Until I Cross Water

or, Hot Boudin, Cold Coush-Coush *

This essay first appeared in Local Culture, a journal of the Front Porch Republic

The hundred-pound carcass is in the truck bed cooling on ice. Before me, stretching out in the morning sunlight in long looping curves, is 49 miles of Highway 15, a narrow two-lane road perched atop the Mississippi River levee in Central Louisiana. The previous Saturday I had butchered the hog with the help of a friend on my East Tennessee farm. We started the frosty morning with a warming shot of home-distilled muscadine brandy, just because. In the woods, the grunting hogs gathered around us, impatient for their breakfast. The one I was to kill was smaller than the others, an abdominal hernia having stunted her growth. Raising my .30-30, I shot her between the eyes from about three feet. She dropped instantly, motionless, onto the forest floor. Killing animals is an integral part of life on a farm. It’s a gruesome task that, especially in the case of those you have raised, is best done without much premeditation or fanfare—it is always good to just get on with the traitorous deed. I set the rifle down and we rolled her onto her back before starting the bloody business of sticking. Meanwhile, the other pigs continued to eat just a few feet away without any real concern. Porcine compassion, like our own, seems in short supply.

The hard part done, we began with the scalding, scraping, and eviscerating. My friend had recently become an American citizen, and we chatted about upcoming projects on both of our farms and discussed the politics of his native Germany and the U.S. Because here is the thing about a slaughter day: even elbow-deep in the still-warm carcass of a dead hog, life goes on. The dogs stayed close, the flock of sheep grazed on the hill, the geese honked and prepared to fight with any and all who came near their domain, and we took time out to eat sandwiches, holding them with our blood-caked fingers, all while a cluster of chickens, having joined the dogs, searched for scraps at our feet.

A few days later I loaded up my truck with the hog on ice and left home to go home. Over the years I’ve given the act of going and coming much thought. I have decided that it is a bit like having dual citizenship. When I return to Louisiana, home of my birth, the act of going does not really begin until I cross water. It’s not when I pull down the long gravel driveway and leave the farm, nor when I traverse Alabama or Mississippi. It’s when I cross The River. The mighty Mississippi, which is just that, a massive current of water, awe-inspiring yet frightening in its single-minded push toward the Gulf of Mexico.

This particular morning, I made the crossing between Natchez, Mississippi, and Vidalia, Louisiana. From the top of the twin cantilevered bridges, the cotton fields of Concordia Parish spread out far to the west. Below, the ghost of Harlan Hubbard navigated the wild currents in his shantyboat, dodging the heavy barge traffic on the broad river. Now I roll down my windows as Jerry Lee belts out the live version of “What I’d Say”over my truck speakers, and I suck in a lungful of thick Delta air. It tastes of home. Pulling off the bridge onto Highway 15, I give a respectful nod to The Killer a few miles north of here, where he takes his final rest in a Ferriday cemetery, before I turn the wheels south toward the heart of Acadiana.

The real Louisiana is a shrouded place. It’s often hard to glimpse if you are blind to seeing. But if your eyes are open, you will discover that the veil is slightly parted on the present culture, revealing instructive (albeit unfashionable) vignettes to older modes of living. While there is plenty of modern commerce and industry, there are also a people and a lifestyle that remain essentially rooted in a rich past. And while there are still agrarian echoes of the authentic South in scattered pockets, it is only when you cross The River that you find them concentrated in an almost undiluted form in this still slow-to-change world. It is of no small importance that Louisianans have the lowest outward migration in any of the 50 states. And even when they do leave, they still remain, as do I.

I often find it hard to convey to non-natives of the Bayou State what a real food culture is like, one where eating amazing food is as natural as a breath or a heartbeat. It has often been said that the native of Louisiana is not focused on the next meal but already planning what to eat the following weekend—where to catch, trap, or shoot it, and most important, whom to share it with. Because the true heart of Louisiana is found at a table of family, friends, or even perfect strangers eating the bounty of the soil and waters from this most generous land as they sit cheek to jowl under an oak tree next to a gas station or convenience store parking lot.

That is where I find myself around lunchtime, at a no-name crossroads convenience store just east of Simmesport. I pull into a parking lot packed with duck and deer hunters, pickup trucks, and boat trailers. The all-male, camouflage-clothed clientele are keeping the friendly ladies behind the counter busy placing orders for plates of jambalaya, bowls of gumbo, and fried chicken platters. I drift almost without thinking into the line. Even though I have only stopped to take a leak and pick up fresh ice to put on the hog, a bowl of jambalaya finds its way into my hands, and I go back out into the warm day. I squeeze onto a long picnic table with the assorted hunters. Each clutches a noonday longneck in one hand and a fork or spoon in the other. I eat my lunch and listen to their stories of the morning. Some are sharing tips on the best ways to prepare a duck gumbo, others about the best processors for smoked venison sausages. In East Tennessee, men shoot deer and gather at Hardee’s to talk. Yet they seldom express much enthusiasm for eating. No wonder, when what they share are only dreary recipes for venison chili or jerky. (This is a truth that is pointless to dispute.) Which is another thing that sets my birthplace apart: its population of working-class men are obsessed with good food, how to get it, and how to best prepare it … so very French in its values, not just in its appreciation of great eating but in all things.

