“Hot tamales and they’re red hot, yes she got ‘em for sale.” Robert Johnson

The sad and untimely death of writer Julia Reed a few weeks ago prompted me to embark on an all-day frenzy of making Mississippi Delta-style hot tamales. I believe she would have approved, given the Delta native’s celebration of both the hot tamale and grand gestures. I revelled in her columns and cable TV commentary; she was a mainstay of my Southern consciousness. Julia’s good humor and biting insights channeled the best of the eccentricity and joie de vivre I associate with my own relatives from the Mississippi Delta.  Making hot tamales from scratch allowed me to both get busy in the kitchen and commune with both Julia and some aspects of my own personal history.

Much has been written and said about the Delta Hot Tamale, and I do not intend to re-cover much of that ground in this post. The Southern Foodways Alliance has dedicated significant resources to documenting the history and practice of tamale making in the Mississippi Delta. Check out their extensive oral history project, at https://www.southernfoodways.org/oral-history/hot-tamale-trail/  For good measure, here’s an equally interesting story in “Roads and Kingdoms” magazine about the futile quest for that perfect hot tamale in the rural Delta region of Issaquena County, The Hot Tamales of Issaquena County, and how such legends abound in the land William Faulkner described as a doomed wilderness “which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant.”

After consulting several excellent sources, including “The Southern Foodways Alliance Community Cookbook,” “Eat Drink Delta,” by journalist Susan Puckett of the Atlanta Journal–Constitution and “Screen Doors and Sweet Tea,” by Delta native and Paris-trained chef Martha Hall Foose, the recipe I followed looked pretty similar to the one found here, reduced by half, https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2011/04/cook-the-book-mississippi-delta-hot-tamales-recipe.html

First, let’s talk briefly about the process, and what I learned for future efforts. Making the tamales took me about five hours total. If and when I do it again, I would spread this across two days, making the pork filling the first day and then focusing on the dough, assembly and simmering the next day. I was almost too exhausted at the end of the process to enjoy the hot tamales. Fortunately, the leftovers continued to be very tasty.

When it comes to rolling the tamales, I would make smaller, more tightly rolled tamales and then bundle them in twine, as I have seen others do on videos, to secure them for the simmering process. Finally, I would endeavor to practice a bit more patience in the simmering of the tamales. I started removing them from the simmer bath right at the one hour mark, but a number of them needed some additional cooking. The microwave helped fix these errors, but I will more carefully test the doneness of the tamales before removing them from the simmer next time.

Now, to the more interesting questionof why Delta hot tamales. Much has also been written about the mysterious allure of the Mississippi Delta, the region scholar James Cobb described as the Most Southern Place on Earth. Like the backstory of tamales, I am not going to summarize that voluminous body of literature. My connection to the Delta is more personal. I’m a kid from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a cultural universe apart from the Delta. But my dad was raised in the Delta town of Greenwood, and he loved to tell stories of his seemingly mythological childhood there. His glamorous Delta family members made a living growing and selling cotton, that is when they weren’t fighting wars, winning golf tournaments or tossing back highballs in the lobby of the Peabody. The family still owns farmland in the Delta, but few of my cousins are farmers. In fact, many of them have moved on to far-flung places including New York, Chicago, San Francisco and even Hong Kong.

I’ve got plenty of Delta stories and tall tales to unpack, most of them passed down to me from my father, who had a deeply ambivalent view of his iconic home region. For present purposes, I will share one of my own fonder memories of visiting the Delta, a story that includes eating hot tamales, twice.

In the mid-2000s, my eight-year-old son Emmet and I traveled to Memphis and the Delta to visit my dad and attend the annual blues festival in Helena, Arkansas. My dad, nomadic by nature, was living at the time in Hernando, Miss., just south of Memphis. We played golf at Overton Park in Memphis, where my grandfather caddied as a young lad before going on to a career as a professional golfer. We toured Sun Records of Elvis fame and ate ribs and tamales on Beale Street. After spending part of a very hot day at the blues festival in Helena, home of the famous King Biscuit Flour Hour radio show, we repaired to the nearby Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Miss., and then ate some more tamales at Morgan Freeman’s Ground Zero Blues Club. I do not have distinct memories of those tamales, other than knowing that they were a special regional treat. I have stronger taste memories of eating another plate of tamales about a year later, also with dad, at Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, another distinctly Delta venue regularly celebrated by Julia.

