Twain's Feast (9 page)

But looking for places that serve roasted raccoon is a different story. And if you want to meet people for whom eating the meat is a yearly event—who gather, a thousand strong, to feast on raccoon in the local high-school gym—your options narrow still further. They narrow, in fact, to one.

In January 1988, Governor Bill Clinton’s plane slid off the end of an icy agricultural runway in the Arkansas rice country, sending up a cloud of white powder as it skidded through a blizzard. The plane ended up nose down in a snowbank; Clinton and his companion, Senator Dale Bumpers, were both fine. They climbed into a waiting car and began driving south. Fourteen miles later—still a bit pale, townspeople recall—they pulled into the high-school parking lot in Gillett, population eight hundred: “Home of Friendly People and the Coon Supper.”

The run-up to Gillett’s annual supper may be your one chance to hear someone say, without irony, that they’re cooking only six hundred pounds of coon this year. The supper began in the 1930s, when a few local hunters decided to get together and cook up the meat they had left over after skinning out their take. By 1947 it had evolved into an annual early-January fund-raiser for the Gillett High School football team, a team that, like most of the downtown—two of three motels, four of five small grocers, the lone hardware store—has now vanished.

Gillett is on the Grand Prairie of Arkansas, and it’s rice farming country. It’s also almost entirely white. That’s unusual for a rice-growing town in the American South, and can largely be explained by the fact that rice wasn’t planted here until the first decade of the twentieth century; in Louisiana and the Carolinas, by contrast, slaves grew rice for over 150 years before abolition. Actually, saying that the slaves planted rice doesn’t go far enough; for a time enslaved Africans—especially those from the French Company of the Indies’ Senegal Concession—probably knew more about growing rice than anyone else in their respective colonies.

For hundreds of years, farmers in the Senegal Concession (which stretched from Mauritania to Sierra Leone) had painstakingly constructed earthen dams and bulwarks, holding and diverting water as they cultivated wet rice. The farmers pierced each earthwork with a valve made from a hollowed-out tree trunk, allowing rains to flood rice paddies while keeping seawater out. As early as 1594, a Portuguese trader out of Cape Verde described how residents were “growing their crops on the riverain deposits, and by a system of dikes had harnessed the tides to their own advantage,” a system nearly identical to the one slaves eventually built in South Carolina. White planters clearly recognized the African farmers’ expertise; in the decade after 1719, when French ships carried seed rice from Whydah (modern Benin) to Louisiana, more than half the slaves brought to the territory were from the Senegal Concession. In 1785 newspapers still advertised newly arrived slaves “who have been accustomed to the planting of rice.” Much of America’s early rice history is African: African in conception, African in design, and African-labor built.

Which is why Gillett is mostly white. The wet, granular Delta soils just south of the Arkansas River—where the towns are mostly African American—were just what early rice-growing slave owners wanted. But until 1909 the land around Gillett was prairie—and, in the town’s historical memory anyway,
poor
prairie, where German Americans from the Midwest struggled to raise cattle on sage grass. The relatively thin prairie soils overlay a hardpan of packed clay, which eventually proved to be a blessing. The hardpan, it turned out, could trap water nearly as effectively as plastic sheeting; if you built levees and pumped in water, the earth would flood—holding the water, ready for rice.

Soil, here, is demographic destiny. Still, the farmers of Gillett owe a genuine debt to those of the Gambia and Niger rivers—if not for the establishment of rice around Gillett proper, then for the existence of an American rice industry at all. It’s a debt not lessened in the slightest by the fact that it goes unacknowledged.

At the edge of town, a black-and-white sign has a picture of a startled-looking raccoon and the town slogan: GILLETT: HOME OF FRIENDLY PEOPLE & THE COON SUPPER. It’s a rice-growing town. But it’s the Coon Supper that brought Clinton, and decades of governors and Miss Arkansases, and it’s what brings me.

The Quarles farm was in the region called Little Dixie. Flanking the Missouri River, Little Dixie was settled, in the plurality, by white farmers from slaveholding states like Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Many of the farmers brought enslaved men and women with them from their home states and grew corn, tobacco, and hemp to ship downriver to New Orleans. By reputation at least, Little Dixie was not as brutal as the worst cotton- or rice-growing regions, and there’s no record of physical cruelty on John Quarles’s part (except, of course, for the raw fact of forced bondage). He was typical of the region, having arrived from Tennessee in the 1830s with the intent of setting up as a tobacco farmer.

During his childhood summers, the boy Sammy Clemens spent weeks with the slaves—playing with the children, tagging along with the adults. He believed that one of them, Aunt Hannah, was old enough to have talked to Moses; another, Uncle Dan’l, was a potent figure who would live on vividly in the mind of Mark Twain. “We had a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and advisor in ‘Uncle Dan’l,’” he wrote in his
Autobiography,
“whose sympathies were wide and warm. . . . It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. This feeling and this estimate have stood the test of sixty years and more and have suffered no impairment. The black face is as welcome to me now as it was then.”

But even as a child, he understood that truly good and honest friendship wasn’t possible under the divide of slavery; he later wrote that “all the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. I say in effect, using the phrase as a modification. We were comrades and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of and which rendered complete fusion impossible.” Of course, it’s not taking any kind of leap to say that the “subtle line” looked considerably less subtle to the boys standing on the other side of it; there’s no doubt that the farm that Twain remembered so clearly and so well had many secret pathways, many places hidden to him.

