If you don’t live in eastern North Carolina, and you’ve heard of Ayden, it’s because of barbecue. More specifically, it’s probably because of the whole hog barbecue at Skylight Inn. When somebody from Seattle or Sweden plots a barbecue pilgrimage to Pitt County because they saw Skylight on a television show or a barbecue best-of list, we have my grandfather Pete Jones to thank.
Pete Jones started building Skylight Inn when he was a teenager. At the time, he was working at the City Cafe, a country cooking place with whole hog barbecue run by Emmitt Dennis, one of Pete’s uncles, in downtown Ayden. Emmitt taught Pete how to cook barbecue. While working for Emmitt, Pete also had plenty of responsibilities on the family tobacco farm. He was expected to be a part of the labor workforce, and that farm wasn’t a big moneymaker. It was there to sustain the family. The family grew, and the mayonnaise doesn’t spread but so far on the bread. In an effort to do better for his family, he went to the other side of town and opened Skylight.
At this time Pete’s brother, Robert, worked for another family member also selling barbecue. He was Emmitt Dennis’s brother, John Bill. Pete and Robert were as close as any two brothers I’ve ever witnessed. They became partners in the farming operation, and once the restaurant picked up, my grandfather needed to have less responsibility as it pertained to the farming aspect. They became business partners in the restaurant as well. Robert would tend to the farm, Pete would tend to the barbecue joint, and they’d split everything evenly.
Skylight Inn opened July 8, 1947. Barbecue was his main squeeze, but Pete had hamburgers, hotdogs, and whatever else a burger joint might have on the menu. With two other places selling barbecue in town to compete against—his uncle Emmitt’s City Cafe and his other uncle John Bill’s place downtown—he needed to set himself apart. Pete never drank, but Skylight served beer, had a jukebox (which also played through outside speakers), and was open as late as 11 p.m. I’ve heard stories of my great-grandmother firing a shotgun in the air from her porch across the street and shouting, “It’s time to shut it down.” Young couples and fellas with their mistresses would park behind the restaurant, and they weren’t there for the barbecue. One could say it was a bit of a wild place in the beginning.
Pete was ready to build a dance hall out by the pack house, sort of beside the restaurant. He had it staked off and everything. Both of my great-grandmothers on this side of the family were churchgoing women, and both of their husbands were drunks. As I said earlier, granddaddy never drank, but he didn’t attend church back then. The preacher came out to see him one day to tell him the dance hall wasn’t the right thing to do. If I had to bet, it was something along the lines of how that dance hall would upgrade his ticket to hell to first class. Ole Pete told the preacher that he wouldn’t tend to the church’s business, if the preacher would let him alone to tend to the barbecue business. That was right before my dad got run over the second time. We’ll get to that story in a minute, but it gave my granddaddy a change of perspective. He never did build the dance hall, and by the late 1950s, Skylight stopped selling beer. In 1971, the town of Ayden issued a curfew due to civil unrest, so Skylight started closing up at curfew, 7 p.m. It was then that Skylight Inn ceased being a late-night hangout spot and became a full-fledged barbecue joint.
The original smokehouse was a cinder block building with a dirt floor. The pit was made of regular brick, and it had just a small chimney. A big day back then was three hogs, and hundred-pound ones at that. That’s about all that would fit on the pit. They raised their own hogs in the early years, and not because they wanted to be trendy. They were farmers. They were raising them anyway, so might as well cook the ones they had.
Thus far it may seem they lived a nostalgic country life. The Joneses did not have that life. My granddad had a wife and two children, a brother with a wife and four kids, and a sister and brother-in-law with one. The significance of me telling you this is because at one point, each family lived in the same house that Pete’s mother fired that shotgun from. My dad’s bassinet was a dresser drawer by day. They had nothing, but it wasn’t because anyone was lazy—they were just dealing with hard times.
There were an especially bad six years when my father was just a kid: six years of bad harvests, six years of little rain when the crops needed it, and too much when they didn’t. Then there were the enormous medical bills from my dad’s close brushes with death as child. I’ll let him tell you about them in his words:
I’ve been run over twice. I was four the first time. I was riding with my granddaddy on a two-ton truck, standing in the seat with a balloon hung out the window. The door came open when he turned the corner. I fell beneath the truck and the back wheels got me. I broke everything on the right side of my body—arm, ribs, leg, and foot. The doctor fixed me up. I was in a body cast for months.
