The Food Device

hot tamales and memories

“Welcome to Greenville Little Prince. Be kind when you send your evaluation to your father.”

“I think my father is evaluating Me, not your store.

Shall we begin the tour? I’d like to meet everyone. “

“Will you stay for supper?”

“It’s why I came!”

“What kind of steak do you like? They have big and bigger.”

Being the little prince has its advantages.

“Show Mr. Campbell that Rube Goldberg machine y’all use to make tamales.”

Steak, you can get anywhere. Hot tamales you can only get in the Delta.

The kitchen was not at all clean. Never visit restaurant kitchens if you’re squeamish. In a corner, an old black woman in a chair pulled a lever that made tamales come out the other end. When she made enough, she’d wrap them in corn husks, taken from a big bowl of warm water, and tie them in bundles.

Some were sold in coffee cans for to-go orders. Some went into the pot to sell in Doe’s Eat Place itself. Each simmered in red Tamale juice that smelled of lard and peppers.

The brown people who came here from Mexico were treated nicer than the darker brown people who were brought here from Africa, but not much.

“You boys ever pick cotton?”

“Sí.”

“You’ll have to provide your own lunch. Y’all got what you need?”

“Sí.”

Our cornmeal was different from theirs, yellower, tastier. The chiles were dried, not fresh. Before the white man came, Tamales were mostly venison and turkey. These were beef and pork. Communal tables of happy, genetically related Mexican women assembling the tamales were replaced by old black women with machines who remember when it was illegal for their kind to eat in the dining room.

Mississippi food requires saltine crackers. I’m not at all sure why. In Jackson, we even serve our pink, mayonnaise-based salad dressing on just crackers. When the Hutchison School girl was alive, I’d buy her comeback dressing and crackers, so she didn’t wish she were dead. It worked for a while.

Comeback on tamales is wicked good. You should try it.

Doe’s had been an old house; rooms and porches were hastily added on. The steaks were bigger than a small dog. I came for the tamales, and maybe the bourbon.

Drinking had been illegal in Mississippi, but quite popular—unless, of course, you sold it to coloreds, which could get you shot—unless of course, they worked for the bootlegger. Mississippi is a very strange place.

There was an old man from the Delta who sold tamales at five points. There were times when one brother was in college, the other brother was in the hospital, Momma and the golden girlchild were away doing mysterious things only girls would do, and Daddy and I were alone to feed ourselves.

“Here’s twenty bucks. Get us a couple cans of tamales, a carton of smokes, and some ice.” We spread the day’s news on his desk and feasted. Carbs, peppers, ground pork, crackers, and whiskey with ice. A meal for men.

My Uncle Tom still printed the papers in those days. Sometimes he and Daddy got along. Some days they didn’t. Different generations, I suppose. They had different solutions to Mississippi’s many ills, but shared a passion to find them. Daddy and Rowan were the last of the Capitol Street Gang. I think Tom knew that. I think he knew old Mississippi was dying. Nobody knew what the new Mississippi would be, but we all had hopes.

If you order tamales now, they come in a plastic, soulless styrofoam clamshell sort of device. It keeps the food warm, but has no soul. Not like a coffee can. Mississippians drink an obscene amount of canned coffee, or did. We’re uptown now with barristas and things, but in those days, coffee came in a can and was served by someone with a hair net and sagging stockings.

I never liked being the Little Prince. I hated it. My friends called me “Le Dauphin,” a title bestowed upon French Kings, including Louis Quatorze, who had a brilliant career, but set the stage for the French Revolution. I was not called “Le Dauphin” out of love, but a sort of mockery of Mississippi’s attempts at dynasticism, which I mocked too.

For years, I’ve developed a theory about how we translate culture from generation to generation. There’s literature, art, music, education, and, most especially, food. My father made every effort to share with me the foods of Mississippi. Some of it, hog’s head, chittlins, and souse, could be quite gross. Tamales were sublime.

“Try it with chili and sour cream.”

“I like it with just crackers.”

In high school, the Travelers used to travel through the Delta like the gang in Clockwork Orange. As I got older, I made trips on my own, at night, in the flat, flat, flat, delta, where you can see the sky clear to Pluto and back. I’d pass the signs leading to town where ladies I’d seen in their full nakedness lived. Naked ladies are fine. Tamales are better.

“What fer ya, hun?”

“Let me get the ribeye, as rare as you got, and a dozen Tamales for me and Mr. Kimbrell.”

“You order like you’ve eaten here before.”

“I have.”