Ever since I can
remember there have been family dinners.
Family come to visit for holiday meals, such as Thanksgiving and
Christmas.
Family gather together for
births and deaths, and there is
always
food involved.
Graduations and other
celebrations also bring family together, and with that gathering, there is again,
always food.
It would seem that the food
is the glue that allows the people in my family to sit down and take the time
to talk to one another.
Family dinners have come to
symbolize togetherness and are a celebration of those days when life didn’t get
in the way of family ties.
When I was a
child, my family and I moved around on a nearly annual basis.
As my father was retired and decided to
become a writer, our moves became more “inspirational moves” rather than “government
dictated moves.”
Through my childhood
years, I would hear tales from my mother about family gatherings at her
grandmother’s house and the Sunday dinners that were a weekly event and a fond
memory of mother’s own childhood.
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| Family Photo - Sunday at Grandmother's House |
Southern families
are rooted in tradition.
“If it ain’t
broke, don’t fix it” my family always says.
Traditionally my mother, along with her sister and parents, would travel
each Sunday to Reynolds, Georgia, to have Sunday dinner at
her maternal grandmother’s house.
Grandmother Wilson was a widow, and this was an opportunity for her two
daughters to bring their families together and visit, as well as check on
Grandmother and see how she was faring.
Along with the tradition of gathering together, there was a tradition of
what was consumed at these dinners, and it was typically the same thing every
week:
chicken, black-eyed peas, green
beans or butter beans, yams or squash, collard greens and always corn bread or
homemade muffins.
“The importance of
food to southerners is perhaps best revealed in [the] proverb: a full belly
makes strong arms an’ a willin’ heart.”
(Joyner,
17.)
I’m not too sure what that proverb
means other than if you’re hungry enough to eat, your heart will be into
putting in the work that is required to grow or kill your own food.
And that is just what mother’s family did
back in the day.
They raised and
prepared all their own food.
My mother recalled:
We never bought anything from a
store. In fact, I think I was twelve or
thirteen years old before I ever entered what would be considered today as a
grocery store. We grew our own
vegetables and raised our own chickens, and we ate what we cultivated. Everything was fresh and every meal was made
from scratch.
What is now
considered a time honored tradition of preparing from scratch meals made from
home-grown fruits and vegetables was actually necessity back in those
days.
As mother mentioned, they didn’t
have the luxury of shopping in grocery stores as we do today.
Taking the time to make favorite family
meals, and making them from fresh ingredients, keeps alive the memories of days
long gone by.
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| Personal Family Photo - Lackey Farm |
Not all dinners at
my great grandmother’s house were fried chicken, though that was the favorite
and traditional meal.
Mother recalls a
time when dinner was actually at Uncle Elmer’s house and the dinner was a
hog.
The change in menu makes that day
stand out in mother’s memory not merely because they ate hog instead of
chicken, but the events that led to eating that hog.
And here we get the story of
Elmer’s Hog.
We had a big group for lunch that
day. There was daddy and mother, Judy
and myself, along with Uncle Ken, his wife and children, Grandmother, and then
of course Elmer and his family because we were at Elmer’s farm. Elmer was Grandmother’s younger brother. Well, the menfolk decided that they wanted to
have pork chops or ham that day. So
daddy, Uncle Ken and Uncle Elmer tried to kill this hog. It was Elmer’s hog from his herd of hogs and
pigs. They get him and somehow he gets
away. They try shooting him. Now, my daddy’s a crack shot, but he wounded
him! And so that made the hog mad and he
was running around like a nut! So, daddy
shot him between the eyes and he said, “You know, we shouldn’t have made such
the mess that we did killing this hog.”
Well anyway, they strung him up to a
tree and they gutted him, and then they took his intestines and passed them
through the kitchen window to the women who were already preparing the table
for this stuff. Here they washed the
intestines out and they were already working on the stuffing. This is how sausage is made. I had no idea! I’m looking in the window. I didn’t eat sausage for years and years and
years after that! Meanwhile while the
women were preparing the sausage, the men had carved this hog up. Some of it was smoked but other parts were going
to be cooked. It took the whole day, so
we ate very late.
