Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food

CONCLUSION: Market Bulletins: Writing the Mess of Greens Together

Market Bulletins Conclusion writing the mess of greens together U Cookbooks and curb markets continued across the twentieth century and into our own. From the 1930s to today they have been simultaneously places of containment and exclusion on the one hand, and possibility and potential on the other. To conclude our exploration of moments in the southern food and gender story, we turn to one final example of mess writing, one final hidden archive. With the perspective garnered from female moonshiners in literature, battles over biscuits and cornbread, economic stores of the gardenvariety tomato, ghostly pellagrins in strike novels, and the hopeful possibility encodedincookbooksandcurbmarkets,wenowhavetheskillstounderstand a peculiar book published posthumously in 1988 by a garden writer named Elizabeth Lawrence.1 The direct project that resulted in Gardening for Love did not even begin until the late 1940s, when Eudora Welty subscribed her friend Lawrence to the Mississippi Market Bulletin. Yet, the decades-long, collaborativewritingprojectofGardeningforLovewasthespiritualandhistorical progeny of all the messes of greens we have explored. It is also a concluding Dear Friend, Received your letter with the leaf. No red shank is a shrub herb and don’t have leaves like your leaf . . . Be sure to write again. I am a friend to all. Write me about yourself, a letter helps a lonely person. Love, Mrs. Fergusson. Elizabeth Lawrence, Gardening for Love 194 conclusion chapter in the southern food and gender story that has the potential to bring us, its descendants, into our own future, redefining our own mess writing beyond these pages. Without our change of perspective we could not even hear the soul-saving friendship between a gardener in urban, thriving Charlotte, North Carolina, who wrote for the city newspaper and Mrs. Fergusson, a plant lover seeking an herb from her own childhood that might have helped her sick friend. Despite Eudora Welty’s direct influence, southern literary scholars mostly missed the dialogue despite or beyond class, race, or place that Gardening for Love contained.2 The friendship of those Elizabeth Lawrence, the Charlotte gardener, described as “gardening for love” disappeared for years. Gardeners and seed savers advertised their flowers and friendship in farmers’ bulletins that were designed to be about agricultural business but which became places for women to meet over shared passions. They spoke in the bulletins, in letters with Lawrence, and through her book to us. The market bulletins became a region-wide repository of what McKimmon called the miscellaneous at curb markets. The “we” of the North Carolina or Arkansas cookbooks, as well as of McKimmon’s curb market memoir, When We’re Green We Grow, fits well withLawrence’sargumentthat“noonegardensalone”—andnooneexchanges seeds and preserves plants without reaching out to others in collective, shared, messes of talk. Market Bulletins The market bulletins were not designed to be vehicles for women’s intimate connections and communication. Rather, they were, as the Web site for the Louisiana Market Bulletin says, “for the purpose of disseminating market information .” Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina had some of the earliest bulletins, with the idea discussed as early as the first decade of the twentieth century, and full publication commencing around 1916. West Virginia and Florida followed quickly in the late teens, with North Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, Virginia, and Alabama joining in by the 1920s and early 1930s. conclusion 195 When garden writer Lawrence set out to subscribe to all of the bulletins, she could only find one vigorous state publication outside of the South, in Connecticut . Like girls’ tomato clubs and extension-based women’s curb markets, market bulletins were a primarily southern phenomenon. In general, residents withinthestatesadvertisedforfree;outsidefolkssubscribedorlistedwantads only; most states limited advertisements to around twenty-five words. Regardless of what the states thought they were supporting, residents soon noticed some flexibility in the mission of the bulletins. For instance, Louisiana ’s assisted “in marketing Louisiana products and services not normally available through commercial channels.” The bulletins soon overflowed with nontraditional products and services, the miscellaneous elements of farm life. Everything from a “widow with no family ties” looking for “a home with an elderly couple needing someone to take care of them,” to a “family of cotton pickers” seeking “work and a house near school and church,” to a “bachelor with no bad habits” who wanted “a congenial job where the hunting and fishing were good” was advertised in the bulletins. Reading Mississippi’s bulletin, Lawrence was left wondering “whether puppies got homes and lost dogs...