CHAPTER 9
Better Late Than Never
1910, Oklahoma enacted a grandfather clause that disenfranchised its black citizens on the basis that their grandfathers, as slaves, had not voted. What law failed to accomplish in ending black independence, power and manhood rights, whites achieved through fraud and violence . . . The black dream of Oklahoma became another southern nightmare.
WILLIAM LORENZ KATZ,
The Black West
Yet, what could have been an even greater soul trauma for black Texans ended as a magnificent celebration of la liberté, l’égalité, la fraternité, to borrow a phrase from our Haitian brothers who were also hoodwinked outa real freedom. It seems that the presence of Africans in Texas since the sixteenth century, our intermingling with northern Mexicans for no less than three centuries, and the illegal importation of thousands of native-born Africans from Cuba to Texas during the mid-1800s failed as legitimate reasons to announce the “freeing of the slaves,” also known as the Emancipation Proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln, September 22, 1862. While ignored throughout most of the Confederacy, enslaved Africans in Texas were deliberately kept ignorant of their new status until June 19, 1865, when General Order number 3, authored by a Major General Granger, was issued without much ado.
GENERAL ORDER, NO. 3
The people are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves and the connection heretofore existing between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor. The Freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.1
Imagine the impact of such a sweeping change in a territory where, by 1860, Africans were clearly a third of the Texas population. And imagine they did. Since they’d missed the end of slavery by two years, black Texans created their own Independence Day, June-teenth, which is still celebrated wherever black Texans and their descendants or admirers dwell, from oil-rich Alaska to the plains of Nebraska and Kansas. June 19 is a special day for us, a day of absence, we might say. A day of celebration.
Along with Mexican and mestizo cowpunchers, black cowboys and their women found ways of gettin’ together and amusin’ themselves that are still practiced today in far-off outa-the-way homesteads or urban cowboy enclaves from Las Vegas to Boise.
I haveta describe to ya a dazzlin’ feat tol’ to me by Dena Swayze, somebody who was actually there a couple of years ago in Colorado and whose attention to detail is truly astounding.
I was attending an outdoor trick roper and whip handler show, and the demonstration included volunteers. Let me tell ya, the handler pulled me out the crowd. There I was center stage, he’s standin’ there with two ten-foot whips to “tie” me up. He’s six feet from me, understand? Cracked the first whip, and used that momentum after the crack to wrap up my ankles! Did the same thing with the second whip, but this time he got my wrists, since my arms were stretched out. Now, here, this must make me a fool. I’m standing there, all tied up already, when he puts a piece of spaghetti in my mouth and a blindfold over my eyes. What people tell me is, he snapped the spaghetti ’bout two inches from my lip. I was blindfolded, so I wouldn’t flinch! Thank God.
The most spectacular arena was the rodeo where the wit, skill, and strength of real animals was challenged by black cowboys whose tradition in this arena was as old as their Mexican forebears. At least that’s what I discovered when I added barrel racing, pole bending, roping, bulldoggers, tie-down, and bronco busters to my emotional and physical regimen. Along with modern dance classes in Sunnyside, a miniature Watts in Houston, came the challenge of learning to ride against a clock, partner a two-thousand-pound animal in a rough but precise tango with the wind, or a mean turn on four legs, my head and my horse’s held proud, high, as expected of any Alvin Ailey dancer.
Rodeos provide the excitement and the time for women (usually, but not always) to prepare the finest barbecue of the season, while others demonstrate their prowess on horses with a mind of their own; the fires were stoked for traditional grilled meat from longhorn brisket to whole cabritos (young kids) spiked and rotating over a hot, smoldering fire.
Though just as the cry “There’s gold in them thar hills” echoed across the continental United States, so did the hum “There’s oil in them thar hills,” which changed how barbecues at rodeos were prepared. From empty oil piping, cut lengthwise, we developed a cooking machine where the heat could be controlled, the meat smoked and saturated in its own juices and wanton smoke not cloud the eyes of rodeo clowns seeking to protect a bulldogger trying to outdo Bill Pickett or a young barrel racer fighting the clock and the edges of upright oil drums. My good friend from Houston, Enomoyi Ama, describes one—or something like it.
