Researching on the internet is far too easy — and too easily distracting. I could lose entire days simply clicking through links from one page to the next, looking up unfamiliar words only to have their definitions lead me to yet another alley down which my mind races. Come to think of it, I have lost entire days.
Right now, I’m researching Applachian Kentucky. It’s for a book that I’ve been trying to write over the past six months while my blogs have been on hiatus. No, the subject isn’t Appalachia. It’s a fictional novel, but one of the characters hails from there and I want to know more about how his background would influence his thinking, his character.
Above all, I want to avoid stereotyping the character (and, by extension, those who live where he comes from). Perhaps I’m going too far in my efforts, perhaps I don’t really need to be reading all of this information, but my own family’s past — we come from the Hill Country in Texas — makes me particularly sensitive to such stereotypes.
I was still tiny when we moved from Texas to California, so most of the memories I have of living there are actually inherited. I do recall, however, what it was like to be treated as a “hillbilly”, the insulting description people attached to us after hearing our heavy Southern drawls, how we’d refer to others as “y’all“. How we’d express our curiosity about someone’s actions by asking “how come you to”. How we kids would answer “Yessir” or “Yes ma’am” to teachers and other adults, refusing our parents’ friends invitations to call them by their first names and, finally giving in so far as to call them “Miss Diane” or “Mister Jerry“.
One time I invited a friend over to spend the night. This was a very big event for me since my mother, like me these days, didn’t particularly like having other, strange children (and usually ill-mannered) children in her house. I’d fretted about my friend’s arrival all week long, going so far as to clean my room not once but twice, something I’m certain increased my mother’s tolerance of the whole thing. Having heard stories about my mother and her two sisters sharing one bed throughout most of their childhood, I set us up two sleeping bags on the floor so as not to risk being called backwards. I even made us a stash of snacks in the cardboard box between our sleeping bags on top of which I placed a flashlight so we could tell ghost stories without getting too spooked in the dark.
When the big day arrived, my friend’s parents dropped her off just in time for supper. That’s what we called the last meal of the day in our house, even though outside of our family us kids knew to refer to it as “dinner” like all of our peers did. Since my mother was never one to enjoy cooking much — and since family suppers often devolved into us kids eating in silence while Mom and Dad bickered between themselves — it was a big deal that she’d spent the afternoon fixing a nice meal and had instructed my brothers and sister to be on their best behavior.
You know, these days there’s a whole style of cooking known as “California Cuisine”. It’s not particularly new, in my book. It’s simply a style of food born out of the abundance of produce that area’s year-round temperate weather makes possible, along with a heavy dose of health food ingredients that were just gaining hold in those post-Hippy days: brown rice, bulgur, whole wheat, honey in place of sugar. That sort of thing.
Hailing from Texas, eating healthy for us meant having three different kinds of vegetables with our meals — all of them cooked in bacon grease. It meant putting oleo on our cornbread, and eating plenty of rice. Granted, it was Minute Rice and we topped it with butter and sugar, but it was rice instead of mashed potatoes, so that had to be more healthy, right?
My friend sat down with us at the table and started reaching for the nearest side dish. An awkward silence ensued until my dad cleared his throat, put his hands together in front of him, and bowed his head. “You got to wait until the blessing is over,” I whispered to my friend. Her eyes just about fell out of her head. Her parents were the kind of people who considered themselves too educated for religion. But, to her credit, she squeezed her eyes shut and tucked her chin to her chest and waited along with the rest of us while my dad rambled through a prayer just long enough to ensure the food was lukewarm by the time we ate.
Finally, it was time to help ourselves. I reached first for the fried okra, a dish that to this day is my very favorite thing my mom ever made. Now, as I mentioned, my mom wasn’t all that much into cooking, and she had her specific way of doing things despite how everyone else did them. Frying okra was one of them. Instead of the cornmeal-heavy batter favored by most Southern cooks she used mostly flour, adding just a scant trace of cornmeal, then fried the hell out of it. She liked food — all food — well done, as in cooked to the point where it no longer resembled whatever it was supposed to be. Her fried okra, which looked like little brown rocks, was no exception. But I loved it.
