Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [38]
To be honest, after the brining, boiling, smoking, and saucing, it’s tough to get at the raccoon’s real flavor. Much as I hate to admit it, the first thing that comes to mind is chicken. Not chicken breast, the dreaded, flavorless, protein-patty white meat—they’ve cooked the raccoon a lot, but they could have stewed it since September and not ended up with that. What it tastes like is an elusively gamy version of the super-dark and moist meat alongside a chicken’s spine. It has the texture of pot roast (or, I suppose, mutton), but bland pot roast, without any of beef fat’s unctuousness; again, there’s a gamier undertaste that I can’t quite bring to the front. When Eric cooked muskrat at Flowerdew, you tasted nothing but muskrat, absolute and pure; here there are layers of barbecue sauce and broth before you get to the meat. In the supper’s early days, the cooks would smoke it in skimmed broth from the stewpots instead of Swanson’s, and I wish they still did—if you’re gonna eat raccoon, you might as well taste the raccoon. “Bear I abominate,” Marryat wrote, but “rackoon is pretty good.” I agree enough to eat three pieces.
The Coon Supper program is much like that of any small-town athletic dinner; there are brief, four- to five-sentence testimonials to each kid, each with the same mix of joshing and flattery that brings me back to my own Connecticut high school’s football dinner circa 1990. The basketball coach takes the joshing further—too far, really, ripping into some of the kids with the stated intent of getting each to “play like he can.” In fact, the basketball coach is on fire, comparing himself twice to David and a minimum of three times to Custer (this, apparently, because other schools had the temerity to appear at athletic contests, as scheduled, with the intention of fielding a team). The anger makes more sense when he turns it on the assembled dignitaries, making a call to “any politician in earshot” to stand up for what’s right for the school.
Miss Arkansas follows, and is just a flat-out silver-tiaraed pro, speaking the perfect ergonomic and enunciatory distance from the microphone, obviously feeling that the coach went too far as she talks about how everyone just loves these kids to death. Then she plays an aria from Carmen on the flute—and does so pretty well, I think, considering the echoing and hollow PA system. Soon afterward a kid receives an over-under shotgun as a sportsmanship award; it’s given in honor of students killed in a traffic accident, recently enough that emotions in the room are still palpably raw. Then Governor Mike Beebe stands, pledging to fight for Gillett, but I don’t really totally believe him. The fire-spitting attorney general follows, endorsing the individual right to bear arms and the notion that the presidential oath of office should include “so help me God,” getting by far the loudest applause of the night.
Back in 2005 or 2006, there was an Internet campaign to stop the supper. You can still see one of the petitions at thepetitionsite.com, and the comments there make for interesting reading; one woman claims that raccoons are smarter than her college-honor-student daughter, several assume that the raccoons are raised in tiny cages, and a good portion—maybe one in ten—are actually in favor of the supper’s continuing as an annual tradition. Unsurprisingly, the people in Gillett are dismissive or scornful of the protesters, usually taking it for granted that they drew up their plans over a mighty platter of T-bone steaks. John Cover says that “you probably couldn’t find a person in this community that thinks of it as an event harmful to animals,” while emcee Phil English goes further: “If you’re a Christian, you have to think of these things as put here for sustenance. When I drive along the levy and I see a coon there, skinny, got the mange, I ask, are we doing