Twain's Feast (26 page)

That’s probably why Erik finds a nest, one humid Maryland summer morning, in the packed-gravel path of the Neavitt playground. The only sign of the nest is a shallow depression. But Marguerite was a good teacher, and Erik spots it right away, calling to her at the edge of the grassy field where she’s been picking honeysuckle. The hard, gray gravel is nothing like a prime nesting spot—but now that the sandy shores are often piled with jagged riprap, it’s the best the turtle could find. Marguerite kneels, pointing out a few shell fragments—torn, lonely-looking remnants left by a raiding crow. Then Erik digs with the Turtle Lady, scraping through stone and sand, down to the three surviving eggs.

Neavitt isn’t a waterman’s paradise anymore, but it’s still a Chesapeake place. It’s as lovely and wounded as the bay.

Twain dropped some terrific things between writing the list of favorite foods in his journal and the final menu he published in
A Tramp Abroad
. A lot of them were inexplicable—a man who forgets to include “lobsters boiled & deviled” on a list of great American foods can maybe be forgiven, but a man who lists them, then edits them out, is a man who has made a serious mistake. Fried onions, for some reason, failed to make the cut. So did hot eggs, pot liquor, cabbage boiled with pork, scalloped oysters, shrimps, pine nuts, catfish, hard crabs, potato salad, celery salad, lima beans, smelts and sturgeon from San Francisco, and rib of beef. I regret each and every one of these exclusions, except the celery salad, raw celery being one food I’ve never been able to champion.

Still, Twain was on a roll. In his
Autobiography
he’d rant that including too many details in a story made it into a “tangled, inextricable confusion,” leaving it “intolerably wearisome to the listener.” So on his menu, he pared dishes to their simplest essence. He listed ingredients rather than recipes; he wanted good things, simply prepared. Yes, he was strutting a bit—Twain was in an ostentatiously American mood, like Ben Franklin as he strolled through Paris in a coonskin cap. Still, the menu was a real cache, a trove of what the great writer saw as the best of his country’s food; even the porterhouse steak he wanted for breakfast was an American cut, never produced by European butchers.

True, at home things were changing. Railroads and cans had already transformed the food of Twain’s youth, increasing choice and availability but also disconnecting the food that made Americans
Americans
from the land that made America
America.
Michael Pollan makes the wise observation that a culture that treats foods as medicines can’t be said to have a real cuisine at all; now dietary reformers like John Harvey Kellogg, Eliza Leslie, and Mary Mann were arguing that the health of one’s bowels was more important than flavor, that inner purity should take precedence over taste. For Kellogg, Leslie, Mann, and more, proper food was a sign of physical and even moral virtue.

But though the idea that food should be something other than food was beginning to be a problem in Twain’s day, it was never a problem for Twain. He scoffed at the whey-and-grape diets he saw offered to invalids; he demanded fried chicken, fresh butter, and hot rolls; he reflected that “it is a pity that the world should throw away so many good things merely because they are unwholesome.” Food, for Twain, was most often about pleasure—pleasure in taste, pleasure in company, pleasure in remembering where a thing was from.

He had his dour moments. He had a store of dark bitterness that, later in life, would threaten to overwhelm him. But, man, nobody did joy like Twain.

When Livy wrote a letter to a friend, he had yet to actually write down his menu. Still, he added a postscript: “Dear Mrs. H—If I have a talent it is for contributing valuable matter to works upon cookery.”

 

 

 

 

 

W
HEN TWAIN LEFT NEW ORLEANS in 1857 at the age of twenty-one, he left as an apprentice Mississippi River steamboat pilot. But he’d come looking for cocaine.

Brazilian cocaine. While working as a printer’s apprentice in Keokuk, Iowa, Twain had read a book about Amazonian expeditions, which along with wild stories of alligators and monkeys “told an astonishing tale of
coca,
a vegetable product of miraculous powers . . . so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up-hill and down all day on a pinch of powdered coca and require no other sustenance.” Believing it to be “the concentrated bread & meat of the tribes . . . about the headwaters of the Amazon,” Twain was inspired “to open up a trade in coca with all the world.”

Upon arriving in New Orleans, though, he asked when a ship might be leaving for Brazil and “discovered that there weren’t any and learned that there probably wouldn’t be any during that century.” What was more, the nine or ten dollars he had left in his pocket “would not suffice for so imposing an expedition as [he] had planned.” The disappointed Twain found himself unable to score coke in New Orleans.

Still, he was there, and that was saying a great deal. It was his first visit to New Orleans, then the great metropolis of the South: cross-roads between river and ocean, between the Caribbean and the Lower Midwest—America’s one West Indian city. The French Market, in particular, bustled with an incredible array of nationalities wandering through “pretty pyramids of fresh fruit” and other delicacies. “I thought I had seen all kinds of markets before,” Twain wrote home, “but this was a grave mistake—this being a place such as I had never dreamed of before”:

New Orleans’s famous cuisine relied on this kind of bounty. But it owed just as much to the market’s crowd of “men, women, and children of every age, color and nation.” There were Natchez, Houma, and Chitimacha Indians, French and Spanish Creole planters, blacks from the West Indies and the American South, Germans, Italians, and Chinese, along with rural Cajuns come to the city from the bayou. In the market, black women fried hot calas
—
rice cakes—while Choctaw Indians sold filé made from powdered sassafras. Twain might have seen Croatian oystermen, Cajun butchers, even Isleños
—
the Castilian-speaking descendants of Canary Islanders—come to town to sell fish. But of all the people he saw cooking and buying and selling and eating, the ones he admired most were the steamboat pilots.

