You know what they say, "American by birth, Southerner by the grace of God." Well, I am about to reveal my Southernness. I have five brothers and I love them all. We grew up doing all sorts of things together. Years ago, my oldest brother, Don, owned a pulp wood business. I worked for him for a couple of years back before I left home. This would have been back in the early '70s. Every day we got up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and headed to the woods to cut timber. Don did the sawing while I stacked the pulp wood into piles. Our younger brother, Bruce, drove a machine called a retriever that had an arm on it with grabs on the end of the arm that would pick up the piles of pulp wood. He would load the back of the retriever down with pulp wood and, when it was full, he would drive it to the truck and transfer the pulp wood to the truck. Another brother, Dennis Wayne, ran a chain saw and helped cut trees down. There were also a couple of African American men who worked for my brother. Delton drove the truck and Ernest ran a chain saw.
Back then, we worked really hard. In Louisiana it is hot and humid in the summer and cold and damp in the winter. Before we got the retriever, we loaded everything onto the truck by hand. It was backbreaking work. By the time we called it a day, we were dead tired. I was just ready to go home and relax. Eat a little supper, maybe watch the news, and relax.
I must say that my mother was one of the best cooks in Union Parish. We lived in a very small community called Nip'n'tuck. It was so small there wasn't even a sign with its name on it, but everyone knew where it was. And it seemed like everyone knew my mother was a good cook. I certainly knew it. Mother was the sort of person who wasn't happy if she wasn't cooking and who always seemed to be cooking. So, she was generally happy. She found her purpose in feeding her family well on a really tight budget. We didn't eat fancy, but we always had plenty to eat. We boys did a lot of hunting and fishing, so we also had plenty of wild game to eat.
My mother would fry up a big mess of squirrels with gravy and biscuits and mashed potatoes. Or, quite often, we would have a fish fry with blue gill and white perch (crappie), and maybe a catfish or two, with fried potatoes and biscuits and -- a specialty of my mother's -- fish gravy. This was made with some of the leftover oil from frying the fish mixed with cornmeal and cooked until the cornmeal turned dark brown. Then she added a little water to this mixture and let it simmer a little while just before we ate it. This gravy was awful good, especially with biscuits. It was also amazingly greasy. I cringe to think of eating that sort of thing now, but when I was a boy it was a real treat.
Another specialty dish of my mother's was to bake up a big coon in a granite roaster. First, she would boil the coon to help tenderize it; then she would bake it with sweet potatoes. The coon was seasoned with plenty of pepper sauce made with cayenne peppers. This coon dish would be so spicy it would burn your lips for a long time after you were done eating.
In later years, my mother had a small café and sometimes she would have an evening set aside just to serve a coon supper to her customers. These "coon suppers" were well attended by the community. We boys grew up hunting coon and it was very natural to eat it as well. I loved baked coon; I also enjoyed it fried.
One day, my brother Don and I came home from a hard day at work. Tired, worn out, and ready for a nice meal and a hot bath. My mother was hard at work in the kitchen. She was happy to inform us that she had baked a coon for supper. This was good news since we didn't have coon every day. We considered it a real treat. Don and I sat down to the table and, to our credit, we ate almost all of that coon by ourselves. My mother seemed to be especially proud or, at any rate, she had a big grin on her face. Just as we were finishing our meal, she asked us how we enjoyed the coon. We both said it was good. I actually said it was some of the best coon I had ever eaten.
Mother burst out laughing and said, "That wasn't coon boys! It was a big old possum!" She was laughing so hard she could barely speak. I had to laugh myself. Mother always enjoyed a practical joke and she had certainly got us good. I had to admire her creativity.
Don wasn't too amused. He pushed himself away from the table and stood up, "Do you know what those things eat? Why, last week I saw one in the woods crawling out of the rear end of a dead cow!" He stomped off to the bathroom and was in kind of a huff for a couple of days. That didn't deter my mother from gloating about how she fooled us boys though. She told that story for years before her death and always laughed her head off every time she told it. Now, after more than 40 years have passed, even Don can laugh about it.
Sam Byrnes is a Gentry area resident. He may be contacted by email at [email protected]. Opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 09/16/2015