Classic Eateries of the Arkansas Delta

No one knows just how old Jones’ Bar-B-Q Diner is, but Mr. Harold Jones says the recipe goes back 150 years or more. His grandfather and uncle made and sold barbecue from the same recipe he uses today. Everyone agrees that the place was open in 1910, so we can at least surmise that the Marianna staple is past the century mark.

Harold Jones’s grandfather used to go downtown on Saturdays and sell barbecued pork from a washtub, what folks called the Hole in the Ground. On Fridays, he and Jones’s grandmother would sell it out the kitchen door of their home on the corner of California and Florida Streets.

Jones himself has been in the business since 1968, in what started as a little one-story building on Louisiana Street. The flat-topped building was constructed in 1964. He says, “I was fourteen years old when they let me outta school when there was too much to cook. Me and my brother got out of school to do it.” Over the years, add-ons were built, including a second story where Jones sleeps when he’s not home with his wife, Betty.

Every day he gets up and opens at 6:00 a.m. Every day it’s all gone before the lunch hour is over. Sometimes it’s gone by 11:00 a.m., depending on who’s come to town. “Back in May, there were judges who came down to Memphis, to the big cookoff up there, and they’d ask,” Mr. Harold told me, “‘Where’s the best barbecue around here?’ And these guys, these guys who were cooking off, they’d say, ‘You have to go down to Marianna,’ and they came.

“The governor, he sent me an autographed photograph,” he continued, waving his hand toward the wall by the guest book, where a smiling image of Arkansas governor Mike Beebe looks out into the diner. “Day he came in here, he brought a whole lot of people. They packed in like sardines, but everyone was havin’ a good time.”

Every day it’s still three dollars a sandwich, six dollars a pound. Sandwiches are made on Sunbeam white bread, always the same—lay down the plate or aluminum foil, put down a slice, heap a mound of pork on it, drizzle on the thin sauce, dollop with sweet coleslaw, top with another slice and wrap. When there’s not someone waiting, Jones keeps making them. He wraps each one in foil and deposits it in an electric roaster.

Butts—pork butts, that is—are put on a wire rack in a makeshift pit about eight by sixteen feet. The rack looks just like the inside of an old-style box-spring mattress. The coals come from a fireplace that is a half century old or better; hickory and oak burned down until they gleam red on black from the gray ashes shoveled into the pit. That’s the only heat the meat will get—the slow heat from hot wood and hot charcoal. A plywood cover on a pulley goes down and the meat smokes.

There’s not much more to it than that, except the sauce. Jones doesn’t let anyone know the family secret, not even his wife. It’s stored in a variety of vessels—gallon jugs formerly used for other items along the back of the kitchen and sixteen-ounce water bottles for handing out with big meat orders.

Out in the dining area, there’s a guest book. It’s a little yellowed, but it’s still somewhat new; the smoke probably colors it a bit. Flip the pages, and you’ll see a random smattering of places beside the names—Stuttgart, Arkansas, right before London; New York City; Yemen; Alaska; Memphis; San Francisco; Beirut, Lebanon; Israel; and even Japan—a collection of handwritten testaments from travelers the world over who have come to this little two-top diner that’s not even on the main highway of a small town in the Arkansas Delta.

We got into town at 10:20 a.m. on a Saturday in July, sure the barbecue was already gone. I could already smell the place before I turned off Alabama Street.

Grav had never been, but I had—several times, in fact—which is only equaled in strangeness by the fact that I can’t eat what Mr. Jones sells. I’m allergic to pork. Still, I’d been selling the idea of the place to my photographer for a few days, and when we got out of the car, I knew the sale was closed. Grav started popping around shooting the exterior with an urgency of needing to taste what he was smelling. I’ve rarely seen that in humans—it’s usually reserved for cats hearing the sound of an electric can opener.

Harold Jones waits at the window for orders inside Jones’ Barbecue Diner in Marianna. His James Beard American Classic award hangs above. Grav Weldon.

It’s not that I haven’t experienced the sauce. The day Arkansas Pie: A Delicious Slice of the Natural State came out, Kim Williams brought up Mr. Jones’s good meat. It was Second Friday Art Night in downtown Little Rock, and the Historic Arkansas Museum (hosting not just my signing but another and debuting a Delta art show) was feeding folks his barbecue and fried pies in celebration. Kim also brought along a couple whole smoked chickens, and Grav and I had our share bare-fingered in the upstairs catering kitchen with a little squirt of sauce here and there, quickly consuming what we could before folks started showing up. It was as fulfilling as any fine dining experience.

When we got inside, Grav was full of questions—which was good, since Mr. Harold (I’ve just started to think of him that way, since that’s how Kim refers to him) is quick to answer them. Recognizing the guy with the camera in hand as a newcomer, he stepped out of the kitchen and started talking. He reached up with one hand and plucked a box off the wall above the kitchen window, a black shadowbox frame with a ribbon and a medal in it.

It was his James Beard award. That’s right, the only place in Arkansas to actually receive the Oscar of restaurants is a little, white two-story barbecue shack in the Delta. Mr. Harold used to just pull it out and hand it to folks and show it off before Kim got him the box.

Before the spring of 2012, no one could imagine such an august award for the place. They just knew the barbecue was good, cheap and consistent. Since the nomination, Mr. Harold has been profiled by CBS Sunday Morning, talked with reporters from every variety of press and broadcast and welcomed visitors from Paris, London and Japan. It’s not uncommon for journalists and bloggers to pop in unannounced. He takes it all in stride.

Here he was answering questions he must have answered thousands of times by now, from yet another guy with a camera. I just took notes and watched.

