Wilcox County Takes Off

When we started this tourism program 5 years ago, who’d have thought that Wilcox County would be one of the stars in our crown? They were a community that time forgot. They had turned inward upon themselves, without much regard for the outside world. They were either living in the past or struggling toward the future. They were one of the most isolated parts of rural Southwest Alabama, partly by geography and partly by choice. For whatever reason, they were a place apart.

A number of things came together to change Wilcox County’s perception of itself and the outside world’s perception of it. The first thing was the return of the retirees. There were professional people who had left the area to seek jobs elsewhere, but when it was time to put down permanent roots, they returned to the place of their birth. They brought with them the vision of other times and other places based on the things they had seen out there in the world. In spite of being in the bigger world, they always longed for the peace, natural serenity and beauty that was their Wilcox County birthright.

The second thing to change was the discovery of the Gees Bend Quilters by the Big World. The beauty of the quilts made from the scraps of daily living symbolized what Wilcox County has to offer - bevy of designs that together make art out of everyday living. They are original, colorful, and individual. Together they make a bold statement personified in the people still there in Gees Bend -“We are who we are. You can appreciate us for who we are or not, but we will continue as we are. If you want to come see us, we will welcome you. It will take effort to find us, but should you come, we will share our authenticity with you. You will leave feeling you have met people who are real.”

The third thing to happen to change Wilcox County was the founding of Black Belt Treasures. It was the brainchild of John Clyde Riggs – the director of Alabama Tombigbee Regional Commission. Two years earlier, he was one of three visionaries along with Norman Burton of Ala Tom R C & D and Nisa Miranda of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Alabama, who started a tourism program as an on going program of economic development for rural Southwest Alabama. John Clyde (good old southern double name) would wake up at night thinking of a way to pull together all the artists, writers, musicians and craftspeople of the area into one marketing effort. Black Belt Treasures was born. They started out by identifying 90 artists and craftspeople to represent in a nonprofit cooperative gallery. That number has grown to 280.

The fourth thing that happened was that Governor Bob Riley allowed the Gees Bend Ferry to reopen. It had been closed in the ‘60s to prevent the people in the Bend from coming over across the river to Camden, the county seat, to register to vote. By ferry, the distance was 6 miles, but road, it was 45 miles. It just never reopened. Bureaucratic red tape is hard to remove once it place. It takes something big to make it happen. When Gees Bend Quilts became world famous, it happened.
Now with the quilts on one side of the Alabama River and the Black Belt Treasures on the other, suddenly there was a road trip worth taking.

The fifth thing to happen was the printing of a brochure called 100 Places to Eat Before You Die. The Alabama Department of Tourism and Travel says it is their most popular brochure ever. Gaines Ridge Supper Club is on the list. They were a thriving business already, but their traffic ahs picked up even more with the listing of their Black Bottom Pie. In the meantime, another restaurant called Uncle Redd’s has opened with soul food that is rapidly becoming famous.

The sixth thing to happen is the innovative thinking of the people themselves.
The Chamber of Commerce has come together behind good ideas. There is a whole weekend of festivities coming up the last weekend in June with a Riverbank Festival of Jazz and food on Friday night, a Folk Life Festival at Black Belt Treasures on Saturday the unveiling of a Quilt Mural Trail in Gees Bend, and a fireworks display on Saturday night. There was a Crappy Fishing Tournament that was a big success. There is an ongoing effort to bring cultural enrichment to the children and youth of the area through a program called Bama Kids headed by local legend Sheryl Threadgill Mathews. People are coming together in Wilcox County. They are working together for the common good. It’s a good place to visit. There are lots of things to see.

Vacation at Home

When I was a child we used to have operettas at school. We would all dress up in homemade finery and sing songs like the one I remember in my head right now “I just came back from a lovely trip along the Milky Way. I stopped off at the North Pole to spend a holiday.” I feel like I’ve just been on a trip to a place just that farfetched. I went to a convention in Las Vegas.

The Las Vegas in my mind was the one left over from the sixties and seventies with modern architecture and lounge lizard singers. There was cheap food to get you to gamble. That world no longer exists. Now there are castles from Europe and pyramids from Egypt. The shows are Cirque de Soliel spectacles and Broadway productions. The hotels themselves are works of art. I stayed at Caesar’s Palace. It looked like a palace – the kind that they turn into museums in Italy. There are casinos in the hotel that you have to walk through to get to everything, but there are also upscale shops, dining and theaters. The food itself is now a centerpiece of the entertainment. Nothing is tawdry. Nothing is cheap. For example, there was no coffee maker in the room. I called down and was informed that to have one brought up would be $40.00. There was coffee for sale downstairs in a fancy French patisserie for $4.00 in a to go cup.

