Free Twain's Feast by Andrew Beahrs Page B

hunted with dogs.
    Unlike prairie chickens, which are forever tied to a single natural habitat, raccoons are fantastic generalists. Raccoons don’t disappear when their territory is plowed up or clear-cut; much as deer multiply when suburban lawns push into the woods or rock pigeons thrive on the overhangs of stone and brick buildings, raccoon populations often explode near human sprawl. The Humane Society estimates that twenty times as many raccoons can live in an urban environment as in a comparable rural area; prehistoric Berkeley didn’t have anything like the numbers of raccoons that its fruit trees, storm drains, open trash bins, and attics support today. There’s no shortage of raccoons, no single place to go look at them.
    But looking for places that serve roasted raccoon is a different story. And if you want to meet people for whom eating the meat is a yearly event—who gather, a thousand strong, to feast on raccoon in the local high-school gym—your options narrow still further. They narrow, in fact, to one.

    In January 1988, Governor Bill Clinton’s plane slid off the end of an icy agricultural runway in the Arkansas rice country, sending up a cloud of white powder as it skidded through a blizzard. The plane ended up nose down in a snowbank; Clinton and his companion, Senator Dale Bumpers, were both fine. They climbed into a waiting car and began driving south. Fourteen miles later—still a bit pale, townspeople recall—they pulled into the high-school parking lot in Gillett, population eight hundred: “Home of Friendly People and the Coon Supper.”
    The run-up to Gillett’s annual supper may be your one chance to hear someone say, without irony, that they’re cooking only six hundred pounds of coon this year. The supper began in the 1930s, when a few local hunters decided to get together and cook up the meat they had left over after skinning out their take. By 1947 it had evolved into an annual early-January fund-raiser for the Gillett High School football team, a team that, like most of the downtown—two of three motels, four of five small grocers, the lone hardware store—has now vanished.
    Gillett is on the Grand Prairie of Arkansas, and it’s rice farming country. It’s also almost entirely white. That’s unusual for a rice-growing town in the American South, and can largely be explained by the fact that rice wasn’t planted here until the first decade of the twentieth century; in Louisiana and the Carolinas, by contrast, slaves grew rice for over 150 years before abolition. Actually, saying that the slaves planted rice doesn’t go far enough; for a time enslaved Africans—especially those from the French Company of the Indies’ Senegal Concession—probably knew more about growing rice than anyone else in their respective colonies.
    For hundreds of years, farmers in the Senegal Concession (which stretched from Mauritania to Sierra Leone) had painstakingly constructed earthen dams and bulwarks, holding and diverting water as they cultivated wet rice. The farmers pierced each earthwork with a valve made from a hollowed-out tree trunk, allowing rains to flood rice paddies while keeping seawater out. As early as 1594, a Portuguese trader out of Cape Verde described how residents were “growing their crops on the riverain deposits, and by a system of dikes had harnessed the tides to their own advantage,” a system nearly identical to the one slaves eventually built in South Carolina. White planters clearly recognized the African farmers’ expertise; in the decade after 1719, when French ships carried seed rice from Whydah (modern Benin) to Louisiana, more than half the slaves brought to the territory were from the Senegal Concession. In 1785 newspapers still advertised newly arrived slaves “who have been accustomed to the planting of rice.” Much of America’s early rice history is African: African in conception, African in design, and African-labor built.
    Which is why Gillett is