A Delicious Journey
Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover's Companion to the South.
Catching Memories in a Box: Photographic Work by Students in Coffeeville, Alabama.
The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830-1925.
Written in the Bricks: A Visual and Historical Tour of Fifteen Mississippi Hometowns
Southern Belly: The Ultimate Food Lover’s Companion to the South.
By John T. Edge. Pen and ink illustrations by Blair Hobbs.
Athens, Georgia: Hill Street Press, 2000. 270 pages. $24.95.
Enter the Southern Belly with Georgia born
John T. Edge and you will get a short history of the Greek influence in
Dixie’s restaurants; hear the arguable contention that Texas is not a
Southern state gastronomically; take the bitter of racism with the sweet
of meat alchemized over hardwood coals at Ollie’s Barbecue in
Birmingham; reminisce over the days when carhops really hopped; salivate
at the “jiggling core of custard” at the heart of Mattie Johnson’s
Big Bob Gibson coconut pie; discover why most Southern cafeterias, unlike
their Northern counterparts, have servers carrying trays for the patrons;
and make the acquaintance of Mobile’s Eugene Walter, author of the Time
Life classic American Cooking; Southern Style, novelist, poet,
essayist, actor, raconteur, bon vivant, and artist who painted, among
other things, a portrait of “The Devil’s dear Grandmother pondering
what menu to serve when she invites Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Jesse
Helms to dine in Hell with Hitler and Mussolini.”
You will
then be on page 13.
Given
that this survey of Southern eateries runs to 270 pages including three
indexes (places, people, and a “general” category that is primarily
food) you may feel the urge here for a glass of sweet tea. Given that this
is a book about hunger enticingly assayed, it would not be surprising if
that urge later makes you decide to drive a few hundred miles for a taste
of central Kentucky’s beer cheese or a piece of Gus’s Famous Fried
Chicken in Mason, Tennessee.
But
hunger is never a simple matter in the South, and unlike other road food
books, this one is not only concerned with what’s on the plate, but also
with the how and why and by whose grace it got there. Most mortals would
be content to sit in Martin’s of Montgomery, Alabama, savoring a
slightly spicy drumstick and marveling at the integrated clientele that
fills a place that was once the favored meeting/eating ground of George
Wallace. Edge is the deceptively sweet‑faced guy who turns to the
black man at the next table and asks when all this integration happened.
For his reward, and our on‑going education, he is told that the
times, they are still a’changing. The most
recent
development, his neighbor says, is the presence of black waitresses. Up
until 1996 or 1997, the black staff was confined to the kitchen and
servers were all white. “Nowadays, no one pays much attention to it,”
the man tells Edge. “When you’re black, you develop an ability to
notice things like that, same as a dog in the wild develops teeth to
protect itself.”
The
ability to notice and relate such undercurrents, shadows, tantalizing
clues, and delicious details is what makes Edge and his book such
extraordinary companions-either on the road or in the living room. Cover
and illustrations by Oxford’s Blair Hobbs are another of the fine small
pleasures that make this book a treasure. Her jumping catfish on page 131
is worth the price of admission alone.
Ronni
Lundi
Catching
Memories in a Box: Photographic Work by Students of Coffeeville, Alabama.
Edited by Andrew Goetz. Foreword by Jack Shelton.
Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Program for Rural Services and Research, 2000. 52
pages, 37 black and white photographs.
A collaborative effort between elementary school
children in Coffeeville, Alabama, and photographer Andrew Goetz of the
University of Alabama’s Program for Rural Services and Research, Catching
Memories in a Box features 37 black and white photographs taken by 24
different students. After teaching them how to use their cameras, Goetz
sent the students out to photograph. He told them that since they lived in
America, they should take pictures of whatever they darn well pleased.
They didn’t come back with many surprises, though: the book shows us
images of the students’ homes, their families, and one another, usually
mugging for the camera. We
learn a little about Coffeeville and its people in the process, though
often only incidentally.