After showing off the medal and replacing it on the wall, Mr. Harold stepped back into the kitchen, answering even more questions along the way. He stepped back to the counter and proceeded to make another sandwich—foil, bread, ’cue, sauce, coleslaw, bread, wrap, roaster. He began another—foil, bread, ’cue, sauce, coleslaw, bread, wrap, roaster, as automatic as you please.

When I finally got a chance to get a word in edgewise, I handed Mr. Harold a five-dollar bill and asked if he’d make one for Grav. He handed me change and a sandwich and nodded to the refrigerator in the dining room and said, “Get that boy a Coke.” I did, and by the time I turned around Grav had half-inhaled the sandwich. I just saw a grown man fall in love. It was a beautiful thing.

I heard Grav say something he doesn’t usually say. He will tell someone their food is the best in the area, or one of the best things he’s eaten that day, but rarely will he utter words like these: “Your barbecue is about the best I have ever had.”

His sandwich gone, he wiped his hands, grabbed the camera and looked for more to shoot. He had Mr. Harold hold the medal and shot him, had him stand in the kitchen and peer out the window and shot him again. All the time, Mr. Harold continued the story, one told many times but always with pride.

A young woman opened the door and peered in. She noticed me standing there, and Grav and the big camera, and hesitated.

“I wan’ a sannich,” she called back, finally sliding in and closing the door behind her.

I could see him making the sandwich the entire bit of conversation, not taking his eyes off her until he went to squirt on the sauce. He paused a bare second to hear whether she wanted the slaw, and when she answered, the slaw plopped down on the meat and the bread was slid on over. It didn’t take him but a second to wrap the sandwich and pass it out of the kitchen. She handed him her three dollars in the same motion and was back out the door.

He led us through the kitchen to the back of the building to see where the barbecue is smoked. Being now lunchtime on a Saturday, the smoking had ended for the day. Three younger men were sitting around on chairs and an old van bench watching a white television set showing—I kid you not—It’s a Wonderful Life. One of the guys got up and showed us the pit. I marveled at the interior of the back screened-in section. Decades of smoke had turned the ceiling a deep-charred black, but not just the ceiling—the walls were dark and stunk of sweat and salt. A windowpane was stained with brownish-red flamelike flanges where the smoke had intruded. And it smelled. It smelled like I hope heaven smells.

He chuckled. “I’ve eaten so many over the years, sometimes I might eat one, sometimes I might not.”

Back in the restaurant itself, we were making our farewells when one of the regulars came in. He grinned and offered testament himself: “I was telling him the other day I ate his father’s barbecue, and every time someone comes in with a camera, he goes and raises the prices!” Both men laughed; the prices haven’t gone up in a long time, and Mr. Harold Jones isn’t giving any indication that they’ll change any time soon.

Marianna lies at the crux of two great national byways—Crowley’s Ridge Parkway, which goes north up and along the ridge that divides the Arkansas Delta in half; and the Great River Road, which hopscotches a number of state highways and country roads here and passes through nine states on either side of the Mississippi. There aren’t many restaurants in Marianna these days, just a few little spots here and there. But back in the 1920s, it was where Bulgarian immigrant George Petkoff and Macedonian native Tanas Tripp Traicoff started the National Baking Company, which would later move to Helena and become the Royal Baking Company. Marianna’s status as a crossroads in the heart of the Delta made it a good jumping-off point for the research on this book, not just because of Mr. Jones, but also because of the many highways that spiderweb out from the hub, just off the Mississippi River.

Where to go first? Grav and I decided to make our way south on Arkansas Highway 1 to see what we might find. Of course, the first classic restaurant on this path happened to be Alton Brown’s only Great River Road stop in Arkansas, at a little dairy diner that never expected the attention.

How long has Ray’s Dairy Maid been around? Long enough for Ray to not be anymore, and long enough for the place to have well established itself as a standout must-stop on the trek to Helena–West Helena each year for the King Biscuit Blues Festival. Locals recall rolling in from Marianna and up from as far as DeWitt and farther to have a bite. Some even remember a similar restaurant, Ray’s Kool Freeze, in nearby Marvell.

“Nana” Deane Cavette at her restaurant, Ray’s Dairy Maid in Barton. Kat Robinson.

Today, Deane Cavette, a second mother to many of those who come by, runs the place. Though Frommer’s recently stated she’s been serving food there for more than fifty years, I don’t believe that for a second. Deane is a lot of things, but ancient she isn’t. She has an energy to her that glows from within.

Some of the confusion over when she started serving might come from how Deane started out. She began working at the family restaurant, the aforementioned Ray’s Kool Freeze (opened in 1955), when she was fourteen. Back in those days, some Arkansas restaurants were still segregated, with split dining rooms. Deane told me, with an ounce of shame, that this was the case at the Cavette family–run restaurant. It was a different time, we both agreed.

Ray’s Dairy Maid established itself as the local spot for Barton teenagers and families way back in the 1950s. When it came up for sale in the 1970s, Deane bought it and kept the name.

I talked about Ray’s Dairy Maid in the pie book; I’ve dreamed of it any time pecans come to mind. More than once, I’ve found a reason to divert my travels from wherever I was planning to go to sweep by, duck into the dining room to check the pie case and then order at the window. In fact, on this particular trip through the Delta, despite being quite full from Pasquale’s Tamales (which I’ll tell you about in a few pages), we stopped in, parking at the business next door because there were more than three dozen cars in the lot. Grav shot the interior, where there wasn’t a single spare table, and I counted the slices. And then, greedy person I am, I ordered both of the slices left of the pecan coconut pie.

The pie didn’t make it back to Little Rock. In fact, it didn’t even make it to the fork, with each of us swiping chunks off our slices with our fingers from their white clamshell boxes as we headed down the highway.