The second time I was seven. I was holding hands, as our mothers told us to, with my first cousin Jeff. We were crossing the street to get to Skylight. I was just ahead of Jeff, and I didn’t see the car. Still holding hands I got hit at one driveway and got knocked down to the next driveway. Jeff did not. It was worse than the first time. We didn’t have a rescue squad. The hearse from the local funeral home carried me to the hospital. The funeral director, Jimmy Farmer, told my daddy, who was not a church man at the time, “Get anybody who knows how to pray, I’d get them started. I don’t think your boy will make the ride to the hospital.”
I made it to the hospital. The doctor told daddy, “I can’t set any bones until he regains consciousness, and I really don’t think he’s gonna regain consciousness.” Mr. Farmer, who had picked me up in his hearse, sat there all night long. Daddy told him he appreciated it, but there was no need in him staying at the hospital, but he said, “Pete, I don’t mean to be ugly or cruel for you, but from what the man said, it would be a waste of my time to go to Ayden and have to turn around and come back.” I didn’t get back in that hearse. The same doctor that fixed me up at four did it again.
The doctor told daddy, “Now, we’ve done the surgery on your boy. It’s been a success, but in the long run, this boy is not going to be able to walk the cement floor. He’s going to have to have a sit-down job.” My daddy told him, “There ain’t no sitting-down jobs in the barbecue pit or the farm. Sorry.”
It took a long while to heal, but I laugh when I tell people now. I’m sixty-seven, still walking the floor of the barbecue place. There’s been no sitting down on the job.
My granddaddy Pete and his brother Robert weren’t selling enough barbecue to cover for the tobacco losses. All the businesses in the community would let their neighbors buy on credit. This was the norm for our area, as there were so many who farmed. They would just carry your bill all year, and you made sure to pay up after the harvest came in. Pete was no different and had to negotiate that. Pete would go to these places and say, “Look—I don’t have any money. If you work with me, I’ll make it right.” He had to do that for six straight years. Pete eventually paid his debt, but it’s crazy to think that Pete owed these folks for six years.
For six years asking the men who owned the fertilizer company for more credit. Mr. Thelbert Worthington, who owned Worthington’s Five & Ten, allowing clothes and school supplies to walk out the door with the Joneses, yet they had no money to pay. McDonald Edwards, who ran Edwards Pharmacy, allowing medicines for all those kids, one of them crippled, to be prescribed with nothing in return. Pete didn’t pay those people a dime in those six years, but they still carried him.
When I started working at Skylight Inn, three or four guys would pull up by the back door in their nice car on Saturday mornings. My granddad would make somebody, oftentimes me, stop what he was doing to go see what those guys wanted. I did it one Saturday, and a guy in a Cadillac wanted two pounds of barbecue and a piece of skin, which we do for nobody. I was thinking, “There’s a line of people inside. Why do I need to stop working to go out here to provide this special service?” Pete said, “Get the man whatever he wants.” Then, we didn’t even charge him.
Pete wasn’t known for doing anything extra for customers when we were busy. He put paper trays of slaw in to-go bags because he was too cheap to buy a container with a lid. He would actually argue with you if you just wanted to change your order, so I was wondering, “Who is this guy?” It bothered me enough to ask my dad. He told me the man I carried food to was McDonald Edwards who used to own Edwards Pharmacy. (I still get my prescriptions there today.) Another gentleman was Thelbert Worthington who owned the five and dime. These were the guys who carried Pete through those rough years.
It was this community that allowed Skylight and the Joneses to survive, which gave us the opportunity to thrive, and for the Skylight name to become a legend. Well, maybe for Pete Jones to become a legend, anyway. There are still customers who call it “Pete Jones Barbecue,” and he’s been out of the business since 2004. I reckon they may not even know it’s called Skylight, which, admittedly, isn’t a name that exactly screams “barbecue.” It came from a local pilot who flew over the place while it was under construction. He observed from above these apparent holes in the roof. This was obviously a question he needed answering, so after he landed in the small airfield behind the property, he walked over and asked my granddaddy if he had planned to put skylights in the roof. A conversation was had about it, and somewhere in this exchange, the name “Skylight Inn” was born. At least that’s how the story has always been told to me. Then again, our family stories aren’t short on embellishments.
The last photo of Pete Jones at Skylight Inn, taken two weeks before his passing.
