Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (12 page)

Precisely when and where a barbecue was first served in anything like its
present form falls within the realm of folklore. Texans concede that some
simple form of barbecuing meat doubtless came from below the Rio
Grande-or perhaps from French Louisiana-but believe that its present
form is a Texas development. Wherever it came from, and whatever in the
beginning may have been its recipes and customs, the barbecue fell into
friendly hands when it met the Anglo-American pioneers who were settling in the Southwest.

Until the friendly hands of Anglo-American pioneers got ahold of it, Texas
barbecue was just Mexicans burying cow heads, the logic goes. But of course,
nobody believes those old creation stories anymore. Now it is widely held that
it was old German butcher shops that date back to the turn of the century and
before, like Southside Market in Elgin and Kruez Market in Lockhart, where
the current form of Texas barbecue was invented.

When I started writing the Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook, I believed
these meat markets were the birthplace of Texas barbecue, like everybody else.
But there were a few problems with the story. For one thing "barbecue" isn't a
German word or a German concept. So how did wurst and Kassler Rippchen
suddenly turn into Texas barbecue?

Several old-timer pit bosses tipped me off. It was the hoards of black and
Hispanic cotton pickers who once roamed the state that started calling German smoked meat barbecue, they said. So I combed through Texas libraries
and museums looking for archival material about black cotton pickers and
barbecue. What I found were narratives in which former slaves talked about
cooking barbecue on Texas cotton plantations before the Civil War and turnof-the-century photos of blacks cooking barbecue in earthen pits.

It wasn't what I was looking for. In fact, it ruined my whole neatly organized book outline. If blacks were cooking barbecue on cotton plantations in Texas in the early 18oos, then how could I write that German meat markets invented Texas barbecue half a century later?

And how did it happen that we forgot blacks used to cook barbecue in
Texas in the first place?

"African Americans have been completely erased from the meta-narrative
of Texas history," University of Texas history professor Neil Foley told me.
Foley is the author of White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in
Texas Cotton Culture. I was intrigued by a couple of paragraphs in the book's
introduction about the way Texas reinvented its history after the Civil War. So
I called Foley to see if he could help me understand the strange disparities in
Texas barbecue history I was running into.

"Between 188o and 1920, Texas cotton farmers lost ownership of their land
and became tenant farmers and sharecroppers," Foley summarized. Nobody
was proud to be a cotton farmer anymore. Meanwhile the cattle business had
taken off, and although it didn't employ that many people, it provided Texans
with an image.

"You want to hang your mythological hat on something you can be proud
of. The image of the rest of the South was cotton, the Confederate flag, overalls, and mules," Foley said. "But Texas had something no other Southern state
had-the Alamo. Texans were the men who won the West, the men who defeated the Mexicans."

"So in the early twentieth century," Foley says, "Texas started to consciously
reshape its history." The melancholy Confederate symbolism was swept away
in favor of the mythology of the cowboy. Of course, Anglo Texans didn't actually invent the cattle culture, as some American history texts claim.

"What did Moses Austin from Connecticut know about cattle?" Foley
chuckles. "There was already a thriving cattle culture in northern Mexico before the Anglos ever got here. But there's nothing new or unusual about this
sort of thing, it's been going on forever," he says. "You expropriate the cultural
material of the people you subjugate and then repackage it as part of your own
culture."

And so it was with barbecue. Whites and Mexicans have struck a Faustian
bargain in Texas, the historian suggests. Mexican Texans play the role of the
colorful minority, and in exchange, Anglos acknowledge that much of the
state's heritage is actually Mexican. Everyone agrees that Mexican barbacoa
was probably common in South and West Texas long before open pit barbecue arrived.

But blacks were an inconvenient reminder of cotton and slavery and pov erty. So their contributions were expropriated, and they were left out of the
story. "Once the myth becomes accepted history," Neil Foley tells me, "nobody
questions it anymore. College-educated people from all over the country still
see Texas as the wild West. There's a reason for that. Tourists come to Texas to
see San Antonio and the Alamo. There are no African Americans in the Alamo
scene.