As a young child, the fact that another boy had merely ridden on a steamboat to St. Louis left Sammy dying with jealousy. Now, begging, pleading—Lord knows how—he persuaded the pilot Horace Bixby to take him on as an apprentice. For years after, New Orleans would be a polestar for Twain: the final destination of the paddle wheelers racing currents or braving shallows down all the winding, treacherous lower river south of Cairo, Illinois.

It was the golden age of steamboating. When Twain was born in 1835, there had been some two hundred steamers on the river; when he began his apprenticeship in 1857 there were close to a thousand. With their churning wheels, towering Texas decks, and howling whistles, the ships were hugely impressive. Far more impressive, in fact, than they were durable or safe—their ornate superstructures floated on flat, fragile, amazingly shallow hulls that sometimes drew only a few feet of water.
¹⁴
The average steamboat lasted only five years. Still, they were by far the fastest means of long-range transport between the Midwest and the Gulf, so vital that they could earn back the cost of their construction within six months.

The only men able to maneuver these fragile but imposing craft were the pilots. While his steamboat was under way, a river pilot had authority even over the captain, who might set destination, cargo, and schedule but was legally bound to defer to the pilot in matters of navigation. A river pilot, Twain thought, was “the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.” Kings, by comparison, were underlings; writers were “manacled servants of the public.” Twain would look back on this time as the happiest of his working life, when he commanded his howling, splashing dreams, his days and nights all in motion.

The river, Twain thought, was “a wonderful book . . . which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.” And it was “not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.” The river seemed to change shape in the night; it transformed under the stars and in pitch-blackness, in gray mist and by the light of a multitude of moons. His hulking paddle wheeler slid between shoals and sandbars, over blind crossings, and past hidden snags; charts were nonexistent, the water opaque as a wall. Twain had to memorize the river, steering by the constantly revised shape in his head; it was a job few could do at all, and fewer still could do well.

Change always fascinated Twain; calling a person or a story “monotonous” was an expression of intense disdain. Now he watched the varied light on the river’s surface; the Mississippi was always in flux—always rending and re-forming the world around. The mud it carried built a maze of channels and sandbars. Currents lodged dead trees like hidden spears or washed all away in a night. When pilots came together, they would talk always, and only, about the river: how high it was running, how they’d run the crossings themselves, where bars and shoals had risen, which landmarks—dead trees, woodpiles, old barns—were gone.

The same changes that made the Mississippi fascinating, that made it beautiful, also made it deadly. “My nightmares, to this day,” Twain wrote in 1883, “take the form of running down into an overshadowing bluff, with a steamboat. . . . My earliest dread made the strongest impression on me.” Accidents and disasters were amazingly common; between 1811 and 1841, nearly a thousand boats crashed, exploded, or had their bottoms ripped out by a snag. Ten of the fifteen boats Twain piloted were destroyed on the river—none, fortunately, while he was piloting, though in 1860 he did back into the New Orleans levee—with two more blown up to avoid capture by Union troops. “The muddy Mississippi” is a cliché today, but its murk once made it genuinely dangerous—and made pilots essential. It took a skilled and experienced man to read the riffles and currents and swirls, to sense what was caused by wind and what signified a submerged trunk that could destroy a boat.

During a two-year apprenticeship, and then a two-year career as a licensed pilot, Twain mastered the river’s language. It was a great achievement—but one that carried its own losses. While still a young cub pilot, he remembered, he had watched a sunset in a “speechless rapture”:

Once he’d become a full-fledged pilot, he mourned, his educated eyes could no longer see the river’s grace and beauty. Now the sun signaled wind, the floating log a rising river. The dark and silver marks on the water meant sandbars, reefs, and snags; the tall, dead tree was a useful landmark that he worried would not last long. “I had lost something,” he wrote, “which could never be restored to me while I lived.”

Still, he’d gained a lot. He had gained his independence and a sense of who he was. He would stay on the river his whole life, he believed, until one day he died at the wheel.

New Orleans was as far as Twain’s steamers went, so arriving there often meant a break from the four-hours-on, four-hours-off schedule he kept during the long Mississippi passage. Characteristically, Twain didn’t make much use of the rest time. “Yesterday I had many things to do,” he once wrote to his brother Orion, “but Bixby and I got with the pilots of two other boats and went off dissipating on a ten dollar dinner at a French restaurant—breathe it not unto Ma!—where we ate Sheep-head fish with mushrooms, shrimps and oysters—birds—coffee with burnt brandy in it, &c &c,—ate, drank & smoked, from 1 P.M. until 5 o’clock, and then—then—the day was too far gone to do anything.”

Sheepsheads, shrimp, oysters, and game birds: Twain’s was the perfect languorous New Orleans luncheon. Gigantic, brackish Lake Pontchartrain bounded one side of the city, America’s largest river the other. All around were swamps, crowded with bald cypress; nearer to the coast, the blend of salty Gulf water and fresh flows from the Mississippi’s countless distributaries nourished an eternity of grassy wetlands. From the start, New Orleans was built on soaked land, utterly surrounded by water, sinking by the year—a horribly vulnerable position. But also an incredibly bountiful one; the swamps and wetlands, so thick and menacing to unfamiliar eyes, were the breeding grounds for the foundations of Creole and Cajun seafood cookery.