A
number of such projects have been carried out in recent years. Among the
first (and better known) was Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and
Stories by Children of the Appalachians (1985), coordinated by Wendy
Ewald among several school districts in southeastern Kentucky.
It includes some intense, even frightening, images of hardscrabble
Appalachian life from a child’s point of view. More recent are volumes 1
and 2 of Seeing Our World: The Photographs and Writings of the Children
of Tutwiler, Mississippi, under the guidance of the Center’s own Dan
Sherman. These publications provide a gracefully broad view of life in a
small Mississippi Delta town, and the viewer comes away with a palpable
sense of the students’ homes and families helping to keep Tutwiler bound
together. Making the photographs for Catching Memories in a Box was
no doubt a highly rewarding experience for the children of Coffeeville.
One wishes the book could have been equally as rewarding for its readers.
David
Wharton
Southern
Folk Medicine, 1750-1820.
By Kay K. Moss. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 275
pages, 16 halftones. $29.95.
Using over a dozen commonplace books penned by both women and men
of the early American frontier South, Kay K. Moss in Southern Folk
Medicine, 1750-1820 provides insights into the use of herbs and other
medical procedures employed by yeomen, physicians, housewives, and slaves.
To be sure, some of these procedures are not for the faint of heart; for
example, the pages that
describe the act of phlebotomy, with handsome illustrations.
While
many of us may not want to know of such practices, these detailed pages
point to several facts. First, Moss is thorough in her research on healing
practices and provides minute details on backyard cures, as well as those
touted by the leading physicians of the day. Second, these medical facts
point to the level of uncertainty concerning the maintenance of good
health and the general therapies used, including
bleeding, sweating, purging, and blistering of patients in hopes of
curing them. As Moss notes and as one can easily imagine, such therapies
were often fatal. And, finally, these frontier medical applications give
voice to the three existing cultures and point to a route of intersection
among these cultures, which were more mutually beneficial than some of the
other known routes of intersection.
One
excellent example this is the noted case of the enslaved African who was
granted his freedom via the South Carolina General Assembly, and paid a
pension for life, for what is known as Caesar’s Cure, a treatment
for poison and snake bites. So noted was this remedy that some 50 years
after its discovery, when its early mention appeared in a 1750
publication, it still carried Caesar’s name and its original ingredients
of roots of plantain and hoarhound. This remedy was seen as so effective
that an 1816 almanac reported that, after treatment, should a patient not
exhibit signs of improvement, then either the patient was not poisoned or
it was such a poison that “Caesar’s antidote will not remedy.”
Nonetheless, people were far more willing to abandon the patient than to
abandon Caesar’s Cure.
The
unpublished commonplace journals of Southerners’ medical notes, filled
with typical to exotic cures, are offset with the more widely used printed
manuscripts such as John Quincy’s 1736 Pharmacopoeia Officinalis;
William Buchan’s 1774 Domestic Medicine, and Nicholas
Culpeper’s 1770 The English Physician Enlarged. Moss has
skillfully employed these reference guides as historical markers in
“tracing the traditions followed by Southern domestic practitioners.”
Moss’s goal in writing this work was not to validate the actual healing
receipts found with in the pages of the commonplace books, but it was more
to elucidate these early frontier practices. This book thus serves as a
floodlight on early Southern culture.
Phoenix
Savage
The
White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People,
1830-1925
By Mia Bay.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
288 pages. $19.95.
In
the past several years, the idea that race is a social construction has
become extremely influential among scholars. A fascinating contribution to
the field of race-thinking, Mia Bay’s important new book analyzes the
range of meanings African American thinkers attributed to race, blackness,
and whiteness from the 1830s into the 1920s. An intriguing blend of
intellectual history, folklore, science, and religion, the book discusses
well-known intellectual leaders as well as more obscure thinkers, always
depicting how their ideas were part of broad arguments about power,
identity, and respect.