To my knowledge, there is no other state that has guidebooks and websites devoted to the best “real” food to be found at gas stations. Running a successful gas station in rural Louisiana includes providing good food; the man who ignores the mandate doesn’t stay in business. That is Louisiana. Outsiders may describe it as Cancer Alley, a flood zone, a hurricane either on the way or just arrived, or, God forbid, by the reductionist “Oh, New Orleans, I love it!” But if asked what home means, a native Louisianan is most likely to say it’s a table covered in newspapers upon which is dumped a massive pile of boiled crawfish or crabs, to be served alongside potatoes and corn on the cob. Staying up until midnight shucking 500 pounds of oysters. Duck hunting on the marsh at sunrise Thanksgiving Day, making sure you’re back home in time to be clean and ready for the feast at 2 p.m. Being a Louisianan means it’s 7 a.m. and you’re already five miles off the coast fishing for ling, a true roast beef po-boy with 20 napkins still not enough, a truck stop diner serving chicken sausage gumbo, a cochon de lait out on a levee. A Pentecostal church social that serves up jambalaya prepared in a 50-gallon cast iron pot and that all denominations show up to support. A Baptist picnic under 300-year-old live oaks with endless tables of food, including, and always, massive platters of dirty rice. But most important, it is almost never a restaurant dinner. It is, at its most fundamental, about sharing food with family and neighbors.

A trip to my home state doesn’t need signposts. If you are surrounded by pine forests, you know you are in the northern hill parishes, where my uncle Burl once told my uncle Al, “Nothing grows here but timber and babies.” If the road winds among rivers and endless bayous dotted with small villages, each with a Catholic church at its center, you know you are in Acadiana. Old, ruined plantations tucked among oil refineries that loom next to The River? Then you are between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The Midwestern landscape of flatness, impossibly straight roads, and endless rice fields interspersed by sleepy, sluggish bayous? Now you’ve arrived in my home territory of Southwest Louisiana. You are at the place where Jean Lafitte’s men raided my fourth great-grandfather’s home, on September 27, 1819, up on Bayou Queue de Tortue—an event that precipitated a chase by the USS Lynx to recover stolen slaves and resulted in capturing the pirates in Galveston Bay and hanging them in New Orleans before a public audience.

But wherever you find yourself in this state, you are always near good food and a cold frozen daiquiri stand. Because in Louisiana, the laws on and enforcement of alcohol consumption are somewhat befuddled with a Bacchanalian impulse toward legislation. (This is a state where it used to be legal to drive while drinking, just not drunk, which was an odd but somehow important and civilized distinction for the lawmakers, possibly in an act of self-preservation, to insist on codifying.)

My destination on this particular journey south is Chicot State Park, just outside of Ville Platte. I’m heading to the annual gathering of the men in my family. My path takes me past Lecompte, home to Lea’s Lunchroom, a landmark enshrined in my family lore not for its dozens of pies on display but for the visit circa 1930 when my mother’s older sister danced the Charleston as a little girl, to the amusement of family and the other diners. That this aunt later became the most severe tempered of Baptists made the image of her performing even more one to cherish.

Early afternoon I pull into Ville Platte, not far from where my high school father walked out of the woods with a buddy after a week of fishing, flagged down a truck for a ride back to town, and was informed that the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. Coming home is like that: the memories are as thick as the fields of sugarcane around me, planted among a landscape of cypress trees along winding bayous, rich rice fields and pecan orchards, all teeming with my ancestors, who walk among and out of mists as densely storied and historied as any in the country.

I load up at Teet’s, a grocery and specialty meat store of long standing (1955), with the essentials for our weekend — mustard greens, boudin, tasso, ponce (stuffed pig stomach), bacon, beer, wine, and coffee. The truck overloaded, I head to a remote cabin sheltered in an old-growth forest alongside Chicot Lake, where I sensibly take a nap to await my kin.

The husband of a niece is the first to arrive. A young ex-marine with a quiet, solemn mien, he helps me get things squared away while we wait on the others. Late afternoon I begin cutting the onions for the big pot before sautéing them in half a stick of butter alongside a quarter pound of smoked bacon. While the onions and bacon cook down, the two of us rinse and chop a grocery bag full of mustard greens, then toss them into the mix. A few chunks of tasso (spicy cured pork), a quart of water, plenty of Tony Chachere’s seasoning, and the lidded pot is left to simmer for the next few hours.