Pie is not all Ray’s Dairy Maid serves, though, if you’d believe the press (and you might because of that Feasting on Asphalt appearance), it might as well be. Ray’s is also a true and dedicated drive-in, with good burgers and plate lunches and a killer breakfast. The shakes are gobstoppingly good: thick and packed with just enough extra chocolate or fruit in them to make you shut up and enjoy the ride when you’re headed down the road, which we did.

Phillips County is named after Sylvanus Phillips, who first arrived on the land in 1797. It was carved out of a Spanish land grant in 1820 and given his name. The town of Helena, incorporated and named in 1832, bears the name of his daughter, who had died at the age of fifteen.

The port town was founded seven and a half miles south of where the Saint Francis River converges with the Mississippi, at the tail end of Crowley’s Ridge. It became the largest Arkansas town along the big river before the Civil War. In 1862, a Union military unit under the command of Brigadier General Samuel Ryan Curtis took control of the city and constructed a fort. Confederate forces tried to storm the garrison on July 4, 1863, but were pushed back and defeated. You can visit several Civil War sites in the town today, including the garrison at Fort Curtis.

Before and after the war, Helena served as the main stopover point between Memphis and Vicksburg on the river. Cotton was king, and the port saw its share go out from the plains beyond the swampland. Lumber was also big, with logs being floated down the Saint Francis to several different lumber manufacturers that set up shop in the city, making everything from furniture to wagon parts to barrel staves.

The bustling city brought in immigrants who came up through New Orleans, looking for a jumping-off point to start their new lives in the New World. Sicilian, Italian, Bulgarian, Greek, Lebanese, Syrian and Chinese folk settled in Helena, joining established residents. Germans passed through on their way to settlements at Stuttgart and Ulm, and Swiss travelers went on to Barton and Hicks. Jews journeyed onward from the port to Jonesboro, Blytheville, Pine Bluff and Wynne. Mexican nationals came north to work the fields after the Civil War, while black Americans were able to find footholds in city government and leadership. The Helena of 1900 was a vibrant, multi-national melting pot of cultures.

Restaurants and groceries flourished for decades, including legendary spots such as Alvin Solomon’s Helena Wholesale Dry Goods, Paul and George Garofas’s Busy Bee Café, Tom Nick’s People’s Café, the Garofas family’s Bell Café and Etoch Habib’s eponymous café, which became famous for shipping fruitcakes nationwide.

In the early part of the twentieth century, developers began building northwest of town. In 1907, this new area was connected by a trolley system to the port. In 1917, the new city of West Helena was incorporated.

Sadly for both towns, the lumber manufacturing base was smacked with two problems—the development and expansion of automobiles (which eliminated the need for new wooden wagon parts) and Prohibition, which meant an end to the need for beer, whiskey and wine barrel staves. Both towns began a slow decline that would continue throughout the century.

On January 1, 2006, the cities merged into one, and Helena–West Helena was born. You can still tour downtown Helena, starting at the Delta Cultural Center (where the King Biscuit Hour, hosted every weekday by the legendary “Sunshine” Sonny Payne since 1951, is held) and passing by the buildings along Cherry Street that once housed many of those old restaurants. Sadly, few classic eateries remain in business. Still, one dining experience endures, thanks to the third generation of a Sicilian family that’s responsible for the development of a Delta staple: the Arkansas Delta tamale.

Every Friday and Saturday morning, a white trailer appears alongside U.S. Highway 49 in Helena–West Helena bearing a simple banner: TAMALES.

Throughout the day, cars pull up. Scents waft on the breeze, full of corn, beef and spices. While the trailer is new, the scent is ancient to the settled Delta. If you were to go to the window of the trailer, you would be greeted by Joe and Joyce St. Columbia.

The tamales are Joe’s grandfather’s recipe, but Joyce is the reason they’re still being sold today. The tamales and the way they are made are a particular Arkansas Delta tradition, something that dates back more than a century.

Joe St. Columbia’s grandfather Peter came to America in 1892, leaving behind his wife and only son in Cefalu, Sicily, to find his fortune. He landed in New Orleans all but penniless and got a job cutting sugar cane for fifty cents a day. He kept up that hard work until he had enough to buy passage up the Mississippi River.

He made it as far as Helena. Joe says it’s possible his grandfather ran out of money. He was just the second Italian to make it to Helena, a town already full of Greeks, Germans, Lebanese, Chinese and Jews also seeking a better life in America. Peter looked for things he could do to make money. He was a smart man who could find his way, and by 1897, he’d made enough marketing wares and doing odd jobs to bring over his wife and son for a visit. They came through Ellis Island and then from New York by train—$300 for the entire journey. When they arrived and saw how well Peter was doing, they decided to stay.

He was able to pick up languages easily, and his Sicilian dialect of Italian wasn’t so different from the Spanish spoken by the Mexican families who sent men to the fields to work cotton. He got to know many of them well, and they shared gossip and recipes. He taught them pasta making and Italian dishes, and they taught him how to make tamales. The tamales they made would include anything from chicken to pork to goat. They were the perfect portable meal to carry in the field, and they kept warm in a pocket. Since they were already packaged in corn husks, they had their own biodegradable container.

The recipe Peter put together for the Arkansas Delta tamale was a little different from what he was taught. Instead of the other meats, he used only beef, good cuts that were lower in fat, a finer ground mesa and plenty of spices. These he’d take out to the fields and sell to other farm workers.