The Pete Jones mantra: “If it’s not cooked with WOOD it’s not BBQ.” He didn’t mind saying it, because that’s exactly what he believed, and more than a little bit strongly. The haphazard piles of split oak wood out behind Skylight are a testament to that. We go through it too quickly to bother with stacking.
The mantra was at the front of Pete’s brain when some out-of-towners walked through the door in 1979. They were from National Geographic. A writer, Thomas O’Neill, and photographer Ira Block were trekking across the country stopping in small towns researching for a book that would be named Back Roads America. O’Neill wrote that the day they visited Skylight Inn they were on “a search for the best barbecue in eastern North Carolina.” When they told Pete of their quest, he simply said, “You’ve come to the right place.”
He explained to them the importance of wood cooking and demonstrated it by having an employee fetch a plate of gas-cooked barbecue from a nearby restaurant. There was no comparison. “So I called off my search,” said O’Neill, who was so thoroughly impressed with granddaddy’s whole hog that Skylight was his only stop for barbecue.
If you’ve researched the history of Skylight Inn, so much of our story is wrapped up in that visit from National Geographic. Every explanation of the silver dome…oh yeah, there’s a silver replica of the US Capitol building on top of Skylight’s roof. Pete built it four years after National Geographic declared Skylight Inn the “capital of barbecue.” Years ago, you would hear me telling the story often, and so many reporters have repeated it that it might as well be fact. My dad will tell you that Pete never boasted about his barbecue until National Geographic called it the best in the country—except they never really said that.
To understand how significant the National Geographic mention really was, remember that back in 1979, pork fat was the enemy. It was surprising that anybody wanted to do a story about pork barbecue. When the folks from National Geographic came in, I think it was probably the first experience of anybody from outside the area giving a damn about Skylight. As with the first customer at a child’s lemonade stand, my grandfather shifted to into sales-pitch mode. I say that because ole Pete handed them a shirt with “AYDEN, BAR-B-Q CAPITAL OF THE WORLD” printed on the front. Meaning, he was so certain of his own barbecue he had printed a shirt before National Geographic ever walked through the door.
I know he received a copy of the book, Back Roads America, when it came out. Due to Pete not being able to read, somebody, most likely my grandmother Lou, would have had to read it to him. The words “Bar-B-Q Capital of the World” are printed on the page, but only to repeat the boast on Pete’s shirt. No matter what the book really said, it changed everything. It had been a long time since day one in 1947. This was the first blip for him on anyone’s radar. He, and the family, had worked every day, all day, and finally someone noticed.
The local newspaper reported on the newly minted barbecue capital. Pete Jones was heralded as a barbecue king. It was now his job to make it true, and he did. The wood fires never ceased, and new customers looking to knock him off the throne would be their own judge. They couldn’t argue after a bite of Pete’s barbecue. As he told People magazine in 1989, “If a man has but one item to sell, it has to be good.” With wood-cooked whole hog and a little exaggeration, Pete built his own kingdom, one persuaded customer at a time.
Pete’s inflated claim of barbecue dominance also lit a fire in my dad. Bruce, who by then was working full time at Skylight, learned of the 1981 Barbecue Bowl taking place in Washington, DC. One North Carolina representative was challenging another from South Carolina about which state had the better barbecue. North Carolina’s representative was Gene Johnson from Greensboro. Bruce called him to share the National Geographic story, or at least the story as recounted by Pete, and told Mr. Johnson that Skylight needed to be part of the Barbecue Bowl. Here’s how Bruce told it to me:
I called Gene Johnson in Greensboro and I said, “Mr. Johnson, I understand y’all are having a barbecue contest and you don’t even have barbecue.” He said, “Who are you?” I said, “Bruce Jones, Pete Jones barbecue.” I didn’t say Skylight Inn, I didn’t start, but most people knew. He said, “Well, what makes you think yours is so hot?” I said, “National Geographic just featured my daddy”—the guys used the term “Barbecue King”—so I said, “featured us as the best barbecue in the nation right now.” He said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah,” and I told him about the article. He said, “Well, bring it to Washington.” And so, by that time I hate to say I was the mouthpiece of the store, I come back and I tell Daddy, “Hey, we got a chance to go to Washington, DC.”