The trip with Emmet was a success in almost every way in that we were able to enjoy two of the Delta’s main attractions, the blues and its distinct foodways, and to pass several pleasant days with my often-volatile father, who was on his best behavior for his eager and enthusiastic  grandson. The whole experience, at least in my own pantheon of personal memories, was ideal, a perfect Delta tale like something out of one Julia’s columns!

In addition to tackling tamales, I also honored Julia Reed this past week by listening to the entire audible version of her lovely 2018 book of essays “South Toward Home,” read aloud in her distinctive, Scotch-laced southern drawl. I also made a modest donation – something I plan to do each time I post here going forward — of $25 dollars to the Emeril Lagasse Foundation (ELG), and I would encourage you to do the same on both scores. Future donations will go to ELG, the Lee Initiative or the Oregon Food Bank. Thank you very much for spending a little time with me.

[AUTHOR’S NOTE: As I predicted, this well-intentioned effort to re-read through the body of Dr. Percy’s work fizzled not long after this post first appeared. Who knows, maybe I will get back to it, along with Shelby Foote’s Civil War trilogy, another monumental literary achievement by a fellow Greenville native.] The first section of “The Moviegoer,” which is divided into seven chapters, sets the stage for the novel’s protagonist, John Bickerson “Binx” Bolling, a Korean War veteran and the scion of an aristocratic Creole family. The son of a physician father who was killed in World War II and absent nurse mother who left her son to be raised by his paternal aunt, Binx has settled on his own cure for malady of post-War modernity, a solipsistic quest to break free from what he calls everydayness punctuated by his superficial pursuit of the pleasures of the flesh with an ever-changing line-up of secretaries.

Binx, as the narrator, sets up his quest against the backdrop of the trappings of the high-modernism that characterized the work of writers like William Faulkner and T.S. Elliott – stoic concerns about the collapse of the pillars of Western Civilization and a firm belief in the necessity of pursuing a certain kind of honorable course of action despite its inevitable futility. As Binx’s Aunt Emily, his surrogate mother, explains: “A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.”

Supporting this tragic view of honor in the face of sure defeat, Binx’s narration abounds with references to knights, crusaders and Roman stoics, and the characteristics of such heroes are attributed to those around Binx, including his successful, Catholic Uncle Jules (his victory in the World is total and unqualified) and to a lesser degree his college friend Walter (a model to others, an arbiter of taste), who is engaged to Binx’s emotionally fragile cousin Kate. Yet, Binx rejects his Aunt Emily’s worldview, telling her he feels no obligation to make a contribution to the doomed fight against dissolution.

When I first read “The Moviegoer” three decades ago, during my time as an English major at Loyola University in New Orleans, I took Binx’s quest as it is ostensibly presented, as an honest effort to wrest meaning from a world revolving around rituals that have ceased to be relevant. I may have recognized the ironies embedded in the narrative tapestry Percy weaves, but I did not experience Binx as unstable or intellectually dishonest. Today, Binx strikes me as a detached, dreamy young man with a grandiose, self-important view of himself who propounds a diagnosis of the ills of the world around him that serves little purpose other than supporting his own bloated self-image. Here are just a few examples of his intense self-involvement:

Binx continually offers up a deprecating self-assessment — I’m not that smart– but he also claims that he would much rather luxuriate in his own deep insights than be stuck in the everydayness of life-transforming medical research. It never dawns on Binx that these endeavors are not mutually exclusive.

Binx eschews established communities, whether it be the respected Krewe of Neptune of which he remains a member or spending time with a group of good fellows who have gone in together on the purchase of a man-cave houseboat. Yet he admits, with little or no self-consciousness, that during college he was so intent on impressing Walter that he was willing to ridicule others within his own fraternity to gain Walter’s approval.

Binx abandons a group of friends, fellow war veterans, with whom he has made a connection hiking the Appalachian Trail because he cannot make them happy. Binx, distracted by his own fantasies and depressed feelings, assumes that because he cannot feel sufficiently connected with his friends that the connection is inherently unworthy.

