Fried Chicken (9 page)

 

 

when we tell the story of our country, we tend to focus on the big names, the men and women whom historians and the popular press have decreed proxies for the whole unseemly lot of us. Who won the Civil War? Abraham Lincoln. To whom do we owe the fruits of the civil rights movement? Martin Luther King, Jr.

The same applies to many of our totemic foods. We often tell the story of hamburgers by way of Ray Kroc and McDonald's, the story of hot dogs by way of a Coney Island man named Nathan. I need not remind you what name we invoke when we talk of fried chicken.

But there are a thousand other stories out there worth telling: tales of cooks who fed the civil rights movement, who fed both Confederate and Union combatants during the Civil War, who, over the course of a career, did nothing more (and nothing less) than feed their patrons skillet after skillet of peerless fried chicken. Despite his brush with fame, Austin Leslie is one of those people. And so was Lyndell Burton of Atlanta, whose story follows.

NINE

Deacon Burton and His Atlanta Flock

 

 

 

 

 

 

the Deacon received his public while stationed at the end of the serving line, in front of the cash register. A rack of Rolaids to his right, trays of plastic cutlery to his left. And always, within arm's reach, a small brass bell, which, when Lyndell Burton required your attention, he shook with all the authority a two-inch clapper could muster.

That bell figures large in many a recollection of Deacon Burton, for it was his custom to ring it upon learning that a dignitary—or, better yet, a first-time visitor—was among the lunchtime throng at Burton's Grill. I remember my first visit. (Looking back, I now recognize it as my first pilgrimage in search of fried chicken.) The year was 1986, and I was new to Atlanta, newer still to Inman Park, the Deacon's corner of the city. “See this boy with the old knock-knees,” he called out to me over the din. “ We're gonna feed him some black-eyed peas.”

I ate fried chicken that first day, the glories of which I had, by then, been hearing about for a good ten years. I had read about it in
Knife and Fork,
a monthly restaurant-review letter. I had seen television news reports of the Deacon's trip to Washington, D.C., to fry chicken for Congressman John Lewis. I had perused the local press tributes, wherein the writer usually managed to point out that, while Harlan Sanders was merely an honorary colonel (more than 170,000 fellow Kentuckians share the title), Lyndell Burton was an actual deacon in the Free for All Baptist Church of Decatur, Georgia. And though I can't be sure of my exact order that summer day, I imagine my lunch included a thigh and two legs, rice and gravy, black-eyed peas, and hoecakes. It became my usual, for over the next seven years, until Lyndell Burton passed away at the age of eighty-three, I was a regular.

The Deacon served chicken of a certain size. Ralph McGill, longtime editor of
The Atlanta Constitution,
described such diminutive birds as “barnyard subdebs, rarely more than ten to twelve weeks old and weighing from a pound and a half to two pounds.” For me, the size of his chicken was appealing because I could order three pieces without being branded a glutton.

And, like the ladies of the Chalfonte Hotel, the Deacon served chicken of a certain softness. Though he floured his chicken and fried it in cast-iron skillets popping with grease, he did not serve birds plastered in a crust that, after two bites, fissured and fell away. His was an elastic, somehow crisp envelope that tasted of nothing more exotic than salt and pepper.

Cynics might successfully argue that other Atlantans were equally adept chicken fryers. Annie Keith, who once operated a house restaurant nearby, has her adherents. And so does Thelma Grundy of Thelma's Kitchen over near Georgia Tech. A troubling few might even look to Lester Maddox, onetime owner of the Pickrick Cafeteria, who rose to the highest office in the state by leveraging his Jim Crow-era refusal to serve fried chicken to African Americans. But Deacon Burton never claimed to serve the best in Atlanta—that title was thrust upon him. Ask him how he prepared his chicken and he'd reply, “Wash 'em, put 'em in some flour, season 'em with salt and pepper and some grease. That's all.”

He was a quiet man with a thin and deeply furrowed face, a wiry body, and a smile that somehow let you know he had weathered his share of adversity. Aside from his bell-clanging habit, his only sign of ego was broadcast by his taste in hats: In his later years, the Deacon wore a high fluted chef's toque, which, when lunch service was at full tilt and the kitchen was smogged with grease, shone above the haze like a beacon. It took me a good year of sixty-second conversations at the cash register to coax forth a semblance of his life story, but I realized when I began researching this book that I still did not know nearly enough.

