Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (48 page)

Ten thousand pounds of mullet. Five tons of mullet: netted, beheaded, scaled,
gutted, battered, fried. It's not all the fish in the Gulf of Mexico, but it sure
looks like it, as five laughing, sweating guys work their huge propane-fired fryers like pinball wizards with delicate, taut, subtle turns of the wrist, moving
the fish in and out of the spitting oil.

In this booth, marked "Boggy Boys Sportsman's Club," a Boggy Boy in a
T-shirt that proclaims, "All You Can Do Is All You Can Do"-obviously some
kind of West Florida Zen slogan-takes over at the fryer from another Boggy
Boy. The first one goes to the back, out of range of the hush puppy batter, to
fire up a Marlboro.

That fish needs to pile up fast; there's line of people all the way down to the
funnel cake stand and beyond. They've been waiting since the Boggy Bayou
Mullet Festival opened its gates, swatting at mosquitoes who ought to be gone
by now-it's October-and watching the billion-dollar jets from Eglin Air
Force Base are like comets in the sunset sky. Sure, some of the crowd of fifty
thousand have come to the festival to hear Rhett Akins sing "That Ain't My
Truck," some have come to see NASCAR demigod Geoff Bodine's genetically
enhanced Ford Taurus, and some have come to drink more beer than they can
hide from Daddy back home. But most have come to eat mullet.

Along the Gulf, mullet used to be poor people's fish, trash fish, rarely sold
to the fancy restaurants and seafood markets in New Orleans, Pensacola, or
Mobile. The fish can get up to eighteen inches long, but most will fit comfortably on a paper plate. Mullet started at campaign fish fries in the swamp hamlets of North Florida and Lower Alabama, where a politico could demonstrate
that he was the goodest of good ole boys, untainted by the linen-tableclothand-fancy-bourbon, fat-cat world in Tallahassee or Montgomery, just by
sucking mullet bones in public.

In lean times, mullet was subsistence food (like possum or squirrel). People would net them or catch them with a baited hook, maybe "chumming" the water by sprinkling rabbit food or bread crumbs on the surface to seduce
them. Between October and Christmas, you'd get the bonus of white or red
roe. The red is the mullet caviar, deliciously oleaginous by itself or forked up
in scrambled eggs and grits. The white isn't roe at all but mullet sperm. In our
house, this unmentionable feature of fresh-caught mullet was discreetly
turned over to the cats, but Walk Spence of Niceville, Florida, whose father,
Francis, founded the Boggy Bayou Mullet Festival in 1977, says, "I like to eat
that white roe. I fry it or smoke it; it's milder than the red roe."

Roe is increasingly hard to get. The Japanese and the Taiwanese have taken
to paying big money, maybe fifteen dollars a pound, for red roe. Some claim it
enhances sexual performance.

As you might expect, if people are prepared to pay top dollar for fish eggs
to help them, as Marvin Gaye would say, get it on, then the fish themselves
start getting scarce. "You never," says Florida State University marine biologist
Felicia Coleman, "want to be considered an aphrodisiac. It's a disaster for a
species."

In 1995 the state of Florida banned the use of nets larger than five hundred
square feet. This isn't just a state law now but an actual constitutional amendment, approved by 72 percent of the voters. Why this happened and whether
it's a good thing depends on whom you ask. The state's official line is that
mullet stocks were depleted, with large-scale abortions performed on mullet
mothers in the name of jump-starting Asian love lives, and replacement of the
fish slowed. So the state made it much harder to catch mullet. Dr. Coleman allows that "any time you hammer a species during the height of its reproductive season, you are asking for trouble. It severely reduces the replacement capacity of the population."

Advocates of the fisherman say that the real battle wasn't humans versus
fish, but commercial fishermen versus "sport" fishermen, poor-but-proud entrepreneurs with shabby boats and proletarian tans versus real estate pirates
and corporate lawyers with thirty-two-foot Parkers powered by twin 200horsepower engines-Old Florida versus New Florida.

The coastal communities from Homosassa Springs to Perdido Key fought
against the net ban down to almost every man, woman, and yard dog. Fisherman Lee Spears of Spring Creek, Florida, a tiny village in the wetlands off
Ochlockonee Bay, does not understand why the gradual measures the state
began to take years before-no fishing on weekends, the increasing of netmesh size-were not enough. He calls the net ban "too drastic." The Spears
family has been fishing for seventy-five years, father and sons. Now they live
mostly from crabbing, getting only "a little bit" of mullet.

