Beans, corn, and endless varities of root vegetable—is this the stuff of an obsession?
The land was inviting, but depending on its bounty could trouble your dreams.
This Christmas, my two sisters and my brother and I, along with our families, will head toward home, our real home, which is where our seventy-eight-year-old mother, Christy, lives, in western Kentucky. She’ll be ready for us with the usual Christmas feast, and what I’m looking forward to most is the green beans and sweet potatoes and creamed corn, the farm fare that once seemed so oppressively ordinary to me. When I was growing up on our fifty-three-acre dairy farm, we were obsessed with food. Food was the center of our lives. Everything we did, every day, revolved around it. We planted it, grew it, harvested it, peeled it, cooked it, served it, consumed it—endlessly, day after day, season after season. This was life on a farm. I can appreciate the value of a country upbringing now, but when I was a girl all that toil drove me crazy.
One day my mother and my grandmother were shelling beans and talking about the proper method of drying apples. I was eleven and entirely absorbed with the March girls in “Little Women.” Drying apples was not in my dreams. Beth’s death was weighing darkly on me at that moment, and I threw a little tantrum—what Mama called a hissy fit.
“Can’t y’all talk about anything but food?” I screamed.
There was a shocked silence. “Well, what else is there?” Granny asked.
Granny didn’t question her duties, but I did. I didn’t want to be hulling beans in a hot kitchen when I was fifty years old. I wanted to be somebody, maybe an airline stewardess. Also, I had been listening to the radio. I had notions.
Life for our family was haunted by the fear of crop failure. We ate as if we didn’t know where our next meal might come from. All my life, I have had a recurrent food dream: I face a buffet or cafeteria line, laden with beautiful foods. I spend the entire dream choosing the foods I want. The anticipation of eating them is deliciously agonizing. I always wake up just as I’ve made my selections but before I get to eat.
Working with food was fraught with anxiety and desperation when I was a girl. Like all farmers, we were at the mercy of the weather, and it wasn’t to be trusted. My mother watched the skies at evening for any portent of the morrow. A cloud that went over and then turned around and came back was an especially bad sign. Our livelihood—even our lives—depended on forces outside our control.
I think this dependence on nature was at the core of my rebellion. I hated the constant sense of helplessness before vast forces, the continuous threat of failure. Farmers didn’t take the initiative, I began to see; they reacted to whatever presented itself. More than that, though, I disliked women’s part in that dependence.
From the front yard, where I sat reading under a maple tree, I could see my mother stooped over in the garden and my father on his tractor, far back in the field. No wonder I believed that progress meant freedom from the field and the range. That meant moving to town, I thought. Because we lived only a mile outside the town of Mayfield, I was acutely conscious of being country. I felt inferior to people in town because we had to grow our food and make our clothes; we couldn’t just go buy things, the way they did. Although we were self-sufficient and resourceful and held clear title to our land, we farm people lived in a state of psychological poverty. We felt that the fine life in town—celebrated in magazines, on radio, in movies—was denied us. Of course, we weren’t poor at all—I knew that. Poor people had too many kids, and they weren’t landowners; they rented decrepit little houses with plank floors and trash in the yard. “Poor people are wormy and eat wild onions,” Mama said. We weren’t poor, but we were country.
The truth was, Mama was a natural cook. At harvest time, after she’d got in from the garden and put out a wash, she would whip up a noontime dinner for the men in the field—my father and grandfather and maybe some neighbors and a couple of hired hands: fried chicken with milk gravy, ham, mashed potatoes, lima beans, field peas, corn, slaw, sliced tomatoes, fried apples, biscuits, and peach pie. This was not considered a banquet, only plain hearty food, fuel for work. All the ingredients except the flour, sugar, and salt came from the farm—the chickens, the hogs, the milk and butter, the potatoes from the potato patch, the beans, peas, corn, cabbage, apples, peaches. Nothing was processed, except by her. She was always butchering and plucking and planting and hoeing and shredding and slicing and creaming (scraping cobs for the creamed corn), and pressure-cooking and canning and freezing and thawing and mixing and shaping and baking and frying.
We were known to eat our pie right on the same plate as our turnip greens so as not to mess up another dish. It didn’t matter if the peach cobbler oozed all over the turnip-green juice and the pork grease. “It all goes to the same place,” Mama said. We never used napkins, and our table manners were boarding-house reach—no “Pass the peas, please.” Conversation detracted from the sensuous pleasure of filling yourself. Every meal required meat and vegetables and dessert. We drank milk and iced tea (“ice-tea”). Our salads were fruit Jell-O and slaw. We also ate “poke salet” and wilted lettuce. Mama picked tender young pokeweed in the woods in the spring, before it turned poison, and cooked it a long time to get the bitterness out. We liked it with vinegar and minced boiled eggs. Wilted lettuce was tender new lettuce, shredded, with sliced radishes and green onions, and blasted with hot bacon grease to blanch the rawness. “Too many fresh vegetables in the summer gives people the scours,” Daddy said.