The St. Columbia family prospered in the New World. Peter peddled wares, drove a taxi, ran a grocery store and made some investments. By the First World War, they were doing well, and he and his son, Sam, built and bought properties in downtown Helena. The Depression came about, and they still did just fine since Sam and Peter had never trusted the banks. While those around them lost their shirts, Peter managed to keep ahold of their properties and businesses and purchase more. As Joe related to me, it wasn’t uncommon to hear people speak of the St. Columbia family as such: “Don’t those damn [Italians] know how tough finances are, spending all that money?”

Sam’s thought on the matter was: “If I do well during the Depression, when there’s no more Depression, I’ll be rich.”

Around this time a couple, Eugene and Maggie Brown, approached him about renting out one of his buildings. They wanted to open a restaurant that sold soul food, sandwiches and pie. Sam saw he had a building that would just sit empty otherwise, and renting to these folks seemed a good investment. So he agreed to let them use the property on one condition—they had to use his recipe to make tamales. They did—altering it just a little bit.

The combination of a Mexican dish, recreated by an Italian and produced by an African American family as soul food created the Arkansas version of the Delta tamale. The Elm Street Tamale Shop took off, and it became quite well known, with folks coming out of the woodwork to get theirs. The couple did well, selling the tamales alongside other soul food like turnip greens, pig ears and sandwiches. They also built a pushcart and took it around from one juke joint to another on Walnut Street, with the chant, “One for a nickel, three for a dime. Sell a lot more, but there just ain’t time.”

The folks that ran the Elm Street Tamale Shop did well, and their kids grew up and headed to Detroit for jobs. The shop stayed open through World War II. Eventually, the couple died of old age, and Joe’s two brothers bought it. They ran an Italian deli in the same spot for ten years, while still serving those tamales.

Joe, on the other hand, went into the insurance business and then into the ownership of a beer business he ran for some twenty-odd years. When his brothers folded up, that was it for tamales for a while. But there was a day when Mammie Davis (Joe’s maid) and Joyce, Joe’s wife, got a hankering for tamales. They got out the old recipe and started working those tamales and made a mess of them. Joe got home and had some, and they were good. Joyce said there was a real need for these tamales and they should start making them again. So they did, in the kitchen at the beer factory. Long story short, Joe restarted the business, except this time, it was all about making the tamales. His daughter-in-law, Rhonda, had done research and had found that Joe’s dad, Sam, had the original first name Pasquale, which Sam hadn’t cared to share because it sounded so foreign. Thus was born Pasquale’s Tamales.

Joe got a factory going. The operation started off first as a hand-crank deal, with a lot of labor involved. Then the St. Columbias purchased a mechanical extruder and conveyor belt system, and they started making tamales in batches of 2,400.

They started a restaurant that sold Italian dishes alongside the tamales. They worked like mad, putting in eighteen-hour days. Tamales got hot in the region again, and they just kept going and going, until Joyce had a heart attack. Joe came to the realization that, although the tamale factory and the restaurant were going strong, both took a lot of their time and effort. And as Joe puts it, “all the money in Phillips County wouldn’t be worth it without her.”

The dust settled. Joe sold the tamale factory to a guy who—well, he had a heart attack, and Joe bought it back. He pared the operation back a lot. He stopped doing mail-order sales of tamales, got the cart and just did tamales two days a week, on Fridays and Saturdays.

And that’s where you’ll find them today, alongside U.S. Highway 49, usually selling every tamale they have before the day is done.

It’s no wonder. There are no preservatives in these golden tubules of gastronomy—er, these tamales. They’re made from finely ground cornmeal, chopped sirloin, fresh garlic and onion and a plethora of spices, steamed in corn husks and served hot. Everything’s all-natural—no fillers, no lard, no bull. Well, of course, there’s the sirloin.

It used to be that every single tamale was hand-wrapped in a corn shuck and tied with a bit more corn shuck that had been tied together, which was very time-consuming. One day, Joe came up with the idea of using a kitchen-friendly product similar to an elastic band like you use to pull back your hair. It’s usually used to truss chicken legs, but Joe found it worked just as well for tying tamales. The corn shucks? Still tucked tight. Now the tamales are extruded, shuck-wrapped and tie-banded. They’re cooked up together in what becomes the most amazing juice imaginable, a soup of spices and the flavors of corn, cornmeal and beef all together. When you order a sack, you get a cup of the juice to take with you. Just pull the tamales out of the box, put them in a dish and soak them in the juice. They’re just as good as when you pick them up from the stand.

They are so good, in fact, that longtime Arkansas TV personality Chuck Dovish, back when he was the Travelin’ Arkansas guy for Channel 11, told the audience that the tamales were “shuck-suckin’ good.” “You have to be real careful saying something like that,” Joe told me. From that segment, the tagline of “suck the shuck” was born, and folks around here know you’re talking about Pasquale’s Tamales when you say those words.

Helena is the birthplace of several famous musicians, including gospel maven Roberta Martin, blues legend Willie “Big Eyes” Smith, Grammy award–winning baritone William Warfield and the “High Priest of Country Music,” Conway Twitty.

Of the many restaurants that dot both sides of Helena–West Helena, few local eateries have survived the twenty-year mark. Of them, only one makes any major claim to a flavor tradition.

That place is the Burger Shack, a tiny little drive-in serving umpteen flavors of soft-serve, a smattering of burger-and-fry combinations and, as the signs on every side boast, the Best Coke in Town. Open since the 1960s, it’s not unusual to find a line of cars snaked around the corner as patrons patiently wait their turn at the window.

Yes, I have tried the Coke. Yes, I think it probably is the best in town. It has a sparkly, crisp, slightly citric bite that recalls the good days of Coca-Cola before all this “new” mush came about.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In a single photograph of one little spot along U.S. Highway 49 in the little town of Marvell you’ll find 100,000 sighs, the sighs of generations of hungry Arkansawyers, wishing again for a time that was and will probably never be again.

