Food Memory: Kushmagudi

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As the cold weather holidays roll in, I look forward to family food traditions. Going into Thanksgiving week and celebrations in Birmingham with my family, food memory kicks in bigtime.

There is a dish called “kushmagudi” (this is my own spelling; there is no official spelling) which is always on the Journey family tables at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is simple Southern food and its name (and my phonetic spelling) has no precedence that I can find.

My brother wrote a lovely essay about this dish a couple of years ago but since I haven’t been able to retrieve it, I will reintroduce the basics to “Professional Southerner” readers.

My grandmother Eula Harbison used to make kushmagudi and I always assumed that it was a known thing, like salt on watermelon, pepper on cantaloupe, and celery sticks served with turkey. As long as I can remember, kushmagudi was on the holiday table so I would mention it casually and be surprised at the blank stares I received. As I lived and traveled around the country, I realized that nobody outside my immediate family seems to have a clue what “kushmagudi” is.

Many might know some variation of the dish, I think, but not by that name.

Kushmagudi is nothing more than a tasty mixture of crumbled cornbread with the potlikker of turnip greens. I say “nothing more” but I am convinced that one needs a cook’s instinct to pull off the right mix. I have always heard stories about Grandmother feeding the masses of her family and crowds from church at short notice in the ‘30s and ‘40s and having family move into her family home between jobs and houses, during travel, etc. Based on what I know, I realize that Grandmother’s kushmagudi may have been invented as Depression food and a way to make the food in the rural house and garden go farther.

Based on what I know, I am sure that the word “kushmagudi” is Grandmother’s own coinage to name a dish she already knew but reinvented for her immediate and extended families. I have talked with Southerners who know a variation of potlikker and greens but, so far, none outside my own family have referred to it as “kushmagudi.”

After Grandmother died in December 1995, I was asked if I would make the kushmagudi for Christmas. I will admit that I was daunted. I had eaten it all of my life but I had never thought about it.

I relaxed and thought about the dish. I realized that it is a basic and instinctual recipe and that if one understands its components one should be able to make it in a satisfactory manner.

Here’s my basic recipe for my grandmother’s kushmagudi:

Eula McCarn Harbison’s Kushmagudi

Make 1-2 cakes of cornbread or use leftover cornbread if you have it (remember that sugar is never acceptable in cornbread).
Boil up a pot of turnip greens with your favorite spices and seasonings.
Bring the greens to a boil and simmer on low for at least a half hour.
In a large mixing bowl, crumble 1-1½ of the cakes of cornbread.
Ladle the potlikker of the greens over the crumbled cornbread in the mixing bowl and mix to your preferred consistency and taste.
Let the mixture meld for a while, keep it warm, and serve it.

I like to mix some collard greens with my turnip greens to vary the flavor of the potlikker a bit. Grandmother tended to use less spices in her greens than I do; she used salt and pepper. I like to add a little pepper sauce, sage, bacon fat, garlic powder, thyme, and other seasonings to the greens before I strain them into the cornbread. I also might add a small dash of sugar to the greens (but never to the cornbread). I also like to mix more of the actual greens into the mix. Grandmother generally just used the potlikker and served the seasoned turnip greens as a separate side dish.

This is truly a recipe that may be adapted to your and your family’s preference.

A bowl of kushmagudi with a glass of buttermilk is a perfect meal on a chilly night in late fall or winter.

Even though kushmagudi is cornbread-based, it is different enough that my family serves it alongside Mother’s traditional cornbread dressing. I think one must sprinkle pepper sauce over a good kushmagudi at table. This is a dish that is always on my family’s table at Thanksgiving and Christmas and is often a side at my New Year’s Day luncheon.

If you have a variation of this dish, or a variant name, I would love to hear from you. If you’ve never tried it, you ought to. It’s easy and tasty.

Happy Thanksgiving.

“Hello … I’m Johnny Cash”

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I still remember 1968, of course, as a watershed year in the U.S. and world events. Vietnam was going full-force and the nightly news always opened with that day’s casualties from the war. Johnny Watts, a family friend from our Birmingham neighborhood, was one of that year’s casualties. I had spent much of the early part of the year as an inquisitive little news junkie watching assassinations, riots, televised funerals, the May ’68 Paris protests, and out-of-control political conventions in Chicago and Miami Beach. In November 1968 Richard Nixon was elected. ‘Nuff said.

In fall 1968 I was a surly teenager who was miserable when my father’s job transferred the family from Birmingham to Nashville. The Nashville junior high school I transferred to was far behind the Birmingham school I had transferred from in most of my courses and I dreaded getting out of bed each morning. I look back now and realize that I was a nightmare for my parents during that time.

Looking back, there’s not much to redeem my year in Nashville from late-1968 to late-1969. But I find that much of what I remember and think fondly of – and it had its moments – is centered on the music and entertainment industry, fitting recollections for a year in “Music City.” We moved to a suburban area called Antioch and it turned out that Dolly Parton – then a young singer on Porter Wagoner’s television show – lived down the street. She would wave to my little brother as she drove past the house in one of her Cadillacs (gifts from Porter, we were told) on Saturday afternoons on the way to perform at the Opry.

One Saturday morning, Dad had business on Nashville’s Broadway and we had driven into town with him. Mother, my brother Rick, and I were sitting in the car waiting when Mother said, “That’s Bill Monroe.” I looked up to see a very distinguished man wearing a suit and a grey hat strolling down Broadway. There was the “Father of Bluegrass” and, while it didn’t fully register then, it totally registers now that here was the man who invented one of the most complex and culturally pristine genres of American music.