I enjoyed the shopping. The stores were famous designers. I know that I am a bargain shopper. I also know that all the clothes, whether designer or discount store, are all made in the same sweatshops in the Far East. Sometime the fabrics are nicer and the clerks are snobbier, but otherwise you are paying for a label. If you think a label makes a skirt worth $300, then go for it. I didn’t, but I enjoyed the looking for my education.

The food was wonderful, as it should be at those prices. In rural Southwest Alabama, we eat well for week on what one meal there costs.

I love to read. One thing I noticed was that there was only one book shop that I saw. I was about to go in until I realized that it was a bookie shop. The signs leading to it said Book with an arrow pointing the way. I go to it and realized that it wasn’t what I had in mind.

I would hate to be in Las Vegas this coming holiday weekend. It was crowded during the week, so I can imagine it on a holiday. Luckily, I don’t have to be there. I have been on the go so much lately that I will spend this weekend in my favorite place – on my porch. I am sitting here now writing this. I heard birds singing in all of the trees. My garden is in full bloom. The daylilies are dancing with the hydrangeas. I am drinking a glass of pomegranate iced tea and contemplating life. Two cats doze nearby. I will sit here this holiday weekend and read a good book. I’ll put some classical music on the CD player to mingle with the birdsong. My food will be just as good as that I ate in Las Vegas – just a different kind.

I love to see the world. Las Vegas is a world class destination. I’m glad I saw it. I’m equally glad that I can be here in rural Southwest Alabama today and not there. My real world is so much better than the fairy tale they have created for you to live in while you give them your money. There are plenty of one armed bandits in Las Vegas to take your money, but the whole world of $40.00 coffee pot rentals has figured out more than one way to fleece you.

I will just be here on the porch enjoying the birds and the flower gardens. I will read a book, not place a bet with a book maker. I’m betting that I will have a better time here this holiday weekend, than I did in Las Vegas. Where I am in rural Southwest Alabama is real, authentic, and relaxing. This is a place to restore your soul, not loose your shirt.

Avoiding the Food Police

Before you’d get arrested by the food police for even mentioning bacon drippings, we ate it at every meal. It was for us what ghee (clarified butter) was to the Indian diet. It was essential.

It all started in the rural south when pork fat was the only cooking medium available for both frying and seasoning. I don’t know what Yankees used, but I bet it didn’t have the same nourishing, smoky flavor of bacon fat. You notice that I referred to it as bacon drippings. That is what all the southern cooks in my family have always called it. They had special little metal pots with a little tray sieve in it. They could pour the hot bacon fat directly into it. The little bits of cooked bacon in the pan would be caught in the sieve, with the hot fat dripping down into the pot below. I guess that’s why they called it bacon drippings.

We don’t eat that much bacon drippings anymore since the food police took over when we started making the correlation between pork fat and people dropping dead of strokes and heart attacks. Doctors, who have had one course in nutrition in their entire medical training, became those food police. If we ate bacon drippings, they would put our names on a most wanted list that hung in post offices all over rural Southwest Alabama and I’ve heard even as far away as Texas where our relatives went when they got in trouble with the law in Alabama and Mississippi. I understand the food police had a list for butter offenders nationwide, which they recently had to remove because somehow, we found out that butter is so much better for you than margarine which turns out to plastic.

Today I had steam fried potatoes and onions in bacon drippings. Now I have to turn myself in. However, as every good sinner knows, some things are worth it. The bacon drippings may be a more forbidden pleasure than adultery. I know that eating those potatoes was certainly pleasurable.

My grandmother used to make potatoes like those every time I would go spend the night with her. They are really a very simple dish. You heat the bacon drippings to the sizzling point in a heavy pan. Then you throw in as many diced or sliced potatoes and onions as you think you can eat at one sitting (they’re not as good left over). You turn down the heat, put on a lid and let them steam fry. Every so often you take a spatula and get up the parts that have browned to the pan. You do this several times during the approximately 20 minutes it takes to cook the potatoes over medium heat. I only cooked one potato and half an onion, because I had eaten a bacon and tomato sandwich earlier. That is how I came to have bacon drippings on hand. I threw away my bacon drippings container sometime in the last century or when I got divorced. I thought of my grandma’s potatoes and felt nostalgic.

They don’t call it comfort food for nothing. Those potatoes, sprinkled with the Creole seasoning instead of Maw maw’s liberal dousing of black pepper, topped with a light squirting of ketchup made a really great supper. The onions were transparent and the potatoes were custardy. Both were shiny with bacon drippings, even though I had drained and patted them with paper towels to assuage my guilt. I have rarely had such a soul satisfying meal recently. I understand why grassroots southern cooking is called soul food. Those potatoes, with their coating of politically incorrect bacon drippings filled up a place in my soul. There were to me, what the made lines were to Proust in “Remembrance of Things Past”.

