FOREWORD

I’m sitting down to write this foreword on the day after my favorite event of the summer—the Grady Fish Fry in the Hardin pecan grove in Grady in Lincoln County.

For the fifty-ninth time, the Grady Lions Club put on an event that drew people from all over southeast Arkansas, not to mention the fact that it attracted seemingly every politician in the state. It was hot and humid, in contrast to what has been an unseasonably cool summer here in Arkansas, but the crowd seemed bigger than it has been in recent years. The fried catfish, fries, hushpuppies and sliced watermelon were as good as ever. And there in the thick of things, taking photos and talking to people, was Kat Robinson. Kat seems to be everywhere when it comes to chronicling the state’s food culture.

Like me, Kat doesn’t hail from the Arkansas Delta. Also like me, she has an affinity for this historic part of Arkansas, which has been losing population since at least 1950. There’s something that captures your soul when driving those back roads of the Arkansas Delta, and often the attraction is food.

My favorite barbecue in Arkansas? Craig’s in DeValls Bluff. My favorite catfish in Arkansas? Murry’s, near Hazen. My favorite tamales in Arkansas? Rhoda’s in Lake Village. My favorite plate lunch in Arkansas? The Pickens Commissary in Pickens, which is just south of Dumas. My favorite place to hang out in a restaurant’s back room and swap tales with hunting buddies? Gene’s in Brinkley. I said my favorite summer event is the Grady Fish Fry, so my favorite winter event? The Slovak Oyster Supper in southern Prairie County.

All of these places are in east Arkansas. And I’m from southwest Arkansas, though I have roots in the east, since my mother grew up along the lower White River in Des Arc. When it comes to eating, give me the Delta. Give me a lunch at Rhoda’s Famous Hot Tamales, where Rhoda Adams has been turning out Delta-style tamales for almost four decades. Her husband’s aunt asked her to try making tamales, and the rest is history. Rhoda is the mother of fifteen children, only eleven of whom survived to adulthood. She has almost sixty grandchildren and great-grandchildren, some of whom she has never met. Business executives have been known to fly private jets down from Little Rock just to have lunch with Rhoda and then take several dozen tamales home.

Give me a Friday night supper of catfish cooked by Stanley Young at Murry’s on U.S. Highway 70 between Hazen and Carlisle. I began patronizing the original Murry’s in DeValls Bluff when I was a child. My grandparents lived in Des Arc, and we would often make the short road trip from the Prairie County seat in the north to the Prairie County seat in the south in order to consume mounds of catfish at Murry’s or barbecue at Craig’s.

When I was in my twenties, there were times when I would load up the car with hungry friends for a trip to DeValls Bluff. We would have a pork sandwich at Craig’s (with medium sauce, since the hot sauce is a bit too hot for my taste) for an appetizer and then drive over to Murry’s for catfish. I miss that rabbit warren of trailers that housed the original location, though I always had the feeling when eating there that a grease fire in the kitchen would quickly incinerate us all. While the current location doesn’t have the ambiance of the old place, the food is as good as ever, maybe better. And Becky Young is the best hostess you’ll find anywhere.

Give me a plate of barbecue at any number of places in the Delta, the strongest barbecue area of a good barbecue state. The barbecue is pork here (beef has crept over from Texas into parts of southwest Arkansas), though the sauces vary from place to place. At Craig’s, you’ll walk into the ramshackle building and immediately be asked if you want your barbecue sauce mild, medium or hot. The crowd is a mixture of locals, hunters from Little Rock and Memphis when it’s duck season and those who were wise enough to get off crowded Interstate 40 and find their way to DeValls Bluff.

In Marianna, meanwhile, Jones’ Bar-B-Q Diner, the winner of the James Beard Foundation’s American Classics Award, can be found in an old house in a residential area. Jones’ has been around since at least the early 1900s. While it’s hard to determine the exact year it opened, there are some historians who believe it’s the oldest continuously operated black-owned restaurant in the South.

Up in the far northeast part of the state, you’ll find five or six good barbecue joints in Blytheville, a fact that led me to proclaim it the Barbecue Capital of Arkansas.

Yes, the Delta is a place apart. To me, the Grady Fish Fry represents all that is good about the Delta—a sense of history, community, continuity and place. Good friends, good food and helping others.

I checked my old calendars and was able to determine that this was the eighteenth time in the past nineteen years that I’ve been in Grady on the third Thursday in August. The only fish fry I missed during that stretch was a decade ago. I was Governor Mike Huckabee’s representative on the board of the Delta Regional Authority (DRA) at the time, and we were interviewing candidates in a Memphis hotel that day for the job of DRA chief operating officer.