In Binx, Percy has created an ideal postmodern anti-hero, a legend in his own mind in the parlance of our time (to paraphrase another popular and self-involved anti-hero). As the first section of the book comes to a close, Binx and Kate, his cousin by marriage who has survived her own tragedies and who has sought refuge in alcohol and drugs as well as creativity, take in a Mardi Gras parade but take their leave before Walter appears, opting instead for the New Orleans-based medical thriller “Panic in the Streets” in which the film’s physician hero must save the City from the threat of an infectious plague. The malady threatening Binx resides within his own consciousness, and Percy, the physician-turned-novelist, has set himself the tall task of rescuing Binx from himself, or at the very least to go down fighting.

“To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” Binx Bolling, The Moviegoer

I’m famous for starting out on creative or quasi-intellectual journeys with the best of intentions, only to abandon them to follow a newer, shinier object of intellectual curiosity, and so on and so forth. My interests are wide but shallow, each pulling me into its orbit only to quickly recede and be replaced. There’s no guarantee that’s not going to happen here either. But, like all those other journeys, I head out on this one with sincerity and determination — and a bit of hope too.

I decided to launch this new effort a few weeks ago when I opened the trunk of my car and found my son Emmet’s paperback copy of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, an odd book for a 21st century college freshman to be reading in the first place (more on that later). He left it behind when he headed back to college at The New School for his spring semester, a sad day for me and my wife Abby and daughter Zoe. Emmet had the book in the first place because my friend Rob, who went to college with me in New Orleans and lives in New York City, gave it to him last fall.

I’ve read and admired a good bit of Percy’s body work, but not in recent years. My first thought in seeing that book sitting in the trunk was: This is a sign that I should re-read this book. I first read it at about the same age Emmet is now because I wanted to be a Southern writer, and so I read all the books that any respectable would-be Southern writer should read. I understood vaguely what the author was trying to do, but can’t say that the book’s message held all that much import for me at the time. My friend Don, a Louisiana-based playwright, thinks you need to be at least 40 to tap into the wisdom of The Moviegoer.

My initial thought that I should re-read one book has morphed into something more grand (or grandiose, as the case may be), a “pilgrimage” of sorts to use a word often associated with the author in question. I’ve decided to read/re-read all of Walker Percy’s books over the course of the next year, and make some notes on this blog about what I learn along the way. As with previous efforts, I am hoping that these posts will offer a way to jumpstart my creative juices and revive the intellectual curiosity and engagement of my yesteryears.

So that’s the plan — to read the following books over the next 12 months, with my tentative deadline for completion being March 1, 2020:

The Moviegoer
The Last Gentleman
Love in the Ruins
Message in the Bottle
Lancelot
The Second Coming
Lost in the Cosmos
The Thanatos Syndrome
Signposts in a Strange Land
The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

My goal for these notes about my reading adventure is to post to this blog about once a week with thoughts about what I am learning along the way. Emmet got another copy of The Moviegoer at the Strand, and we are reading this first book together. I am hoping that he will provide some commentary here as well.

I started this blog platform more than two years ago with the vague notion of writing about being a Southern exile and about struggling with anxiety and, of course, about food. I wrote two blog posts, and got distracted (see my opening sentence). What better way to revive this false start than to write about renewing my relationship with a Southern author who more than any other addressed what it means to be Southern and to be nervous and to be lost in the cosmos of these crazy times.

Inspired by the understated adventures of Binx Bolling, hero of The Moviegoer, a stock and bond broker who lives in Gentilly and stands at the gate defending those great Western values of faith, wisdom and justice, against the marauding threat of everydayness, here goes nothing….

We are headlining this entry with another Louis Armstrong-ism, the title of one of his most popular tunes, mainly because it makes reference to the subject of this post, BBQ. Don’t count on Satchmo making an appearance every time.

As I age, I find my affinity grows for various things that represent my Southern childhood – food, music, certain styles of dress, etc. At the top of this list is BBQ.

I did not love or crave BBQ as a kid, but I ate plenty of the stuff because my dad did have a passion for smoked meat, particularly ribs and the occasional pulled pork on a bun. By contrast my favorite foods – beyond the basic kid eats – were Italian and Chinese cuisine, plus red beans and rice, which we already covered. When I moved to New Orleans as a college student, I fell in love with all things New Orleans, including its food, which I still consider the pinnacle of dining.

