Twain's Feast (8 page)

“This is savanna,” Frank says. We’re on top of a rise with grass and trees intermingled, one of the rarest prairie ecosystems. Though this kind of land impressed early explorers of Illinois like Louis Jolliet, today there are about eighty-four acres left in the state. For us, right now, it’s simply the best place to watch the remaining burn. My boot soles have melted; tonight my nose will blow black. The fire will go on for a few more days, little spots popping up around wood coals burned from the stands of trees.

“There are flowers in here that survived hundreds of years of grazing. It’s a special place,” Frank says with unabashed affection. Then he stoops and sets one of those flower survivors on fire. It’s an odd, necessary way of showing love; Frank knows about this land, and its grasses, and the destruction it needs. But he won’t burn whatever doesn’t burn on its own. He likes to leave some spots as hideouts, mimicking the way that trees and grass can take passive shelter from a wildfire in the lee of a lake.

“The red, running buffalo,” Frank says as the flame makes its way toward a copse of burr oak. “That’s what the Indians called it. And we do the same thing they would, letting the red buffalo run.” I ask how they would have stayed clear of burns set by others, or by lightning. “They pretty much held to the river courses,” he says. “But listen to that now.” Again the fierce crinkling, like breaking glass. “You’d have heard that coming on the wind. If I hear that coming, I got matches with me. And I’m dropping a match and following my own fire out.”

Soon the fire is roaring down the slope, pulled higher and hotter by its own wind. Red-tailed hawks circle before the fire line, hoping for rabbits or quail to dash from the blaze and onto exposed ground.

Behind us the ground is black, and smoking, and clean. It’s ready to grow.

 

 

 

 

 

B
ERKELEY RACCOONS ARE BIG, fearless, sewer-swimming bastards. One has begun sneaking in through our supposedly impregnable, magnetically locked cat door; once he left muddy footprints next to Erik’s bed. My latest confrontation with the raccoon ended with me, naked, brandishing a Maglite in one hand and an umbrella in the other, as the foul beast ate a bowl of our cat’s food. I bellowed—I swung the umbrella like a sword.

The raccoon yawned. It looked better than three feet from nose to tail. When it yawned, I saw its teeth. I must say again—really, I find, I can’t stress this particular point enough—that I was naked. What’s more, I
felt
naked, like I’d never in my life worn clothes. It came to me, then, that I did not greatly desire to fight the raccoon, or to do anything that would increase, even marginally, the chances of my fighting the raccoon. Maybe I was being rude. I shone the flashlight on the floor, so he could eat in peace. It didn’t seem to make any difference either way; the raccoon ate calmly, picking up cat kibbles individually or by the pawful, leaving, in its own leisurely good time, with a final, disdainful slam of the plastic cat door.

It was a scandal: a disgrace. For a few days, we considered repellents, motion-detecting sprinklers, even a dog.

For some reason it did not immediately occur to us to try eating him. But there it is! Right there on the menu—“coon,” tucked neatly between “’possum” and “Boston bacon and beans.”

Eli says, “No.”

I hadn’t asked. But she knows that there’s a chance I’ll try to follow through; though I’ve eaten neither raccoon nor opossum, I have eaten muskrat, and after muskrat, raccoon sounds like freakin’ pumpkin pie. When I was cooking Twain’s breakfast biscuits, I used a recipe given to me by archaeology grad student Alison Bell on Flowerdew Hundred Plantation, deep in the Virginia Tidewater. The plantation is named for an early colonist, Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley (“Hundred” was a way of implying, falsely, that the settlement could support a hundred men-at-arms); through the centuries it’s been the site of both Native American and English palisades, a colonial tavern, and the pontoon bridge that carried Grant’s army as he tried to outflank Lee near Petersburg.

When I worked on excavations at Flowerdew during my college summers, it was home to country ham and angel biscuits and Rabelaisian breakfast spreads and brutally hot weather relieved by hammering James River thunderstorms. The professor who ran the dig was a guy named Jim Deetz, a native Marylander who looked (speaking conservatively) forty years older than his actual sixty-five and who thought of his years spent at UC Berkeley as an eon of exile. For one month a year, Flowerdew was a place for him to drink Rebel Yell bourbon, and play horseshoes and his beaten banjo.

Though it was best known as the site of the first windmill in English America, Jim thought the farm might be the site of another, far more important, first—that it might be the literal birthplace of African America. In 1625 a muster of the plantation’s people included the simple entry “NEGRO WOMAN and a young Child of hers.” The first Africans in what would one day be the United States had arrived in 1619, when a Dutch ship brought slaves to Jamestown. Five years later there were still only some thirty in the whole Virginia colony, which wouldn’t adopt truly large-scale slavery for decades. That’s an awfully small window—if the “young Child” wasn’t the first person of African descent to be born in what would become the United States, he or she was certainly among the first. Flowerdew Hundred, on the bank of the James, might be the best place in America to raise a monument to a small, unnamed child.

Anyway, Jim hated Berkeley and, I believe, California in general. So when he was back in the Tidewater, he wanted to eat
Southern,
reveling in properly cured slab bacon, blue crabs, and stone-ground hominy grits. And up at the local store, there was a big chest freezer filled, Jim discovered, with skinned and gutted muskrats; and there, atop the freezer, was a hand-lettered sign affirming that eight of said muskrats could be had for the price of seven. So he came back with a sack of the things and wanged one down on a picnic table like a shovel, right in the middle of a particularly heated game of Spoons. The muskrats had their heads on, and their teeth were really long, their noses wrinkled up as though in disgust. We wrinkled our own noses in completely genuine disgust; some of us, I recall, swore. “Dinner, you ass-holes,” said Jim.

