Fried Chicken (10 page)

 

 

the creosote-swabbed timbers of the CSX rail trestle loom large at a bend in the road leading into Gordonsville, Virginia, a small town twenty-five miles north of Charlottesville. Even today, the sight and sound of a locomotive heaving up and over the trestle, skirting town at rooftop height, commands attention. The brute force of the engine calls to mind the days when Gordonsville was the junction of the Chesapeake & Ohio and the Orange, Alexandria & Manassas.

Catercorner from the trestle is an abandoned freight depot. Beyond that is the two-story clapboard Exchange Hotel, commandeered as a Confederate hospital during the Civil War and now home to a museum dedicated to the late unpleasantness. Across the way—and of greatest import for the purposes of my fried chicken quest—is the onetime site of Gordonsville's passenger station. That's where, from the mid-1800s until at least the 1930s, African American women peddled food to travelers whose trains stopped here to take on water and coal.

Gordonsville was not the sole town that fostered such entrepreneurial activity. Natives of Corinth, a onetime railroad town in northeastern Mississippi, tell tales of Julia Brown, who in 1867—just two years after gaining status as a freed-woman—began meeting trains at the depot, selling drumsticks and wings. Ditto long-tenured residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who speak fondly of the kerchiefed women who greeted new arrivals at Reading Terminal with baskets of tissue-wrapped thighs priced at a nickel per piece.

These women came of age when rail lines had not yet adopted the niceties of service that came to define mid-twentieth-century travel. There were no Pullman car berths for overnight passage. No dining cars boasted tables napped with linen and set with crystal and china. Instead, as Barbara Haber revealed in her recent book
From Hardtack to Home Fries,
in 1857
The New York Times
reported that many travelers endured long days, with “hot cinders flying in their faces” before approaching a station “dying with weariness, hunger, and thirst, longing for an opportunity to bathe their faces at least before partaking of their much-needed refreshments. . . . The consequence of such savage and unnatural feeding are not reported by telegraph as railroad disasters; but if a faithful account were taken of them we are afraid they would be found much more serious than any that are caused by the smashing of cars, or the breaking of bridges.”

The African American women of Gordonsville were among the first entrepreneurs to define and satisfy the nutritional needs of travelers. Without a doubt, thousands of other women, in hundreds of other towns, tried their hand at the same. (My colleague Psyche Williams-Forson has written a dissertation on the subject of black women and chicken,
Building Houses out of Chicken Legs
.) But a peculiar confluence of capitalistic hustle, booming rail traffic, and proximity to the media outlets of nearby Washington, D.C., gave rise to Gordonsville's unmatched reputation for poultry cookery. Indeed, by 1869, essayist George W. Bagby was calling the town “the chicken-leg centre of the universe.” It was a title to which the city would lay claim long after the last Gordonsville train boarded passengers.

 

 

 

visiting Gordonsville, I take stock of the legacy of those cooks, talking to their descendants and admirers. Key to my visit is the afternoon I pass in the company of octogenari-to ans Mildred and Pete Avery. Mr. Avery's mother, Elsie Swift, and her sister, Mamie Swift, were veterans of the local fried chicken trade, and were, along with their fellow townspeople, known as waiter-carriers. The moniker may have come from their practice of
carrying
trays of chicken and pie and coffee from their homes to the train platform where they would
wait
on passengers.

Over the course of the afternoon, I learn much about the
idea
of waiter-carriers. I begin to understand that the frying of chicken was a step toward independence for African American women during the dark days when labor and the products of labor were the property of slaveholders. Talking with Pete—who recalls plucking the chickens his mother and aunt killed and scalded—I realize that these women were employing a sort of vertical business integration, raising fryers from chicks, feeding them out to a weight of two or three pounds, and then cooking them and serving them to travelers. It was an early and important underground economy that leveraged self-reliance and rewarded its practitioners with an independence that many of their sharecropping husbands could not muster.

Pete tells me of the seemingly superhuman strength of those waiter-carriers. They were able, he says, to muscle a tray stacked with baskets of fried chicken and pots of coffee above their heads, to carry them from home kitchens to the station. They would heft them again when a train arrived, so that customers leaning from passenger coach windows might reach down and serve themselves. When I hear Pete talk of the beautiful dresses the women wore beneath their starched white aprons, and the multicolored hats they donned to cover bandanna-clad heads, I imagine a band of regal women in whom the whole community might take great pride.

When Pete describes the preparation of chicken—how the birds benefited from two soaks in salted water and how the women battered them with water and flour and fried them in locally rendered lard—my mouth waters for a taste of bird as prepared in the Gordonsville style. But luck is not with me. It seems that the last of the businesses connected to the trade, Hattie's Inn, closed a while back. And while Pete's wife, Mildred, does fry chicken in the traditional Gordonsville manner, she does so—on order from Pete's doctor—just one day a week. Since that day is Wednesday and my audience with the Avery family takes place on a Thursday, I am, for the moment, out of luck. (I did, upon returning home, develop a Gordonsville style recipe based on Pete's description and a few tricks of my own; turn to page 104.)

