Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food

3. Pit Barbecue Present and Past

Pit Barbecue Present and Past Of course, even if they wanted it, the organizers of the Black Family Reunion Celebration would never get permission for such a feast. The Washington Mall is far too acclaimed and austere a space to play host to the skirmishes and smoke, the booze and bawdy antics that greeted Ward on that midsummer’s day in Peckham Rye. Neoclassical monuments and memorials even now dominate this terrain, granting entry to more spontaneous and free cultures only under certain terms and conditions. A decade or two of good intentions are not enough to break their stranglehold . Kind words cannot quite dispel the suspicion that much of what the Black Family Reunion celebrates does not fully belong to this terrain, and even if permitted entry to its galleries and museums cannot quite challenge its circumscribed vision of U.S. culture. Hip-hop has provided Washington with its soundtrack for some years now. But in this hallowed terrain, in this mythic heart of a city otherwise invisible and poor, it even now sounds strange—irrepressible and strange. Portion after portion of pit barbecue, Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855) 3 { 88 } pit barbecue present and past { 89 } served up at the edge of the lawn, suffers a similar fate. President after president has courted association with such food, and some even seem to have liked it. Still, however, the impression remains that it is an interloper, a strange black element. Still the smells of spice and smoke, pork butt and grease can conjure up another America—a more American, less Eurocentric , America. Polystyrene cartons still seem to suit it better than china. Disposable, just waiting to be tossed away, these cartons seem almost to conspire with the auspicious memorials, enforcing their verdict that the barbecue in your hands deserves neither cutlery nor respect. Nightfall will come—and this food will disappear. Neither barbecue nor hip-hop will leave a mark on this hallowed, reverent space. In this chapter I delve further into modern U.S. culture. In particular, I raise my eyes from the colonial archive that I have been exploring so far, asking how the savage barbecue tradition that it invents relates to the kind of pit barbecue that, served up just a few days a year on the Washington Mall, remains a far more familiar feature of life across the U.S. South. We consider two distinct barbecue traditions over the course of this inquiry. On one side looms “savage” barbecue, its mythology imperial, invented, and alive with race. Opposite it stands pit barbecue, a food that has long proven unusually able to bridge even unusually deep racial divides. Ultimately , this chapter offers no definitive account about the specific foodways that gave rise to the second of these two traditions. I leave that history to another. Here, instead, I consider how this southern phenomenon has drawn upon and developed barbecue’s old and preexisting savage implications . For, while these two traditions are in certain ways distinct, they do not exist—and nor have they ever existed—in splendid isolation from each other. And pit barbecue culture, as these pages will make clear, playfully draws upon the savage implications of its name, persistently luxuriating in its own barbaric status. Pit barbecue is conspicuous by its absence from many formulations of the national cuisine of the United States. None of the museums along the Washington Mall seem able to accommodate it. Donna Gabaccia’s We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (1998), to take one account of U.S. cuisine, comments on it only cursorily (39–40). Even Sidney Mintz, a man who has done much to establish food and the Caribbean as credible fields of academic study, passes quickly over this food. Indeed, in a doomed odyssey for “regional” American cuisine, { 90 } chapter three Mintz’s failure to consider pit barbecue traditions can seem downright odd. No other cuisine, after all, involves the “active producing of food and producing of opinions about food” that Mintz wants to find quite like pit barbecue. And—as John Shelton Reed’s “second-most-quoted sentence” puts it—“Southern barbecue...