The German meat market story is the current white creation myth.
"[While] the ultimate roots of barbecue can be traced back to the Stone Age
... it's more immediate Texas origins date from one hundred or so years ago,
when meat markets cooked and smoked their surplus stock," said Texas
Monthly in May 1977. Gourmet magazine's Jane and Michael Stern credit "East
European immigrants" for definitive Texas barbecue. (November 2000).

I called the author of the New York Times article, Steven Raichlen, an acquaintance of mine who has published many books on the subject of barbecue. I asked him if he had ever been to a black barbecue joint in Texas and how
he came to pick his winners.

He said he had visited a few black places, but that the white-owned barbecue joints he'd chosen were classic examples of the Texas style. "When you're
in Florence, you go see the Michelangelos," he concluded.

It's a Saturday afternoon carnival at Burn's BBQ on De Priest Street in the
Acres Home neighborhood. There's music coming from a jam box out front
and more music coming from the cars in the parking lot.

"What's good today?" my companion asks a woman in gray sweats climbing into her car with a pile of styrofoam containers.

"This time I got ribs," she giggles. "But this is my second trip. It's all good,
and they really pile it on!"

Outside the front door, a guy in a black Oakland Raiders shirt and matching hat is standing at a card table, selling 3-for-$i8 CDs. There are lots of Marvin Gaye, Temptations, and Stevie Wonder albums, along with a little rap. Inside, there are twenty customers waiting in line.

I find Roy Burns, the patriarch of Burn's BBQ, sitting in a plastic chair in
the back. Burns, sixty-five, grew up in Midway Texas. He's been selling barbecue for over twenty years. "I used to set up a smoker on the side of the road,
but my arthritis got to me," he says. So he settled down and opened a restaurant and brought in some family members to help. He has been at this location for the last twelve years.

We eat at a picnic table under a canvas tent in the front of the restaurant.
The ribs are well done, but the meat holds together under a sweet subtle glaze of sauce and smoke. They are among the best ribs I've tasted. The brisket falls
apart on the way to your mouth, it is as soft and wet as pot roast.

"That's the difference between white and black barbecue," Houston artist
Bert Long once told me. "White people don't cook it as long. And they doctor
it up with marinades. Blacks cook everything to death." At Goode Company,
one of the most popular of Houston's white-owned barbecue places, every
piece of meat is served in a perfect slice, he says. In the black East Texas style,
they don't mind serving you a messy pile of meat debris.

As I learned at the barbecue symposium, the epitome of Deep South barbecue is pork, slow smoked to stringy mush. In the black East Texas barbecue
style, this original Southern cooking tradition is preserved, but with the substitution of beef, which was cheaper and more plentiful here.

"Need no teef to eat my beef," is a favorite slogan of black Texas barbecue
men. If the beef isn't falling apart, then it simply isn't done enough, according
to this way of thinking. Black Texas barbecue has its own aesthetic. If you are
judging it by the standards of white barbecue, then you don't get it. Put some
of that falling apart brisket on a bun with barbecue sauce, pickles, and onions
and think of it as Texas's answer to a Carolina pulled pork sandwich-suddenly you'll understand.

Except for my friends and I, everybody at Burn's BBQ is black. And everybody seems to be having a very good time. The cars in the parking lot remain
long after the sandwiches are eaten, and there is a basketball game shaping up
on asphalt nearby.

A plume of rising oak smoke liberally scented with spicy meat has long
been the beacon of black celebrations in East Texas. "We ate barbecue at every
wedding, funeral, and family reunion I can remember," says Gary Reese, a
local black writer who grew up in Conroe. "My uncles would stay up all night
cooking the meat."

Whites also held huge barbecues in Texas. In Texas, barbecues attended by
thousands of people for which whole herds of cattle were slaughtered marked
major occasions of all varieties. But the open pit cooking style used at these
events and the traditions of barbecue as a civic gathering came to Texas with
the cotton culture. And the people doing the cooking, in the Old South and in
East Texas, were black.