Walt Spence is careful to point out that the mullet for the Boggy Bayou jubilee comes from the Alabama end of Perdido Bay, where the big net is still
legal. He admits there has been overfishing in some spots but thinks that the
problem should have been addressed on a case-by-case basis, not with a
generic ban. "The sport fishermen helped create a scare," he says. They were
mad because mullet fishermen kept catching speckled trout.

Sportfishermen are never trying to catch mullet; they want trout, grouper,
red drum snapper-the glamour fish of the Gulf, not the country cousin that
many think of as mere bait.

Felicia Coleman says the net ban was sold to the public as an environmental
issue- "check this little box on the ballot, and you've done your green thing for
the year"-but was always a sportfishing issue. The Florida Conservation Association (now the Coastal Conservation Association), an environmental lobbying group with oceans of dollars, helped mount the petition drive that got
the craftily worded measure on the ballot in the first place. They were aided not
just by virtuous environmentalists but also by charter boat operators and the
tourist industry. I)r. Coleman acknowledges that "there clearly has been a positive effect on marine resources," but adds that the method was "Machiavellian" and that "fishery management is a complex issue that should be based on
good science, both biological and socioeconomic, not politics and emotion."

Yet it's hard for Lee Spears to keep the emotion out of his voice when he
talks about the huge public relations campaign, largely waged in the magazine
Florida Sportsman, for the net ban. The fishermen feel the magazine distorted
the truth. "They said we tangled up porpoises and such as that catching mullet. If you just looked at their side of the story, we should have been hung instead of banned."

The striped mullet, Mugilidae cephalus, which translates literally, but inelegantly, as "suckerhead," has become a cause celebre. As I sit here in Niceville
(the town's original, more descriptive name was Boggy Bayou), picking delicately textured mullet flesh, sweet as a pecan, off its many bones, I am aware
that I and all the other people exclaiming over the Boys' speed-frying technique and the subtle flavor of the fish aren't just having dinner, we are committing a political act. We are not precisely defiant (though fishermen have
been defying the net ban by casting plastic tarps or other creative material not
covered by the amendment), but we do resist what Florida is becoming: rich,
Republican, urban, un-Southern. A place where mullet, like grits, is an embarrassment or a joke. Eating mullet is an assertion of the old ways, homage
to a time before Disney and developers. Mullet has become the coastal Cracker
poster-fish, a badge of proud redneckery.

Mullet has always had a vexed relationship with the apparatus of state in
Florida. There's this story, which has taken on the status of myth, about the
time mullet was declared a bird. In Mulletheads, a wonderful disquisition on
mullet and mullet culture, author Michael Swindle puts the date at some time
in the 192os, but up and down the coast I've heard people variously claim that
this happened just after the Civil War, in the 195os, and about ten years ago. It
doesn't matter. Seems these three guys were arrested for fishing mullet out of
season. In court, their lawyer had a biologist testify that since mullet have gizzards (which is perfectly true, because mullet live mostly on hard-shelled
algae and need to grind off the hard layer to get at the oil inside), then mullet
are ipso facto chickens. The judge bought it, and the three guys got off.

In the mid-i96os, the state of Florida decided that it was too hard to market mullet as mullet, irrevocably associated as it was with bottom-feeding and
the backwoods. So the state renamed the fish "lisa," the Spanish word for mullet, and tried canning it like tuna. One day at my weird little hippie prep
school (I think I was in the fourth grade), we were informed that the governor
was having lunch with us. With grins like the prison guards in Cool Hand
Luke, the lunch ladies served us lisa pizza. It smelled like an old metal garbage
can and had a sort of butane aftertaste. The governor ate all of his, but we figured that's why he got the big bucks. It is understating the case to say that
canned lisa did not fly.

Mullet in Florida is, as they say in the philosophy department, a multiple
signifier. There's the mullet haircut, favored by the fourteen-year-old boys you
see hanging around the skating rink on the south side of Tallahassee and, less
attractively, by the thirty-five-year-olds in Ron Jon surf shop pastels who offer
to buy you a Mai Tai at Fudpucker's in Destin or the Spinnaker II in Panama
City. Mark Hinson, a Tallahassee cartoonist and writer who admits to having
sported a mullet in the early eighties, describes it as "a shag-style 'do, short on
the sides, long rattail in the back, and porcupine on top."

