Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (50 page)

There are a lot of websites about peanuts on the internet, but I'm still at a
loss to find much recorded history about boiled ones. Peanuts are still grown
primarily in coastal southern states-Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and Texas-as well as in Oklahoma and New
Mexico. They require a long growing season and are very sensitive to frost. It's
no wonder the recipe for boiled green peanuts didn't travel inland-the green
peanuts didn't either. I've found no mention of boiled peanuts in the many
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources I've relied on for years in my research on the foods of the South, but I'm not surprised. There are also very
few written recipes for some of the most basic dishes of the coastal South-especially those for fish and vegetables. I do think it's telling that peanuts continue to be grown mostly in the coastal areas where West Africans were the majority prior to the Civil War. Nevertheless, culinary experts from New Orleans
admit to knowing nothing about them. It's just not a Mississippi Delta thing.

It's apparently not a Virginia thing, either. Robert Waldrop is a Virginia
writer whom I've known since our college days in Athens, Georgia. "First off,"
he told me, "Virginians abhor the thought of boiled peanuts. My mom, from
Richmond, never heard of them till my family all started sharing an old beach
cottage on Fernandina Beach, Florida, in the 1950s. I asked Shelby and Polly,
neighbors of mine, if they had boiled peanuts growing up. All one of them
said was a very direct, `Lord, no, I'm from Richmond!'

"We got the old beach cottage each summer with my Uncle Hardy, Aunt
Babs, and my cousins who lived in Blackshear, Georgia. I remember the
peanuts getting boiled being a big occasion all by itself with the same mystique
as crabs and shrimp.

"My mom says when she first saw Hardy eating them, he was on the veranda in a rocking chair all by himself. She asked him what they were. He said,
`Sex food.'

"My mom said she asked to taste one, and Hardy said, `No!'

"And he ate them right in front of her!"

Perfectly boiled southern-style peanuts are always salty, but not overly so.
They should perfectly accompany a beer, iced tea, or soft drink, though lately
I've seen people eating them with white wine. It's best to eat them outside
where it doesn't matter if wet shells are tossed on the ground. I think most
boiled peanuts are probably purchased from roadside stands and eaten in the
car while they're still hot, the shells tossed out the window. Those stands may
now be appearing in places where they never were before as Southerners move
to other parts of the country, but the popularity of boiled peanuts still seems
very localized.

Fran McCullough, who edited my first two books on Southern cooking,
tells me that "there's a funny little urban gardenish place up in Harlem that
often has a very excited sign saying something like, `We Got 'Em! Boiled
Peanuts!' and I always think of you because I know you'd scream `STOP!' and
run right in."

I know exactly where she's talking about. It's the same place I'd go for my
collards and "butt's meat" (smoked hog jowl) when I used to live in Manhattan. Some folks from South Carolina drive trucks up to New York once a week
during the late summer and fall, full of old-time Southern specialties that just
aren't available elsewhere, like just-picked okra without a hint of black on it,
and thin porto rico sweet potatoes, no more than two inches in diameter and
pointed at both ends. They get green peanuts, the little Valencias, before they
dry up and lose that fresh beany flavor. They boil them in salted water for a
couple of hours, then let them soak in the water until they've reached the right
degree of saltiness, just like back home. They usually sell out, right from the
kettle, before they cool off.

I was at a dinner party recently with some friends from Alabama. He's from
Mobile-Ole Mobile-and she's from Opelika, near the Georgia border. He
never ate boiled peanuts when he was growing up and wasn't introduced to
them in college, either (he went to Washington and Lee, in Virginia). She
knew them well, from summers spent in the Florida Panhandle-about as
deep in the South as you can get. They are both fond of them now and try to
offer them amidst the pistachios and almonds they serve in their home in the
Hollywood Hills (if for no other reason than to assert their Southernness).

A new Southerner standing near us at the bar overheard our conversation
and screwed up her face in disgust.

"I just don't see how you can eat those things," she said. "I can't stand the
texture."

She proceeded to eat olives and a black bean dip with gusto, and I just
smiled and said, "Fine, that means more for us."

I knew that if she had liked them, she would have used the plural, "y'all."

Each fall I receive an exact intimation of how far away I have become. Such
signs are not always dramatic, the Old Testament notwithstanding. When
God, or memory, or the past, or any stern force wants to get your attention,
the ways are legion. Ravens shriek over Ezekiel's cowering head, branches
burn and are not consumed, a child turns in a ninety-year-old womb. There's
a secular version too: a taste of a coming season in the wind can sweep your
whole life past you, rich in portent. Elizabeth Spencer, in The Voice at the Back
Door, describes this as "the dusty stir of autumn in the twilight, with the indescribable quality beneath the eagerness and color that tried to speak and
could not." Such thoughts are designed to haunt, in one way or another.

But there are different kinds of haunting. And different kinds of ghosts,
which live in different places. The most powerful ghost that reaches for me in
early fall, here in Chapel Hill, lives in a grocery store, in neat ranks of plastic
snap-top boxes with stickers bearing the name of an orchard in Wadesboro,
North Carolina. The phone number is included on the sticker, in a shade of
green that almost matches the contents. Antiseptically, rebelliously, inside the
box nestle thick-skinned globes of golden-green, sprinkled with microscopic
brown freckles and sometimes wide, harmless liver spots, like those on the
hands of a beloved elder. Scuppernongs.

