Free Fried Chicken by John T. Edge Page B

become Deacon Burton was born in the town of Watkinsville, northeast of Atlanta. I know that, on a Christmas Eve when he was just fourteen, Burton ran away from home. I know that by Christmas Day he found work as a dishwasher at Faust, a Greek restaurant in downtown Atlanta.
    Burton rose from dishwasher to cook, working at some of the best Atlanta dining rooms of the day, including those of the Henry Grady Hotel and the Capital City Club. And I know that Burton cooked in the Navy during World War II, feeding three meals a day to 4,000 men. He opened Burton’s Grill after returning home from the war, and in the early years moved it from a highway north of town to Inman Park.
    Lenn Storey and I talk over his father’s and his own cooking career. Growing up, Storey did not know Burton was his father, but he was already following in his footsteps, first, during high school, pressure-frying chicken in a Kentucky Fried Chicken-licensed cafeteria, and later, when he cooked communal meals for his fellow Atlanta firemen. We talk of the time just after his father’s death when Storey fought a bitter and ultimately unsuccessful court battle to legally establish his lineage. And we talk of the first time that the Deacon rang the brass bell and announced to all in attendance, “I want y’all to meet my boy, my son, Lenn Storey.”
    as we talk, I gnaw on a plate of Lenn Storey’s chicken. It tastes like I remember his father’s chicken tasting. Nothing fancy here, just salt and pepper and schmaltz. (That’s schmaltz as originally employed in the Yiddish language, meaning not maudlin sentimentality, but chicken fat.) And the restaurant, which sits cheek-to-jowl with his father’s old corner storefront (now converted to an Italian trattoria), is a dead ringer for Burton’s Grill. As I eat, I grow sentimental. Even the serving line, outfitted with those light green melamine lunch trays, conjures his father’s spirit. But what Storey may never conjure is the spirit of the times in which Deacon Burton came to be a revered cook, a beloved Atlantan. And in many ways, he would not want to.
    When many whites first discovered Burton’s Grill in the 1970s, fried chicken was considered a relic of days gone by, back before the civil rights movement, maybe even before the Civil War. At Aunt Fanny’s Cabin, a restaurant out in the suburb of Smyrna, fried chicken was presented as the ultimate plantation dish, a savory of step-and-fetch-it allure served to locals and tourists alike amidst the retrograde splendor of a retrofitted slave lodging. Downtown, at Pittypat’s Porch (named for a character in Gone With the Wind ), the trappings were more tasteful, but the underlying message was no less offensive.
    Burton’s Grill was different. Black Atlantans had long doted on Paschal’s Restaurant, on what was then called Hunter Street, taking pride in the fact that some of the seminal events in the civil rights movement, including the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, were planned over platters of their fried chicken. But for many whites that proud history proved intimidating.
    In time—no one seems to know how or why—everyone seems to have made their way over to Burton’s Grill. It may well have been the first Atlanta restaurant where the food and the setting inspired blacks and whites to recognize their common humanity across a table set with fried chicken and black-eyed peas and cornbread. Though it was black-owned, it somehow came to be considered comparatively neutral ground. Many locals remember Burton’s Grill as one of the first places where they saw blacks and whites interacting without nervous pomp or pretense. And all—black and white—remember the first time they visited, the first time a kindly gentleman rang a small brass bell and, above the report of the clapper, shouted out a welcome.
    Deep South Deacon-Fried Chicken
    ATLANTA, GEORGIA
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    Deacon