Now if I must, I will give myself up to the food police. As I told you before, some things are worth it.

Garden Plant Follies

If everything I had planted in my garden had lived, I’d be in the midst of a jungle right now. It’s probably for the best that my garden practices survival of the fittest. We have been in drought for the past 3 years. Last summer was the worst. What plants did come back, I know to be like the residents of rural Southwest Alabama themselves – hardy survivors.

It’s early morning and I have already been out for my morning walk in the garden. I go barefoot and carry a cup of some kind of tea. I love tea – hot in the morning. Later in the day when I am done with my morning tea, I cut off the kettle and let it cool down. I then drink it in the afternoon iced. I love tea, but I guess in some ways I am not the typical southern tea drinkers because I can’t take the sugary syrup that most southerners want. Our most famous meal is meat and three with sweet tea. It is like drinking sugar straight to me.

My garden is beginning to contribute to my tea drinking by providing various kinds of mint to add to it. I have peppermint spearmint, mint the best, apple mint, lemon mint, orange mint, chocolate mint and variegated pineapple mint currently planted in my garden. Most of them are planted in pots. I’m no fool. I have seen many happy plants gallop away to really invade a garden. That has recently happed with my volunteer spiderworts. This is a plant brought over by the colonists for its medicinal properties. It is so happy in the rural south that it runs a close third in garden invasions to kudzu and wisteria. “Kudzu and Baptists are taking the South” was what a college professor of mine used to say. Wisteria is nothing but genteel kudzu. The way you plant both of them is a throw a plant down and run like hell.
Spiderwort may be worse in a garden because it reproduces from ANY part of the plant - roots, leaves, stems and flowers. The real problem with it is, like wisteria, it looks so pretty at the beginning that you think it belongs there. I have visited two public gardens recently where it was in the flower borders with more legitimate plants. One was Jasmine Hills Gardens and the other was Grace Episcopal Close Garden. They have real gardeners, so I assume they knew what they were doing. This is one plant that not only survived the drought, but tried to fill up most of my flower beds in the process.

My wisteria is a century old problem. My house is that old and the first owner must have planted it when Art Nouveau was making wisteria so revered. I have a large yard. The wisteria is down in the east corner. Over the century, the roots have come up and started new bushes anywhere nobody was paying attention. There is an oak tree that has exposed roots on the bank that has survived three hurricanes because the wisteria is so intertwined with it. In another part of the garden, the growth was so invasive that I just gave up and built a swing arbor for it to crawl on. Unfortunately, it can’t tell the difference in the arbor and the nearby tree, so it has engulfed both and has sent out roots so long, they are coming up on the other side of the house many yards away. The vines in the lower part of the yard are big enough to build stout furniture out of it. I can’t mess with it much, though, because the big oak tree would fall down.

I do have to get to work on the spiderwort. I need to let it know it’s not the only plant I want to grow. I have included a picture of it. It’s like that junior high girl who looks so pretty, but smarts off at her parents when she’s at home.

Simple Foods

I just had one of my favorite breakfasts. I was sitting on my porch listening to the birds sing. The food I ate is a dish I learned to make at age 5 while reading my Susie Homemaker Golden Book. It is melted sharp cheese on saltine crackers. I have come to name it Poor Man’s Cheese Straws.

One of the absolute favorite party dishes here in rural Southwest Alabama is cheese straws. They are cheese pastries torturously extruded out of a cookie press. They are wonderful – a mixture of cheese, flour, butter, cayenne pepper and pinches of spices. Now you can buy them at places like Target anytime. They used to be quite a delicacy making famous for the households that produced them.

My poor man’s cheese straws taste very much like them, only they are just toasted crackers and cheese. When I grew up, a friend of mine’s father had a country store on a dirt road in Chance, Alabama. They lived in an unpainted house across the road form the store. I can remember going to visit them on Sunday afternoons when I was a little girl in the days before Daddy took up golf, which ended our Sunday excursions forever.

When I was about four, we went down to visit. We played outside in the road coaxing doodlebugs out of their holes under the house with the taunt “Doodlebug, Doodlebug, come out o your hole. Your house is on fire!” They would come out. Not because they understood the gravity of their situation with the house on fire, but because we were torturing them with a broom straw stuck in the hole. Anyway, we were dirty and had to be bathed in the big claw foot tub in the bathroom added on the back porch. There were 3 of us in the tub. I can remember it so clearly because there was only an inch of water in it, but it was enough for us all to bath in. I didn’t understand it was because of it being a dry summer and the well being low.