That's what brings me back to the Deacon's old corner today, when I take a seat at Son's Place, Lenn Storey's faithful rendering of his father's grill, I know that the boy who would become Deacon Burton was born in the town of Watkinsville, northeast of Atlanta. I know that, on a Christmas Eve when he was just fourteen, Burton ran away from home. I know that by Christmas Day he found work as a dishwasher at Faust, a Greek restaurant in downtown Atlanta.

Burton rose from dishwasher to cook, working at some of the best Atlanta dining rooms of the day, including those of the Henry Grady Hotel and the Capital City Club. And I know that Burton cooked in the Navy during World War II, feeding three meals a day to 4,000 men. He opened Burton's Grill after returning home from the war, and in the early years moved it from a highway north of town to Inman Park.

Lenn Storey and I talk over his father's and his own cooking career. Growing up, Storey did not know Burton was his father, but he was already following in his footsteps, first, during high school, pressure-frying chicken in a Kentucky Fried Chicken-licensed cafeteria, and later, when he cooked communal meals for his fellow Atlanta firemen. We talk of the time just after his father's death when Storey fought a bitter and ultimately unsuccessful court battle to legally establish his lineage. And we talk of the first time that the Deacon rang the brass bell and announced to all in attendance, “I want y'all to meet my boy, my son, Lenn Storey.”

as we talk, I gnaw on a plate of Lenn Storey's chicken. It tastes like I remember his father's chicken tasting. Nothing fancy here, just salt and pepper and schmaltz. (That's schmaltz as originally employed in the Yiddish language, meaning not maudlin sentimentality, but chicken fat.) And the restaurant, which sits cheek-to-jowl with his father's old corner storefront (now converted to an Italian trattoria), is a dead ringer for Burton's Grill. As I eat, I grow sentimental. Even the serving line, outfitted with those light green melamine lunch trays, conjures his father's spirit. But what Storey may never conjure is the spirit of the times in which Deacon Burton came to be a revered cook, a beloved Atlantan. And in many ways, he would not want to.

When many whites first discovered Burton's Grill in the 1970s, fried chicken was considered a relic of days gone by, back before the civil rights movement, maybe even before the Civil War. At Aunt Fanny's Cabin, a restaurant out in the suburb of Smyrna, fried chicken was presented as the ultimate plantation dish, a savory of step-and-fetch-it allure served to locals and tourists alike amidst the retrograde splendor of a retrofitted slave lodging. Downtown, at Pittypat's Porch (named for a character in
Gone With the Wind
), the trappings were more tasteful, but the underlying message was no less offensive.

Burton's Grill was different. Black Atlantans had long doted on Paschal's Restaurant, on what was then called Hunter Street, taking pride in the fact that some of the seminal events in the civil rights movement, including the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, were planned over platters of their fried chicken. But for many whites that proud history proved intimidating.

In time—no one seems to know how or why—everyone seems to have made their way over to Burton's Grill. It may well have been the first Atlanta restaurant where the food and the setting inspired blacks and whites to recognize their common humanity across a table set with fried chicken and black-eyed peas and cornbread. Though it was black-owned, it somehow came to be considered comparatively neutral ground. Many locals remember Burton's Grill as one of the first places where they saw blacks and whites interacting without nervous pomp or pretense. And all—black and white—remember the first time they visited, the first time a kindly gentleman rang a small brass bell and, above the report of the clapper, shouted out a welcome.

 

 

i have long been fascinated by the shoebox lunch, a traveler's repast assembled in a box that once contained high heels with grosgrain bows or brogans studded with brass eyelets. As constructed by a mother, an aunt, or a family cook, it might hold a fried chicken leg, a half-sandwich of pimento cheese on crustless white, a couple of deviled eggs tucked in a sleeve of wax paper. And, secreted away from the prying eyes and appetites of neighbors, it might even include a slice of red velvet cake slicked with cream cheese icing.

Until recently, as a self-aware and somewhat defensive native of the South, I thought of shoebox lunches as harbingers of the bad ol' days. They conjured a time when laws and customs complicated a trip of any distance in the Jim Crow South, dictating that black citizens could not eat alongside white. But, in the story that follows, the story of the railroad cooks of Gordonsville, Virginia, I found a story of black and white interaction and eating on the go in which I might eke out a measure of pride.

TEN

The Chicken Bone Express