The fish fry is like something out of a movie about the South—the convicts in their prison whites waiting tables, the prison band playing, the politicians making the rounds. If you have any doubt that the South still lives, all you have to do is show up at Ned Hardin’s pecan grove on the third Thursday night in August one year, and all doubts will be erased. They start serving the fish at 4:00 p.m. and stop at 8:00 p.m. In between, hundreds of people make their way through the lines, loading their paper plates and watching the amazing hushpuppy machine (constructed years ago from salvaged farm equipment) drop batter into the hot grease, two hushpuppies at a time.

Kat has done a real service by capturing so many Delta restaurants, events and traditions, many of which likely won’t exist a decade from now. The economic trends, unfortunately, are working against these places. I see nothing on the horizon that leads me to believe that the population shift in this state from the east and the south to the north and the west will slow anytime soon. Most Delta counties have been losing population since the end of World War II, when the mechanization of agriculture meant that thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers were no longer required. Monroe County, which includes Brinkley and Clarendon, lost a larger percentage of its population between the 2000 census and the 2010 census than any county in Arkansas—20.5 percent. This trend is not confined to the Arkansas Delta, mind you. Rural America now accounts for just 16.0 percent of the nation’s population.

Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau put it this way: “Some of the most isolated rural areas face a major uphill battle, with a broad area of the country emptying out. Many rural areas can’t attract workers because there aren’t any jobs, and businesses won’t relocate there because there aren’t enough qualified workers. So they are caught in a downward spiral.”

In his 1997 book Rising Tide, which chronicles the Great Flood of 1927 of the Mississippi River, author John Barry closes with rumination on societal changes: “A society does not change in sudden jumps. Rather, it moves in multiple small steps along a broad front. Most of these steps are parallel if not quite simultaneous; some advance farther than others, and some even move in an opposite direction. The movement rather resembles that of an amoeba, with one part of the body extending itself outward, then another, even while the main body stays back, until enough of the mass has shifted to move the entire body.”

So it is in the Delta of east Arkansas. There have been no sudden leaps forward following decades of economic decline, no giant automobile assembly plants, no ethanol boom, no discovery of vast oil and gas reserves. But there are many talented people, including those who run the region’s restaurants, who are taking those “multiple small steps” forward, hoping that the steps will result in a better life for the people who live in this historic, culturally rich part of the state.

Delta residents are among the most resilient people in our country. The Delta experienced the Civil War, Reconstruction, yellow fever and other epidemics. Then came the Great Flood of 1927. Just as the region was beginning to recover from the flood, the Great Depression began in 1929. Another flood covered the region in 1937. Much of the rest of the nation began to prosper again in the years immediately following World War II. Thanks to the GI Bill, thousands of veterans became the first members of their families to attend college. Following college, they married, bought homes and purchased automobiles. The steel industry boomed. The automobile industry also prospered. In the Delta, though, the mechanization of cotton farming and the evils of segregation drove thousands of people—African Americans and poor whites—out of the state. Men and women who had once worked as tenants on the plantations of east Arkansas were working, in the years after World War II, in steel mills and automobile factories in places such as Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago.

One only has to drive through rural east Arkansas during the Christmas holidays to see the automobile license plates in the driveways from Illinois, Michigan and even California. These are the children and grandchildren of people who left their native Arkansas in search of better opportunities.

During the past decade, the Delta has done a better job of attracting those drawn to heritage tourism. Blues tourists come to the region to pay homage to their blues heroes, eat pork barbecue and then head home. For far too many of those who actually live in the region, though, the blues are all too real. If they have a job, the chances are that their wages are low. Too often, their health is poor and the education their children receive is not up to par.

But the Delta matters. The best-known American music has its roots in the region. The Delta counties on both sides of the Mississippi River have supplied our nation with many of its finest statesmen, writers and chefs. And there’s the unique ethnic mix. In addition to the African American culture, there are the Italians who came to the region as sharecroppers and the Jews who settled along the Mississippi River as merchants. The Chinese came to build railroads and sometimes stayed to run businesses. Across the Delta, one can still find grocery stores with names such as Fong and Wong. The Lebanese and Syrian merchants added to this fascinating cultural stew.

The sharecropping era, when hundreds of people flocked to Delta crossroads communities each Saturday night, ended long ago. For many Arkansawyers with roots in the region, the Delta is no longer the place they call home. It’s instead a charming place to hunt, fish, experience the blues and eat out before returning home to Little Rock, Fayetteville, Fort Smith or Texarkana. We cannot allow this part of our state to become nothing more than a hauntingly beautiful but increasingly deserted museum piece. The Arkansas Delta and the gracious people who still call it home deserve better than that. Thanks to my friend Kat Robinson for capturing an important part of their story.

REX NELSON

August 22, 2014