"My grandfather, Emmett Turner, had a pit in the backyard, and I mean a
hole in the ground," remembered Bill Bridges, a seventy-seven-year-old food
writer and photographer from Palestine, when I asked him to describe oldfashioned white barbecues in East Texas. "This would have been around 1930.
He used to barbecue a quarter of beef; he wouldn't bother with anything smaller. We'd go to the butcher shop and poke around until he picked one.
Then he'd pick up a colored guy named 'Lijah who actually came and did the
work. Grandpa would sit in the shade and drink beer all day and tell 'Lijah
what to do, `Time to turn it over, 'Lijah, time to mop it. '

When the facts as you understand them don't fit into the existing metanarrative, you write a counter-narrative, a different version of history, Neil
Foley told me. Based on oral traditions and other evidence, African Americans can present a convincing counter-narrative of Texas barbecue history.

"After the cotton was all picked, the slaves were given meat, whole steers
and pigs, to barbecue. It was a big party at the end of the harvest," Louis Archendaux explained when I asked him what he knew about the origins of the
Texas barbecue tradition.

The evidence suggests barbecue was as common on Texas cotton plantations as it was elsewhere in the South. "De sarvants had lots ob picnics an ole
Marse ud gibe us meat fer barbecue," former Texas slave Winger Vanhook of
Waco told an interviewer. The W PA Slave Narratives, a series of interviews
with over 2,300 former slaves conducted in the late 19305 by writers working
for the Works Progress Administration, contain several references to black
barbecue by former Texas slaves and their offspring.

"I kin remember w'en I was jes a boy about nine years old w'en freedom
cum's [June 19th, 1865] ... w'en we commenced to have de nineteenth celebrations ... an' everybody seem's like, w'ite an' black cum an' git some barbecue," former Texas slave Anderson Jones remembered.

Steve Williams, a slave in Goliad County, described life after being driven
away from the plantation. "So we jes' scatters 'round, here and yonder, not
knowin' zactly what to do. Some of us works on one farm and some on another for a little co'n or some clothes or food. Finally I works 'round 'til I
comes to San Angelo, Texas, and I cooks barbecue (at a barbecue stand) for a
long time 'til I jes' finally breaks down."

Tamale salesman, barbecue sellers, and outdoor food vendors of all varieties began to disappear in Texas, as in the rest of the country, when sanitary
regulations were introduced around 1910. As food service establishments
came to be licensed and inspected, whites brought Texas ethnic food traditions into restaurants. Mexican food went from street corner chili stands to
Anglo-owned establishments like the Original Mexican restaurant in San
Antonio.

Since African American pit barbecue was still cooked in a hole in the
ground at the turn of the century, roadside stands had little hope of comply ing with sanitary laws. The German and Czech butchers, on the other hand,
smoked meat in brick enclosures and were already subject to whatever sanitation regulations various Texas counties chose to enforce.

In the 192os, a Beaumont barbecuer named Joe Burney came to Houston
and taught the local blacks how to construct cinder block pits that would pass
inspection, old-time Houston barbecue rnan Harry Green explains. Of course,
black barbecue restaurants were segregated and restricted to black neighborhoods. But during the era of segregation, they were quite successful. The Fifth
Ward alone supported six outstanding black barbecue joints at one time. But
once integration arrived, blacks deserted the old neighborhoods, and by the
early 1970s, black-owned barbecue joints began to disappear.

"In East Texas, white barbecue is served in restaurants. You get nigger barbecue from a stand by the side of the road-usually about the size of an outhouse with a hand-lettered sign," Bill Bridges, a white Texan, told me on the
phone from his home in Palestine. "In the old days, white barbecue was
brisket, the same as it is now. Black barbecue was hot links and the stranger
parts of the animals."

Bridges is a very likable and knowledgeable guy, and he doesn't consider
himself a racist. But he was born in 1925 and can't break certain lifelong habits.
Although his use of the N-word is deplorable, ironically, he is one of the few
white Texans I've talked to who understands the key role blacks have played in
Texas barbecue history.

"Nigger barbecue isn't a derogatory term in East Texas," Bridges says when
I ask him about his use of the word. "It's like calling Brazil nuts `nigger toes.' If
anything, the term is used with affection."