It
is not unusual for food memories to play a role in our lives.
The smells of certain foods (or the mere
thought of them) can bring back a flood of memories, such as the sausage did
for my mother.
Such memories can be fond
or humorous, like remembering how the men had a difficult time catching the
hog, while the same memory can be a deterrent from eating anything related to that
memory, i.e. sausage.
These memories
can affect what we choose to include in our current diets.
Mother still loves yams and black eyed peas,
but it took her years to try another sausage.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t the killing of the hog that turned her off, but
knowing which parts of the hog that were in the sausage that made her sick at
the thought.
Traditionally,
as stated in this story, the men did the killing and the women did the
cooking.
In my family that didn’t change
much until about 20 years ago.
Until
about the 1990s, the women in my family would slave away in a hot kitchen and
dining room in an effort to make things “just right” for visiting family.
Even women who arrived for the visit set to
work helping out while men sat and caught up on current news.
Back in the 1950s when mother was having
Sunday dinners at her grandmother’s house, she recalled that the women would be
preparing the meals while the men sat out on the porch and chitchatted.
My father and the
other men would sit out on the porch and rock and talk about, you know, the
world problems, and smoke cigars to keep the gnats and flies away. My father only
smoked cigars on Sunday. Only on Sunday and only in the country at Grandmother’s to keep flies and gnats
away. And only the men folk would do
that. And he wore a blue striped seer
sucker suit with a straw hat. And they
always had their straw hat on. Anyway, I
always remember the men sitting out there rocking and talking. When the women finished, they would come out
and rock and talk and have ice tea.
There was a porch swing, and we used to just love to sit and swing and
laze around.
Why do Southern women go to such
trouble for their men?
It is all a part
of Southern hospitality.
“Southern
hospitality is the gentle art of sharing.
It is the noble gesture of putting another’s comfort before your
own.
It is taking the time to make
others feel good about themselves.”
(Jenkins, 13.)
This idea of
giving is not foreign to me, and that may be because I was raised to “do for
others.”
I must say, however, that the
twenty-first century has changed the dynamics of who is working in the kitchen
or preparing the meals in general.
Today
it is common for the men to stand over a flaming grill as they prepare the
bar-b-que feast for guests.
The gender
roles of responsibility have melted together and there is not so much the
expectation of who is working while someone else is doing the visiting, just as
there is little expectation that my husband or brother will step outside and
kill a hog for dinner.
But there are things that do remain
the same.
Family meals are still
together whenever possible.
The
prosperity of the past century has divided families geographically as jobs have
required household transfers.
When
family does get together, for holidays and special occasions, those special
meals that help us recall our days together are prepared as a symbol of our
togetherness – a celebration of sorts.
Our children won’t remember dinners at Grandma’s house because Grandma
lives two thousand miles away.
They
probably won’t have Sunday dinner memories because those traditions faded away
as the families moved farther and farther apart.
But they will have memories of family get-togethers, and in those memories they will recall stories, smells and even
foods that they will go on to celebrate with their future generations.
And who knows, maybe a story they will share
will be the one their Grandmother told them about Elmer’s hog!
Today's entry was written in 2008, just a year before my mother's sudden passing. I hope you enjoyed reading about her memories in rural Georgia. If you liked today's post, please feel free to share with your readers by clicking on the share buttons below. I would love to hear from you! Please leave me a message below and tell me if this story sparked a memory of your family meals from when you were growing up!
Works Cited
Stratton, Ginger. 2008. Tape recorded interview. 24 May.
Joyner, Charles. 1999.
Shared Tradition: Southern History
and Folk Cultures. University of Illinois Press: Urbana
and Chicago. 17-19.
Jenkins, Emyl.
1994. Southern Hospitality. Crown
Publishers, Inc. New York. 13.
Works Consulted
Botkin, B.A.
1932. A Treasury of Southern Folklore.
Crown Publishers, Inc. New
York.
Brunvand, Jan.
1998. The Study of American Folklore.
W.W. Norton and Company. New
York. London.
