Purple Hull Peas and Fried Taters

 

I recollect telling momma that if I ever got grown that I would never eat purple hull peas and fried taters again.  It seems that we ate them every night for supper.  At other times, all we had was googie gravy and biscuits.  For something extra momma would peel a mater (tomato) for the gravy.  Momma was a wonderful cook, but she had very little to make supper during my early teen years.

I remember when dad moved us to Illinois from Alabama.  My uncle Clifton convinced daddy to move there to get a job at Beloit Iron Works.  I commit to memory when we left.  Mom had a few suitcases on the back of an old truck that had the bed removed to haul paper/pulp wood.  She told me to watch the suitcases from the window of the cab of the truck.  I can still see one old brown suitcase in the stack bouncing as she let the truck roll down the dirt road hill to crank it.  The battery was dead.  She pushed the truck and as it started down the hill, she jumped into the cab, pushed the clutch, put the floor shift into gear, and popped the clutch.  We road to the bottom of the hill and she turned around and we began our journey leaving the “Heart of Dixie” to Illinois, the Land of Lincoln.

Daddy moved us into this old wharf rat infested apartment.  I was five years old but I remember how scared momma was.   Momma was twenty-six, my baby sister Diane was two, and we were a long way from the cotton fields of Chilton County Alabama lonely and full of anxiety.  When we arrived, we did not have much to eat so momma fixed some buttered toast and sprinkled it with sugar.  Diane and I did not know any better and thought it was delicious.  It remains one of my favorite things to prepare for a quick snack.  As Diane and I ate our sugar sprinkled buttered toast momma stood guard with a large butcher knife in case one those Yankee wharf rats wanted some of our sweet delights or two small Dixie kids.  I think of  momma imitating Jim Bowie and throwing the butcher knife at the Yankee rat that looked like an Alabama opossum.

We didn’t live in Illinois but about three years. Daddy made us a good living and food got better.  One of our homes had a cherry tree in the backyard.  Momma could fix the best homemade cherry pies.  I love cherries.  I ate my first pizza there.  I used to walk across the street and watch a man in a Chef Boyardee hat tossing pizza dough into the air.  I tasted salami there, drank drinks made from mixing water with fizzies tablets, and ate Wisconsin cheddar cheese.  We lived on the Illinois/Wisconsin line.  We lived in Illinois and daddy worked in Wisconsin.  All I had to do to cross the state line was walk across the creek, which I did almost every day.

Living in Yankee land there were no purple hull peas or fried taters.  Momma got homesick and daddy moved us from the bounty of the North to the poverty of the South.  Daddy had a difficult time finding work in Alabama.  Once again, food was scarce.  I remember my Grandpaw Chapman bringing us food on Saturday mornings until daddy could find work.  I can see him driving up in his old 1950 Plymouth Special Deluxe with the passenger seat filled with sacks of groceries.  Daddy thought himself a failure and would not ask for help.  If he were alive today, he would be really ashamed at how people want handouts.  He worked hard to provide with very little yield but at least he worked.

Looking back I never thought of us as poor.  Everybody out where we lived was just as we were.  All of us were still feeling the results of a hundred years Reconstruction.  Momma was doing the best she could with what she had.  As daddy found work and life got better momma could fix the best Sunday dinners.  Her table looked as a buffet at Shoney’s.  Daddy said momma learned to cook while having grown up ‘fixin’ possum and coon.” 

It was humorous realizing that we were eating “high on the hawg” compared to momma.  Purple hull peas and fried taters, even though they got old every night, were better than possum and coon and we knew that Sunday dinner was coming.

I did get grown and went a long time without peas and taters, especially since momma and daddy have passed on into eternity.  We didn’t have the wonderful enmities that folks have today but we did have love.  It amazes me at the panic created by the 2020 COVID 19 virus and the run on toilet paper and groceries.  Heck, I was almost grown before we could afford toilet paper when we moved back to the Heart of Dixie, the land of cotton and outside toilets with Sears’s catalogs and corncobs.

The other day I reminisced and thought, “I wished I could have momma fix me some purple hull peas and fried taters.  Some googie gravy and biscuits wouldn’t be too bad either.

Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a fatted calf with hatred – Proverbs 15:17 KJV