April 2011 Newsletter

Jim Casada                                                                                                    Web site: www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com
1250 Yorkdale Drive                                                                                           E-mail: jc@jimcasadaoutdoors.com
Rock Hill, SC 29730-7638
803-329-4354

Of Black Folks, Good Food, Good Old Days,
and the Telling of Tales

While I did not know Beulah all that well as a youngster, that changed in the last two decades. We became close friends, thanks in no small measure to the fact she was so good to my father in his later years—ironing, cleaning house, and baking wonderful cakes. Most of all though, she would visit, sit and talk, and help him dispel loneliness. I made a point of visiting her every time I was back where I grew up, and my admiration for her grew each time we would sit and chat. She had been a caregiver to a whole community, looked after two sisters in their later years, and was one of those wonderful people who never wasted anything. I loved to call her saying I had a mess of trout for her or some vegetables I thought she might use. I did so because her invariable response to my question, “Can you use some trout?” was an enthusiastic “Oh, yes!” Similarly, I loved to hear her say the words “I know” when we were discussing some subject. That phrase is common with young kids, but in the case of Beulah she really did know.

Late in my father’s life I learned that Dad was paying her a mere pittance for the scrumptious black walnut cakes she made for him on a regular basis. I just happened to ask him or her, I don’t remember which one, the payment amount. When I learned it was $10 I asked Dad if he knew what a cake like that would cost from a bakery and told him it would likely be between $30 and $40. Characteristically, his reply was: “If I ate a bite of cake that cost that much it would give me a bad case of indigestion.” I just chuckled to myself and henceforth my brother and I made up the difference between what Dad paid and what he should have been paying. When I first did this Beulah said: “Why, I’d bake that cake for him for nothing.” That wasn’t just talk. She meant it, and that gives some index to the woman and her character.

Whenever I enjoyed a conversation with her, my thoughts would invariably go back to another wonderful black woman, this time one who figured quite prominently in my boyhood. Aunt Mag Parrish (as a boy I never knew her last name—she was just Aunt Mag, with the “Aunt” being a title of respect accorded an elderly woman) and her daughter lived just down the road from us, and they were, in terms of material goods, about as poor as it was possible to be. “Poor as Job’s turkey” was the phrase I often heard my parents use to describe them. Yet both Aunt Mag and her daughter worked hard and in some senses lived a simple existence worthy of envy. According to my parents, they washed my diapers when I was a baby, boiling them in a big iron kettle situated over a fire outdoors. They kept chickens (we sometimes bought eggs from them when they had extra ones) and raised a garden, and Daddy always planted a bit of extra stuff in our garden with them specifically in mind. He loved to talk about how Aunt Mag approached the whole matter of garden produce.

When she noticed an abundance of something like mustard greens, tomatoes, or turnips, she would ask if she could have some. Invariably she did it in a polite fashion, always finishing with the phrase, “I always say it ain’t worth having if you don’t ask for it right.” Whatever they grew, gathered (they didn’t let poke salad, wild strawberries, blackberries, or indeed any of nature’s bounty go to waste) or got from us, Aunt Mag could work sheer culinary magic with it. She cooked on an old cast iron wood-burning stove we had given her, and just thinking of the food which came from it sets my salivary glands into involuntary overdrive.

She also was decidedly of the “make do with what you’ve got” school of thinking when it came to all matters culinary. I’ll offer two anecdotal examples, both of which tickled my fancy as a boy and continue to do so as a man.

Aunt Mag’s chicken lot was a gold mine when it came to digging worms for fishing. A quarter hour with a mattock could produce enough worms for a full day on the creek, and it didn’t seem to matter that I dug them day after day in the warm weather months—there were always plenty more. Aunt Mag (and the chickens) welcomed my bait-gathering activities, but the former did expect something in return. Namely, regular messes of fish. Day after day I would bring her a mixed stringer of catfish, panfish, and a member of the stoneroller family locally known as knottyheads, then came a sorry day of fishing when I returned without the expected bounty. Aunt Mag looked at me in abject dismay and asked: “Didn’t you catch any?”

