Hallelujah! The Welcome Table_ A Lifetime of Memories With Recipes - Maya Angelou [12]
We sat together under the lamplight so many nights copying recipes that I can pull a perfect image of me and Momma bending over the kitchen table, scrutinizing the news page.
Momma said, “Now, here is one for you. It’s called wilted lettuce. Don’t that beat all? I have to buy ice to make my lettuce crisp up, and here is a recipe for wilted lettuce.
“ This cook didn’t know all she had to do to make this dish is wash the lettuce and leave it on the counter. It will wilt for you in thirty minutes.”
Then she thought again. “We have some nice lettuce in the garden. I’m going to make this dish tomorrow.”
The next day we sat down to Momma’s version of wilted lettuce, and much to her surprise we all enjoyed it. I ate the silken side dish and wondered about the white woman who lived in the white part of town about a mile from the black area, which was still called the Quarters.
Would she think that a black grandmother was feeding her grandchildren the same dish she was offering to her privileged family?
Would she resent the grandmother or just shrug her shoulders and say, “Let them help themselves”?
I’d like to think she shrugged.
Wílted Lettuce
SERVES 4 TO 6
6 slices of bacon
6-8 green onions (white and green parts), sliced
1 tablespoon sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
⅓ cup vinegar
1 cup water
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 heads Boston or Bibb lettuce, leaves washed and separated
Cut bacon into small pieces, and fry in medium skillet until crisp. Remove from heat, and drain on paper towels. Add green onions, sugar, salt, vinegar, water, and pepper to bacon fat in skillet. Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes.
Put lettuce into salad bowl. Pour onion mixture over lettuce, and stir. Top with crisp bacon, and serve immediately.
IN 1903, MOMMA had been married five years and had two sons. One bright morning, her husband told her that he was leaving. He explained that he had received a call—the Call—to preach. To study and prepare for that awesome responsibility, he had to travel to Ada, Oklahoma, where an elderly preacher he had met at a conference would school him. Years later Annie Henderson found that the old Oklahoma preacher had had a beautiful and marriageable daughter and that my grandfather quickly began to court her. When it was legally possible, he married the daughter and never returned to Arkansas.
My grandmother was left with a two-room shack, a lively four-year-old who would later become my father, and a two-year-old boy who was crippled.
For most of her life Annie Henderson blamed herself for Uncle Willie’s condition. As a one-year-old he had crawled out of the house and had fallen off the porch to the ground.
No amount of doctors were able to convince my grandmother that Uncle Willie’s paralysis was caused by a neurological malady rather than by what she thought of as her neglect.
She also laid my grandfather’s departure to his displeasure at having a crippled son. So again, she was to blame.
She looked around at her situation. She was a colored woman in the South at the beginning of the twentieth century. She had herself and her sons to feed, house, and clothe. She would not work as a maid, for that would mean leaving her tots, especially her crippled one, in someone else’s care. She decided to make use of the two largest employers in Stamps. They were the cotton gin, and three miles away, the lumber mill. She devised a plan that would let her make money and at the same time mostly stay at home with her “darlings.”
At night she would cook and then grind and season ham and chicken and also make a batter for her cakes. Sunrise found her kneading the dough and placing the meat in the center of each pastry. Midmorning she walked from her house, leaving a young girl to watch her boys for three hours.
Carrying her fresh raw pies, her coal pot, lard, and a fold-up chair, she would arrive at the factory. She placed herself and supplies on the ground adjacent to the door the black