Free Twain's Feast by Andrew Beahrs Page A

hazelnuts and persimmons, among the wild trees filled with the “far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood pheasants in the remoteness of the forest.” And the most important thing of all was who he hunted with:
    I remember the ’coon and ’possum hunts, nights, with the negroes, and the long marches through the black gloom of the woods, and the excitement which fired everybody when the bay of an experienced dog announced that the game was treed; then the wild scramblings and stumblings through briers and bushes and over roots to get to the spot; then the lighting of a fire and the felling of the tree, the joyful frenzy of the dogs and the negroes, and the weird picture it all made in the red glare—I remember it all well, and the delight that everyone got out of it, except the ’coon.
    Such hunts could be exhausting; Thomas De Voe went on one (his “first and last”) that left him “hungry, thirsty, tired, hoarse, and used-up generally” and “unable to speak aloud for several days.” But they were popular, especially in the South—and on the Quarles farm, as was common elsewhere, they were often led by slaves.
    Thinking about Twain’s feast means thinking about the people who grew, caught, gathered, and prepared the foods he later longed for. The farm was known as the Quarles farm, but the fifteen people enslaved there were the ones leading hunts, harvesting corn, and tending the garden with its butter beans, tomatoes, muskmelons, sweet potatoes, and peas. They were the ones cooking the hot batter cakes, venison, roasted pig, apple dumplings, and peach cobbler—it was their cooking that, as Twain put it, gave the farm’s food its “main splendor.”
    Understanding a little about what they did and made means thinking about differences. But it also means thinking about things that whites and blacks shared—the things that, after generations of influences from Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans, were on their way to being simply Southern. And on the Quarles farm, as Twain remembered all his life, that included the hunting, cooking, and eating of raccoon.

    Raccoons are in-between animals—border dwellers that thrive where fields and woods and marshland meet. They’ll eat almost anything, but the bulk of their wild diet is made up of creatures that can survive in both air and water, that creep from stream to bog: turtles, newts, mussels, crawfish, salamanders. Their dexterity is legendary, so that their Algonquin name, aroughcun, means “one who scratches with his hands.” That dexterity only improves under their preferred, between-places conditions; as a raccoon gropes in shallow, standing water for food, the skin on its paws softens, and it can better detect the kind of minute details that let one dismantle my cat door with the fantastically annoying aplomb of a furred Houdini. If raccoons had opposable thumbs, I suspect they might one day rule the earth.
    A tapetum lucidum , or “bright carpet,” at the back of their eyes collects light and gives them good night vision (less fortunately for raccoons, their shining eyes also provide targets to hunters who don’t want to injure a pelt). But they’re also exceptionally nearsighted; their vision is less important than their sense of smell and a tremendous sensitivity to vibration. When researchers tagged one blind raccoon with a radio collar, they found that it could still follow its normal routines, traveling easily over eight square miles of snowy countryside.
    Raccoons are terrific climbers, able nearly to run up trees with their powerful hind legs and gripping forepaws. Once there, they’re tough to dislodge; in the 1950s one two-hundred-pound hunter reported hanging from a raccoon’s tail as the animal clung to the inside of a hollow tree. They can swim across swift rivers well over a hundred feet wide. A person would have little or no chance of chasing down a motivated raccoon; there’s a reason that they’re