That’s one day that my dad stepped out to garner some attention in a way that Pete never would have. So Bruce and Pete packed up some freshly chopped barbecue into an insulated box and boarded a little Cessna. They flew to DC and served the barbecue at the Capitol. There’s a photo of Bruce, Pete, and Strom Thurmond, at the time a senator from South Carolina, from the Barbecue Bowl, which was supposedly taken just after Thurmond abandoned a plate of South Carolina barbecue in favor of Skylight’s. North Carolina governor James Hunt Jr. sent a congratulatory letter to “Barbecue King of the World,” Pete Jones. Of course, that letter is still on display at the restaurant today.
If you’re the barbecue capital, you might as well have a dome to match. At least that was Bruce’s thinking when it came time for an expansion of Skylight in 1984. As he told it to me:
I said, “Daddy, since you have been recognized, or referred to as the Barbecue King, let’s put a dome on the top and be the Barbecue Capitol.” I said, “Come on, it’ll be unique.” Larry House built it for us. When he first built it, it looked like a church steeple rather than a dome. It made him mad when Daddy said, “Tear it off.” Daddy told him how he wanted it and Larry built it about half the size, and Daddy said, “Tear it off, it ain’t what I want.” On the third try, he finally built it like it is now. And it became a talk piece, you know, for a while people wanted to know, why the dome? And I said, “It’s the barbecue capital.”
Business was great then, and the accolades kept coming. People magazine said we had the best barbecue in the country in 1989. The New York Times praised it in 1995 almost as much as the Washington Post did five years later. They all mentioned the skin, which has been the signature of the Jones family barbecue.
Lots of barbecue joints discard the skin after cooking, or fry it up for cracklings. Part of our process has always been cooking the skin until it’s crisp, then chopping it into the barbecue. There was a time when customers could ask for big pieces of skin on the side. But it became too popular, and there wasn’t any skin left to chop into the barbecue. That’s when Pete starting chopping it all into the barbecue, and now it wouldn’t be Jones barbecue without it.
I grew up on that pork skin. My dad jokes that he even added a little pork lard into my baby bottles to be sure it was in my blood. I was raised working in barbecue. Not just in barbecue, but in my family’s barbecue place. One of my first duties working at Skylight was to weigh in the hogs. A man named Floyd would deliver the hogs, and they came tagged with a weight. There’s a set of scales with a hook just outside the cooler door where the hogs were hung to double-check their weight. I would slide a cinder block over and stand it up the tall way so I could reach the scale to verify the weight. I didn’t realize it then, but even at a young age, I was partially responsible for the profitability of the restaurant on some level.
That restaurant—it wasn’t just a place to make money. Don’t get me wrong, Pete enjoyed making money. But it was always something more than that. He gave birth to that child. He struggled for decades through its slow growth, so when it came to flourishing, it was like Pete was watching his child walk across the stage during graduation.
I used to think he was the craziest man in the world, because the few days that we were closed in a year, he would still be at the restaurant. It would come time to eat Thanksgiving dinner (that would be lunch to some), and my grandmother would look to me and my cousins and say, “One of you boys step across there to the restaurant and tell your granddaddy to come on, it’s time to eat.” I’d walk across the street, and I’d see him watching me. He knew I was coming, and he knew why, but he’d stand right there, propped up on one elbow, smoking a cigarette, and gazing through the front double doors until I walked in and the doors closed behind me. The place was closed, but that’s where he wanted to be. I often wonder, what was he thinking about? Probably imagining a line of customers standing there and converting his barbecue into their cash.
I was sitting in the doctor’s office with a cold on June 4, 2004. My aunt brought Pete into the same office with chest pains. The next thing I knew they had called the ambulance, and Pete was on his way to the hospital. As always, my dad was at church. I called my mom, because he doesn’t use a cell phone, to tell him he needed to come to the hospital. He and I went in the back of the ER where they were about to rush Pete away for a heart catheterization. He told my dad, “Until I can get back on my feet,” pointing at me, “let Samuel take care of the pig bill,” and this and that. He lived for almost two more years, but following that procedure, his mind was never the same.
A few months before his heart attack, he shared with me some things that I then wrote on a napkin—for example, the arrangement we had with the family we buy our pigs from. He said, “I might not be around here forever and somebody needs to know a few things.” As I said before, my crowd are awful teachers, so it wasn’t like he gave me a detailed orientation about how to run Skylight, but it was something. I mean, nobody else had made decisions in that place while Pete was around. He was much like the mafia dons of the past: nothing happened without his blessing.
