I bite into a plump, juicy blackberry in my Ohio kitchen and suddenly it is a blistering summer afternoon in the South and I am 8.
I am with my three sisters and our pails, in the middle of the brambly bushes in the woods behind my house in Greenville, South Carolina. We are picking berries, fat as bumblebees, plop, plop — 10 in our metal buckets and two in our mouths. We are smart enough to make sure more berries make it to the buckets than our mouths lest it take forever to collect enough for the cobbler Mama will make straight away. We will applaud and shriek and crown our reward with vanilla ice cream that will melt as soon as it touches the hot syrupy berries and warm mounds of Martha White dough.
I sink my teeth into a perfect tomato this time of year and I am likewise transported.
I can never fully grasp the godliness of the summer tomato, any more than I can hold the deep memory, and no more so than if the tomato is green and coated in cornmeal.
I bite into a crispy fried-green tomato and I am in Mama’s hot, un-air conditioned kitchen and it’s time for dinner.
It’s the same with a good ear of corn, not a bland one, mind you, but a good, sweet ear, the kind Daddy would pull out of his sun-drenched garden next to the tree house. Stripping back the husks, he would let us bite into the raw starchy corn right then and there in the backyard, juicy kernels popping all over our Madras shirts.
Fried okra and cornbread doused in glasses of cold buttermilk. Homemade ice cream hand-cranked on the back porch. Warm, firm cucumbers from Aunt Charlotte’s garden next to pitchers of sugary tea. We took this food for granted: It was simply what we ate. Whole Foods without the logo. And yet now, for me, it is the nectar of the gods and deeply embedded in my red blood cells.
I was lucky, unlike so many friends I know whose elders didn’t like or know how to cook, to sample a wide repertoire of foods growing up, to include this food, to include the palate of Mississippi-born Grandma Bledsoe’s house, on my father’s side. This manifested on a long Sunday table after church, everything homemade and homegrown, bowls of green beans with fatback, vats of macaroni cheese pie with eggs and a crusty toast topping, banana pudding with homemade custard, vanilla wafers and meringue, pillows of potato salad made with sweet pickle relish and crisp fried chicken, compliments of the fowl Grandma raised and slaughtered just behind the house. Nothing was not Southern. Nothing was touched until the eldest son, Uncle Kenney, in the thickest of Southern accents, had his say before Father and Savior.
On my mother’s side was her grandmother, Granny, aptly named, a slug of snuff in her cheek, granny glasses, granny black shoes and full apron. A former mill hand, she lived deep in the country in a modest house with an oil-cloth floor and real feather mattresses you got lost in when you lay down. A visit to Granny’s house always netted not only the inevitable trip to the scary outhouse but more happily, a bottomless bowl of her canned soup with okra and tomatoes, with fresh biscuits accompanying. Better than candy.
There was on my mother’s side, too, a distinctly different grandmother. My great-grandmother Big Mama hailed from Lebanon and had two refrigerators and stoves in her cavernous kitchen, from which constantly emerged the delicacies of her homeland — labneh, grape leaves, fried and raw kibbeh, pie bread as big as extra-large pizzas and luscious purple olives you couldn’t get off the regular grocery shelves back then but that her grocer tycoon husband imported. As she grew older and I would stay the night to tend her, as soon as I heard her go to bed, I would hie to the fridge and sneak olives.
When I was 17, Mama up and moved us to New Orleans. Here, we were introduced to a whole other kind of food. Here we learned to cook and love gumbo with fat Gulf shrimp and andouille sausage, étouffée, jambalaya, beignets and spicy crawfish whose heads and tails we sucked by the pound. All these foods are part of me. But it is in summer, it is now, that I close my eyes and feel the deep childhood story connected to the food. Maybe I feel it most profoundly because it’s hot and the senses are ever heightened. Maybe it’s because the food was seasonal, what we were meant to eat.
Come July, I not only hanker for a tall glass of sweet tea — even though I don’t eat sugar now — but I long for a trip to Wood’s Lake.
Here is where Mama and us and Grandma and an assortment of aunts and uncles and cousins would go Saturdays or Sundays to cool off and act as children, screaming as we jumped off the tall plank above the water to feel the lush, sandy bottom between our toes.
Here is where Mama would call us to the picnic table midday where she would have brought chicken and potato salad and corn and sliced tomatoes and cucumbers in a tiered metal holder that became synonymous with picnic.
All that, and watermelon. How could I forget watermelon.
“Sweet, good watermelon,” writes poet Natty Sunday in her “Ode to a Watermelon”: “You made your way to me on a hot summer day. Round like a planet happy as a child pink as bubble gum. Dark green skin of summerhear me say my praise to you and give my regards to your homeland.”
I bite into the pink flesh of summer, its juice dripping down my chin and sticking to my halter top until I jump back in the water.
I am refreshed, fed, happy and 8.
