Hunting Down Alabama Old-Time Manure Tea

Figure 1.

"A hot cup of it is good for sore throat, fever, and cures colds. I never took the children to doctors. Never had to." Mary Surles of Lowndes County, Alabama, prepares her ingredients for manure tea, a traditional cure-all on which she raised her seventeen children. All photographs courtesy of Karen Yochim.

Owing to the soaring prices of pharmaceuticals, I thought it wise to track down a woman who is known for brewing that old-time, all-purpose Alabama cure-all, cow-manure tea. Where I live in Acadiana, I'm in the habit of asking Cajun elders about their home remedies. They have numerous unusual cures handed down for the more than two centuries they've lived in Louisiana—swallowing alligator oil or drinking dried chicken gizzard-skin tea, for example—but manure tea is not in the old-time Cajun medicine chest. I don't yet know what culture began the use of manure tea, but there is an old French Canadian cure for sore throat using cow manure.

I had saved an article about Mary Surles and her manure tea that Tom Gordon had written for the Birmingham News in 2002. I dug it out of my clippings file, tracked her down by telephone, and set out to meet her at her farm in Lowndes County, less than an hour from Montgomery. After all, it's the older generation that passes on these old-time home remedies. Whether or not these old cures are lost depends on the young people's willingness to preserve them.

There is a warm feeling of peace that comes with driving by field after field of great, round newly harvested bales of hay—the sun shining golden, like calendar art, on a farm culture that continues despite the bitter war news or the latest Washington scandal heard on the radio. Passing through Hayneville, I turned off toward Mary's tiny village of Mosses, pulling in at the only grocery store in town, where her daughter Azile worked. Azile greeted me warmly from behind the counter. We left the store, and I followed her car down the blacktop to the farm's gravel driveway on the outskirts of town.

Mary's blue frame farmhouse, well landscaped with ornamental bushes and wide beds of flowers, is set back about a hundred feet from the blacktop. Azile and I entered through the spacious, screened side porch, where Mary's son Albert, a double amputee who is wheelchair bound, was shelling butter beans into a galvanized pail.

We found Mary in the large country kitchen, barefoot and wearing a long, loose black cotton dress, talking with another son who had stopped by to visit. Mary is a smiling, welcoming person, who has a gift for putting people immediately at ease. She is tall and big-boned, and her skin is remarkably smooth for someone who has raised seventeen children. She speaks with a soft, slow Alabama accent.

Azile, Mary, and I sat down at the long dining table to talk about Mary's famous tea. She explained that she was temporarily out of the brew and couldn't make more because her recipe required rabbit tobacco, or "life everlasting," a plant that grows wild in the woods and was not yet in season.

"I make my tea with dried manure from the field," she said. "I boil it with the rabbit tobacco, strain it through a white cloth, and add lemon juice, honey, and peppermint candy. It's a very sanitary process, and any germs are killed during the cooking. We call it Many Weed tea."

Figure 2.

"I make my tea with dried manure from the field. I boil it with rabbit tobacco, strain it through a white cloth, and add lemon juice, honey, and peppermint candy. It's a very sanitary process, and any germs are killed during the cooking. We call it Many Weed tea." Mary Surles (right) with her daughters Azile Bell (left, holding manure cake) and Cherry Prince...