A powerful first section on antebellum intellectual leaders
displays the key dilemmas for African Americans thinking about race.
African American intellectuals wrote to reject concepts, many of them
Thomas Jefferson’s, of the inherent inferiority of blacks. But most
African American contributors to the field of ethnology--the study of the
origins and characters of different groups--argued against those ideas
without rejecting the concept of race. Instead, many used the concept to
argue for African superiority. Addressing issues of science, history, and
theology, African American intellectual leaders placed “emphasis on two
not always compatible themes: human
sameness and racial distinctions” (54). Some, Bay finds, developed ideas
of African Americans as a “Redeemer Race,” with special qualities of
kindness and respect for justice, in contrast to what some called “Angry
Saxons,” who had tastes for violence and domination. Frederick Douglass,
who rejected all ideas of race, stands out in this section of the book as
a bit of an exception.
An intriguing second section analyzes folk thinking about race,
whiteness, and blackness in the WPA Slave Narratives. Less theoretical in
nature, those sources made two main points. First, African Americans in
the 1930s remembered slavery as an effort by slave owners to blur the
lines between human and animal. One after another, former slaves recalled
African Americans’ efforts in words and actions to resist that attempt.
Secondly, the WPA sources reveal considerable discussion of religious
themes--whites as something approaching devils, heaven as a place without
whites.
A third section, again studying intellectual leaders, brings the
topic into the 1920s. For a brief period, ideas about evolution,
especially social Darwinism, replaced ethnology as a key to thinking about
race. Much stronger among African American intellectuals was a movement
among cultural anthropologists to study all groups without using ideas of
inferior or superior, primitive or civilized, backward or advanced.
Intellectual leaders like W. E. B. DuBois used anthropological theory to
reject ideas of race while continuing to emphasize strengths of African
and African American culture.
This readable book studies ideas as explanations and tools. Taking
seriously ideas and the thinkers who developed them, it helps clarify a
complex and controversial concept. Just as importantly, it adds new
details to our understanding of the long and difficult career of the idea
of race.
Ted Ownby
Written
in the Bricks: A Visual and Historical Tour of Fifteen Mississippi
Hometowns.
Text by Mary Carol Miller. Photographs by Mary Rose Carter.
Brandon, Mississippi: Quail Ridge Press, 1999. 232 pages, over 100 color
photographs. $39.95.
Author
Mary Carol Miller and photographer Mary Rose Carter portray the history of
Mississippi through images and stories of historic buildings in
communities throughout the state. The book covers Oxford and Holly Springs
in the north; Ocean Springs and Pass Christian on the Gulf Coast; Natchez
and Vicksburg on the Mississippi River; Carrollton, Greenwood, and Yazoo
City in the Delta; Columbus and Tupelo in the east. Also included are
Brookhaven, Jackson, Hattiesburg, and Meridian. Written in the Bricks
will appeal to travelers, those who go on the road and those who stay home
in the armchair to explore the places described and pictured here.
Country Music Annual 2000, published by the
University Press of Kentucky, is now available in bookstores and on-line
at www.kentuckypress.com. Edited
by Charles K. Wolfe (Middle Tennessee State University) and James E.
Akenson (Tennessee Technological University),
Country
Music Annual 2000
contains a diverse set of articles on topics ranging from Minnie Pearl to
country music in the Los
Angeles gay community.
Editors
Wolfe and Akenson invite scholars doing research in all aspects of the
history and contemporary status of country music to submit manuscripts for
consideration. Country music is very broadly defined to include musical
styles which share common historical, cultural, and
demographic roots. Topics and styles may range from country music prior to the advent of radio and recordings to varied styles such as Alternative, Bluegrass, Cajun, Crossover, Honky Tonk, the Nashville Sound, Hot New Country, New Traditionalist, and Western Swing . Inquiries should be directed to Charles K. Wolfe at CWolfe@frank.mtsu.edu or James E. Akenson at JAkenson@tntech.edu.