The folksy humor that such a name encourages, popularized in tiresome
public-radio commentaries about Mama-n-them, should be fiercely resisted.
This name is a rich briar patch of syllables, strange with the forbidding
strangeness of ancestor stories that terrify when viewed with humility. Trivializing the name because of its link to the memories of individual and collective
rural pasts means trivializing the namers. It means trivializing Southern rural
life, and it means scoffing at the darkness from which the stories reach for you,
opening their scarred palms. The words of those stories taste as dark and rich
as any fruit. Your great-great-uncle stuck a knife in a man's back when he cut
in front of him in line at the cotton gin. Your great-aunt, the youngest child of a family that included six older brothers and a mother who beat them all with
a mule bridle, struck out in the middle of the night to elope with a traveling
salesman. Your grandfather, her second- or third-oldest brother, was still
cursing the spot, forty years later, where the salesman's car outdistanced the
Hupmobile bristling with father, brothers, and shotguns. You imagine that
girl's frightened anger and shudder, but you lean into the touch of the stories
on your shoulder, amazed at how gentle those long, rough hands can feel.

And there is no way now to explain or relive to yourself that gentleness -
the paradoxical draw of the way of life that can produce such violence-except
to lift that clamshell box from the grocery store shelf and take it home, and
once home to eat them, one at a time, remembering how far away the time
was when you ate them where they, and you, belonged. Twenty minutes into
the country from the Alabama town where he maintained the controlled
chaos of a small-town doctor's life, near the tiny, lyrically named settlement of
Oak Bowery, your grandfather kept a farm-a farm your family has sworn
will be the last of its holdings to go in times of depression. Here he maintained
a herd of Angus and Hereford cattle, and a lake of catfish, and an orchard of
plum and peach trees in which you were forbidden to climb but did anyway,
and a rustling, purple-smelling fig tree, and a well of pure water that tasted
like the tin dipper on its nail above the wooden well lid, and a scuppernong
arbor.

High summer was the time of peaches and plums, yellow jackets glutted
into harmlessness, and your grandmother in pedal pushers and not-yet-white
hair posing happily above bushel baskets and scarred plastic buckets brimming with rosy fruit. You were happy that your mother was recording all this
bounty with her camera. It was the time to run in the long grass of the orchard
without fear, knowing snakes would flee before the commotion of picking,
and to plant a small sneaker-shod foot on the tempting low branches and
climb. Propped in the gnarled branches, you could eat plum after plum, trying to pinpoint the exact moment at which your teeth-innocent of braces or
cavities or the adult yellowing of coffee and cigarettes-cracked the taut, burgundy skin and flooded your mouth with the savage, red essence of joy.
Vaguely thrilling, vaguely frightening. Did the two go together? Does something always have to break?

The scuppernong time was wiser. It was September, the time of your own
birthday and your sister's (which you hated because it drew attention from
yours), the time of resigned re-bondage to school, the time that would drive
you mad even then trying to name the wistful, mica-hard cast to the golden
light in the sky. Something was different, although it all looked the same. The orchard was still hot, still rustling and green, still haunted by the terror of
snake bodies writhing to life under your feet. It was all about to end. To ignore
that, you walked under the low, rough timbers of the scuppernong arbor (the
same kind of hand-broken cedar posts from which your father and his brothers made the wire gaps on this farm twenty years before) and reached into the
galaxy of palm-sized, five-starred leaves over your head and ate scuppernongs.
You ate and ate of that fruit of the knowledge of what exactly was behind the
wise, melancholy light over the pastures and the catfish lake and the red clapboard sharecropper's cabin next to the orchard. Eventually you learned that
the quiet man who had always worked in your grandmother's yard and was
the only black mourner at your grandfather's funeral had been born in that
cabin, where his family had lived since no one could remember. "They were
there when we bought the place," you were told. "We inherited them." Always
after that, you imagined the histories of these other children laid like a quilt
over the same ground that held your own history: the quiet man and his
brothers and sisters running barefoot as you did in the sun-hot dirt of the garden around the squash and collard plants; fearing what he has always called
"no-shoulders" underfoot in the grass, just as you did; drinking from the
same burnished tin dipper at the well. You learned what "inherit" meant, and
it seemed much too small a word for people.

There is a care and a delicacy to the eating of scuppernongs that sounds
sloppy when described. But then any good ritual does sound, at first, alarming. My body and my blood, take and eat. Choose a scuppernong for the right
balance of gold and green, weighted toward gold, in the skin. Holding the
scuppernong firmly between your thumb and forefinger, set it carefully between your teeth, stem end first, so that when you bite it, it bursts into your
mouth. (If the other end has become overripe, it will burst in the wrong direction, and then you'll have scuppernong all over your shirt.) In one motion,
you can scrape the seeds out against your teeth with your tongue and be Emily
Dickinson's happy little tippler, leaning against your own innocent, perfect
sun. Then, if you are so inclined, you can slip the thick, cracked rind over the
tip of your tongue-thick and velvety on the inside, it fits your tongue like a
red clown nose fits-and make faces at your sister, who is doing the same to
you. And you can lie back in the grass beside a growing, boozy-smelling pile
of seeds and husked scuppernong shells, shoo away yellow jackets, look at the
sky, and feel at least a little closer to the mystery, pleasantly hypnotized into a
sort of understanding. Ritual is hypnotic. That's why it lasts.