The photo would be that of a little paint-faded building beset with lean-tos, its screen doors shut for good and an aging wreath adorned with black ribbon tied to a handle. The wreath has been there since a couple days after the death of Wayne Shadden on May 21, 2010.

Shadden was the proprietor of a restaurant inside an old general store, a place that bore the name Shadden’s Bar-B-Q. It has been oft reported that the place started out as a combination of barbecue joint and gambling hall, and that a $500 fine and a year in jail convinced Shadden to just concentrate on the ’cue.

The scent of pork butt smoke would pull you right off the road. If you hit it right and the gravel lot wasn’t full of cars, you were in luck. You scooted past the guys sitting in chairs outside (if it wasn’t hot as the devil and sometimes even if it was) and the big old freezer out front and through those screened doors. Inside you could get a burger, but you should have ordered the barbecue, sliced. The mild sauce was spicy, the hot nigh unbearable, and all of it meant to be consumed with an ice-cold beer. The sauce, by the way, was the contribution of Wayne’s wife, Vivian, to the two-handed sandwiches.

As of this writing, it’s been closed for four years, and since the Shadden kids all live out of state, chances are it’s never coming back. But you can still enjoy the barbecue sauce. The recipe first appeared in the cookbook High Cotton Cookin’: A Collection of Southern Country Recipes, published back in 1978 by the Marvell Academy Mothers’ Association.

Sauté the onions in butter and oil until tender. Add the other ingredients, mix well and cook for 30 to 45 minutes over medium heat.

The great restaurants that hang on do so only because they’ve managed to make things work. But not all survive. Driving south from Marvell down Arkansas Highway 1 shows that. In DeWitt, Sahara’s Family Restaurant has been up and running since 1981, but the fantastic melty cheeseburgers at Irene’s are a thing of the past, and the old Don’s Catfish is now used for karaoke (though Pat and Donald Vansandt’s granddaughter, Lizzie Stubblefield, had a self-named place of her own on the downtown square for a while). You can still get a bite off the buffet at The Willows, or you could end up at Troy’s Drive In.

Troy’s is just another old-fashioned dairy diner. Its Facebook page simply calls it “an old joint with good food,” and that’s pretty much it—great fountain drinks, hamburgers and fries, soft-serve ice cream. Nothing decadent.

Keep heading down Arkansas Highway 1, which the Great River Road follows, and you’ll eventually end up at a little town with a nationwide reputation. For one night in January each year, it’s the center of the political universe.

Gillett is a town of just 691 people along Arkansas’s Great River Road. It’s a small community built around agriculture and southern tradition. But on one day each year, the town doubles in size in the first act of a year’s political drama. Every Arkansas politician of any renown has come through Gillett at one time or another, including the most famous of our native-born sons.

This is not that story. As Alton Brown so succinctly put it, “I’m here for the food.”

To talk about Gillett’s Coon Supper is to reference not one event, but two. The larger event happens each year as it has every year since 1933 (except during World War II) in the old high school gymnasium. The smaller event began in the 1970s. There was a gentleman who lived across the street from that high school; he and his wife would open their home for a party each year before the get-together. That young man eventually decided to run for office, and the party became a political fundraiser. When Representative Marion Berry came home from Congress, the party became a different sort of fundraiser—one that sends two Gillett high school seniors to college each year. The party remains a part of Arkansas tradition, though now it’s held on the Berry Farm rather than in the house in town.

We came into the Arkansas County town from Stuttgart via DeWitt with the singular direction, from my friend Gabe Holstrom, to “follow the Berry signs.” Down a gravel road, still somewhat slick from rain, way out into the verdant and soggy plain of an Arkansas field planted in the past year with corn, a right turn past a rice paddy, a left turn onto a road headed out to a set of outbuildings. There were cars parked side by side near what appeared to be a hangar. Outside, three men tended a smoker while two young boys threw rocks into a puddle.

My daughter, Hunter, had come along for the ride, and she played shy with the kids while I made introductions and found my direction. The men were lording over long skewers of bacon-wrapped meat in the chilly air.

It was 3:30 p.m. on the dot. Concerned that we would be late to the party, we’d arrived on time, and within the hangar there was just a scattering of people tidying up the last minute details. These included making sure sponsor banners were in place, the bar was fully stocked and a long table was loaded with food. Each item appeared to have been brought by someone local. There were cubes of cheese; thin slices of salami and smoked ham; a duck prosciutto; homemade pancetta, naked-looking and soft; vegetable trays; fruit trays; a spread of crackers and a cheese ball; and that strange blob of cream cheese covered in sauce you see at any gathering these days. There was a large cooler of peeled and deveined shrimp with sauce, a pile of soft rolls and a roaster full of venison stew packed with onions, carrots and potatoes.

And then there were the meats—not the deli meats but the hearty, bone-sticking meat you’d expect to sustain one through winter. From the smoker came pork butts, which the ladies in the back would break open, shred and platter. There were big links of sausage too. And there were Duck Bites. The Arkansas Delta, after all, is known for its duck. Nearby Stuttgart is the Duck and Rice Capital of the World, and the season was still underway. These appetizers were the skewered bacon-wrapped parcels on the smoker I saw coming in, containing parmesan-breaded jalapeno-stuffed slices of wild duck that were only pulled when they started to char.

Gabe had told me these would go quick—and they did. Though there might have been fifty pounds pulled from the smoke, they went quickly into the mouths and onto the plates of the individuals who came to the line. When they were gone, they were replaced with fall-apart smoked turkey and chicken.

