Part 4 (1/2)
I was beginning to suspect that barbecue had become something of a hall of mirrors. Mitch.e.l.l himself seemed to embody the culture of Southern barbecue as reflected back at itself in the celebration of Southern barbecue by Northern food writers, professors of cultural studies, and the Southern Foodways Alliance, which had gotten behind Ed Mitch.e.l.l in a big way. This possibly explained his habit of speaking of himself in the third person (”And that's when the story of old Ed Mitch.e.l.l really began to spiral ever upward ...”). Mitch.e.l.l talked about The Pit as his new ”stage,” and how he and Greg Hatem were taking whole-hog barbecue upscale, and making it ”a little bit more trendy” while ”keeping it real.” The Pit had an executive chef, and I got the feeling Ed was doing a lot more talking than cooking nowadays.
Delivering his practiced patter, Ed was upbeat in the automatic mode of the salesman or evangelist. And yet I also detected a real sweetness in the man, a pa.s.sion for cooking for people, and, somewhere deep down there beneath all the talk about authenticity, the kernel of something that felt a lot like ... authenticity.
I asked Ed about the event in Wilson, which some of the PR people at the restaurant group had discouraged me from attending. Maybe it would turn out to be as boring as they promised (”I just have to warn you, it's a long hot day in a parking lot with a lot of sitting around”) or maybe they wanted to keep the focus on the restaurant, but to me it sounded perfect. Ed would be cooking a couple of hogs himself in his hometown, a.s.sisted by his younger brother Aubrey. He planned to start the hogs on the pit at his old restaurant Friday night, and then finish them in the parking lot Sat.u.r.day on portable cookers. I asked Ed if I could help out.
”I don't see why not. Come on down, we'll put you to work, show you how old Ed Mitch.e.l.l cooks whole-hog barbecue.”
When I showed up at The Pit Friday afternoon to meet Ed Mitch.e.l.l for the drive out to Wilson, the pit master was not in the kitchen. He was in the dining room, getting his picture taken with a customer, something that clearly happened all the time. Ed was a slow-moving bear of a man with the build of a linebacker (in fact, he attended Fayetteville State on a football scholars.h.i.+p), but a sixty-three-year-old linebacker, with a prosperous belly. His complexion was dark as coal, and his full-moon face was fringed in a nimbus of snow-white beard. Ed had on his trademark outfit-crisp denim overalls and baseball cap-and after finis.h.i.+ng up with the customer, he asked a server to take a picture of the two of us, with our arms wrapped around each other's shoulders like old friends.
On the ride out to Wilson in one of The Pit's catering vans, I got ”the Ed Mitch.e.l.l story,” complete with that t.i.tle. Listening to him tell his story was very much like deja vu. More than once, I could swear I had heard this exact sentence somewhere before. And I had-usually in one of the oral histories I had read before coming to North Carolina. The version of ”the Ed Mitch.e.l.l story” that follows draws on both those oral histories (especially the one done for Southern Foodways Alliance) and my own interviews with Ed.
Cooking barbecue had never been part of Ed's life plan, though because he was the oldest of three boys his mother, Doretha, had insisted he learn how to cook. She worked while he was growing up, first for a tobacco company, and then as a domestic in the home of one of the tobacco executives who lived in the grand houses on the west side of Wilson. ”I stayed home to cook for my brothers, and I hated it. Hated it! Cooking just wasn't something boys did. But I'm a mama's boy, always been, and Mama insisted on it.”
Cooking barbecue was different, however. It was something the men did on special occasions: at Christmastime and other holidays, and for ”the quarterlies”-family reunions. Ed remembers getting to cook his first pig at fourteen, and how he relished the privilege of spending long hours around the fire pit with the men of the family.
”Moons.h.i.+ne was always an important part of barbecue, because, you see, the men were not allowed to drink in the house. So this kind of whole-hog cooking that had to be done outside and went on all night long-well, that was just perfect for pa.s.sing the jar!” To Ed, the great appeal of cooking a whole pig was not so much the meal as the occasion it provided, for time around a fire, for talk, and for camaraderie. The food was almost incidental to the ritual work of producing it.
After a couple of years playing football at Fayetteville State, Ed was called up to serve in Vietnam, where he spent eighteen harrowing months. When he got home he finished his degree, graduating in 1972, and was recruited by Ford Motor Company to join a minority-dealer development program. After some training in Michigan, Ford sent him to Waltham, Ma.s.sachusetts, where he worked as a regional manager in customer service for twelve years, until the day he got word that his father, Willie, had taken ill. Ed decided to return to Wilson to help his parents out.