We strode out at dawn, in the dew, and picked until the midmorning sun bore down on our heads. To protect her hands from the thorns, Mama made gloves from old bluejeans, with the fingertips cut out. Following the berries down onto the creek bank, we perched on ledges and tiptoed on unsure footing through thickets. We tunnelled. When Mama saw an especially large berry just out of reach, she would lean her body against the bush and let it support her while she plucked the prize. We picked in quart baskets, then poured the berries into red-and-white Krey lard buckets. The berries settled quickly, and Mama picked an extra quart to top off the buckets. By nine o’clock, the sun was high, and I struggled to the house with my four gallons of blackberries, eager to wash the chiggers off and eat some cereal.
From the blackberries, I learned about money. I wouldn’t eat the berries, even on my cereal: I wanted the money from selling them. Granny said everything was food, but I was hungry for something else—a kind of food that didn’t grow in the ground. Yet I couldn’t deny that we were always feasting. We ate sumptuous meals, never missing dessert. At Christmas, we slurped gallons of boiled custard. Once in a while, Daddy brought home exotic treats—fried oysters in little goldfish cartons and hot tamales wrapped in corn shucks.
Food was better in town, we thought. It wasn’t plain and ordinary and everyday. The main pleasures were there, too—the barbecue places, the movie shows, all the places to buy things. Woolworth’s, with the pneumatic tubes overhead rushing money along a metallic mole tunnel up to a balcony. Lochridge & Ridgway, with an engraved sign on the third-story cornice: “Stoves, Appliances, Plows.” On the mezzanine at that store, I bought my first phonograph records, brittle 78s of big-band music—Woody Herman and Glenn Miller, and Glen Gray and his Casa Loma Orchestra playing “No Name Jive.” A circuit of the square took you past the grand furniture stores, the two dime stores, the shoe stores, the men’s stores, the ladies’ stores, the banks, the drugstores. You’d walk past the poolroom and an exhaust fan would blow the intoxicating smell of hamburgers in your face. Before she bought a freezer, Mama kept our meat in a rented food locker in town, near the ice company. She stored the butchered calf there, and she fetched hunks each week to fry. But hamburgers in town were better. They were greasier, and they came in waxed-paper packages.
At the corner drugstore, on the courthouse square, Mama and my younger sister Janice and I sat at filigreed wrought-iron tables on a black-and-white mosaic tile floor, eating peppermint ice cream. It was cold in there, under the ceiling fans. The ice cream was served elegantly, in paper cones sunk into black plastic holders. We were uptown.
She was eager for a chance to buy us things. After the war, she had wanted Daddy to get out of dairy farming and run a small business of some kind, something that would bring in more cash, but he had refused to leave his parents’ farm. He was an only child, and my grandparents depended on him to carry on. Mama had swallowed her disappointment. She was resilient and optimistic—when Janice and I were growing up, we always saw her sparkling like morning dew—and she always wanted more for her children.
I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. Running our own little restaurant could mean we wouldn’t have to work in the garden. I wanted nothing more to do with okra and beans. I longed for deliverance and an endless supply of Co’-Colas.
A restaurant would hold no fears for her. “It’s a chance to make big money,” she told me. She told the owner she would try it for two weeks. If she liked the work, the deal was, she would be permitted to rent the business, for a hundred dollars a month.
“If it works out, maybe I could make a hundred dollars a week,” she said.
I tagged along. I felt important waiting on customers—strangers driving along the highway and stopping right where I was for a bite to eat. I wanted to meet somebody from New York. When I drew glasses of Coca-Cola from the fountain, the Coke fizzed over crushed ice. I made grilled-cheese sandwiches in the grilled-cheese machine. I experimented with milkshakes. I was flying.
Most of all, I loved the jukebox. The first week Mama was there, the jukebox man came by to change records and insert new red-rimmed paper strips of titles: Doris Day and Johnnie Ray duets, “Teardrops from My Eyes,” by Ruth Brown, and “P.S. I Love You,” by a Kentucky vocal group called the Hilltoppers. I listened avidly to everything. I was fourteen and deeply concerned about my suntan, and I was saving pocket money to buy records.
The restaurant also had a television set, which sat in a corner with a “television light” on top—a prism of soft colors which supposedly kept people from ruining their eyes on TV waves. I had no experience with television, and I was captivated by Donald O’Connor’s variety show and “I Love Lucy.” When the evening crowd came in, Mama was kept busy as she trotted back and forth from the kitchen with her hamburger platters and catfish platters, but she would stop and laugh at something Lucy and Ethel were doing on the screen.
A tale of faith in human dignity restored.