However, I can vividly remember patronizing a little barbecue stand next to a dingy bar and across the street from St. James Catholic Church in Gulfport. We would grab our food and devour it outdoors, sitting on a decrepit picnic bench nearby. These meals made my dad happy, a seemingly rare occurrence from my vantage point, and so they, in turn, made me happy, or at least less anxious about when the next storm darkening his mood would arrive. Years later, I would experience a disturbing transliteration of these memories while eating in a restaurant in Pittsburgh, Penn., with my own son and my dad when he got into a fairly heated discussion with a waiter over how ribs should be served, specifically in his view without any sauce.

As the years have gone by, my own personal taste for BBQ has come on strong. I suspect that new appreciation has as much to do with an attempt to retain those fond memories, as well as a South Foodways Alliance-inspired appreciation of everything the art of the pit master has to say about the broader cultural legacy of the South, as it does with my true appreciation of brisket, ribs, pulled pork or sausage. Of late, a co-worker with Alabama roots and I have been making a systematic study of the BBQ places in and around the Portland area, including Matt’s BBQ pictured here (which reminds me a bit of that spot my dad and I frequented). The results are still out on where the best PDX BBQ can be found, but I will keep you posted.

The deliciousness of BBQ notwithstanding, I find myself curious, in a self-reflexive way, about what’s going on with the quest for good BBQ, particularly good BBQ that authentically represents particular cultural regions of the South, regardless of whether that’s Texas, the Carolinas or Memphis.

Thanks to Proust, the connection between food and memory is axiomatic. BBQ, I suspect, represents more for me than a Southern affectation (I can certainly be guilty of those at times) or simply an effort to reinforce fond memories, although that’s certainly one aspect of what’s going on here. BBQ, like golf or music, represents a way to bridge the divide of decades between the present and my various, complex and sometimes painful memories of the past.

So, for now, I will just keep following that sweet smell of smoke, sending up signals from a different time and place.

I’m running low on Camellia red beans, already, even though I returned home to Portland last month from a week in New Orleans with a four-pound bag that I picked up at the Wal-Mart on Tchoupitoulas Street. Red beans and rice are a constant in my life; I make them at least once and sometimes twice a month. They soothe my soul, which is no easy feat.

Red beans and rice take me back to elementary school in South Mississippi where they were served for lunch every Monday with a slice of white bread. I dreaded going to school on Monday morning. My stomach would churn as anxiety washed over me; the prospect of another week of school would seem more than I could possibly handle. I have spent my whole life struggling with some form of this fear, which might come as a shock to many people who have known me casually or even worked with me, although it will be no surprise to anybody who knows me well. The one bright spot on those grammar school Mondays, and many Mondays and other days thereafter, were those earthy, salty, slightly spicy red beans and rice. They provided solace as I struggled to manage my nerves and get through the day.

The jazz giant Louis Armstrong often signed off his letters with the phrase Red Beans and Ricely Yours. It was his favorite meal, and he was known to make two requests when he stayed at people’s homes during his many travels: a pot of red beans and rice and a little weed. Sounds like he was seeking some solace too.

What’s so great about red beans and rice? They take a long time to cook, but not a lot of effort. They are hard to screw up. Everybody has their own favorite version , and yet they all share something in common, the warmth and comfort they offer. Red beans and rice are the ultimate “soul” food both in their connection to a culinary tradition and in the way they nourish more than just the body.

I’ve made several other attempts to chronicle my personal perspective, but in each case they have fizzled under the weight of trying to say too much, to be too relevant. I opted to start this effort with red beans and rice because they are something about which I feel passionately, regardless of why or whether that passion holds any real significance for the rest of the world. They are important to me, and that’s all that matters as I embark on this effort to write honestly about my life, about my identity as a Southerner, about my relationship with food, about my family and my new home in the Pacific Northwest and about my lifelong dance with anxiety and how all of these various things are connected.

South Carolinians Matt and Ted Lee, TV show hosts and best-selling cookbook authors, launched their food empire by preparing boiled peanuts in their Lower East Side apartment because they were “homesick: for sea spray and sand and for something as soothingly simple as boiled peanuts.” So they went looking for raw peanuts in Gotham. To a similar end, I’m setting out on this adventure with a simple, modest goal: find the raw materials needed to bear witness, honestly, to this life I have been given.