It was the late ‘60s and I was a Rolling Stones and rock ‘n’ roll fan but the move to Nashville forced me to attend to Nashville’s pervasive country music culture. This wasn’t totally foreign to me since I had family members who played bluegrass and my Granddaddy Harbison was an avid listener to country music.

Besides Dolly Parton down the street, local television stations would air a smorgasbord of syndicated country shows on the weekends. I wouldn’t admit it but I would watch the thirty-minute syndicated shows of Porter Wagoner, Bill Anderson, Marty Robbins, Billy Walker, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and others late into the night. The Happy Goodman Family and other gospel groups had Sunday morning gospel shows. I am a little amazed that I remember this. I am more amazed that I’m owning up to it.

A Nashville indie television station aired an afternoon teen dance program called “17 Time.” It is thanks to “17 Time” that the Ohio Express song “Chewy Chewy” will be forever etched in my mind. My brother, who was a toddler and could not have known better, loved “Chewy Chewy” and it was on our turntable incessantly. While I’m venting, the same toddler also made “Bang Shang a Lang” by The Archies a staple in the house. You owe me big time, Rick; actually, I just re-listened to both of those bubblegum hits and I have to admit that they’re both pretty catchy in an insipid way.

The 1968 Elvis Presley television special “Elvis” aired on December 3, 1968, less than a month after we moved to Nashville. I remember lingering with my 21-month-old brother in the television section at Sears while Mother and Dad were buying things for the house (or maybe Christmas presents). I caught a few minutes of the acoustic set with Elvis performing in the round with messy hair and a black leather jacket. Elvis had been relegated to teeny bopper movies by this point in his career but it was obvious that this television special denoted something big and new in his future. I wished I had stayed home to watch it and the next day, at my new school, Elvis was all my classmates were talking about.

“Did you see Elvis last night?” one asked.

“I saw a little of it while I was at Sears,” I said.

“Oh man,” came the reply. “Elvis is back!”

Apparently that was the consensus since that telecast will forever be known as the “Elvis Comeback Special.”

On the day I enrolled at my new Nashville school, a new girl was enrolling with me. She was moving to town from Los Angeles and her dad, she said, was a television producer. This was fitting since it was days after Nixon had won the presidency with his “Southern Strategy” and the entertainment world was looking to Nashville and the South for inspiration and ratings.

Within weeks, in early 1969, two of the major networks announced television variety shows that would be filmed in Nashville. ABC was going to shoot “The Johnny Cash Show” as a summer replacement variety show. CBS was going to shoot a cornpone answer to NBC’s popular “Laugh-In” and call it “Hee Haw.” Local television reported that the cast and creative staff of “Hee Haw” took a hayride from the airport to downtown. It was a corny publicity stunt but it was supposed to signify that Hollywood was coming to Nashville. The Cash show and “Hee Haw” began production in 1969. Nashville entertainment was getting the big head and going mainstream.

Even though I pretended to be too sophisticated to watch “Hee Haw,” I will say that I often did and that “Gloom, Despair and Agony on Me,” one of its signature songs, summed up my adolescent angst at the time. Years later, when I was griping about something to my friend Clay Christian, I was taken aback when I realized that he was softly mouthing “Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me.” I got over my bad self and started to sing along: “Deep dark depression, excessive misery / If it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all / Gloom, despair, and agony on me.” It’s no “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” but it’s a classic in its own right.

That may have cemented my friendship with Clay forever.

As entertaining as all of these things may have been, the major event was “The Johnny Cash Show.” Cash was already a popular entertainer in my household and this was before he had quite achieved massive hipster cool beyond the rockabilly set. The show was filmed in Ryman Auditorium when it was still the home of the Grand Ole Opry.

When ABC began shooting shows I did not rest until my parents got tickets to a taping. On a Tuesday night my mother, our next door neighbor, and I traveled to the Opry House to see the show. My dad and the husband next door babysat Rick and the neighbors’ baby. Here’s context: Standing in line at the Opry House, people nearby were debating the merits of the 1966 Mike Nichols film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Mike Nichols died yesterday.

When we were finally seated in the Ryman and waiting for the taping to begin, I excused myself to go to the restroom. I had no idea where the restroom was and just started walking down the nearest stairs I found. Finally, when I got to the bottom of the stairs, I walked down a hallway. I didn’t see a restroom but heard voices from a room off the hall. I walked into the room and found myself in what I suppose was a dressing room. Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and the Statler Brothers, instruments in hand, were sitting there.

Conversation stopped. “Do you know where the restroom is?” I said. I realized later how ridiculous that sounds.

I don’t remember who told me to go back up the stairs but somebody did and I eventually found the restroom. I made my way back to my seat. I’m not sure I mentioned what had just happened.

Eventually, the show started up. On a darkened stage, a spot hit the man in black, He strummed a chord on his guitar, turned and looked at the camera, and snarled, “Hello … I’m Johnny Cash.”

Think about this: It was Johnny Cash performing on the Ryman stage. His back-up singers were June Carter and the Carter Family. Mother Maybelle Carter, the matriarch of twentieth century country music, was on that stage along with her daughters — June’s sisters – Anita and Helen. Carl Perkins and the Tennessee Three were playing. The Statler Brothers were backup singers and comic relief.

The guests that night were singers Gordon Lightfoot and Evie Sands. Dan Blocker, who played “Hoss Cartwright” on the iconic TV western “Bonanza,” was a guest on that show also but he was not present for the taping we attended. He was only announced and talked about as if he were there. His actual performance came at later tapings and was spliced into the finished product.

