NATIVE AMERICANS

From “the Rooter to the Tooter”

/ cigarman501 / 11 Comments

Sorry.  The year is only three hours or so old and I am entering it like a derailing steam locomotive.  I have completely run off the rails.  It’s three-thirty in the morning, do you know where your mind is?  I don’t.  I apologize for rambling.

I’ve got food on my mind while researching how a Southern community might have survived in the days following the Civil War and Reconstruction.  I was led down a pig trail by an article on “Southern Poverty Food, How the Other 90% Ate.”1   The article brought back childhood memories of my most favorite subject, food and the diversity of the people who created it.

I never thought about growing up poor but understand being in the “Other 90%”.  We certainly weren’t rich and compared to the rest of the families living along the Charlotte-Lancaster Highway, we all were in the same boat…a boat full of the rural working class.

While never having everything I wished for, I certainly had everything I needed.  I was surrounded by family and there were always vittles on the table.  The food certainly wasn’t filet mignon and caviar, but I never thought of it as “Poverty Food”.

“You chaps go on out and pick me a mess of greens,” echoes brightly in my head.  I ate a bunch of greens, and then some, through those first two decades of life; mustard, turnip, collards.  Like green beans in the summer, there was usually a mess of greens warming on my grandmother’s stove in the winter.  She never threw any away, she just added to the pot liquor that might have been fermenting for weeks it seems.  Sometimes I thought, “If I have to eat one more bite of turnip greens….”  But I ate it anyway or went hungry.

Cooked in the renderings of fried, salt pork, what we call fatback, greens were seasoned with a bit of this and a bit of that.  Maybe some vinegar, hot sauce or left-over bacon or ham.  It was always accompanied by cornbread and a glass of tart buttermilk. One had to have something to sop up the pot liquor.

If we were eating “high on the hog,” the garden’s bounty was accompanied by a cut of meat, usually pork.  The greens might be served with the fried fatback itself, salty and crunchy between two pieces of cornbread or short ribs slow cooked in the Dutch oven.

Pigs were important to Southern Poverty Food it seems…thankfully.  High on the hog….  Pigs were always one of the mainstays of Southern cuisine.  Easy to raise, with eight to twelve in a litter.  Left alone they would “root hog or die” and even a blind one “will find an acorn if they root hog hard enough.”

Recognizable cuts were usually breaded and fried or roasted over open fires or above hardwood coals.  Sometimes, on special or large celebrations, whole hogs were buried in a deep hole filled with hardwood, then covered with wet burlap bags and left to slow cook all day.  Thinking of it triggered a Pavlovian reaction.

Unrecognizable portions were turned into sausage, liver mush, hash, or head cheese…which is not cheese at all.  There was also fresh bacon to serve with brains and eggs the first morning after a hog was slaughtered.

Slow cookin’ over glowing embers was something we picked up from indigenous folk before we uprooted them and marched them west to the “Indian Lands”.  Something else we picked up was using the hog “from rooter to the tooter” but not from the Native Americans.  From pig’s snouts to chitlins’, loin to pig’s feet, little was wasted.  We picked that habit from folks bought, paid for, and shipped from another continent.  People who weren’t allowed to eat “high off the hog” during earlier times.

Pigs were not indigenous to North America, either.  Interestingly, I was “today old” when I discovered the infamous explorer, Hernando de Soto, brought the first pigs to North America.  Thirteen originally, they must be prodigious breeders if the wild hogs in our area are an indication.  I was a history major and teacher, shouldn’t I have known that?  I wasn’t paying attention that day or I did know it and forgot it.

The Spanish invaders saw Taino Indians of the West Indies cooking meat and fish over a pit of coals on a framework of green wooden sticks. The Spanish spelling of the Indian name for that framework was “barbacoa”.  A tradition and a name were born.

I wonder why my own Southern “rearing” had so much in common with the people of color or Native Americans that lived in nearby enclaves.  Enclaves created by the enforced segregation of the period.  I remember the wariness and fear that undercut the period and the relationships, the period of hard fighting for Civil Rights.

Our food was the same…just not seasoned as well.

There were a few people of color who lived in old sharecropper shanties in the area of my childhood and many Native Americans who had adopted the same names as my Scots Irish forefathers, intermarrying and moving to a place named “Indian Land”, just south of “Indian Trail”, west of “the Waxhaws” and east of the Catawba River.  What is in a name?

Regardless of race, creed, or color, we all shared the same love affair for slow-cooked pork, and the creative use of “certain” pig parts.  Served with a wedge of cornbread, red-hulled peas with onion and the “greens de jour.”  When I say we, I am speaking of the family I grew up with, in the area I grew up in although it seems Neo-Southern cuisine has caught on again, both above and west of the Mason-Dixon.  A “new” cuisine that features greens and pork extensively.

I have drawn a line.  I draw it just before the tooter in “from rooter to the tooter.”  I shouldn’t limit myself, but I have not participated in a chitlin strut or dined on the porcine version of Mountain Oysters, sometimes called “pig fries”.  I probably won’t…although I can’t guarantee what might have been in the barbeque hash served over white rice…don’t know what’s in it, don’t care what’s in it…um, um, good…as are pig knuckles, brains, and eggs, and liver mush.   Okay, I should rethink the chitlins and pig fries.  Nothing ventured…a New Year’s resolution?

By the time you read this, it will be New Year’s Day.  The tradition of serving collard greens and black-eyed peas will be observed in my little piece of heaven…a tradition I have not varied from ever during my lifetime.  A superstitious fear.  Peas for luck and collards for money.  Not that I have vast amounts of luck or money, I’ m just afraid I will lose what little I have.

