Archive for "Nov 05 2008"

Of racism, food, memory and Obama’s victory

I spent 2.5 hours waiting to vote yesterday. I was surprised to see that my Grant Park polling place was selling an assortment of processed junk food and soft drinks Although, I saw nobody buying the stuff, I was glad to know that if my blood sugar fell during the wait, help was nearby.

I voted for Obama – surprise! — and seeing a black man actually win the presidency has been extremely moving to me. I’m old enough that I remember segregation, which endured long after the Civil Rights Act’s adoption, in many areas of the country.

I spent my first five years out of undergrad working for newspapers in rural Georgia. Yesterday, seeing the spread of junk food at the polls and watching Obama win so definitively, caused me to flash back to those years in the sticks and recall how the ritual of dining was central then, and now, to our political life. I remember, time and again, dining with ordinary people who spouted racism as if it were a common value among all white people. And, of course, all public dining was segregated. Dining itself, so much an expression of community, was strictly controlled by the protocol of racism.

I remember, for example, that I frequently had to cover the weekly Rotary Club meeting, where lunch, prepared by black women, was usually followed by a talk by a politician. I’m not sure why, but I always recall the moment when lunch was being finished. Conversation died away and the introduction of the speaker began. Cigars and cigarettes were lit as the small-town white power brokers prepared to have their asses licked. There were smiles all around and the occasional clinking of a fork on a dessert plate.

Racist euphemisms over lunch

Besides the cooks and service staff, there was not a black face in the room and it was not unusual — not remotely so — to hear a speaker prattle about states’ rights, private property rights, the value of private education and many other euphemisms for continuation of a racist society. During these speeches I often watched the black women cleaning up the dining room. Their faces did not betray any emotion.

Political events were often held outside — at the county fairgrounds or on someone’s farm. These almost always involved a picnic featuring barbecued pork. One of the reasons I do not share other urban foodies’ thrall on seeing a hog and chickens cooked over coals in a pit or in an iron smoker is that I saw this constantly during these years. (Indeed, when I see such sights, I want to know why there’s no squirrel in the Brunswick stew and why there are no chicken feet for sale on the side real cheap.)

I knew I’d crossed the threshold to acceptance in one town when I was invited deep into the woods for a “goat mull.” This too was a political event, or at least that was the excuse for it. Mainly it was elderly white men who sat around telling stories and eating the stew made of a goat roasted on the premises. Much of what I heard that day was shockingly racist, including stories of KKK events and a lynching. I comforted myself by assuming most of it was exaggeration. Still, I don’t think most people under 40, unless they were raised in such areas themselves, have any idea how traumatic integration was and how bloody the battle for it was.

One of my signal memories of the period is a barbecue spot in Elberton. It was open, as I recall, Thursday through Saturday. The pork was roasted in open pits next to the building, which looked like something between a mobile home and a tarpaper shack. The interior of the restaurant was completely decorated with souvenirs of Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s racist campaigns.

The most shocking part of the experience of eating there, though, was seeing that a constant parade of black people lined up at a take-out window, even though they were not allowed to dine inside.

A road trip back to racism

Not quite 10 years later, I returned to Elberton during a road trip with Larry Ashmead, then executive editor at HarperCollins. He had contracted me to write a book about Flannery O’Connor and the Southern Gothic, and I couldn’t wait to show him this barbecue shack, which I’d learned was still open.

When we drove up, I was disappointed that the exterior had been cleaned up a good bit. And the inside was even tidier. Moreover, all the racist memorabilia was removed from the walls. We sat at a table and were soon greeted by the new owner, who turned out to be a black man.

I was stunned that this recent monument to racism was now the property of an African-American man. I introduced myself and asked the man if he knew the restaurant’s history. He said that he certainly did. I asked him why black people had bought the restaurant’s food when they weren’t allowed to dine inside. “Because they were hungry and the barbecue was good,” he replied. A moment of silence followed. I expected further explanation, but the man laughed and went back to work.

The experience was another of those enigmatic revelations of moral ambiguity — not just from the offender’s perspective, but from the victim’s too. That confusion was my experience frequently during the years I worked in the sticks — and, of course, that was one of O’Connor’s persistent themes, too: that evil and grace are often instruments of one another. Outcomes are one thing; the source of their making is another, usually mysterious — like the feeling behind alchemy or cooking.

Thus it is with the election of Barack Obama. The entire nation is stunned by its own act of grace. Nobody thought we’d get here so quickly but here we are in one of those accelerations that seems to unexpectedly occur in evolutionary narratives. I look back to the world I saw in that Elberton barbecue shack during my first year out of college and, honestly, I can’t really make any sense out of how we got where we are today. But, more than any time in memory, I feel (as Michelle Obama did not say) proud of America.

(Image from BarackObama.com)