite.com
, and the comments there make for interesting reading; one woman claims that raccoons are smarter than her college-honor-student daughter, several assume that the raccoons are raised in tiny cages, and a good portion—maybe one in ten—are actually in favor of the supper’s continuing as an annual tradition. Unsurprisingly, the people in Gillett are dismissive or scornful of the protesters, usually taking it for granted that they drew up their plans over a mighty platter of T-bone steaks. John Cover says that “you probably couldn’t find a person in this community that thinks of it as an event harmful to animals,” while emcee Phil English goes further: “If you’re a Christian, you have to think of these things as put here for sustenance. When I drive along the levy and I see a coon there, skinny, got the mange, I ask, are we doing right by that animal? Any piece of land got its own carrying capacity—you get past that, all you have is hungry animals, starving animals, dying slow.”

Well, I’m not a Christian, or not in the sense in which I think Phil means the term, and (as Phil himself might suspect) I don’t believe that anything was put here exclusively for our sustenance. On this I stand with Twain when he compared humanity to the paint on the Eiffel Tower’s tip.

But even if I come at it from a very different direction, I agree with Phil’s broad point. You can’t separate hunting from the health of the population being hunted, and to me it seems dogmatic and shallow and blind to oppose all hunting, everywhere, as inherently cruel, without considering what the actual real-world results are of
not
hunting. These can include overpopulation and associated malnutrition—as Phil put it, “starving animals, dying slow.” Besides, if I’m going to eat meat, it matters to me that the animal it comes from was raised as humanely as possible. The raccoons served at the supper lived fully wild lives until being killed; that, it seems to me, is going way beyond cage-free chickens.

At last the supper tapers off; Phil offers a last thank-you. I grab a few souvenir cups and follow the crowd flowing from the gym; one of the first houses we pass boasts a spotlighted raccoon sign beside a fully lit Christmas tree. The after party starts now (an ad in the local paper describes the Coon Supper as the “biggest party weekend in Arkansas County”). The Hideout, the lone bar left on Main Street, will be jammed until three, people dancing to a band covering “Suspicious Minds,” and “Maggie May,” and “Keep Your Hands to Yourself.”

It’s time to go home. But I know where Gillett is.

 

 

 

 

 

I
N SEPTEMBER OF 1861, Twain lay facedown on the thwart of a skiff, looking farther into Lake Tahoe than he’d dreamed you could see into water. He could see rocks and trout eighty feet below, so clearly that he felt he was in flight—he and his partner, John Kinney, had immediately dubbed their boat trips “balloon voyages.” But the water here was deeper than that; his vision ended in a blue at once dark and translucent. He found it strange to drift over perfect transparency and yet see nothing; he peered, trying contentedly to make out anything at all, his vision wavering only when he let his fingers trail along the surface. This was a week before he set the forest on fire.

Twain was now a lanky young man of twenty-five, who compared his own dancing to that of a kangaroo. He was far from home, and from any need for propriety in dress or manners; he wore a broken slouch hat over a mop of curly red hair, a blue woolen shirt, and rough pants stuffed into the tops of work boots still dusty from the long walk to Tahoe. He and Kinney had been told that the lake lay a mere eleven miles from their starting point in Carson City, capital of the Nevada Territory. But those miles, it turned out, were nearly vertical. “[We] toiled laboriously up a mountain about a thousand miles high and looked over,” Twain later remembered. “No lake there. We descended on the other side, crossed the valley and toiled up another mountain three or four thousand miles high. . . . No lake yet. We sat down tired and perspiring, and hired a couple of Chinamen to curse those people who had beguiled us.” But when they did finally crest the mountain and look down on the lake, Twain was enchanted. “As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface,” he said, “I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.”