 

 

 

i don't know why no progeny came forward to carry on the tradition, after the Swift family stowed their trays, when Hattie closed her doors. (I am reminded again of Calvin Trillin's observation that “a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman . . . it is not easily passed down intact.”) When I query Pete, he just mumbles about changing times. He is similarly inscrutable when I ask why the Gordonsville Fried Chicken Festival, established in June of 2001, has failed to garner strong support from the local African American community.

But after pondering these developments for a while, I believe I may have tentative answers. The matter of the annual festival is simplest. Some locals see it as a grand ruse staged to ferret out the fried chicken recipes perfected long ago by the waiter-carriers. That may be a bit harsh, but, to my mind, the festival—driven by tourism funds and executed by the local visitors' bureau—fails to pay appropriate homage to the waiter-carriers. Maybe before you can pay tribute to these women, you must first acknowledge that they thrived at the margins, beyond the gaze of the city fathers, taking pride in a sort of renegade capitalism that was quite the opposite of a city-sponsored event.

This distrust of officialdom is deep-rooted. Many have posited that the waiter-carriers met their demise as trains modernized, first adding dining cars, then closing carriages and restricting easy passenger access to the foods vended by the women, and finally, in the 1930s and 1940s, introducing air-conditioning and sealing the carriages. But there are others who believe that the real culprits were local laws and sanctions that appear on the books as early as 1879, when the city fathers began to grasp the impact of the waiter-carriers, and the town council began requiring snack vendors' licenses, and collecting a tax thereon.

This alternate explanation gains strength when I find a 1970 interview from the local newspaper with Bella Watson, described as the sole surviving waiter-carrier. The article refers obliquely to early struggles for vending franchises that exiled waiter-carriers to the opposite side of the tracks from the platform. The eighty-year-old does not mince words about the end of the era. “There was a health officer from Richmond,” she recalls. “I still remember his name, but I won't say it. [He] used to make me so mad that sometimes I would cuss and sometimes I would cry. They made us wrap our chicken in oilpaper and even wanted to see where we cooked it. Of course, we had our secret ways of cooking that chicken and I believe he just wanted to find that out.”

A cynic might say that little has changed in the intervening thirty-odd years: the powers that be still want that recipe. But I'm not
quite
that cynical. On the contrary, it seems good—even just—that fifty years after the era of the waiter-carriers has passed, the fried chicken recipes perfected by those early entrepreneurs are still in demand. I find hope in the knowledge that a new generation of Virginians considers such treasures to be matters of private concern, of family dowry, known only to women like Mildred Avery.

 

 

 

 

 

 

fried chicken eating and churchgoing are long intertwined. I uncovered three examples of the synergy while on the research trail:

• ■ At the Whole Truth Church and Lunchroom, a church-run enterprise in Wilson, North Carolina, funds are raised from the sale of fried chicken and collard greens. The money pays for the closed-circuit audio broadcasts that beam in the good word of the reigning bishop in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith.
  
• ■ Given an audience with a good sense of humor and an appreciation of liturgical pomp, you can make the case that the beauty of a golden breast of fried chicken emerging from the depths of a pot burbling with oil has its roots in the Pentecostal tendency to dismiss a baptismal sprinkle in favor of full immersion.
  
• ■ And for the purposes of advancing this narrative, you should know that, at St. Paul's Catholic Church in New Alsace, Indiana, annual fried chicken dinners (an account of which follows) replenish the congregation's coffers and foster fellowship that envelops the whole of the community.
  

 

But keep in mind that the relationship between church and chicken also has its downside. Psyche Williams-Forson once told me that there are four things that can bring a preacher down. She calls them the four C's: cash, chicks, Cadillacs, and chicken. Fried chicken, to be specific. Too much praise of one sister's cooking tells the congregation that the preacher is availing himself of more than her gospel bird.

ELEVEN

Chasing Chicken on a Slow Time Sunday Morning

 

 

 

 

 

it's just past nine on a Sunday morning when I roll into the burg of New Alsace, Indiana. The drive west from Cincinnati, Ohio, took less than an hour, but the change is remarkable. After threading my way through strip malls and burger boxes, the Indiana countryside is a balm. As the highway narrows to two lanes, roadside billboards advertising discount denture fabricators give way, and plywood signs tacked to fence posts emerge, heralding a community quilt sale, an antique tractor show.

Even the telling of time is different here. While the great majority of the country adheres to Daylight Saving Time, the rural precincts of Indiana, in deference to farmers who start their workday early, do not fiddle with their clocks. They prefer instead to hold steady year-round to what they call slow time.