My granddaddy never returned to retake the throne, or even walk through the smokehouse to see if things were going like he wanted them to. The few times he came back in, he would be escorted by his caretaker, and most often the visit he demanded to have would be cut short due to his mental status. Looking back, I wonder, do we work away the best years of our life, then die? Shortly after his exit, we had three people quit. I had to hire three people to replace them, and one of them was Michael Letchworth. When Pete came in and saw those three new people, he surmised that they’d been hired to do the work he had been doing. Or, in his lingo, “Yep, took three people to replace me.”
Pete passed away February 15, 2006, about two years after his heart attack. After the funeral, when the funeral procession left the church on the way to the cemetery, the hearse stopped in front of the restaurant, which of course was closed. It was just a pause, maybe thirty or forty seconds, then the hearse picked back up again. A sign taped to the restaurant’s glass door announced matter-of-factly, “Pete Jones Died.” No other explanation was required other than when we would reopen.
My dad preached the funeral. He is the pastor at Kings Cross Roads Free Will Baptist Church in Fountain, North Carolina. That is just outside Farmville, which is a small town of about five thousand, northwest of Ayden. My dad is one of those folks who is going to church one more time after he dies. That’s just how it is. He once said, “I’m a preacher who’s a barbecue man,” and not the other way around. He tends to be a matter-of-fact guy.
A lot of folks thought the barbecue at Skylight would never be the same. Even though Pete hadn’t lifted a shovel in ten years or better, apart from cooking the hog he gave to the family that now tended the farmland. (That was a tradition he started years after he and Robert retired from farming, and one we still follow today.) Plenty of customers had convinced themselves the barbecue took a nosedive after Pete died. Rumors circulated that we had sold the business or were planning to. None was remotely close to the truth. However, perception is a powerful thing. It led to some rough years at Skylight. We weren’t starving to death, but the pig bill that was usually reconciled on Sunday sometimes had to wait until Monday or Tuesday for our sales to catch up to our debts. Still, we never let go of Pete’s barbecue commandment. “If it’s not cooked with WOOD it’s not BBQ.” That is the one thing he did show us how to do.
The challenges back then weren’t just monetary, either. When Pete passed on, I was still recovering from a tragedy that had rocked my life a year prior. On August 15, 2005, I picked up my longtime girlfriend, Ashley Farmer, to go to the evening church service, just like I had so many times before. There was an accident, and we didn’t make it to church. I was just twenty-four years old, and my life changed irreversibly that day.
Perception and perspective can be equally powerful. The perception we have of other people’s lives in this age of social media is often shaped only by the positives. Whether it’s an athlete, movie star, singer, or even a celebrity chef, it’s easy to think they have it made and don’t suffer from the same afflictions that we all face, especially when they only post images of the good life. But the truth is, we’re all just people. We all have the same vulnerabilities and insecurities. And once you’ve lived through enough of those difficult circumstances, you gain perspective.
Ashley and I went to dad’s church back then, and I will never forget the sermon from the first service that day, entitled “Trials of Your Faith.” Bruce talked about how faith wasn’t faith until it had been tested. When the invitation was given, I walked down to the altar. I was moved, and had finally realized she was my person. I wanted to go thank God for her, and didn’t yet know how significantly my faith would be tested.
We left church. I dropped her off at her home, then picked her up later for the evening service. We were both laughing as I drove down the same route we always took. I pulled into an intersection, and my truck was struck on her side, ejecting both of us from the vehicle. I came to, face down on the highway. Ashley was under the hood of my overturned truck about forty feet away, upside down. As I crawled to where she was, I managed to find my portable radio for the fire department. I called in the accident, and I knew, based on my training, she was not in good shape. We had been laughing on our way to church at 6:20. At 6:36, she was gone, but I didn’t yet know as I was being placed in an ambulance.
The doctors and my dad kept the news from me in the emergency room. My test results came in just before midnight. The doctor said he would discharge me, but only after I had been told. In my room, I asked again how she was doing and my dad looked at me and said, “Son, Ashley didn’t make the ride.”
