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.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Friday, May 23, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)