the thick brown soup. They ate great northerns, limas, black-eyed peas and purple butter beans, but nothing even came close to pinto beans. Pintos were good enough for company.
In every stove, a golden cake of cornbread baked in an iron skillet, and the smell of the hot bread and bacon grease—you always smeared bacon grease around the skillet before you poured in the meal—would draw people in from the yard. The women would put the pone of bread on a dinner plate and cover the top with another dinner plate, because that’s how it was always done and always will be.
Sometimes, if the season was right, the women would mix pork cracklin’s—little cubes of rendered pork fat and skin—into the meal and lard and buttermilk or water, and men carried it—just that—in their lunch pails to the cotton mills, coal mines and pipe shops.
And sometimes, for a change, people just crumbled up a little cornbread in a glass or a bowl and poured cold buttermilk or sweet milk over it, and ate it with a spoon. They chopped hot Spanish onions up in it, and that was a meal.
They fried okra and squash and green tomatoes in the summer, and turned cucumbers into sweet pickles and pickled cabbage and pepper sauce into chow-chow, a red-hot relish that people ate with their beans. In the fall they ate collards and cooked turnips with butter and salt and pepper—a good turnip will just melt under your tongue. Deer rode across the hoods of Model Ts and across therumps of mules, and smart cooks ground it up with a little pork sausage, to give it taste, or soaked roasts in buttermilk, to make the meat less gamey. They scrambled squirrel brains into their eggs, and made candy for their children by melting cane sugar in skillets and then letting it get hard.
They lived in tightly packed mill villages where the sturdy little houses, all exactly the same but all with a real front porch, seemed so much better than anything they had ever lived in before. Or, like Charlie’s kin, they stayed in the woods in ramshackle houses that had never seen a coat of paint.
They rented, because they were one class below the owners, and owning land was a dream that most of them certainly had. But it might as well have been a dream about steamships and zeppelin rides, for all it would amount to, for generations.
But there was a dignity in them that no amount of servitude could collapse. The women wore their hair long—dictated by the doctrine of a Protestant faith—and the men, even the young ones like Charlie, draped their overalls in severe black coats for court and funerals and voting. A man has to have a lot of dignity to walk around proud with most of the rear end worn out of his overalls. But a pair of ventilated breeches, Charlie figured, was no reason to bow your head.
By the time he was fully grown, Charlie stood more than six feet tall but weighed less than one hundred and sixty pounds. When he climbed into his faded blue overalls, he looked like a mast stuck in a sail. “Whistle britches,” old men would say, grinning, because of the breeze that surely found a way into his clothes through the ragged holes or flapping pants legs.
It was the seat that always wore out first, because he found workas a roofer early on, and the shingles, like sandpaper, just ate the cloth away as he skidded around the roof on his rump and knees. His sisters sewed patches on the inside of his overalls, for decency’s sake.
He wore the same thing every day, because it was all he had. In the winter he wore long underwear under his Liberties, and a canvas work shirt that might have been some color once, but now was gray. He wore lace-up leather boots, what people called hobnails, strung with thin strips of leather, because cloth rotted in the weather, and he wore them when he was working, fishing and dancing. Men like him wore their hobnails to funerals under black suits. They got married in them, and worked saddle soap or oil into the leather to keep it from cracking.
In every stove, a golden cake of cornbread baked in an iron skillet, and the smell of the hot bread and bacon grease—you always smeared bacon grease around the skillet before you poured in the meal—would draw people in from the yard. The women would put the pone of bread on a dinner plate and cover the top with another dinner plate, because that’s how it was always done and always will be.
Sometimes, if the season was right, the women would mix pork cracklin’s—little cubes of rendered pork fat and skin—into the meal and lard and buttermilk or water, and men carried it—just that—in their lunch pails to the cotton mills, coal mines and pipe shops.
And sometimes, for a change, people just crumbled up a little cornbread in a glass or a bowl and poured cold buttermilk or sweet milk over it, and ate it with a spoon. They chopped hot Spanish onions up in it, and that was a meal.
They fried okra and squash and green tomatoes in the summer, and turned cucumbers into sweet pickles and pickled cabbage and pepper sauce into chow-chow, a red-hot relish that people ate with their beans. In the fall they ate collards and cooked turnips with butter and salt and pepper—a good turnip will just melt under your tongue. Deer rode across the hoods of Model Ts and across therumps of mules, and smart cooks ground it up with a little pork sausage, to give it taste, or soaked roasts in buttermilk, to make the meat less gamey. They scrambled squirrel brains into their eggs, and made candy for their children by melting cane sugar in skillets and then letting it get hard.
They lived in tightly packed mill villages where the sturdy little houses, all exactly the same but all with a real front porch, seemed so much better than anything they had ever lived in before. Or, like Charlie’s kin, they stayed in the woods in ramshackle houses that had never seen a coat of paint.
They rented, because they were one class below the owners, and owning land was a dream that most of them certainly had. But it might as well have been a dream about steamships and zeppelin rides, for all it would amount to, for generations.
But there was a dignity in them that no amount of servitude could collapse. The women wore their hair long—dictated by the doctrine of a Protestant faith—and the men, even the young ones like Charlie, draped their overalls in severe black coats for court and funerals and voting. A man has to have a lot of dignity to walk around proud with most of the rear end worn out of his overalls. But a pair of ventilated breeches, Charlie figured, was no reason to bow your head.
By the time he was fully grown, Charlie stood more than six feet tall but weighed less than one hundred and sixty pounds. When he climbed into his faded blue overalls, he looked like a mast stuck in a sail. “Whistle britches,” old men would say, grinning, because of the breeze that surely found a way into his clothes through the ragged holes or flapping pants legs.
It was the seat that always wore out first, because he found workas a roofer early on, and the shingles, like sandpaper, just ate the cloth away as he skidded around the roof on his rump and knees. His sisters sewed patches on the inside of his overalls, for decency’s sake.
He wore the same thing every day, because it was all he had. In the winter he wore long underwear under his Liberties, and a canvas work shirt that might have been some color once, but now was gray. He wore lace-up leather boots, what people called hobnails, strung with thin strips of leather, because cloth rotted in the weather, and he wore them when he was working, fishing and dancing. Men like him wore their hobnails to funerals under black suits. They got married in them, and worked saddle soap or oil into the leather to keep it from cracking.
Similar Books