Two days later, I stood bruised and bandaged in front of a casket holding the twenty-one-year-old young lady I loved. The following weeks, months, and years were the hardest and darkest I’ve ever experienced. It seemed in a short while everyone else’s world started to spin again except for mine, and her family’s. Faith in a brighter tomorrow and the friends who rallied around me are the only reasons I believe I’m here to share these words. That same small community that sustained my family decades prior did the same for me in a completely different way.
Earlier, I told you about that first date with Sarah, but here’s the full story. When I was dating Ashley I didn’t know Sarah. She ran a hair salon in town, and she had been Ashley’s stylist. The day after the accident, my dad took me to Ashley’s house to mourn with her parents, Russell and Sandra, and her sister Jessica. Both of our houses were full of people from the community. We retreated to a back bedroom and cried, but as soon as we gained our composure, her mother looked at me and said, “Samuel, we have a funeral to plan, and you need to be a part of it.” We decided her girlfriends would pick her outfit and I said, “We should ask the Whaley girl if she would do her hair and makeup.” Sarah agreed, but refused any compensation. A month later, out of loyalty, I felt obligated to go to her to get my hair cut.
I still hadn’t emotionally recovered from the accident when Sarah called me to eat barbecue a year later. We joke now about it being our first date, but neither of us saw it as a date back then. We did start dating soon after, and got married in the fall of 2007. We have two daughters, Eliza, who is eighteen months, and six-year-old Elaina, who is in kindergarten. I’ve learned that making it through life’s challenges provides the tools to take on the next one. That event helped change my whole attitude on life, and my perspective on the lives of others. I’m now more prone to empathize than to judge. The things that used to get me bent out of shape are trivial to me at this point. Weathering the storm makes one appreciate the rainbow all the more.
It was 2008, just before noon on a hot August day in Pitt County. You could just about stare at something hard and set it on fire. Maybe someone had, because there were about 150 acres in flames, a pretty good-sized fire, in the woods a few districts away, but close enough that we got a call for help. By “we,” I don’t mean Skylight. I mean the Ayden Fire Department, where I was assistant fire chief. So we sent an engine, a brush truck, and ten of our men.
Later that afternoon, my chief called me to say that they still needed more manpower. It crossed my mind that while we’re paying so much attention to first and second base, so to speak, we might also want to think about home plate. After all, it was hot at home, too. And barbecue happens to involve a fair bit of fire. However, we sent a few more men after giving our roster a quick rundown. At this point, we had only six able-bodied firefighters left in Ayden, not including a few of the older guys who primarily drove the trucks. It was pretty slim pickings.
Back at Skylight I was fully aware of the conditions on all fronts. It was super hot, with low humidity, just right for the smallest of sparks to cause a big problem. I just didn’t realize it would be our problem. James Howell, who at that time was the main man in the cookhouse and had been tending the pits for decades, was about to leave for the day. I told him to make sure not to leave anything burning in the chimney when he closed up the smokehouse for the night. Normally there might be a few pieces of wood burning up there and it wouldn’t be a big deal, but that day…
Shortly after six that evening, and almost immediately after James had locked up, I saw the smoke through the window. Growing up in a barbecue restaurant gives you some particular powers of perception when it comes to reading smoke, and it was immediately clear to me that this wasn’t pig-cooking smoke. It was the other kind. The kind I learned about in my fire training. I did some sort of an Ayden high-step as I charged through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard to realize my truck was in danger. I moved it, took off my apron, and jumped into my turnout gear like Superman in a phone booth. As I ran back toward the cookhouse, I called in to our 911 center from my portable radio: “4221 to Pitt County; I’m on scene and establishing Skylight command.”
I grabbed an old rickety stepladder that you wouldn’t use to cross a ditch, and set it up next to the smokehouse, which was fully and truly now on fire. As I watched flames shooting about three feet above the ridge vent along the full length of the roof, I gave a thought to James, he of few words, and wondered if he’d made it home yet. The doors to the smokehouse were locked (and I didn’t want to open them anyway—it’d only feed the fire), so I got a hose from behind the building and told one of the employees to crank the water on. I aimed and prepared to suppress the fire that was currently turning our business into smoke.
I swear, a man on dialysis has more pressure than what came out. So much for Superman.
By then, even the power line to the smokehouse had burned in half and was jumping all around on the ground, arcing everywhere. It was dire. Fortunately for me and the Skylight, some of those last able-bodied men down at the station had an engine on the scene in about four minutes, with the police not too far behind. And the local news. And some customers. Even with the fire trucks and squad cars on-site, we had a man come in and ask for two pounds of barbecue, bread, and slaw to go. I finally had to have someone go inside and lock the door.