A comedy duet, Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon, provided comedy relief. Clair and McMahon were probably pretty innocuous as a quipping married couple but they seemed terribly witty and urbane to me at age 14. Because I had seen them at Cash’s show, I kept up with Clair and McMahon on the television sitcom and variety circuit for years. Dick Clair would be among the many entertainment talents who died of AIDS in the 80s.

It was a television taping so there was lots of downtime while sets and new set-ups were underway. I’m sure my mother and our neighbor got bored but I was mesmerized the whole night. I enjoyed watching Johnny Cash and June Carter banter when the cameras weren’t on.

That was the only taping of the Cash show that I got to attend. The taping I saw turned out to be the second show aired in the summer of 1969. The first show had Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan as guests. “Best of” videos are available and I strongly recommend them to anyone interested in music.

The Cash show is still legendary among fans of American popular music of every genre. I almost made a list of the artists who appeared but couldn’t figure who I might possibly leave out.

Johnny Cash’s album, “Johnny Cash at San Quentin,” was released in the summer of 1969 as the television show premiered. It was a constant on my turntable for years. I can truthfully say that I was a Johnny Cash fan before it was cool (outside country circles) to be a Johnny Cash fan.

Over 34 years later, my phone rang around 3:00 a.m. on a September morning. The call was from my brother, Rick, who was the anchor of an early morning news program at the time. He was on the set reviewing the overnight news breaks.

“Don’t panic, Mother and Dad are fine,” he said. “And I would never call at this hour but in this case I thought I should make an exception … Johnny Cash is dead. I thought you’d want to know.”

His was the first of many calls I got that day.

My Grandmother’s Quilt

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In the popular imagination, there has long been a romanticized picture of quilting as “quilting bees” in which ladies gathered, gossiped, and used their genteel skills to create colorful quilts. Folk art aficionados and museums have elevated quilts made for everyday use into works of art and the market for vintage quilts has gone through the roof in recent decades.

Quilts are works of art but lost on many are the practical utilitarian reasons for quilts to exist in the first place. As beautiful and artful as quilts may be, they were used to keep us warm and most of the people – mostly women – who created them were creating them as part of their job to feed and clothe and look to the comfort of their families. As beautiful as many quilts are and as much pride as is shown in the careful and intricate construction of quilts, their exhibition and appeal to collectors was far from the motivation for the quilter. More likely the motivation was along the lines of Will it keep the family warm at night? and Will it hold up? and Will I be embarrassed for the neighbor ladies to see it hanging on my clothesline?

As a child, I was fascinated with the quilts that would come out of the chiffarobes and cedar chests and closets when the nights started to become cool in the fall. The intricate patterns and pieces of fabric told a tale of the maker and her family. As I became older, my mother would occasionally offer me quilts that she had from her or Dad’s families. I have never turned down the gift of a quilt and now have a small but precious collection.

I am always curious about the provenance of the family quilts I receive but, because of the nature of the pieces and their creation, the information is often sketchy. These quilts, after all, were not made to be passed down as heirlooms. They were made to cover people and beds and serve a purpose. I have quilt tops that never got quilted and at least one quilt attributed to Snow Patton Journey, one of my paternal great-grandmothers.

Most of the quilts I have, however, were made by Eula McCarn Harbison (1909-1995), my maternal grandmother. All but one of Grandmother Harbison’s quilts are traditionally patterned –star and snowflake forms are popular – and delicately and masterfully structured. There is one exception and that quilt is on my bed as I write this and has been on my bed every cold season for years. This exception is one that my mother gave to me with the disclaimer that “your grandmother would be horrified if she thought anybody would see this one.”

I hope Grandmother Harbison is not horrified when I say that this is my favorite quilt and I am proud to show it to others. It is clearly a “crazy quilt,” with unmatched and large pieces of fabric and no patterning. In examining it, my guess is that it was put together very quickly (perhaps in advance of an approaching cold spell?). It is also the heaviest and warmest quilt I have ever encountered. I don’t much like cold weather but one of the few pleasures of “the weather of northern aggression” is knowing that I will be sleeping under this amazing quilt for a while. My mother can’t remember when this quilt was made but I am guessing the 1940s before Mother’s family relocated to Birmingham after World War II. Mother says that’s a good guess since she doesn’t recall Grandmother quilting after the move to Birmingham.

As an artist and as a lover of art, my tastes often run toward the modernist and minimalist and Grandmother Harbison’s quilt fits in both categories in its abstract and random collection of fabrics and in its asymmetrical and challenging composition. There is a large square of solid olive fabric placed near one of the corners that always reminds me of the blocks of color or text found in some Asian prints. This would not have been something my grandmother necessarily knew about but the artistic impulse and prescience intrigues me. Grandmother always said that every room should have a touch of red somewhere and I always thought Well, she and Diana Vreeland have that in common!

One of Grandmother’s “nicer” more traditional quilts lives on the foot of the bed in my guest room but it’s the thick and crazy one that will cover me tonight and for many nights to come.

(All quilts shown are by Eula McCarn Harbison.)

“Oh, Masha, Masha, Masha …!”

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One of my favorite opening lines in all of dramatic literature comes from Masha in Chekhov’s The Seagull. At the beginning of that play, Medvedenko asks Masha why she always wears black. “I am in mourning for my life,” she says. I was thrilled recently when I stopped by a neighborhood shop on my way home from work. I was wearing a black shirt and black trousers and the shopowner, a friend, asked me why I was dressed all in black. It was the perfect opening for a literary quote and I grabbed it.