I confessed that the fishing had been slow and that all I had managed to catch were a dozen or so quite small bluegills which I had turned loose. She put her hands on her hips in what was clearly a posture of exasperation and asked a further question: “Were they bigger than a butterbean?” I acknowledged that while they were small, they did indeed exceed the size of a butterbean to an appreciable degree. Her response said it all. “Well, I’ll eat a butterbean.”

Aunt Mag also was a regular customer for the carcasses of muskrats produced by my winter trapping, and she paid perfectly good “cash money” for them to the tune of two bits per muskrat. Had my father known of this particular moneymaking enterprise he would have tanned my hide, but I always needed cash for a handful of shotgun shells (you could buy them individually in the 1950s, at least where I grew up). Accordingly, I took her money most willingly.

Then there came a bitterly cold winter’s day when school was closed because of snow. I had been out, by myself, all day in pursuit of rabbits, squirrels, a covey or two of quail, and maybe the odd grouse. I don’t remember whether or not I had killed anything, but I stopped by Aunt Mag’s on the way home to warm up a bit but mostly because I knew I could get a head start on whatever Mom might have for supper. Sure enough, when I walked in the door a wonderful aroma greeted me.

Greedy gut teenager that I was, I asked what was on the stove. Aunt Mag replied, “I’ve done cooked me a stew. Get you a bowl and help yourself.” I did just that digging deeply into the savory mix of vegetables, meat, and gravy which was steaming in the massive Dutch oven she used for a lot of her cooking. Talk about bringing tears of joy to a glass eye—that was provender of a matchless sort. It was so good, in fact, that when invited I had a second bowl. I noticed, as I ate the stew and helped it along with a big chunk of cornbread, that the meat was of a texture and color I had never experienced.

Finally satiated, I thanked Aunt Mag and inquired as to just what I had been eating. She had been waiting for that moment. She cackled like one of her prime hens that had just laid an egg, showed every tooth in her mouth (there weren’t that many), and said: “Boy, youse been eatin’ muskrat.” I should have known but somehow the connection between my trapping and her cooking hadn’t dawned on me. Incidentally, I didn’t tell my father of that experience until long after I was grown, and his response was to shake his head in disbelief and say: “I never thought a son of mine would stoop to eating a rat.” Actually, muskrats are vegetarians, and properly dressed (you need to be sure you remove the scent kernels under their legs) they make mighty fine fixin’s.

She could also cook rabbit and squirrel like nobody’s business, and the baking miracles she could work on that old stove were just that—miracles. Cathead biscuits, cracklin’ cornbread, cakes, pies, cobblers, cookies and more populated that ramshackle old kitchen with a world of goodness. I considered her a dear friend, just as I did Beulah. We could sit and talk about things as diverse as simple gardening pleasures or local gossip.

In the case of Beulah, I also had a living history book on the black folk with whom I had grown up. She would readily say such a man had been “bad to drink” or that a local girl who had gone away, gotten an education, and come back thinking she knew more than anyone else was “an uppity sort who thinks way to highly of herself.” She could talk about the local black baseball team which existed for many years and the celebratory occasions which were connected with their home games, served the same little church faithfully as a member (there were only five left when she died) for eight decades, and was as good a woman as I’ve ever known. I said as much in a short eulogy offered at her funeral service, and as I write this I have a lasting connection with Beulah to console me. It is a blooming cactus of the Christmas cactus type she rooted for me—the only thing is it blooms in the middle of the summer rather than at Christmas. One day the two of us decided it had to be an Independence Day cactus.

That’s enough rambling, but I’ll close with two thoughts which will probably get me some negative comments. First, I have no use for folks, black or white (although the problem is endemic in the black community) who suck at the government teat, have no concept of a work ethic, and who are strangers to morality and decency. Second, our policies on both the state and national level contribute to this situation of welfare babies, food stamps, subsidized housing, and so much more. Beulah was my kind of person, and it had nothing to do with skin color. She worked hard all her life, was the essence of caring and compassion in all she did, and was one of God’s truly good and gentle souls. I will miss her a great deal.

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