Another thing I remember about that trip was that my friend, Frankie, the child of the family nearest my age, came running out to the car saying “I have brought you some paper dolls”. Being a town girl, I knew all about paper dolls from the Bedsole’s Ten Cent Store. I was excited until I saw them. They were cutouts from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue.

I’m telling you all this, to emphasize the simplicity of my breakfast. The basic supplies for making this were in every country store in every part of the Deep South. Saltine crackers and hoop cheese were always available in any place that sold food.
They were as common as the cans of pork and beans or sardines sold for lunches for people working in the woods and fields. The other night at Lion’s Club, two of the members were joking about the seafood platters they had for lunch while working in the woods. What they had were sardines on crackers, which they found as delightful as my poor man’s cheese straws.

There is a right and wrong way to prepare these toasted cheese crackers should you ever want to try them. The right was is to start with the most well aged cheddar cheese you can find. I use a Yankee cheese that I think is the best – Cabot’s extra sharp Vermont Cheddar or Kraft Extra Sharp Cracker Barrel that has a date that is about to expire. You must use plain saltine crackers. I have tried variations with Ritz or other fancier crackers. It will not work. The plain crackers turn into a crisp pastry when done right. Besides, you don’t want any sweetness in these.

You must bake the crackers at 350 degrees until the cheese is running off the crackers and leaves a lacy brown edge on cookie sheet. Do not let the crackers touch each other or they will not be as crisp and good. I have tried adding ground cayenne pepper and garlic powder under the cheese, It is okay if you like it, but not necessary to the success of the crackers. The key is the sharpness of the cheese and the slow baking. I promise you a delicacy that you can serve to anybody with pride. I have served it on the front porch to all kinds of dignitaries who just happen by. My front porch is a known gathering place in my hometown. We’ve had parties after big meetings, we’ve had every morning coffee meetings. We’ve had major quality of life discussions over iced tea. I’m having two distinguished guests who happen to be dear friends this weekend. We’ll be having breakfast on the porch eating – of course, poor man’s cheese straws. Don’t’ be too proud or too sophisticated to try them!

HAPPENINGS IN SELMA

I’m so proud of Selma. There is getting to be something to do there every weekend. Last weekend was the Battle of Selma. The weekend before that was the Pilgrimage and the Antique Sale. In the midst of all that, Senator John McCain made a visit. It doesn’t matter what our political leanings are. This was a major event for Selma, Gees Bend and Thomasville.

This past weekend, there were several interesting things that happened, but on a much quieter scale. The Freedom Foundation which recently moved to Selma from Colorado spearheaded a local production of the musical “Footloose”. It used local talent from all schools, ethnicities, and walks of life.

In conjunction with the play, the historic St. James Hotel had a special dinner package. They offered a 4 course dinner for $30.00 a person. I ate all four courses. The best thing was the sweet potato crème brule'.

The play was good, the food was special. The highlight of the weekend in my anticipation was the Sunday afternoon high tea at Sturdivant Hall. There was to be a tea tasting and wonderful refreshments as well as a lecture by a world traveled tea planter. I was so looking forward to it. Everything lived up to my expectations except the lecture. It was on the art of tea growing. It started off well enough. He told us about the history of tea, the kinds of tea and interesting facts about tea. That was where the interesting part left off. There is NOTHING more boring than a boring Englishman. I think the actual growing of tea takes less time than his explanation of it. There were lots of slides which were supposed to move along automatically. He would stop on a particular slide and give excruciating details about the picking of tea or the drying of tea. People all around me were dozing and slipping out. One lady graciously agreed to give up her seat near the front to a person who were hard of hearing. She had been one of the dozers.

This man had traveled around the world trying to figure out why production was down on a given plantation. I think one reason it might have been down was that pickers were going to sleep during one of his pep talks. He was enthusiastic in a droning sort of way about things like black tea being oxidized instead of fermented. It was like listening to an engineer wax lengthy (not eloquent) on some obscure part he was developing to increase the productivity of a widget. A lot of people’s eyes were glazing over (those who were not dozing) by the time he hit the 45 minute mark. He was particularly into a process called CTC – cut, tear and curl. I was about ready to do all three to him by the time he was through.

The experience reminded me of the old axiom we always use. If a teacher would just teach sex education like he teaches everything else, the students would loose all interest in sex. It was perfectly excruciating.

You may remember the 2 ½ hour lecture on herbs I wrote about a few months back. I could have listened to the herbalist all day. I felt like I DID listen to the tea planter all day. I decided that it being Sunday, I’d have rather listened to a fundamentalist preacher for the 150th time on the blood of Christ than 45 minutes of the tea planter. Oh, God.

The only things that kept me from bolting were the three other people I had fooled into coming with me and the memory of all those beautiful goodies in the dining room waiting to be consumed. It was like bible school. There is a reason they serve refreshments at the end.