I am a man with strong opinions on many things and many of those opinions were formed relatively early in life. I was fortunate to have a high school English teacher who was not intimidated by the Russian master Anton Chekhov and I remember loving Chekhov’s The Three Sisters the first time I studied it in a high school lit class. It was then that I decided that Chekhov was my favorite playwright and he is still my favorite playwright to this day. I must admit that Sam Shepard is a close second. And I will direct a Chekhov or Shepard play at any opportunity.

Chekhov referred to his plays as “comedy.” That fact still baffles many people familiar with the work. It never baffled me. As a Southerner, I have always felt a kinship with the playwright’s sly and droll sense of humor.

Chekhov’s plays examine the idiosyncrasies and foibles of the human condition and he seems on occasion to wince patiently and lovingly. This is what we mortals are, Chekhov seems to assert, as ludicrous as we may be. Chekhov was trained as a physician and examines his characters fairly and humanely but with clinical detachment.

Chekhov’s down-to-earth sense of humor reminds me of my favorite quote from William James: “Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”

I once congratulated a friend on her performance in Chekhov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard. “Oh please,” she snapped. “I hated that performance and I hate that play. He’s so damn depressing!” I realized that her cluelessness about the play and the character may have been what contributed to her excellent and amusing performance as a headstrong woman who couldn’t see the forest for the (cherry) trees.

I have had the opportunity to direct Chekhov plays a couple of times, to act in a couple, and to see many productions over the years. When I directed The Seagull, I played up the abundant humor of the piece. Audience members thanked me for it afterward. An actor friend who drove a hundred miles to see the production grabbed me at intermission and said, “Thank God. Finally a performance of The Seagull where an audience is actually laughing at the funny parts!” (one of my favorite reviews ever).

As the various characters struggle through their various issues – loveless marriages, aging and decay, lack of talent, greed and ruthless ambition, fickle lovers, loss – they often make bad choices and those bad choices are often accompanied by overwrought and over the top overreactions. We smile to ourselves and I think we recognize ourselves in much of what transpires on stage.

I have dealt with The Seagull in many stages in life. When I was a college student, I thought it was the perfect play for college students as it examined our need to define ourselves, set our goals, and perhaps overreach beyond our capabilities. Now that I’m older, the play speaks directly to me on a profoundly different level but with the same intensity. And much of the journey of the play is still very touching and funny.

Konstantin, one of the major characters, does commit suicide in the end. Oh well, there’s that…

Chekhov’s characters are often in turmoil and despair. He does not make fun of them, but he does handle them gingerly and allows an attentive audience to smile at their overwrought reactions to situations that might often be easily remedied with a little common sense and effort. Often it seems his characters are frozen in inaction and ennui simply because they can’t stop talking about their despair. One thinks Just go to Moscow and stop whining about it after listening to the title siblings of The Three Sisters long for Moscow for four acts. To me, that’s funny.

Anton Chekhov died in 1904 at the age of 44. He died of tuberculosis but almost until the end he was writing letters assuring his correspondents that he was well on the road to recovery. Chekhov was a doctor; he knew better. At the end, a doctor who was attending Chekhov ordered a bottle of fine champagne with three glasses. He poured full glasses of champagne for Chekhov, Olga – Chekhov’s wife, and himself. According to Olga, Chekhov finished his glass, smiled, and said, “It’s a long time since I drank champagne.” Then he rolled over in his bed and quietly died.

(The image is Mandy Erbes and Joseph C. Wilson as Masha and Dorn in The Seagull, directed by Edward Journey, at Longwood College in Farmville, Virginia, in September 1993.)

Christenberry: Bearing Witness

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I have had a couple of opportunities to hear artist William Christenberry speak and on each occasion he recounted how his mother worried that, based on his work, people would think that Alabama was just some “rusted out, worn down, bullet-ridden place.”

Christenberry’s work focuses on memories of a fading South and his photographs capture buildings and landscapes in decay. He often photographs the same places year after year and documents how places evolve or disappear or ultimately break down completely.

One such sequence, the “Palmist Building” series begun in 1961, is among Christenberry’s iconic images. The earliest photographs of the building show an abandoned and dilapidated wooden structure. A sign advertising a palmist has been placed upside down in a broken window as protection from the weather. Subsequent images over years show the progression of the building’s decay amidst growing vegetation. In the later images, the building is completely gone, and trees, vegetation, wire fencing, and a utility pole stand beside a lonely road. Similar photographic series include “Church, Sprott, Alabama,” “Green Warehouse,” and “Coleman Café.”

I have never shared Mrs. Christenberry’s concern about her son’s work, but she addresses a basic misunderstanding of the South by people who don’t really know the place. By capturing fade and decay, Christenberry is preserving images of a South that is disappearing … has largely disappeared. His predilection for finding and recording old buildings, abandoned places, overgrown landscapes – a predilection I share and which makes Christenberry’s work special to me – is driven by a need to bear witness rather than by nostalgia. Christenberry focuses on rural landscapes but the impulse seems to me to be the same as my attraction to rust and industrial decay found in urban environments. Some misinterpret these images as representations of what the South is today but Christenberry captures and honors them as a rapidly disappearing landscape.

William Christenberry was born in 1936 in Tuscaloosa and left Alabama in 1961 to live and work in New York, Memphis, and finally Washington, D.C. where he has lived and taught at the Corcoran since 1968. Still, his preferred landscape for his art focuses on the environs of Alabama’s “Black Belt,” an area of rich black soil that cuts through the center of the state, where both sets of his grandparents resided. Hale County, “ground zero” for Christenberry’s art, was also the location for James Agee and Walker Evans’s iconic Depression-era book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a hypnotic and microscopic examination of the lives of three Alabama tenant farm families.

