Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [35]
Still, many of their meals came from the same deep, African-American culinary grammar as these dishes, and that later inspired the free black cooks of Virginia’s Freetown (Edna Lewis’s evocation of Freetown in The Taste of Country Cooking is one of the most flatly gorgeous, inspiring visions ever written about what American food can be). Dipping a wooden spoon into a pot of savory greens, stirring up the bits of bacon and fatback, smelling to judge the “pot likker”;3 whether cooking for themselves or for the Quarleses, the slave cooks helped to define a place over which they seemed to have little control, shaping it with their sensibilities and desires and tastes. For both blacks and whites—and certainly for Twain—their skills helped to make the South the South.
In Was Huck Black? Shelley Fisher Fishkin makes what is, to me, a completely convincing argument that Huck’s talk owed more to Southern black dialects than to the white, “backwoods Missouri” speech Twain mentions in the introduction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Food is much less important to the novel than is speech; still, Twain uses it both to mark Huck’s class and to give him a cultural bond with Jim, though it’s a bond that Huck only gradually recognizes.
In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck had told Tom about a slave named Uncle Jake, ending with, “Sometimes I’ve set right down and eat with him. But you needn’t tell that. A body’s got to do things when he’s awful hungry he wouldn’t want to do as a steady thing.” Still, the foods Huck loves best are also those of the slaves. His own eponymous novel opens with him pining for a “barrel of odds and ends” in which “the things get mixed up, and the juice kinds of swaps around, and the things go better,” a cooking style that sounds a lot like the single-pot stews preferred by slaves throughout the South (the low-fired clay colonoware pots made by some slaves were most appropriate for a slow simmer). By the book’s midpoint, his reluctance to eat with a black man is completely gone. When Huck returns to the raft after escaping the stunning, casual bloodlust of the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud, it’s when he shares a meal with Jim that Huck knows he’s well and truly away—that he’s safe. “I hadn’t had a bite to eat since yesterday,” he says, “so Jim he got out some corn-dodgers, and buttermilk, and pork and cabbage, and greens—there ain’t nothing in the world so good when it’s cooked right—and whilst I eat my supper we talked and had a good time.”
It almost went without saying that Jim knew how to cook it right. Huck is enjoying a meal completely typical among both Southern African Americans and poorer whites: vegetables flavored with meat, served over or alongside a simmered or baked corn dish. Even with monumental social divisions, and great variations in ingredients and cooking technique, Southern food now had a grammar that often crossed racial lines.
The overall culinary situation on the Quarles farm was complicated—in fact, given the forces at work, it’s kind of amazing how natural it seemed to those involved. Borrowings, lendings, bleedings-together, from people originating on different continents and migrating from various regions of the country. Twain himself migrated an entire farm, when in Huckleberry Finn (a novel of motion, travel, and escapes) he lifted up the entire Quarles place, moved it a few hundred miles, and dropped it, now a cotton plantation, in Arkansas.
All through the day