I loved the big mounds of fluffy rice she’d piled on my plate next to the meatloaf which, in her case, consisted solely of meat shaped into a loaf and cooked until it was as brown as shoe leather, then topped with tomato paste. Yes, it looked as horrible as it sounds, and no, I don’t make meatloaf that way now that I’m an adult. But back then it was so rare for my mom to make such a labor-intensive meal that we were all thrilled to eat it. To this day, my oldest brother prefers her meatloaf over any other, much to his wife’s annoyance.
Anyway. I was just about ready to dig into my plate when I looked to my friend expecting to see her as gleeful as I was over this huge spread of our family favorites. Instead what I saw was an expression halfway between confusion and horror. “Where’s the salad?” she asked me. “Or the fruit?” None of us in my family were big salad eaters, perhaps because my mother’s idea of salad was some torn iceberg lettuce topped with too much spicy Thousand Island dressing. Fruit? That was what came in those little tin cups in our lunch that we always threw away when no one was looking.
My friend finally started nibbling on a piece of meatloaf in quiet resignation. She even tried a bite of okra, though I saw her spit it into her napkin then push the rest to the side on her plate. Mostly, she ate rice and, despite my efforts to convince her otherwise, she would not try it with oleo and sugar. Her loss.
I’d thought that at least she’d found something to eat, and perhaps the crisis had been avoided. Then my oldest brother spooned himself the last of the green beans out of the bowl and pointedly set it in the middle of the table. All of us kids knew what that signal meant: it was time to count to five then see who was the first to grab the bowl, with the victor getting to claim it.
See, we liked the juice left over after my mother had simmered the green beans in their juices with a little bacon fat, salt and pepper. Pot liquor it’s called, though we pronounced it more like “pot likker” and still all spell it that way. It was, in our family, the prize for being the first one to finish their vegetables, and more than once our struggle to be the one to grab the bowl had resulted in serious injury. (My next-oldest brother used to have a scar on his hand from when someone had stabbed it with a fork in the struggle. I am not claiming responsibility for that.)
Not surprisingly, despite having an otherwise fun time spending the night at my house, my friend spread the stories about our strange family foods and ways at school that Monday. The whole “hillbilly” thing started all over again as my peers taunted me about every little thing, from my Wrangler jeans (which my mother bought because their reinforced knees could take my tomboy ways) to my continued habit of saying “Yes, ma’am” to our teacher (a habit ingrained by so many spankings there was no way I was ever going to lose it).
It took me years of effort and concentration to shed the traces of my Southern accent, to add R’s into words like “first” and “sugar”. To this day, though, I’ll slip into that same cadence whenever I’m around someone from the South, or even when I’m among Northerners but have had one too many cocktails. I never did lose the habit of saying my Yes Ma’ams and Yessirs, and I’ve passed onto my son the rule about not addressing adults by their first names no matter how much they insist. Saying “y’all” started creeping back into my vocabulary when we moved back to Kansas after our years in Hawaii, but it’s a commonplace word around here, just as eating fried okra (heavy on the cornmeal) isn’t unheard of.
There are times when, as an adult, I wish I could go back and grab my younger self by the shoulders and just shake her. “Someday you’re going to be proud of all this,” I’d tell that little girl. “Pay attention and learn your family stories while you can,” I’d say. “They’re your inheritance.” But I was young and determined to fit in, to shed myself of the pain of being thought of as a hillbilly. To be a Californian.
Maybe that’s why this research has grown so distracting for me. I read web sites maintained by people proud of their heritage, glad to hand down stories to their children and children’s children, and I think what a wonderful resource the internet is for making that possible. And I think, too, how great it is that our interconnectivity has made the world a much smaller place, one where there’s no shame in being proud of the unique things from your heritage. One where I can write about racing my son at the supper table to be the first to grab the pot likker, and other folks actually get what I mean.
I know I’ve got to stop clicking and researching, and get down to the business of writing. I set an alarm today to make myself do just that. Only problem is, now I’ve gone and made myself hungry. I’ve got a cornbread to make, and maybe some green beans to start simmering down. Then I’ll get onto writing. Really.
Just. One. More. Click.