We saw one of Ben Stevenson’s pits outside, chained outside, C. Anderson Davis’s Bar. This was a five-foot straight piece welded together. The other kind is made of two two-foot sections and one three-foot section welded together, so you got two different levels. An interesting thing is that only pin hinges are used to attach the top to the bottom where the pit is covered with steel mesh; this is where the food lays. With these pin hinges, there are no loose little things sticking out. And if you want to take the top off, the whole thing comes off in one piece. Your firebox goes up under the steel mesh. Well, you know that.
Texas Shredded-Beef Barbecue
Cut 4–5 pounds meat in regular-size pieces. Mind to trim off extra fat and wash well. Soak this in cold water. The next mornin’ hold your meat under cold running water (where possible) and Barbecue dry. Take all this and your seasonings to the rodeo. Set up your grill so you’re able to get a fairly high flame when you want. Heat ½ cup bacon fat and ½ stick butter (that’s right) and sauté 1 large chopped onion. When the onion starts to brown add pieces of meat and seasoning and cook over low flames to start. Stir, adding a few drops of boiling water from time to time. When meat is brown and tender, almost dry, put in your salt and 1 large chopped bell pepper and set in a heavy mortar to be pounded till meat is shredded. (You can also do this by running your beef twice through a food grinder.) Then add your sauce.
Before my father died, I managed to convince him to come see me race—pole bend and barrels—in Hitchcock, Texas, near Houston. It was a cloudy day, but I was fairly optimistic the rain would hold back and the ground’d be dryin’ out. It was important to me that my father, the progeny of Canadians and upstate New Yorkers, have some notion of the traditions of rodeoing that honored Bill Pickett, one of the greatest bulldoggers ever known, and his twentieth-century protégés. According to Melvin Glover, recognized as a living legend by the Go Black Texas Committee of the Houston Livestock and Rodeo Show in 1997, the rules for bulldogging haven’t changed since Pickett’s time, nor has the event diminished in danger or excitement. “Well, ya still can’t step in front of the steer. Ya gotta turn him and throw him, so that all four feet stick straight out, cain’t be curled underneath or anything like that. And ya gotta do this within sixty seconds.”
At any rate, the rain did hold, but the ground was soaked, so as to be dangerous for riders and animals alike. Nevertheless, there was plenty of barbecue to be had. Before we had to put a slab of plywood under the car to get her movin’, Daddy did snidely remark, “Oh, I can make better barbecue sauce at home [New Jersey].” I came back with a quick jab. “Maybe so, but it won’t be Texas beef.” I didn’t get to race barrels for my daddy that day, though I tried to explain the rules and skills to my very eastern father—the rules as I learned them from none other than Melvin Glover, my walking cowpuncher encyclopedia. I went by the handle the Gypsy Cowgirl, which suited my poetic side, I thought. Anyway, Glover forever reminded me that (1) if I knocked over a barrel, that was an automatic five-second penalty; (2) if I broke my pattern, I was simply disqualified; (3) in some rodeos, if my horse or I came in contact with the barrels, there was some kinda penalty for that, too. So, insteada bein’ able to concentrate on my prowess as a barrel racer and pole bender, Daddy got a dizzyin’ delight, just thinkin’ about his sauce.
Daddy’s Barbecue Sauce
Add 1 can tomato paste to 2 cups orange juice with the pulp, ¼ cup Worcestershire sauce, and 3 tablespoons A-1 sauce. Then simmer over low flame. Get ⅓ cup Black Jack molasses or ½ cup brown sugar. Put that in there. Add salt and pepper to taste, 1 medium sautéed onion, 1 large hot pepper or 2 small sweet peppers. Let that sit for a while. Just before you add your meat or pour over your meat (in the case of ribs, shrimp, salmon, chicken, fluke, or bluefish), sling a dash of bourbon, red wine, or a golden tequila in there just for the hell of it. It’s important that folks don’t feel a need to add something to my sauce. Let the sauce cook with the meat (on it) until it becomes a part of the meat and doesn’t slide off or peel off. That’s when you can serve it.
I never revealed to my father that we can flavor the fire with mesquite or tequila as well as other herbs, which work just as well to season the meats and vegetables with a magical taste; makes you think that’s how they come naturally. Plus, my father missed the discovery that meat from longhorn cattle, ostrich, and buffalo is lower in fat, more tender, and just as good as something you didn’t hunt yourself.
What’s amazing to me, though I guess it shouldn’t be, is that our compatriots in Trinidad and Tobago used these same oil barrels that we use to barbecue to make steel drums, ranging in tonality from tympani to well above high C, from which emanate Beethoven or the Mighty Sparrow, the calypsonian.
