Free My Southern Journey by Rick Bragg

wanted to die,and in gumbo so good you would pray, quietly, that the cook would say, “Babe, you want me to put this in some Tupperware, so you can take some home?”
    And of course, all over town, I ate them in po’boys and oyster loaves, dripping with hot sauce and tartar sauce, with cold root beer on the side. I was not just eating food, I was consuming culture, and as I came to love the city, I came to love its oysters.
    But it was not just the place, as it turned out. Once my resistance was broken, I ate them in Florida, ate them on the Alabama coast, and loved them, too. Maybe there is no magic to it at all. Maybe—as my mama always told me—as I get older I come to appreciate more of the world around me. Someday, she told me, I will even like butter beans.
    Recently, I got to eat dinner with one of the great writers of our time at one of the great restaurants of our time, Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham. Pat Conroy ate about 10 oysters, with nothing but a smile.
    I ate four, four of the best oysters I’ve ever had, and prepared one more—in the way my grandfather ate them—for my 15-year-old stepson, Jake.
    He gasped and choked only slightly, and fought it down.
    “I know, son,” I said, and gave him a pat.
    “It will,” I said, “get better.”
     
    BAD SLAW

    I almost lost my mind once, over coleslaw.
    I don’t mean I got miffed, or a little bit upset, or even perturbed.
    I mean, I got spitting, deranged, hollering-at-the-furniture, kicking-a-fencepost mad. The kind of mad that makes people reach for their children, and go, “Shhhhhhhhhhhh, Betty Lou. Just keep walkin’ and don’t make eye contact with the big crazy man.”
    Coleslaw is one of the easiest foods to prepare, at least in regard to steps in the preparation. It is slightly labor intensive, as in the cutting of it, but there is really only one hard and fast rule.
    Don’t let it go bad.
    When it does, do not put it under the noses of good people.
    They might, in good faith, take a bite.
    And this, I feel, should be a crime.
    What if I really had gone crazy, from wilted cabbage and tainted mayonnaise?
    I don’t think we, as a Southern society, should have to live with this abomination.
    Somebody should have to pay.
    It was a year or so back, when I had enough. I had a fried chicken craving going pretty strong. I had not had any good chicken in a while; I hadn’t even had any bad chicken.
    I am not a chicken snob. I believe Gus’s fried chicken, from the one on Front Street in Memphis, is the best chicken in the known world. Snobs, the ones who think fried chicken should be honey-drizzled or beheaded when it’s not looking, will tell you about this great little place in Soho… We will ignore them because they are … well, we will ignore them because I say so.
    Anyway, I needed some chicken, and Gus’s was nowhere close, and no one—at least no one who was speaking to me in my rough zip code—was going to fry me any, so that meant fast food or supermarket delis. I am enough of a snob to say this is not often a good idea, but I was hungry.
    I do not usually do deli-fried chicken because of the fatal flaw in the supermarket fried chicken apparatus. The chicken is often fine, though I am still fairly certain that several hours under a heat lamp has never done fried chicken any good.
    But that’s not the big flaw with supermarket chicken. The flaw is that, while the chicken (though perhaps old as Abraham) might taste fine, the condiments will not. Specifically, the coleslaw will not taste like anything approximating food.
    The coleslaw in the deli counter even looks like something that does not approximate food. The slaw, even in your high-end supermarkets, appears to have suffered greatly from time. I don’t know what happens to slaw in a deli case but it ain’t nothin’ good. It ranges from mightily shriveled to Spanish moss to, “Oh, Sweet Lord.” People there try to fool us by making slaw out of broccoli, or apples, or