At 4:08 p.m. on the dot, the crowd swelled in, first individuals pulling up in their own vehicles, and then the crowd that came aboard the Little Rock Tours bus. The empty farm hangar went from hollow echoes to a solid block of sound in seconds. Through the door they came, man and woman, a collection of suits, padded vests and ties and young men bearing campaign stickers for every flavor of Arkansas politician. Amongst the politicians and business leaders, there were folks with camera and pad in hand, like me, jostling about. The journalists, the TV crews, the newspaper folks and the radio guys, we found ourselves suddenly surrounded by subjects. Interviews commenced left and right as fellows clapped one another on the back, and young ladies giggled. Cameras beeped as the crowd filed in and filled out. The room became so loud a coherent conversation between any but the most able lip-readers was conducted in a series of smiles and nods.

And then there was a break, as if the crowd had simultaneously reached the moment to take a breath or a swig of a beverage. At the door, there was a rustle and former congressman Marion Berry came in the room. A swarm of people formed the most disorganized circular line in an effort to get a chance to thank him for his hospitality.

The governor was there. ABC and MSNBC were there. A progressive-country band was playing in the corner, providing a soundtrack for the whole mess. Some 220 people turned out for the pre-supper party, and the resulting crowd brought around $20,000 into the scholarship fund. This particular gathering could be considered nothing but a success. But, as I said, I came for the food. Soon enough it was time to head for the other event.

We arrived at the former Gillett High School a few minutes before 6:00 p.m. There weren’t a lot of people in town at that point, and we were able to park in the lot. I hustled quickly over to the gym door with Hunter, jogging a bit to get there as I saw the glint of metal. I had expected to see cooking on the premises, but I realized at that moment that the cooking was already done.

What I was seeing was a line of men, young and old, wearing white aprons. They were darting back and forth from a truck into the building with aluminum trays of food. They were swift and organized, passing through the double doors into the gymnasium’s hall in shifts. I snapped a few shots and tried to keep out of the way.

Inside, two ladies sat at a table offering caps, ties and T-shirts by the main door to the interior. Across from them, a uniformed man stood at the ticket counter. This was for people to claim their tickets—the dinner had been sold out for weeks.

Within, the finely orchestrated work had begun. The tables were already set with commemorative glasses, Styrofoam plates and numbered programs, eight hundred in all. On both sides of the gym, there were tables in the low concrete bleachers along each side. A musician was warming up on the stage, and there were places set right next to it as well. Every inch of space was taken.

The men worked in teams. Shifts of aluminum tray–carrying guys went to tables, where they set deep tins of coon, ribs and brisket. Others functioned in sets—one man holding a tray of sweet potatoes while another dolloped out a serving on each plate. The same went for the cakes, rolls and rice. They were working as fast as they could—the doors would open promptly at 6:30 p.m.

Each setting was identical: a plate filled with sides, a glass with a cup inside and tins of meat. What was different was what sat next to the rolls: a slice of cake, each different but all individually wrapped in plastic—golden vanilla, chocolate Bundt, chocolate-iced (not frosted) vanilla, peanut butter, chocolate-iced chocolate, strawberry, spice, carrot, cream cheese–topped butter cake. There were so many varieties. The cakes were all made by ladies in town, who sliced and wrapped those pieces before handing them over to the Farmers and Businessmen Club, which oversees putting the Coon Supper together. Everything at the Gillett Coon Supper is donated or sponsored.

Then there’s the coon. Do people really eat raccoon at the Coon Supper? Why, yes they do. Originally, just raccoon was served—two thousand pounds of it for up to twelve hundred people. Over the years, that has changed. No longer is the eating of the coon something that political candidates needed to gobble like a freshman’s fraternity hazing. No, today baby-back pork ribs and beef brisket are also offered—thanks to Jennings Osborne. The beloved Arkansas philanthropist sponsored the dinner for many years, bringing in his epic grills and smokers and serving up barbecued meats alongside the coon. Osborne passed away a few years ago, and the Farmers and Businessman Group managed to find other sponsors.

The coon is harvested by people in the community who set traps for the furry mammals. For a couple months before the event, a stand alongside Arkansas Highway 1 offers $1.68 a pound for each one brought in. A normal-sized raccoon will garner three to four pounds of meat. In 2014, seven hundred pounds worth of raccoon was trapped, purchased and smoked.

By this point in the evening, a line started to form outside, and the other journalists were arriving to find their spots. Many sought politicians such as Senator Mark Pryor, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, former congressmen Asa Hutchinson and Mike Ross and current (as of this writing) Representative Tom Cotton. But Arkansas politicians weren’t the only lawmakers on the guest book. Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois, Angus King of Maine and Joe Donelly of Indiana were in attendance—all three guests of Senator Pryor. The Gillett Coon Supper might as well be a mandatory campaign obligation for any lawmaker planning to make it in Arkansas. Governor Beebe says this Coon Supper was his thirty-second.

Tables line the halls from one end to another with just enough room to pass by inside the Gillett High School gymnasium for the annual Gillett Coon Supper. Grav Weldon.

The mayor himself welcomed people into the gym and pointed them toward their seats. Each row of tables sat fifty to a side, and helpful volunteers ushered folks into place.

So what did the coon taste like? I’ll let Grav tell you: “It starts out nice and smokey, but there’s too much smoke, and then it’s just something I’m not sure I should have in my mouth.”

Hunter, at the brilliant age of five, described it thusly: “It tastes like ash. I mean, like it’s already burnt.”

Raccoon, in my opinion, is best served stewed or soaked well in broth with dumplings. It’s wild meat of course, gray and a bit stringy. To say it’s an acquired taste overstates the obvious.