Occasionally, as I drive around the Black Belt in west Alabama, I will accidentally stumble across a place that Christenberry has photographed. I am startled at the discovery, stunned at the recognition, and often feel like I have witnessed some elusive ancient treasure.

Christenberry’s art encompasses painting and drawing, sculpture, and assemblage but he is primarily known for his photography. It was photographer Walker Evans himself who became a sort of mentor to Christenberry when they met in New York in the early 1960s after Christenberry finished his M.F.A. at Alabama. Evans steered Christenberry along the path of a concentration on photography after viewing snapshots Christenberry had made with a cheap Brownie camera as studies for expressionist paintings.

Often, in his sculptures, Christenberry takes the same buildings he has photographed and does three-dimensional reproductions of them, often resting on an authentic bed of Alabama red clay in a shallow box. Over time, these more realistic depictions have given way to solid white “dream buildings” and ghostly structures drawn from memory and iconographic imagery – ladders, gourds, signs, structures on stilts. Christenberry’s evocative art never tells the viewer what to think; he presents it and allows one to ponder and meditate on it, to explore the implications.

There are many books of Christenberry’s art available. These would be of interest to the uninitiated as well as those who already know the artist’s work. A couple of my favorites are Trudy Wilner Stack’s Christenberry Reconstruction: The Art of William Christenberry (1996) and William Christenberry (2006) with thoughtful essays by Walter Hopps, Andy Grundberg, and Howard N. Fox.

My articles about William Christenberry and Walker Evans with several multimedia links may be found at http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org.

Sustainability and Soul

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Bluewater Creek Farm (www.bluewatercreekfarm.com) is a family-owned sustainable farm near Killen, Alabama, in the Shoals area of the far northwest corner of Alabama. It is run by Liz and Collins Davis in partnership with Liz’s parents, Donna and Doug Woodford. Today I drove over there for the first time to check out today’s farm stand and to join a tour of the farm led by Liz. The more time I spend in the Shoals lately the more I’m convinced that it may be the center of the universe.

I was unaware of Bluewater Creek Farm until August when I was in the Shoals — in Florence — for my second “Friends of the Café” event at the Alabama Chanin Factory. We were lucky enough to sit across the table from Donna and Doug who enthusiastically told about their family and granddaughter Abby. They were thrilled that Liz, Collins, and Abby had recently returned from northern California to start Bluewater Creek Farm. Collins had run farms in California and other places and now they are back in Alabama.

Doug, who is a physician and advocate of holistic nutrition, spoke passionately about his and Liz’s work in nutritional therapy, and Doug and Donna enthusiastically shared news of the activities on the farm as well as pictures of Abby. Doug also had impressive pictures of chickens and bulls from the farm.

What impressed me most was the passion and commitment with which this couple discussed the work they and their family are doing.

I was happy to see Donna and Doug at the next “Friends of the Café” event in October, and this time Liz and Collins were there too. I contacted Liz to get on the farm’s mailing list and that led to the trip today. Bluewater Creek Farm’s stated mission is “to produce nutrient dense, clean food in a sustainable way… this means using farming practices that work with nature. This in turn shows respect for the living beings in our care, and makes a positive impact on our local environment.”

This family makes a convincing case for their philosophy and seeing the labor-intense way in which they practice what they preach drives home the benefits and sanity of their cause. I, like most Americans, have only fairly recently become educated to the benefits of the “slow food,” “No Farms, No Food,” and “Eat Fresh, Eat Local” movements. It is this rising consciousness and education of the general public which has led to the emergence of great local farmers’ markets in virtually every community, to locally owned restaurants serving locally grown foods, to an understanding of why these issues increasingly matter, and to more sustainable farms like Bluewater Creek.

Previous generations knew this first-hand. Most Americans of the 21^st century are learning it anew. Availability nurtures advocacy.

Liz’s tour included the planting beds, still full of lush greens and root vegetables on the first day of November (after the first truly cold night of the season); a visit with the farm’s heritage pigs, including a bunch of tiny piglets; cattle in the pasture, including the grass-fed, heat tolerant South Poll breed; and a bunch of happy grass-fed chickens, joined by a lone turkey (it’s close to Thanksgiving; I didn’t have the heart to ask).

When the tour was over, I continued down the path to Bluewater Creek. I never lived on a farm and have spent minimal amounts of my life in the country and around farms. Yet I find, especially lately, that being alone out in nature gives me a peace and sense of ease that I don’t get in any other environment. It has become my best and most reliable form of release.

On the walk back from the creek to the Barn, I met Liz on the road. We had a nice chat about future plans for the farm. “I’m not trying to preach organic farming,” she said. “I just want to show people what we’re doing and they can decide for themselves.”

Before leaving Bluewater Creek Farm I stopped by the Barn, a converted horse barn now used for events and classes, to visit for a minute with Donna. This was the location of the farm stand with the farm’s various products being sold. I bought some meat, peppers, beets, and beet greens to supplement what I had already gotten at my local farmers’ market a couple of days ago. I also got some honey that had been jarred today. I was too late for eggs. They had just sold out.

That’s okay. I’ll be back.

Red State Blues

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I am a liberal in a conservative state that I love. I accept that; in fact, I embrace it since I know that change comes from within. The whole “red state/blue state” labeling has irritated me since Tim Russert made it a household phrase in the 2000 election cycle. I think that labeling system oversimplifies and stereotypes the complex and diverse populations of each state. Those smug and cutesy “I am a blue dot in a red state” car decals nauseate me.