Hinson blames Billy Ray Cyrus, the country crooner culpable for "Achy
Breaky Heart"-he popularized the mullet for the head of the South. I believe
it: next to me at the picnic table, crunching fried mullet tails and spooning up
baked beans, sits a whole mullet-cut family: Mama, Daddy, and junior-he's
cross-cultural, sporting a T-shirt with the "Yo quiero Taco Bell" Chihuahua
superimposed on a large Confederate battle flag.

Florida's most important fish celebrity has to be Henry the Pole-Vaulting
Mullet at Wakulla Springs. Along with the tree Johnny Weissmuller swung
from in the Tarzan movies and the patch of swamp where they filmed Creature
from the Black Lagoon, Henry is a big attraction. And he's a good little jumper for a fish, though Felicia Coleman points out that all Henry's doing when he
back-flips over the stick, dramatically rubbing his scale's on it, is scraping off
ectorparasites. Still, the one thing in this world mullet like to do (insofar as
they can be said to like to do anything) is jump. Schools of them leap in the
Gulf, their little fish bodies going rigid for a second, then belly flopping back
into the waves. It may be that this disposition to hop gave some genius the
idea for the most famous mullet event of all-the mullet-toss.

The Flora-Bama Lounge bestrides the border between Florida and Alabama like a drunken colossus. It incorporates ten bars, and it claims that the
mullet-toss, in which people stand in Florida and hunk a mullet (deceased) as
far as they can into Alabama, was invented here circa 1985. Maybe, maybe not:
there are people on St. George Island who swear they've been tossing mullet
there for twenty years, and one Alligator Point friend of mine says she's tossed
mullet at least since Armstrong walked on the moon.

Mullet-tossing probably has no single point of origin. When people get
liquored up, they just want to throw something. But why mullet? "They're
much lighter than dwarves," says Dr. Coleman.

Walt Spence, on the other hand, is dumbfounded. "Lord, I don't know
why," he says. "People who have messed with mullet have always tossed them.
They're barbed, too, and can hurt your hands as bad as picking cotton."

For whatever reason, mullet-tossing now happens in bars up and down the
Gulf, or informally on the beach, once the Wild Turkey reaches a certain level
in the bloodstream. (There are even protests against mullet-tossing-always a
sign that a sport has come of age.) The 1996 Interstate Mullet Toss at the FloraBama drew Kenny "the Snake" Stabler, the former University of Alabama and
Oakland Raiders quarterback, to toss the first fish but also got the attention of
Nanci Alexander of the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida (ARFF). She was
quoted in an UP! story from April 1996: "Mullet tossing? That's pretty gross.
Living creatures weren't made to be thrown around. It would be worse if they
were still alive, but it's still not right."

I'm driving down Highway 98, the Gulf coast road in Florida, past little Holiness churches, country stores called Register's, and a rent-a-sign in front of a
closed motel reading "Red Nek Riv-era." From Panacea to Mexico Beach, 98
always washes out in big storms: in some places it barely hangs on to the edge
of high tide. A couple more years and the pale green water will take it back.
The coastline will change shape again; the dunes will disappear in one place
and reappear in another. Who knows what will become of the old fish houses
in places like Carrabelle and Eastpoint? If the traditional fishermen give up,
the condos will move in.

In Panacea, I stop at Metcalf Seafood, My Way Seafood, and Crum's to ask
if they've caught any mullet today. Only My Way has, and I buy some whole
fish to take back to Tallahassee in the ice chest. Mullet are still cheap, maybe
two or three bucks a pound, when you can find them.

The war over mullet isn't over. The state of Florida is still trying to refine
fishery regulations, while fishermen are still angry. Every month of so a commercial operation gets fined, or a crew arrested, for deploying an illegal gill
net or using forbidden mesh. In March, fisherman Van Lewis confronted the
governor and his cabinet while they discussed further tinkering with mesh
sizes. Van Lewis was draped in netting with a few aromatic dead young mullet
secreted about his person to protest what he called "crimes against fish."