Sunday, November 20, 2005

Throw An Apple At Cha

Some woman near here has collected several books worth of essays concerning Southern food. I heard her interviewed on government tax supported communist radio which I listen to most weekends in order to balance out my worldview. I haven’t read her book but if I run into it I would.

First, she knew her stuff. She explained shuckey beans properly, and that only we Southern Appalachian Peoples (SAPs) know them. She knew her different beans, and why most people have no clue of the subtleties that we SAPs will good naturedly argue over while we string them. She knew greasy beans are called that because their hulls have no hair on them and therefore they look slick, like they’ve been greased, not because we cook them with grease. She talked of the pleasure we take in stringing beans as a cultural social function and that to us green beans are not color on the plate but a flavorful staple for the diet and the garden.

She even knew how to pronounce “Appalachia” (apple-at-cha). But she didn’t quite talk right. Her accent was off, her phraseology wasn’t quite consistent. But the main thing was at the very beginning what she said was that they were looking at foodways and how food and culture combine from the way we plant to our unique hospitality, in order to understand it IN ORDER TO CHANGE IT. I know I heard her say that.

Like the Yankee Nature Conservancy director called us all ignorant hillbillies one time, because we know logging actually can be done both profitably and sustainably, without government grant supports (or the tobacco settlement and crop subsidy government money that his organization lives on, that his very salary is dependent upon).

Like the only sustained by government grant high salaried would-be organic poobah Yankee with the perfectly matching flannel shirt and jeans sets unmussed by interactions with people actually born here. Organic and sustainable to him is for other Yankees like himself.

Now, I don’t mean this personally; I’ve many wonderful friends who aren’t necessarily “from around here”. I am degreed and well read and reasonably traveled. But gosh darn if I am not glad that I am NOT a Yankee myself.

And how I wish Yankees weren’t bent on coming into my culture in order to change it. Like the Florida bumper sticker says, We don’t care how you do it up north. Like the local said in the flick Milagro Bean Field Wars, If we were interested in it, chances are we’d be doing it already. Quit trying to save us, quit trying to change us, quit trying to preserve us even. Go home and try to make a culture of your own up if you don’t have a legitimate one to begin with. We’ve got one and we like it fine.

Listening to a local call in radio show the other evening, the difference was stark. Three Yankees and two locals called in on the subject of culture and things to do in the area. The Yankees said there was nothing cultural to do here AT ALL. The locals could name all there was to do, from symphonies to ballets to plays to pickin’ and grinning’, and what’s more, the locals could all play an instrument and tell a story and entertain their damn selves without whining that someone else ought to be entertaining us instead.

And it isn’t that I don’t sympathize with the “no culture” folks. When I was a kid, my mother wanted me to be able to take dance lessons but there was no opportunity for that where I lived. So my mother recruited a dance teacher and for her first year in business, she actually lived at our house and ate her meals with us. She left after some years, but now there are several dance and gymnastic studios there, all of them run by students of hers. Another local woman, originally from Cuba (proving that you do not have to be “from around here” to be local), wanted more cultural opportunities for the area and founded a group that brings in at least one cultural performance a month, from the Folkloric Ballet of Mexico to Broadway plays to symphonies to, well, just anything else. The local library there doubles as an art gallery exhibiting a wide variety of works (and changing all the time).

Doing for yourself has a lot of meanings, and none of them speaks in Yankee whine.

Now, would like some chowchow to go with that bowl of shuckey beans? A wedge of onion? Tea?

7 comments:

Joe Tornatore said...

shuckey beans, another first for me.

Madcap said...

I don't really understand why Yankees are coming to "improve" you folks. Is that a euphemism for more industrialization?

Anonymous said...

Hear, hear!

American by birth
and
Southern by the grace of God!

Parrothead said...

While working in ATL for a cellular corporation, I was told "Lose your southern accent and you can move up in this company".

SIL, please make mine a sweet tea!

Madcap said...

Keep in mind I'm very far away and in a different country when I ask this - is there a widespread bias against Southerners in the U.S.? Up here in Alberta, we find you folks pretty delightful.

And who's inviting the northerners in to save you, anyway? There must be some reason they keep coming back! Stop feeding them so well!

Anonymous said...

MadCap,

Contry was to gracious in her comments. It would be closer to say that white southerners are the last group toward which it is PC to be rampantly bigoted toward. At a time when people are calling for such idioticness as making sure there are no Porky Pig pictures in a classroom because it might offend a Muslim, it is OK to be openly offensive to Southerners. Just look a some of the blogs on your link list, to wit: "took a trip to a Southern city to attend a conference on openness and tolerance and the local people I came across there were just ignorant."

The bigorty is impenetrable. I could go on for some time about the e-conversations I've had with people who sojourned here and said they had witnessed clear examples of Southern racism and when it was explained to them that it was their own bias that was at play, the arrogant bigots would say "Nay, I know what they meant!" For example someone will always bring up that they witnessed a Southern man addressing a black man as 'boy'. See, racist. Yet many a time I've pulled up to the pump island at our rural store and when I've gone in, someone my junior by decades has said to the cashier, "Yeah, I'll pull up and get the gas as soon as this boy moves his truck." Yet the bigot will say, "Maybe, but if it's said to a black person, it's meant to be racist."

Well, I could write a book.

The feeling's mutual, by the bye. We like all Southerners of any turn or shade, we like our Mexicans, we like the Aussies and Scotsmen and all manner of others who have come here to stay short or long, we even tolerate the Californians pretty well and Canadians seem to behave nicely, but uppity carpet bagging Yankees .... aagggh!

Eleutheros the Unreconstructed

"Now I'm a good ol rebel
and that's just what I am
For this fair land of freedom
I do not care a damn
I'm glad I fit again' it
I only wish we'd won
And I don't want no pardon
For anything I done."

Madcap said...

Seem to behave nicely!? I guess so! Nice to a fault, really.