But I am constantly being reminded that I am in a supposedly solid red state. In next week’s midterm elections, the Alabama Democrats did not even bother to field a candidate for some key races. I will not cast a vote in those particular races. The Alabama Democrats are presenting a “Democratic” candidate who was recently a Republican (and before that he was a Democrat) for governor. I will not cast a vote in that race either. I don’t vote for Republicans – never have and likely never will, but I can’t in good conscience vote for certain “Democrats” that I can’t trust. The current Alabama Democratic gubernatorial candidate calls to mind “Shorty” Price, a man who was a perennial (and perennially defeated) Alabama candidate back in the 1950s through 1970s. If there’s an election, this guy will be in it.

I still hear people who pompously declare that they “vote for the candidate, not the party.” That sounds like a noble position and I used to pay lip service to that notion. But now I think the candidate has made a conscious decision which party to affiliate with and if the affiliation is with a party that consistently stands for things that I disagree with or abhor then I have to question the integrity and wisdom of the choice.

Some candidates switch parties for political expediency; that’s certainly not somebody I want to support. If politicians switch parties because that is the only way they think they can get elected in their state or district, then I have to question their convictions and fitness for elective office to begin with. Politics is a game to career politicians, but I can’t forget that their actions or lack thereof affect real people.

Political advertising in Alabama is as troublesome as it is throughout the nation as the candidates strive to divide us rather than unite us and keep fighting moot battles for political gain. In Alabama, local ads and politicians seem to be competing to see who can use the word “conservative” most often. I personally have strong “family values” but I’m not sure that the “family values” extolled by the local candidates are in keeping with my personal definition of the term.

My conservative mother surprised me in the spring during primary season when she said, “It must be frustrating to be a liberal in Alabama. It must feel like nobody wants your vote.” That’s true. I’ve developed a thick skin. I’ve gotten used to local Democrats who feel they have to brandish a firearm to get elected.

When it was announced earlier this year that Birmingham is a finalist for the 2016 Democratic National Convention, I was impressed with what a smart choice that could be for the party. It would show a confidence and aggressiveness that the Democratic Party seems to be lacking of late – sort of like when the Southern Baptists decided to have their national conference in Salt Lake City a few years back. True enough, Alabama generally goes Republican in presidential elections, but Birmingham is a Democratic city and the statement the DNC would be making in choosing Birmingham would be one of the more progressive and intelligent moves that party has made in a while. I don’t expect it to happen because, truth be told, I’m not too thrilled with the Democrats these days either.

In the meantime, I will continue to be amused and confounded by political advertising and politicians and I will continue to vote my conscience and values. To steal (liberally and loosely) from Faulkner, I shall continue to endure until the day I once again prevail.

The Chukker Nation

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A girl I sort of dated in college told me that she thought I looked like “the love child of Mick Jagger and Jackson Browne.” This was the ‘70s. She was delusional; I was young and flattered.

I had forgotten the comment (really, I had!) until somebody forwarded this photo to me from Facebook. It was taken (as far as I can figure since I remember the shirt) by photographer John Earl sometime in the very early ‘80s. I am the skinny guy in the down right corner with a lot of attitude. The photo made me gasp since I had forgotten myself as that skinny, that young, and with that hairstyle. But then the Mick and Jackson love child statement came to mind. Or is that guy in that picture maybe “Zoolander-esque”? Or Zoolander-esque-ish?

The picture was taken in the Chukker, a Tuscaloosa fixture for 47 years from 1956 to Halloween 2003. It was a bar. It was a dive. And it was one of the great and legendary watering holes in the world (friends have reported seeing Chukker tee-shirts in Paris). I was born in 1955 so I was a minute older than the Chukker. But here’s the deal: My parents opened a typewriter business on 22^nd Avenue in downtown Tuscaloosa in 1957 and their shop was around the corner from the Chukker, new at the time but already a dive. Back then, the Chukker was a lunch spot – a grill if you will – in the daytime and reverted to its bar status at night.

I know my parents would probably rather not admit to this, but I remember going to the Chukker as a young child to pick up coffee in the morning and sandwiches at noontime for Mother and Dad. So my personal memories of the Chukker go back to about 1958. It was a different time and toddlers could freely roam Tuscaloosa city streets. I was – I’ll admit it – too much of a spoiled brat to go to day care back then and my accommodating parents made a sort of nursery/playroom for me in the back of their business.

I had the run of the streets in many ways since the shopowners in the area knew me and would look out for me. My parents still have a small bookcase that I decided I needed back then. I spotted it and my 4-year-old self told Mr. McGraw at the furniture store to put it on my parents’ account. He did. I am pretty sure that my mother’s cedar chest still has a drawing of little me that was drawn by an itinerant artist who set up shop for a while in the Chukker in the ‘50s. And I vividly remember ringing the bell at the Salvation Army booth during the Tuscaloosa JayCee’s Christmas parade with my stuffed Coca-Cola Santa under my arm, making a haul for charity. As a toddler in Tuscaloosa I was a “street kid” in the purest (and most innocent) sense of the term

When the family moved back to Tuscaloosa in 1972, the Chukker was still there. And it was still there when I was an undergraduate in college. It was only after I finished college (the first time) and I was still living in Tuscaloosa that I went with friends back to the Chukker. Back then, it was much like I remembered it, but it was a full-fledged bar and its reputation seemed to change biannually. It was reputed to be, at various times, an “artists’ bar,” a “biker bar,” a “blues bar,” a “bohemian bar,” a “gay bar,” a “lesbian bar,” an “old hippy bar,” a “punk rock bar,” a “redneck bar,” a “writers’ bar” … I could go on.