Twain loved secret places. His literary double, Tom Sawyer, thrived on them, as when Tom “entered a dense wood, picked his pathless way to the center of it, and sat down on a mossy spot under a spreading oak. . . . Nature lay in a trance that was broken by no sound but the occasional far-off hammering of a wood-pecker, and this seemed to render the pervading silence and sense of loneliness the more profound.” But Tom’s routes were those of play, as he flung himself through woods to Robin Hood’s lair, discovered the dens of robbers and the haunts of pirates, and learned the infinite interworkings of the cave south of town “as well as anyone.” Slaves had their own vitally important mental maps, ways of doing what they wanted to do—or had to do—without being seen and stopped.

What Tom Sawyer (and Twain) found a fun midnight lark might be, to a slave, a dangerous expedition requiring courage and skill, a way of supplementing inadequate rations of corn and low-quality meat. Maria Franklin, once a graduate student at Flowerdew, now professor at Texas-Austin, points out that in Virginia “blacks understood the advantage of familiarizing themselves with their untamed surroundings—landscapes that remained wooded and natural—for they facilitated secrecy and anonymity. Before long, enslaved Virginians acquired an in-depth knowledge of their environment, and the flora and fauna sustained by it.” That’s one reason that raccoon and possum, as relished by Twain as muskrat was by Jim Deetz, eventually gained a reputation among some whites as slave foods. Raccoons are night creatures, emerging at dusk from their dens—perfect prey for people who had to hunt and trap and fish for what they could in the few unwatched hours they had.

Maryland and South Carolina slave Charles Bell found that secretly trapping and hunting game in a nearby swamp was the best way of ensuring his family’s health. Bell worked hard to “procure supplies of such things as were not allowed me by my master,” first among which was meat. By walking several miles through the woods after dark, he managed to catch enough raccoons, opossums, and rabbits for two or three meals a week; he scorned men like the head of family who, having come in from the fields, “seldom thought of leaving his cabin again before morning.” In the spring, when the raccoons were thin and worthless, Bell turned to fishing, working to feed his loved ones however the season best permitted. It’s not surprising at all that so many plantation raccoon hunts, like that on the modest Quarles farm, were led by slaves: people whose days were not their own, for whom a successful nighttime hunt could mean more meat than they’d be rationed in a week.

Of course, eating raccoon wasn’t restricted to the South; in his 1839
A Diary in America,
visiting Englishman Frederick Marryat noted the profusion of “rackoon” in the New York game market, and in 1867 De Voe occasionally saw it sold there “both alive and dead.” But the growing white perception of raccoon as slave food could be self-fulfilling; once the stereotype took hold, some whites who had enjoyed the meat might refuse to eat it. At Virginia’s Rich Neck Plantation, for instance, black households ate four times as much raccoon after 1765 as they had before, while the species vanished almost entirely from white tables. Whites may have abandoned the food because of its racial associations, with poor whites in particular coming to see eating raccoon as a kind of symbolic barrier between themselves and enslaved African Americans.

None of this is to say that slaves hunted raccoon only when forced to by hunger. Early European travelers to West Africa were often amazed at the variety of wild game eaten there; Francis Moore of the Royal West Africa Company wrote that “there is scarce anything [the people] do not eat: large snakes, guanas, monkeys, pelicans, bald-eagles, alligators, and sea-horses [hippos] are excellent food.” Once in America, the long experience of many Africans with hunting and eating a variety of game may have helped them to see the potential food value of raccoon and other wild species. Benin, for example, has an obvious raccoon analogue called the grasscutter (or greater cane rat), which is two feet long, prefers wet areas like riverbanks, will happily take to a new plantation cut into the forest, and is popular enough to eat to be raised in cages for sale. It’s sometimes served with yam porridge, or
teligbo,
paralleling the matching of dark, shredded meat with sweet potatoes that culinary historian John Martin Taylor says is common throughout the African diaspora. To West Africans used to eating grasscutters and other nocturnal mammals, eating raccoon and possum with sweet potatoes may have been familiar, even comforting.

Certainly some ex-slaves thought of both raccoon and possum with affection. “Oh! I was fond of ’possums, sprinkled with butter and pepper and baked down ’till de gravy was good and brown,” one remembered. Another, Anthony Dawson, had liked raccoon better: “Sometimes de boys would go down in the woods and get a possum. I love possum and sweet-taters, but de coon meat more delicate and de hair don’t stink up de meat.” But whether they preferred possum or raccoon, it’s impossible to know how the slaves on the Quarles farm felt about the hunts they led. Did they resent the loss of sleep? Did they feel the excitement Twain had? Sammy liked and admired some of the slaves; but of course he’d never be their confidant. They had their own secrets, their own paths.

Among the paths Twain couldn’t see was the one leading back to the source of many of his favorite Southern foods. The roots of the slaves on the Quarles farm can’t be traced as easily as can those of people living on the rice plantations of South Carolina or Louisiana, many of whom were enslaved and brought from specific rice-growing areas; some of those on the Quarles farm had probably lived in America for three or more generations. But whatever the ancestry and origin of the slaves there, by the time Sammy came to the farm they were cooking a thoroughly creolized cuisine—one with perhaps its deepest and most important roots among the incredibly diverse cultures of Africa.