Well, this may be a bit nostalgic, but there is nostalgic and then there is NOSTALGIC!
I have been away from “the old home place” for more years that you can count, but I can still recall the sounds and smells of the marshes of my home of my early years – in coastal Liberty County, Georgia.
(I can still feel the fishing line – with a chicken leg tied on the end and one or two crabs clinging – while I coax it up to my net as I sat on the Atlantic Seaboard Coastline Railroad trestle over the marshes of the Atlantic Ocean.)
Thanks to the photographs of the ancient moss-covered Live Oaks covering the rural roads along Peacock Creek – where I once hunted and fished – and regularly posted by the granddaughter of an old friend from Riceboro – I am regularly transported back. I am able to return there without returning there.
But there is one particular place that satisfies just about every one of those old memories, and when I do return I have to argue to get there. It is a building, but not just any old building. Some background:
This is not scientific, and I don’t remember exactly how or why I remember it, or if it is true, but I’m pretty sure that I read not too long ago that the diet of the poor young men in the deep south was actually not that bad for health and nutrition. When the subject was finally studied, the findings were a bit startling.
(A particular study of the diet of the poor in the South involves people like my family – how we lived back when I was a kid (and before, of course) – specifically what we ate and how we came to get enough to eat back in the days of what our history books calls “The Great Depression.” (In my family, there was a saying: “That dang Great Depression came and went and we never noticed it!”)
As I recall, those making the studies were intrigued that football prospects from the poorer, rural south arriving at colleges were as healthy as those arriving from more prosperous families and from the rest of the country. There is something, they decided, about the combination of rice and beans and peas, seasoned by sowbelly and fatback – the cheapest of cheap cuts – that creates a beneficial protein.
(You can probably guess that I am laying the groundwork for justifying something involving Southern Cooking.)
Anyhow, that’s how I remember it, and I could have made the whole thing up because I ate rice and beans or peas, seasoned with small cuts of cheap meat, nearly every day of the first eighteen years of my life – until I left the deep south for good. And I loved the taste of all those cheaper foods then and I love it now – but only when it is prepared and served “back home” style, preferably in Georgia – and only when cooked by an authentic Georgia old person – preferably a lady type old person.
All of this talk of fried foods and long-overcooked vegetables brings me to my point. I need to tell you about Jones Kitchen of Jesup, Georgia, where Heaven is ever present seven days a week and where calories jump up and greet you as soon as you walk through the screen door and into this converted farmhouse. There you confront six long tables, each containing the customers’ entire meal and more. Each table is loaded with platters of Fried Chicken and at least two, usually three, meats like a roast, beef or venison stew, ribs and the like. Also on every table are platters and bowls of biscuits and corn bread, garden and or field peas, lima beans and many of the dozen types of beans – green or dried – and available most of the year.
You pay as you enter (cheaper for children) and sit where you can find a seat. Sometimes – right after church services for example – you may have to sit on one of the benches out on the oak-shaded front porch and wait your turn. It’s an honor system and nobody writes down your name or gives you one of those buzzing devices; you just notice who is there before you and go in after they do.
I don’t know how they do it but there is always fried okra, Two pitchers of Sweet Tea and two pitchers of lemonade are on each table. And ALWAYS, there are at least two homemade desserts such as pecan pie, chocolate layer cake or peach cobbler.
When I used to fly back to Atlanta then Savannah, rent a car and drive down to Jesup, passing Hinesville, where I went to high school and once scored nine points in a game against Reidsville, I would anticipate the fine meal my Mother and Sister and her family were going to enjoy the next day, because I was going to talk them into at least one meal at Jones Kitchen. It was always a bit of a struggle because they saw nothing special about the place.
Although they were wonderful Southern cooks and prepared the same dishes, and in much the same way that the good cooks at Jones Kitchen did, my family would humor me at least once each visit. From a sense of relieved guilt, I always pay!
The clincher was when I reminded Mother that Jones Kitchen ALWAYS featured her favorite dessert – Banana Pudding.
Somehow, over the years, my family has gotten a little too uppity for authentic Georgia Country eating and have begun to dress up a little and go out to some of those pre-fried, cookie-cutter biscuits and canned gravy places when they got hungry and restless.
Now I’m not telling you this to get you on an airplane headed home and not to torment you with visions of the unobtainable.
My Mother is no longer there, but from time to time, I return to visit with my sister and her extended family, and I need to tell you that I can’t understand why it is that now, every time I find my way back home, they want to hit the Huddle House or the Colonel’s Chicken House.
If they get up early and dress in their good clothes I know we are headed due East for the forty mile trip to the Outback Steak House on Saint Simon’s Island And to get there – wouldn’t you know it – we will have to drive right past Jones Kitchen!
And mine will be the only head to turn when we drive pass the old converted farmhouse, and no one but me will pay attention to the cars and pickups parked at odd angles all around the place.
So, there, I sit in air-conditioned splendor as we drive slowly past. I’m pretty sure I can smell the sausage gravy being delivered to each of the long picnic tables by the elderly ladies, each dressed as she has for the past sixty-five years or so and each displaying her distinctive apron made by herself.
THE MATH OF GRAY SQUIRRELS
Outside my window today
fearless Gray Squirrels
fling themselves across open skies
and cling to the new bark
of tallest pines.
Sometimes a dead limb breaks
and they fall like Spanish Moss.
Each time I rush out
in agitation and worry
but
they always shake themselves
and stagger off
to the nearest vine
then flee, fragile limb to fragile limb,
and feed and rest
in the far-off acorn trees.
I need not try to justify
once killing
these acrobatic whiskers and circus tails
who drop acorns from high
in their Live Oak trees.
Back when I lived here
disguised as a hunter,
it was kill and clean
and cook and eat,
as simple as
bagging bread at Safeway.
And the math was clear:
One bullet
must equal one squirrel; one
shotgun shell
add one wild turkey…
and a deadfall trap
multiply
our chance of living the winter.
It was never like television’s
father and son bonding,
with redneck pickup trucks
and howling ‘coon dog hounds.
It was only
food on the table
if you worked the woods all day
and were lucky.
Today I will bandage
and give transfusions
to the tiniest living thing.
But it was different then,
after water was drawn
and kettles filled,
and everyone living in the house
must bring meat to the table
and cut wild greens
and find blueberries
along Bull Creek.
It was never ending.
With summer corn ground
and stored in lard cans
against mice and weevils,
and late peas and beans
picked dry in the fields
and bagged in tight pantries,
there was sometimes enough,
and I could turn to sitting
and reading
and listening to the snap
and the bite
of the crackling stovewood.
But when there was frost in the morning
I would go out in search
for the small game stews
and Indian herbs
and spices from roots…
for the dry rice
and dry beans,
for the dry corn bread,
and the cold, dry winter.
– Charles Brady