What it was, though, was an inclusive community that happened to be a bar. One always felt looked after at the Chukker. One always found someone one wanted to talk to and get to know.

My friend Bill and I were at the Chukker when I heard that John Lennon had been killed. That was no small feat since the bar had no phone at that time. I directed my first, and unexpectedly successful, production of Gertrude Stein plays at the Chukker. Bruce Hopper, the owner at that time, asked me if I wanted to do a show in the bar’s performance space. I told him that I did but I couldn’t guarantee an audience for the avant garde plays of Gertrude Stein. He said “do it” and we sold out nightly.

A film student shot a short film of my friend Deb and me walking in a circle in the Chukker courtyard on the day that Andy Warhol died. We walked round and round and talked about Andy and Andy’s death. I never saw the finished product but someone told me, many years later, that they saw it at a screening somewhere. “You’re the guy walking in circles in that Warhol film.” Yes, I guess I am.

My friend Clay would spend hours, it seemed, glued to the Chukker’s Galaga machine. My Galaga attempts were generally over in under a minute. Clay and I played a lot of pool at the Chukker also. My pool skills were unpredictable at best; I chose to refer to them as “Zen-like.” Clay was one of the few people who had the patience to play pool with me; I even won a game on occasion.

An ersatz and quirky art collection was housed at the Chukker – mostly the work of artists who hung out at the place during their Tuscaloosa sojourn. Some was hanging on the walls and some was painted directly on the walls. “The Sistine Chukker,” Tom Bradford’s Michelangelo homage on the bar’s ceiling, was the most legendary piece of the Chukker collection. For many years, I would welcome newcomers to Tuscaloosa with a postcard of the Sistine Chukker.

The great Tuscaloosa-based Celtic group Henri’s Notions was practically the house band at the Chukker for a while. Forecast, The Indigo Girls, The Replacements, Johnny Shines, Richard Thompson, and Sun Ra all played the Chukker, as did any number of local bands trying to be R.E.M. during that band’s heyday. In fact, I took a long time to warm up to R.E.M. because of the English department “R.E.M. wannabe” bands that sprang up in Tuscaloosa at the time. The real R.E.M. itself adjourned to the Chukker after a concert on the University campus, bringing a substantial number of the concert-goers with them, when Michael Stipe announced to the audience that that’s where they were going after the show. I invited Billy Joel to the Chukker after one of his Tuscaloosa concerts; he declined. Jimi Hendrix may or may not have played there and Keith Richards may or may not have played pool there. Abbie Hoffman DID have a beer there because I was there when he did it. There was always a “Chukker Nation Reunion” on the Saturday between Christmas and New Years’s Day.

“Quarter beer night” on Mondays was a longstanding tradition. One could go on the roof of the building next to the place (the building, in fact, where the furniture store where I bought those bookshelves used to be) and watch the cars converge from every direction at 9:00 p.m. on Monday (remember that convergence scene in Field of Dreams?) and watch most of the same cars leave again at 10 when the hour of 25 cent beer was over.

I had not been at the Chukker for many years when I heard it was closing its doors on Halloween 2003. In fact, the closing was reported on CNN. It was ultimately the victim of a Tuscaloosa downtown renewal. There’s a park where the Chukker and my parents’ typewriter shop used to be, and a fountain nearby. It’s a nice enough place, but a little bittersweet if you remember what used to be.

I went down on Halloween 2003 to be a witness. So did many other people. I didn’t stay long that night, and I was disappointed that I arrived just as Henri’s Notions finished their final Chukker set, but the place was packed; it seemed that every time the door opened that night, it contained a face that I had not seen in ages. Truly, people flew from across the country to be present at the Chukker’s closing night. I visited with the guys from Henri’s Notions, Sandra and Michael, Fred and Jennifer, and other people I knew. I didn’t stay long; I didn’t even have a beer. But I was there.

And then I was not there anymore. It was all I could do not to turn around for one last look as I walked out of the Chukker door for the final time. But I didn’t. I just kept walking.

Community and Kentuck

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I never know what will catch my eye at the Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport, Alabama, right across the Black Warrior River from Tuscaloosa. It is always held on the third weekend in October (www.kentuck.org).

This weekend, October 18-19, was the 41^st running of the Kentuck Festival. I began attending when the Festival was in its toddler stage, around #2 or #3. I’m not sure which one because, like turnip greens, Kentuck now seems ubiquitous in my life. Journalist and Columbia University professor Claudia Dreifus writes that Alabama is a “hotspot” for visual and musical art and that “Kentuck is an incubator, a nursery, a home.”

The festival started on a small local scale in 1971 and has grown in size and reputation ever since, frequently and nationally being touted as among the finest of its kind. Folk, self-taught, and visionary artists have always been the backbone of the Kentuck Festival but it includes a diverse and impressive array of visual artists from the South, throughout the United States, and beyond. The festival takes place in a wooded area of a park not far from Northport’s downtown but the Kentuck organization operates year-round with resident artists, studios, galleries, and workshops spread along Main Street and throughout the city.

Everything builds to the festival. Artists, dealers, patrons, and sightseers converge from all over the country to purchase, mingle, look at art, and meet the artists. Demonstrations, musical performances, storytellers, and food areas round out the sensory overload of the event. I counted more than 250 artist exhibitors in booths spread among towering trees. An added bonus was when I stumbled upon an art installation in an environment adjacent to the Festival grounds. Meredith Randall Knight’s M.F.A. exhibition, “The Marrow of It,” features nebulous concrete abstractions nestled within and interacting with a natural environment just steps from the festival.

