Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [18]
When, after many years away, Twain returned to Illinois on an 1874 promotional tour, he promptly ordered a roasted prairie chicken from room service in a small-town hotel. The African-American boy who served him was amazed that he meant to eat the whole bird himself, which led to an evening-long chat. Twain later immortalized their talk in the essay “Sociable Jimmy,” an essay that, Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin argues, contains the first seeds of Huckleberry Finn’s voice. Surely it’s only a coincidence that it was prairie chicken that set off the conversation. But, at the same time, it’s appropriate that a meal bound so inextricably to the land and to Twain’s memories helped to spark his greatest work of American life and speech.
After leaving Springfield, I drive through mile after mile of cornfields, across the Mississippi and into Missouri, across a contrastingly grassy country all the way out to the site of John Quarles’s old spread near the town of Florida—the place that fixed itself so deeply into Twain’s heart. Today it’s easy to miss. In fact, I miss it twice, zooming past its nondescript, lopsided trailer and a matching pair of tool sheds. Then, beside a barbed-wire-rimmed culvert—maybe even Twain’s “divine place for wading” with swimming pools “which were forbidden to us and therefore much frequented by us”—I see a tilting mailbox of rusty steel, marked with the kind of block-lettered sticky squares that kids use to put their names on bedroom doors:
MARK TWAIN’S
‘THE FARM’
23651 HWY 107
TO CHOOSE A YOUNG PRAIRIE CHICKEN
Bend the under bill. If it is tender, the chicken is young.
—MARY NEWTON FOOTE HENDERSON, Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving, 1877
On the day after Easter, I’m on Frank Oberle’s land in Missouri’s Adair County, a hundred miles north of Florida, waiting for Frank to burn a prairie.
Frank can concentrate hard. His thick, strong frame hunches over a small bunch of grass; he seems to use it to gauge all the hundreds of acres in the wide prairie bowl before us. Over a salt-and-pepper mustache, Frank’s eyes are intent as a scope. The intensity may come from his decades as a photojournalist, during which he took some of the best shots of bald eagles you’ll ever see. Or it may simply be that the day’s work requires this level of concentration—without it, a shift in the high wind could send his planned fire ripping the wrong way, throwing flames across the two-lane road, with nothing to stop it until the river some eight miles away. The only hope then would be setting a hurried, even frantic, burn along the road, hoping to make a blackened firebreak before the main blaze came on with all the force of the wind behind it.
Whatever its source, Frank’s focus makes me feel scattered and flighty, though Frank himself couldn’t be friendlier or more welcoming—at least in between tasks that require his full, almost unnerving, attention. “I’ve promised myself that when I burn, I’ll never, ever hurry,” he says without looking up.
Until Frank and his wife, Judy, bought these eight hundred acres of northern Missouri pasture, the land had been owned by the same family since the prairie on it was first broken in 1854. Now it’s home to their Pure Air Native Seed Company, which sells native grass and brome seeds to jump-start prairie restorations of all sizes. If prairie chickens are ever going to return in numbers to Illinois, it will be because of the work of Frank and others like him; it will be because people care enough to raise the seed that once grew wild from skyline to skyline.
Frank fell in love with this land while driving through on his way to photo shoots in Minnesota and the Dakotas. After decades spending as many as eight months of every