To make your steel pan you need a 45-gallon oil drum, a sledgehammer, a small hammer, metal punch, ruler, compasses, and chalk. The unopened end of the oil drum is “sunk” with the sledgehammer, deeper for the higher drums and shallower for the cello and bass pans. The position of the notes (around the perimeter and in center) is outlined with compasses and chalk and then beaten out with a hammer and tempered with fire and water. The final tuning is carefully done with a small hammer and a rubber-tipped playing stick.2
So, as David Rudder says, “It’s a pan man’s war,” or in my case a barbecue war, followed by hours of dancing, either the Trinidad and Tobago Jump-Up or the Texas Two Step. Though no rodeo is real rodeo, calves, no calves, food, no food, without the legendary line dance the Cotton-eyed Joe, which does resonate with the ring shout, swing, and square dance. Our people rode with Billy the Kid from the Northern Plains down past the Mexican border. Rufus Buck’s gang rivaled the Daltons in misdeeds and daring; further south in the Caribbean, we produced C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, intellectual renegades. So what we eat fueled all that. That’s a cue to me ’bout what to keep in my kitchen, ’round my oil-pipe barbecue as I wiggle to the pan man and make my good sense fall down to the under the ground.
I didn’t know all of this when I first started going to Texas in the mid-seventies to work at the Equinox Theatre; I was in a state of awe. Even more so than when I’d driven across country, stopped in Amarillo, found a café with a real cinema, real red-and-white-checked tablecloths, and a waitress who looked like Karen Black with a South Philadelphia Italian girl’s version of Brigitte Bardot’s classic hairdo. I immediately turned to walk out, but the waitress entreated me, in a sweet voice only southern women have mastered, to please stay for lunch. I did, while looking vigilantly for Klansmen or the bikers who shot Peter Fonda. I musta misunderstood the very kind Texas woman because I was totally unprepared for chicken-fried steak. All I knew about was chicken fried like chicken or fish fried like fish, but not one animal fried like another kind of animal. At any rate, I didn’t send this “new” dish back to the kitchen, where a husky black guy was obviously waiting to see how much care he’d invested in my meal. No indeed.
I was raised to experiment with taste and sound, thus my interest in music, language, and food, but more importantly to never turn my nose or chin up to any kinda food that anybody ate. First of all, who was I to do such a thing. Secondly, they must like whatever they’re enjoying eating. So it was a matter of respect. I had my first chicken-fried steak in Amarillo in June of 1974, thinking I was experiencing what Blanche Boyd might call a white-trash classic. To my surprise, the longer I stayed around and about the Southwest, with my relatives or on my own, chicken-fried steak is one of those things everybody does, like New Yorkers of any nationality can tell a Hebrew National hot dog from Oscar Mayer. It’s a simple concept. However, there is a “colored” way to make yourself a chicken-fried steak. I am now goin’ta share my way with you.
Chicken-fried Steak
I believe in using choice pieces of meat, though that’s not always Chicken-possible or necessary. Anyway, with a decent piece of sirloin steak that’s been tenderized by piercing with a fork or pounding, cut vertical slits in the rim of fat along the edge so your meat won’t curl up. If you want to be really fancy, this meat can be marinated in Worcestershire sauce, red wine, or a mesquite-tinged hot sauce. Meanwhile, fix a batter of milk, eggs, flour (you can add crushed pecans or walnuts to the same batter we use to fry okra—see page 75), salt, and pepper. Dredge your meat on both sides in the batter in a thick-bottom frying pan, the old-fashioned kind, I guess. Your oil should be hot so that a sprinkle of water sizzles. The same problem that confronts you when you are frying chicken appears here. We don’t want the crust of the meat to brown too quickly, before the meat is done. That requires you to mediate the range of the fire ’neath your pan with some focus. I like my meat rare, so my steak is in and out as soon as the crust is a fine brown. I don’t know what to tell you if you want your meat well done. I imagine you’ll be at the stove a bit longer.
I’m including chicken-fried steak that goes wonderfully with grits and cheese or for late supper with creamed spinach and mashed potatoes and cheese because African-American settlers who might have followed men like “Pap” Singleton to Kansas or gone to Oklahoma and West Texas were hunters, and serious beef eaters, like most ranchers are. Therefore, a fine meal is a fine meal, whether the homesteader is black or white. It’ll just taste different ’cause we’re different.