The sense of community is palpable and is one of the factors that always brings me back. Kentuck gives me an opportunity to visit with friends – many of whom I only see annually at Kentuck and some of whom I have known since I was an undergraduate at Alabama in the ‘70s. I can check out new directions in their art, find out how the art circuit has been this year, and catch up on the family.

Among those friends I count on seeing are Lou and Daniel Livingston. It’s always good to see Daniel’s bold works in clay, bright and shiny and delicate. Tim Weber, whose work I’ve followed and collected since he was in residence at Kentuck, is constantly creating new forms in his clay work as well as revisiting and fine tuning forms that he has been doing throughout his career. Close by Daniel Livingston’s area are Andrew and Etta McCall and their lovely little church structures and bird houses and free-form baskets.

T.R. Reid keeps creating whimsical and original whirligigs while his partner, Jeanie Holland, displays her colorful mixed media wares one booth over.

Folk pottery legend Jerry Brown has his face jugs on display among the exhibitors and the Miller family from Miller’s Pottery in Brent, Alabama, throws pieces as patrons look on. The Millers have roots going back to the early days of Alabama potteries.

Amos Paul Kennedy, whose letterpress shop used to be based in Alabama locations, has now relocated to Detroit, Michigan, but still sets up a press at Kentuck to produce his array of colorful and clever posters

I have pieces by all of the aforementioned artists in my home and living with their art is made even more special by knowing and interacting with the artists. Most of my pieces were purchased directly from the maker.

Charlie Lucas, the “Tin Man” and a legend in his own right, seems always to be hard at work on new sculptures in the rusting metal enclosure that houses his work at the festival. Steve Shepard’s outspoken and brightly colored paintings, often sprinkled with his unharnessed opinions on politics and other issues, are as entertaining as the animated conversations with the artist himself.

A new Kentuck discovery this year was Clay Bush, who makes amazing bags, wallets, backpacks, satchels, and other designs from repurposed automobile seatbelts. The structure of his designs is flawless and the execution is masterful

My main purchase this year was a copper and steel balanced wind vane by Allan Kress of the Alabama Forge Council. The finely wrought copper feather moves wistfully, dancing delicately with the breeze. I never know what will catch my eye at Kentuck and I never know, until I’m there, what I’ll be bringing home. For one weekend in October, a community of artists in Northport, Alabama, supplies positive and creative energy that will sustain and inspire me in the days to come.

Food Memory: Turnip Green Soup

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When I was growing up I didn’t think much about turnip greens because they were ubiquitous. They’d be served at home regularly, most restaurants had them on the menu, and any “meat and three” joint or cafeteria would serve them. As long as there was a bottle of pepper sauce – hot peppers in vinegar – on the table to sprinkle over them I was good.

Turnip greens were one of the many Southern staples that I didn’t much think about or miss until I began to travel and lived in places where they were hard to get or completely unavailable. That’s when I began to pay more attention to them. I began to grab them fresh when I could find them. I questioned older Southern cooks about how to prepare them.

I also began to experiment with collard greens which were generally less served in my own native environs. I enjoy cooking collard and turnip greens together; turnip greens have a bit more of a bite and the collard greens pull that down a notch. I even began to play around with the actual turnips, which were rarely served on Southern menus. I occasionally make a creamed turnip puree which is good to spread on bread or use as a dipping sauce with a plate of crudités.

Several years ago my mother, knowing my appreciation of greens prepared well, mailed to me a recipe for “turnip green soup” that she had cut out of the newspaper. I have a rule that I never tamper with a recipe until I have prepared it as written at least once. After that, I can start playing around.

I thought the “turnip green soup” would be a recipe that I messed with because it used frozen turnip greens and some canned ingredients. I would make it their way and then see how I might improve it with fresh ingredients. But here’s what happened: It was so delicious as written that I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess around with it.

I did tamper with it a bit though, and have made substitutions when I was missing an ingredient in the pantry. When fall weather and football season roll around, it’s a great quick meal to prepare. I cook a large batch of it in a cast iron dutch oven, transfer it to containers in the refrigerator, and eat on it for a few days. You must have cornbread with it and I sometimes just make a cake of cornbread but I prefer to make corn sticks as the accompaniment so that I can just dip the corn stick in the soup.

I often serve turnip green soup as a starter course to my New Year’s Day luncheon. A few years ago, when my sister-in-law ran her first half marathon in Huntsville, I prepared a pot of it for lunch after the run and found that it was the perfect post-run comfort food. Friends from Ohio have transferred it up North and I hear it “has legs” along Lake Erie.

I am teaching a Saturday morning class this fall and there are hours of college football to watch when I get home from class. When I left class around 11:00 this Saturday morning, I ran by the store to pick up some ingredients, came home, made a batch of turnip green soup and corn sticks, and had a hearty meal before my main game aired at 2:30.

Here’s the recipe for turnip green soup as I usually make it. It is a forgiving recipe, open to substitutions or deletions depending on taste. It can easily be a vegetarian dish if one is so inclined.

TURNIP GREEN SOUP

2 packages (about 24 ounces) frozen turnip greens with diced turnips

1 package Knorr vegetable mix (from the soup section)

1 can (about 15 ounces) northern beans

1 can (about 15 ounces) navy beans

1 small onion, chopped

5 cups chicken broth

1 pound smoked sausage, sliced thin (I use Conecuh smoked sausage from south Alabama)

1 teaspoon hot sauce (I use more)

1 teaspoon garlic powder

Salt and pepper to taste

Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning to taste

Combine all ingredients in a soup pot. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer. Cook until sausage is done. Serve with corn bread, corn muffins, or corn sticks.