The meal will be seasoned with pig renderings, a dash of vinegar and hot sauce.  Pork chops and cornbread will accompany but they won’t be the main course.  Greens and black-eyed peas are the stars on this day.

May your next New Year be everything you want…or at least everything you need.

From The Cook’s Cook: Southern Poverty Food: How the Other 90% Ate,  May 2018,  https://thecookscook.com/features/southern-poverty-food-how-the-other-90-ate/

The Image was lifted from Wikipedia with malice and forethought.

For further readings about any subjects under the sun, go to https://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM

CHIEF BLUE OF THE CATAWBA

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Growing up on the banks of the Catawba I became well versed on the history of our Native American brothers living across the river bearing their name. Sure! I was well versed in what I had been taught watching too many cowboy and Indian episodes on my black and white TV. The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, Rin Tin Tin and the local Fred Kirby Show were almost a daily fare with certain movie reruns thrown in for emphasis. Like most kids of my era I believed this “was really the way it was.”

TV wasn’t my only outlet. I heard stories from my grandparents and great grandparents of arrowheads being found in fields and on the riverbank, collected from long ago battles fought between the Catawba and the nearby tribes, mostly the Cherokee from across the Broad River which was rumored to be the border between the two enemies. I was also told stories of contact with either the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto or Juan Pardo on their failed search for gold. Later I would learn how the Catawba made friends with the pale English speaking visitors that ventured above the fall line or down from Virginia or Pennsylvania in hopes of finding fertile land to settle on. The Scots-Irish were successful in their venture and I am a product of those efforts. It was easy for the five or six-year old me to visualize buckskin clad warriors battling each other to the death using bows and arrows, stone axes and spears, usually from the backs of their small but spirited horses. This is, after all, how I saw Native Americans on my television. I wondered if these natives had made contact with John Wayne or maybe Jimmy Stewart. Where was Fort Apache?

Early in my memories, foggy memories at that, I think I met my first Catawba Indian on the old ferry that ran across the river near Van Wych. I did not know it at the time and was too young to tell the difference between one “white” man in working cloths and an “Indian” in working cloths. I probably could not tell the difference today. What I do remember was how scary the trip was. Driving onto the rickety old wooden ferry was scary enough but the “hundred” mile trip across the river was terrifying. If stories are true, or my memory accurate, the operator of the ferry was a Catawba. Very soon a bridge would be built and the river crossing would become much shorter and less scary. The ferry would be no more, along with the revenues the crossings generated. As I got older I remember trips to Rock Hill past the old landing with its ferry rotting away on dry land as the years scrolled past. I am not sure I could find the spot again with a gun held to my head.

In the winter of my sixth year I would have one of my “first life bubbles” burst. I could hardly control my excitement as I waited for the end of school and my parents to return home from work at Springs Mills. They would bathe, change cloths and as a family we would return to Fort Mill for the annual Christmas Parade. This was going to be a special parade. Always exciting with bands, homecoming queens waving from convertibles, clowns, homemade floats, venders barking out their wares and the little elf dressed in red riding on top of a firetruck this one was going to be even more exciting. Today I was here not to see Santa Claus but to see Chief Samuel Taylor Blue, newly elected chief of the Catawba Indian Nation. He was to be the grand marshal and in my mind’s eye I saw him riding majestically on his painted horse, clad in buckskins decorated to show his station. I wondered if he would be in war paint and how big a headdress he might be wearing. I was so excited I was afraid that I might not be able to hold my water.

As I thought about whatever six year olds think about my reverie was disturbed as yelling and applause erupted. The parade had started and I scanned down the parade route on Tom Hall Street and saw nothing but a black convertible. In the back seat was an old white haired man in his seventies or eighties dressed in wide lapelled gray stripped black suit. In his hand, a dark fedora was being waved to the cheering crowd. He had a smile as wide as the lapels on his suit. A hand lettered sign had been taped to the door that read Chief Blue. What? No horse, no bow and arrows, no buckskins or war paint. My disappointment was great to say the least.

Despite his age and his lack of buckskins or hatchets, I have found out that Chief Blue was quite the warrior…as an activist and politician. Twice elected chief, he often spoke in front of our General Assembly and was a key figure in working toward settling land claims with South Carolina and York County, gaining citizenship for himself and the members of his nation, something not done in South Carolina until 1944, and gaining federal recognition for the Catawba as a tribe accomplished earlier in 1941. An advocate of Native American arts, his was called the “last native speaker” of the Catawba language. The Catawba are known world-wide for their pottery and woven baskets.

A practicing Mormon, Blue was considered a hero who helped protect missionaries from mobs in the early Twentieth Century. He and his wife would travel to the Great Salt Lake in 1950 and speak in front of the General Conference. Chief Blue died in 1959 after a lifetime serving his tribe and his church. Despite my youthful preconceptions I would say that he died a true Native American Warrior…with or without his buckskins.

In the picture, I understand Chief Blue is sitting on the right holding the child in the middle row.

Don Miller has written three books which may be purchased at http://www.amazon.com/Don-Miller/e/B018IT38GM
Inspirational true stories in WINNING WAS NEVER THE ONLY THING can be downloaded for $1.99.
“STUPID MAN TRICKS” explained in FLOPPY PARTS for $.99.
“Southern Stories of the Fifties and Sixties…” in PATHWAYS for $3.99.
All may be purchased in paperback.