I happened to catch sight of the governor as he came in laughing. He was telling a reporter from one of the newspapers that this was likely his last Coon Supper, since his days in office were nearly over. Governor Beebe gets this crowd, though, and he did his own measure of chuckling as he shook hands and posed for photographs. His tenure here may be long, but it’s not unprecedented. I met one gentleman who’s been coming for fifty-six years, and a lady who had attended or cooked at the supper for more than sixty. I also met beauty queens who squeamishly nibbled at their perfunctory piece of coon meat, grimacing for the cameras; young boys who relished the adventure of eating as many animals as possible in one sitting; and young men attending with their camouflaged-and-booted girlfriends. There was far more talking than eating, for sure. But there was indeed eating taking place while hands met and flesh pressed, a night of eating, listening and a whole lot of talking.

There’s no alcohol served at the Gillett Coon Supper (unlike the Berry Farm party) for a multitude of reasons, which I’m sure have a lot to do not just with community preferences, but also the lack of places to put up those that might need to sleep it off (the Rice Paddy Motel has just fourteen rooms). But there’s really no need to lubricate tongues in a crowd like this.

We left before the crowd could exit en masse. For six blocks around the school there were cars lined up on both sides of the road, with barely a car’s width in between to squeeze through. Past the parking, the town was quiet and empty, block after block of silent homes lit by streetlamps and the ancient Christmas decorations still lining the roads.

Gillett is a town of just 691 people. Its school only offers classes from kindergarten through the fifth grade. Older kids go to DeWitt schools twelve miles away. It’s as flat as a pancake, and its downtown is a collection of lonely buildings without tenants, save the local bank. But the sign on Arkansas Highway 1 says it all: Welcome to Gillett, Home of Friendly People and the Coon Supper. And for one day each year, it’s the center of Arkansas.

1–2 cups sliced jalapeños (number needed will vary based on size of breast)

Slice duck breasts into bite-sized pieces, roughly 1 inch wide by 1–2 inches long. Marinate in Dale’s Seasoning Sauce for 30 minutes. In bowl, combine breadcrumbs and Parmesan cheese. Roll each piece of duck in the mixture. Slice the bacon into 3 inch pieces. Drain the jalapeños. To assemble: wrap each piece of duck around a piece of jalapeño (and pepperjack cheese, if using), then wrap in bacon and secure with a toothpick. Cook in a preheated oven at 350 degrees or on grill at medium heat until internal temperature of the duck reaches 155 degrees. Remove from heat; the meat will continue to heat up for a few minutes. Serve with special remoulade.

I mentioned the Rice Paddy Motel and Restaurant. Locals just call the eatery the Motel. Inside you’ll find good country cooking, a seafood buffet on Friday nights and good Delta catfish any day of the week.

I talked with town historian John Cover about the place. Though he was just a child when the motel and restaurant opened in 1957, he can tell you a bunch of things about it. For one, the motel used to just have four or five rooms and the restaurant was far more diner than country buffet. You could go in and sit on a stool at the counter and have yourself a cold drink or a sandwich, back in the day.

The Rice Paddy was built and started by Johnny and Herbert Holzhauer and their father, John. “Papa John” might have been the one to name the place.

“Papa” John Holzhauer once planted a small paddy of rice in front of the Rice Paddy and Motel in Gillett. Grav Weldon.

“I do remember,” Cover told me, “right out in front, around the main sign, still the basis of the sign today, Papa John plowed up a little place about twenty feet wide and forty feet long and grew him rice there every year. And Papa John took care of the rice. Of course, every field around it had rice in it too—we’re out here in the middle of rice country. We had a little rice paddy for the restaurant and motel.”

The motel and restaurant survived, thanks to traffic along U.S. Highway 165 after it was paved and to the workers from river projects over several years. From 1963 to 1969, there were skilled men employed in the big McClellan-Kerr Arkansas River Navigation System project; in the 1990s through 2002, construction was completed on the nearby Montgomery Point Lock and Dam at the mouth of the White River. Today, during the hunting season, hunters coming through the area keep the Paddy hopping. But any time of year, you’ll find it filled with locals seeking a plate of catfish or a burger.

The Great River Road follows Arkansas Highway 1 down from Gillett on south. It passes Arkansas Post, originally a trading post established in 1686 by Henri de Tonti, an Italian-born French explorer. It’s also the site of the very last battle of the American Revolution. By the end of the eighteenth century, the post, formerly favored by French fur traders, had become a Spanish holding. The Spanish were allies of the Revolutionary forces. On April 17, 1783, a force of roughly one hundred British-allied white and Native American volunteers attacked the Spanish garrison of Fort Carlos III at Arkansas Post. Remembered as “Colbert’s Raid,” the battle ended in a Spanish victory, thanks to a bold defense waged by the soldiers holding the fort.

Unlike the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Natchez Trace Parkway and other nationally designated roads of this nature, the Great River Road is not monitored by the National Parks Service. Instead, it’s a collection of existing roads mostly updated to parkway conditions. Originally conjured in 1938 and designated a national scenic byway in 2005, the series of roads from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico offer leisure travelers a chance to see sights of historical, cultural and geographical interest along its length.

Most of the Great River Road in Arkansas lies along established two-lane and four-lane highways. However, there are stretches that utilize neighborhood streets. A small section that runs concurrent with County Road 239 north of Helena along Crowley’s Ridge remains unpaved. For more information about the Great River Road, check out Arkansas.com/GRR. For a map of the entire route, go to ExperienceMississippiRiver.com.

The post became part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and in 1819 Arkansas Post was selected as the first territorial capital of Arkansas. The state’s first newspaper, the Arkansas Gazette, was printed there in 1819 (today the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is considered the oldest newspaper west of the Mississippi River).