Live-fire training exercise just east of Ayden.
James came back the next day. He didn’t have much to say.
We started tearing the roof off—Uncle Jeff and I did the demolition ourselves to save money. It’s not like we had $20,000 squirreled away for just such an occasion, but we rebuilt. The fire inspector called and told me I could borrow his pig cooker if I needed it. We had the doors back open on Saturday.
I replaced the ladder.
Business got better. Some of that press we’d received in the early ’80s came trickling back starting in 2008 when the Southern Foodways Alliance made a film about Skylight Inn called Capital Q. We hadn’t even rebuilt that pit house. They later asked me to attend a showing of the film at the Big Apple BBQ Block Party in New York City.
Attendees were mesmerized by the double cleavers chopping whole hog on a big wooden block. They laughed when my dad said our barbecue was the King James version of barbecue, and I retold the National Geographic story. I also told the story of Skilton Dennis, my great-great-great-great-grandfather. He was part of another one of those family legends, about a man selling barbecue in 1830 out of a covered wagon in the middle of Ayden, a legend that had been passed down within the family just like gospel. It’s a story I never questioned until I took a trip to a cemetery.
There’s not even a path to the Dennis Family Cemetery in Ayden. A few broken gravestones sit among a stand of trees in the middle of a field. You can only get to it when the crops are out of the field. I went to find a trace of the man who had served barbecue out of the original food truck in 1830. I found Skilton Dennis, but he was born in 1842. I found his mother, Mantha Dennis, too. Back at home, I scoured the genealogy sites for Skilton’s father, Skilton Sr. What I learned was that Mantha’s maiden name was Dennis. She never married. Young Skilton took his mother’s name, and his father was never mentioned, and no other Skilton Dennis was listed in the census.
We don’t know if the younger Skilton was in the barbecue business, but he was certainly in the pig business. He also had some impressively large daughters, according to the Eastern Reflector newspaper. On May 7, 1884, they printed:
I understand that Skilton Dennis, of Contentnea Township, has two daughters, 15 and 13 years of age, weighing 200 and 240 pounds, respectively. Skilton is a good, sober Democrat, who raises plenty of hog and hominy.
As with the National Geographic story, Pete Jones had made the legend of the older Skilton Dennis true. For festivals and catering gigs, Pete had served barbecue out of a replica covered wagon with “Since 1830” painted on the side. Enough reporters had repeated the story that it had become fact. The story was one Pete had likely heard from his forefathers and simply repeated to a willing audience who always loves a good backstory. Nobody back then had access to the digital records we can now access with a few clicks.
Even without the covered wagon in 1830, it’s still one heck of a family barbecue legacy, which continues beyond seventy years and into the third generation. That’s a lot longer than most barbecue businesses last.
Pete Jones’s covered catering wagon in front of Skylight Inn, before expansion, in the early 1980s.
Skilton Dennis’s tombstone at the Dennis Family Cemetery.
It’s the legacy that once prompted the author Michael Pollan, who was searching for a barbecue joint to feature in his book Cooked, to say: “I was looking for the most unreconstructed cooking I could find, cooking as it’s been practiced for thousands if not millions of years, and I found that in Eastern North Carolina whole hog barbecue.”
It’s the legacy that embraces myth and can will Ayden into becoming the “Bar-B-Q Capital of the World.” Was Pete Jones a talented enough cook and showman to make everyone believe stories like those? Yes—absolutely.
I don’t consider myself any type of big shot in the barbecue world or the food world. We’re just a family that got fortunate enough that what we do became popular. It was good and people liked it. We were able to make a living. I don’t think barbecue is one of those things where there’s always got to be a cool, new kid on the block or whatever. Maybe in other foods, people forget the old places while in search of the new star, but I hope barbecue never evolves into that. We’ve been doing it this way all along because it’s what we believe to be the right way even though it also happens to be the hard way. Another family member may come along after I’m long gone and find that cutting corners is worth the extra sleep or the extra profit. That’s not gonna happen while I’ve got a hold of this torch.
From left: Me, Bruce Jones, and Jeff Jones in the doorway of the Skylight Inn pit room, aka the Vestibule of Hell.
Sam Jones BBQ chicken, just right.
Overcooked and scorched!