Back when there was still a South, before it began dying a slow and undeserved death with the invention of air conditioning, you could know where a boy was from by the greens he ate. There was a collard belt, a turnip belt, and a mustard greens belt. Louisiana fell mostly in the latter. My father, shortly before he died at 94, was posed the question, “Dad, what are your favorite greens to eat?” ”Mustard greens” was his prompt and correct reply. Some of the newcomers to the region, who in the far-off times of a decade ago would have been called Yankees, propose kale and bok choy as fair greens substitutes. But if a green cannot be improved by long simmering in pork products, then we Southerners don’t want it on our table.

While the greens simmer and everyone else arrives, while beer is drunk, a nephew and his son prepare venison backstraps and loins for the grill. They have shot two bucks the previous morning and have brought the best cuts to share.

We gather around the table as the sun sets. A younger brother gives the blessing, I give the toast, and we dig into bowls of greens, links of boudin, and blood-rare slices of seasoned venison, all washed down by cold beer from a local brewery. Once we’re done cleaning up, we retire outside to sit by a fire. A few of us smoke cigars, and bourbon and scotch make the rounds. We catch up on family gossip, share family history, talk sports, regale one another with hunting stories, make fun of those who couldn’t make the get-together.

After a hearty breakfast the following morning, we put the hog in the smoker. Come afternoon, we gather around the TV to watch LSU get destroyed by Georgia, giving us a chance to exchange classic game-day stories. Such as the one about the time our maternal grandparents took three ferries in the 1920s across the Atchafalaya Basin and the Mississippi just to watch LSU beat Alabama. Or the one about the letter we have all read from my 18-year-old father to his mother when he was on a destroyer anchored off Iwo Jima (a few months after the battle), in which he asks two things: first, could she send him his trigonometry book so he could bone up, and second, could she mail him the newspaper articles that covered the LSU vs. Alabama game?

Meanwhile, outside, slumbering under the coals, with skin crackling, the pork roasts on as the heat works its lovely magic. A pig roast, like a crawfish boil, is a communal event. It is a call to gather the extended family, bring the neighbors, help share in the bounty. Pig meat is accessible and democratic. We can all eat “high on the hog” with pork, because a pig is easily raised by anyone with the tiniest of rural patches. Flora Thompson writes in Lark Rise to Candleford of small children gathering choice thistle and grasses during the day to feed the family pig. Everyone took part in the yearlong domestic project to fatten the animal so that all could enjoy the sausage, flitches of bacon, salted hams, head cheese, chops, loin, and blood puddings. A pig in the paddock says “We can survive, do for ourselves” and “Bring on the worst—you can’t touch us.” Pull up an overturned bucket, hunker down, and watch a cow eat hay and you feel nothing. Watch a pig tuck into a trough of steamed zucchini, corn, and stale bread and you shout “Comrade!” even as you plot his betrayal.

Around halftime we take a grateful break from the shellacking to indulge in the pulled-apart roasted hog (soused in a Carolina vinegar sauce), accompanied by corn on the cob, beans, and more links of boudin. With the lot of us sitting before a table full of porky goodness, my elder brother gives the blessing and we drink more beer and eat to gluttony. Mercifully the game finally ends, and we do that most manly of things on a Saturday afternoon: we all take a nap.

The next morning I am on the road by five o’clock, headed for home in East Tennessee, with 10 hours before me. The remains of the hog have been dispersed to the younger nephews. My cooler is again loaded, this time with pounds of boudin, tasso, ponce, and various other essentials that make an expat’s life bearable through the grief of nostalgia and hunger.

Late in the evening I pull onto the drive of the farm I also call home. Having now spent many more years in East Tennessee than in Southwest Louisiana, I have an adaptable notion of what homecoming means. The farm, which I work and enjoy with Cindy, my beloved, is a homeplace in every sense of the word that matters. Yet it is only mine and her life that I see reflected in its landscape. It is a different sort of homecoming than that to be had from revisiting the land my family has nurtured for 250 years, in life and in death.

* Author’s Note: “Hot boudin, cold coush- coush, / Come on Tigers, push, push push!” Is a very old cheer that most Louisiana sports teams use, substituting their own mascot for “Tigers.” Coush-coush is fried leftover cornbread served with cream and syrup. And, dear God, if someone doesn’t know what boudin is, or has never eaten it—well, that person is only be pitied.

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Reading: The John Buchan readings continue with Witch-Wood and The Gap in the Curtain.