The cook at Flowerdew that year was frankly astonishing. Archaeology food usually slants toward cold cereal, peanut butter and jelly, and mushy spaghetti with jarred sauce—hot dogs, if you’re lucky. But Eric put together unbelievable spreads, breakfasts that included biscuits, real-deal home fries, country ham, Virginia bacon, pork chops, fresh fruit, blintzes, and omelets cooked to order; one night we had homemade dim sum. He did all this in an open pavilion overlooking some thousand acres of corn and peanut fields and a cypress swamp where bald eagles nested. The story was that Eric had worked for a time at Chez Panisse, but I never knew if that was true—the path from the Berkeley Gourmet Ghetto to a Prince George County peanut field seemed a strange one, but Flowerdew did have a way of collecting wanderers. Whatever the truth was, Eric seemed like a fine person to trust with a platter of whole, semiaquatic rodents. He butchered the muskrats, soaked them in a salt-and-vinegar solution overnight, and fried the pieces up like chicken.

It didn’t work. Perhaps Eric simply approached it wrong; maybe muskrat is a delicate and subtle thing, to be approached with the fine hand of a sushi artist touching his knife to fugu. Whatever: what we ended with, that day, was a platter of chicken-fried meat so dark as to be almost purple, which tasted like a cross between beef liver and sea mussels. Beef liver with sea mussels, let it be known, does not rank with truffled eggs among the world’s great natural taste combinations. I don’t think of myself as a tentative eater; as I write this, a whole pig’s head is simmering on my stove. I’ll fry the slivered ears with joy and strip the snout and tongue for brawn. But I’ve never again sought out muskrat.

Raccoon has a much better reputation. So does possum. You come across recipes for either more frequently than with muskrat, up to and including
Joy of Cooking;
the encyclopedic
L.L. Bean Game and Fish Cookbook
says that raccoon meat is “just as tasty as squirrel, and better than rabbit.” People
like
raccoon, it seems, and anyway, I wouldn’t be cooking the ones from our backyard, which clambered from Berkeley’s antique, redwood storm drains after foraging for unspeakable things. The ones I’d eat would be clean raccoons, woodland raccoons,
sanitary
raccoons, the kind that spend hours scrubbing acorns in fresh mountain streams.

Eli says, “No.”

Reluctantly, I agree. And when I have time to think about it, I realize that the most important thing Twain wrote about raccoon wasn’t even about the taste. It was about how he got the meat in the first place, hunting it in the woods beyond his uncle’s hazelnuts and persimmons, among the wild trees filled with the “far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood pheasants in the remoteness of the forest.” And the most important thing of all was who he hunted with:

Such hunts could be exhausting; Thomas De Voe went on one (his “first and last”) that left him “hungry, thirsty, tired, hoarse, and used-up generally” and “unable to speak aloud for several days.” But they were popular, especially in the South—and on the Quarles farm, as was common elsewhere, they were often led by slaves.

Thinking about Twain’s feast means thinking about the people who grew, caught, gathered, and prepared the foods he later longed for. The farm was known as the Quarles farm, but the fifteen people enslaved there were the ones leading hunts, harvesting corn, and tending the garden with its butter beans, tomatoes, muskmelons, sweet potatoes, and peas. They were the ones cooking the hot batter cakes, venison, roasted pig, apple dumplings, and peach cobbler—it was their cooking that, as Twain put it, gave the farm’s food its “main splendor.”

Understanding a little about what they did and made means thinking about differences. But it also means thinking about things that whites and blacks shared—the things that, after generations of influences from Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans, were on their way to being simply Southern. And on the Quarles farm, as Twain remembered all his life, that included the hunting, cooking, and eating of raccoon.

Raccoons are in-between animals—border dwellers that thrive where fields and woods and marshland meet. They’ll eat almost anything, but the bulk of their wild diet is made up of creatures that can survive in both air and water, that creep from stream to bog: turtles, newts, mussels, crawfish, salamanders. Their dexterity is legendary, so that their Algonquin name,
aroughcun,
means “one who scratches with his hands.” That dexterity only improves under their preferred, between-places conditions; as a raccoon gropes in shallow, standing water for food, the skin on its paws softens, and it can better detect the kind of minute details that let one dismantle my cat door with the fantastically annoying aplomb of a furred Houdini. If raccoons had opposable thumbs, I suspect they might one day rule the earth.

A tapetum lucidum
,
or “bright carpet,” at the back of their eyes collects light and gives them good night vision (less fortunately for raccoons, their shining eyes also provide targets to hunters who don’t want to injure a pelt). But they’re also exceptionally nearsighted; their vision is less important than their sense of smell and a tremendous sensitivity to vibration. When researchers tagged one blind raccoon with a radio collar, they found that it could still follow its normal routines, traveling easily over eight square miles of snowy countryside.

Raccoons are terrific climbers, able nearly to run up trees with their powerful hind legs and gripping forepaws. Once there, they’re tough to dislodge; in the 1950s one two-hundred-pound hunter reported hanging from a raccoon’s tail as the animal clung to the inside of a hollow tree. They can swim across swift rivers well over a hundred feet wide. A person would have little or no chance of chasing down a motivated raccoon; there’s a reason that they’re hunted with dogs.

Unlike prairie chickens, which are forever tied to a single natural habitat, raccoons are fantastic generalists. Raccoons don’t disappear when their territory is plowed up or clear-cut; much as deer multiply when suburban lawns push into the woods or rock pigeons thrive on the overhangs of stone and brick buildings, raccoon populations often explode near human sprawl. The Humane Society estimates that
twenty times
as many raccoons can live in an urban environment as in a comparable rural area; prehistoric Berkeley didn’t have anything like the numbers of raccoons that its fruit trees, storm drains, open trash bins, and attics support today. There’s no shortage of raccoons, no single place to go look at them.