At the time, Ed's parents ran a mom-and-pop grocery story on the east side of town, but after his father pa.s.sed in 1990, business took a turn for the worse. Every day, Ed would escort his mother to and from the store, and he remembers coming by one afternoon to find his mother looking downcast. He asked her why. ”Well, I've been here all day,” she told him, ”and I haven't made but seventeen dollars, and twelve dollars of that was in food stamps.”
”I wanted to cheer her up, so I asked her, what did she want to eat for lunch? She thought about it and said, 'I know what I want. I've got a taste for some old-fas.h.i.+oned barbecue.' Well, I knew what that meant, so I went down to the Super Duper and I bought a small little pig, maybe thirty-two pounds or so, and I bought five dollars' worth of oak wood to give it the flavor I wanted. I pulled the old barrel cooker out of the shed, put the pig on, and gave it about three hours to cook. When the pig was done, I chopped it up, Mama seasoned it, and she and I sat down in the back of the store for a late lunch.
”While we were enjoying our barbecue, someone came into the grocery story wanting some hot dogs, which was something Mom and Dad offered. But when the man saw the pail of barbecue, he said, ”Mrs. Mitch.e.l.l, y'all got barbecue, too?” Mother looked over at me. I had my mouth full, so I couldn't speak, but I nodded, uh-huh. I figured what she needed was to make some money, so, yeah, sell the man some barbecue! She made the guy a couple of sandwiches and he left.
”When I came back that evening to escort her home, Mama was all bubbly, happier than she'd been in all the time since Daddy pa.s.sed. I asked her, why the change in mood? 'I made some money today,' she said. 'I sold all that barbecue.' Get out of here! But it seems the man had gone out in the community with his sandwiches and told somebody, and that somebody told somebody else, and the news got around like wildfire, until all the barbecue was sold.
”Anyway, as we were locking up for the night, a stranger came to the front door.
”'Mr. Mitch.e.l.l?' I thought maybe the man was here to rob us, so I put a little ba.s.s in my voice:
”'Yeah, who is it?'
”'Oh, I just want to know if y'all got any more of that barbecue.'
”'No, we don't have no more today, but we'll have some more tomorrow.' And that is how Ed Mitch.e.l.l got into the barbecue business. The good Lord had brought me right back to where I started, cooking for my mom.”
Within a few months, they had phased out the groceries and built some pits, and Ed had persuaded James Kirby, an elderly pit master in town, to come out of retirement to help man the pits and teach him the old ways. ”Because, by the late nineties, you couldn't find the kind of traditional barbecue we wanted to cook. It had died out when everyone switched to gas units. But there's a most definite distinction between wood- or charcoal-cooked barbecue and gas-cooked barbecue. You can taste the difference.” Mr. Kirby was a purist of the old school, committed to cooking with live fire, and he had a few tricks to teach Ed, including a technique he called ”banking.”
The first time he and Mr. Kirby put a big pig on to cook, Ed had figured they'd be up all night tending to the fire, so he laid in a supply of sandwiches and coffee. ”But after we got the pig on, and I was settling in for the night, Mr. Kirby got up, went to the door, and put on his hat. I asked him where he was going.
”'You can sit here all night if you want to, but I'm going home.' He explained to me that if you bank the coals right-place them strategically around the pit-and then shut down all the drafts, that pig'll sit there and simmer all night, without you having to add more coals.
”Well, I couldn't sleep a wink that night because I just knew that pig was going to burn down the store. But when I came back to check on it at four in the morning and opened the grill, I could not believe my eyes. It was the prettiest pig you ever laid eyes on! This beautiful honey color, and the meat was so done it was literally falling off the bone.” Mr. Kirby taught Ed the finer points of banking coals; he also showed him how to crisp the pigskin into crackling.
It wasn't long before Mitch.e.l.l's Ribs, Chicken & Barbecue had earned a reputation, and the national food writers and then the academics found their way to Wilson, a town of fifty thousand located on I-95, ”halfway between New York and Miami,” as the visitors' bureau likes to point out. The attention had a curious effect on Mitch.e.l.l, altering his understanding of who he was and what he was doing in a way that perhaps only an outsider bearing fresh context can do. A turning point came in 2001, when Ed read an oral history-of Ed Mitch.e.l.l-done by a historian named David Cecelski. The history here was Ed's own-Cecelski had taken down the skeletal first draft of the narrative you've just read-but reading it helped Ed to see his story in a new light.
”I did not fully realize that what I was doing-which to me was just old-fas.h.i.+oned barbecue, the fabric of our lives but nothing all that special-was really a part of the larger African-American story, of our contribution. And that felt very good.”