Fort Hindman, a Confederate fort, was built on the peninsula out into the Arkansas River early on in the Civil War. It was overcome by Union forces during a two-day barrage on January 10 and 11, 1863.

Today, two parks mark what’s left of Arkansas Post—a national site commemorating the American Revolution, the Civil War and Arkansas’s first capital and a state park that preserves the history of life in the Delta and the Grand Prairie. For more information, check out nps.gov/arpo.

Arkansas Highway 1 crosses the Arkansas River at Pendleton, where a tiny mobile home community has sprung up under the bridge. This was once the home of Pendleton Sandbar, a friendly little restaurant serving fishermen and river rats looking for a bite.

Just south of Back Gate, Arkansas Highway 1 diverges southeast from U.S. Highway 165, which continues on to Dumas. Two lanes of blacktop pass by fields of cotton and soybeans, rustic farms and rural houses, down to the community of Watson.

Once a thriving small town, there’s not much in Watson any more. Even the railroad tracks are gone, replaced by a growing asphalt path that will one day link Lexa and Helena–West Helena to the north with Dumas to the south. The Union Pacific Railroad donated for park use what will become Delta Heritage Trail State Park once it’s complete, covering nearly eighty-five miles, making it the longest state park in Arkansas.

If you were to follow that trail northeastward, you’d eventually come to the Arkansas River and the Yancopin Bridge—a nearly mile-long abandoned railbridge. An old lift span on one end now sits permanently anchored in the down position, since the river’s shift over the years have left nothing but sand under it. One of the middle sections is a swing span that is opened to allow taller boats and logging barges through. It’s situated twenty miles upriver from the Mississippi, at the location of a former community called Yancopin that replaced the town of Napoleon when it was swallowed by both rivers. Yancopin was never incorporated. It got its name from either the corruption of an old Indian word (chinquapin) or from the old Yankee holding area there, the “yankee pen.”

Watson is home to a post office, a liquor store and a single restaurant with a blue-painted aluminum façade and a Coca-Cola sign marking Bonnie’s Café.

Watson isn’t really near anything, unless you count the Rohwer War Relocation Center National Historic Site a few miles to the south. For Watson, though, Bonnie’s is the heart of the community. Since 1985, owner Bonnie Davidson has been serving breakfast and lunch six days a week to the folks who come through the door.

Bonnie Davidson’s place is decorated with old saws, maps and other items from around the town of Watson. Grav Weldon.

We dropped in one Thursday morning, were greeted kindly in the almost empty restaurant and were told we could have breakfast or lunch. There was no menu, just an ancient, age-yellowed board on the wall. Our hostess brought us massive Mason jars of beverages and took our orders, and we quietly waited while she went to the back and got things started.

The day’s average patrons dribbled through. It was too early for a full lunch but not too early for pickups. A guy the hostess called Lee came in. Before he was halfway to the register in the back, she started to holler: “Mayo and ketchup, right?” He nodded, and she continued, “Fries ain’t done yet, it’ll be a few.” Lee gave her a nod and a gesture and went out front to sit on one of the two van benches located to either side of the front door.

“About twenty-five years now,” she hollered back, continuing to work on our meals.

A younger lady, perhaps in her forties, came through the doors and entered the middle of a conversation. I caught “she done died up in the hills. She was ninety-six years old, never did have no kids.”

I looked back out front where Lee was waiting. I saw him get up and turn to come inside. The hostess met him halfway across the room with a couple white sacks. He nodded and turned out. I have no idea if any money was exchanged.

The Rohwer War Relocation Center was a World War II Japanese-American internment camp located in rural southeastern Arkansas, in Desha County. The camp housed, along with the Jerome camp, some sixteen thousand Japanese Americans from September 18, 1942, to November 30, 1945, and was one of the last of ten such camps to close. The Japanese American population had been forcibly removed from the West Coast of America under the doctrine of “military necessity” and incarcerated in ten relocation camps in California and various states west of the Mississippi River. Its internees include Star Trek actor and LGBT activist George Takei. The World War II Japanese-American Internment Museum, located in nearby McGehee, commemorates the camp’s existence and the individuals held there.

I’d no more than jotted down a few notes about the exchange when our lunches arrived. Grav’s lunch special was a smothered country-fried steak, potatoes and great northern beans, the former two doused in a somewhat-thin brown gravy, all of it steamy and smelling like a country kitchen. The beefsteak was crunchy and fork-tender, lovingly and lightly spiced with salt and pepper and maybe a little seasoning salt. It was a generous hand-sized portion, about one-half-inch thick. The potatoes were hand-mashed; the beans were slow-cooked and buttery, and I snuck some off his plate. Our hostess noticed when she came to deliver a hunk of cornbread and a biscuit, and she brought me back a bean bowl of my own.

Not that I needed more food. The one-third pound flat-smashed patty on my burger was crusty from the griddle and glued to the top bun by a single slice of American cheese, like what you’d get at a drive-in restaurant. Still, I ended up sneaking Grav’s cornbread off his plate to pinch into my beans. It was soft and yellow, slightly sweet and buttery.

Our hostess came out and asked about dessert. Both of us refused at first, but she told us she’d bring us a small piece. She returned with a corner slice of buttermilk cake, a basic butter cake, similar to a pound cake, with a little cinnamon and that tang you only get with buttermilk. I ended up eating every bit.

The Great River Road splits at Back Gate, with the westward branch sliding over to Dumas via U.S. Highway 165 and the eastern branch following Arkansas Highway 1. They meet again in McGehee on U.S. Highway 65. South of town, rolling fields are criss-crossed with bayous, all the way down to Lake Village.