Mess of Greens: Southern Gender and Southern Food

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I volunteer with a leadership group for at-risk girls in West Virginia. Whether we are dining around a campfire or at a picnic table, no meal at High Rocks begins without a round of “gratefuls,” in which anyone is free to offer thanks to anyone or anything that happened during the day. Having grown up around a southern table whose meals started with a blessing, gratefuls feel a lot like saying grace, except they have a better sense of humor. Inevitably, gratefuls range from the serious to the silly. Book writing, for me, amasses the same range of thanks. First and foremost, I am grateful to the people around the region who left their stories and recipes to history and who became the subjects of this book. I am amazed by their resourcefulness and courage. Included with them are the librarians and archivists who helped preserve those documents—and without whom my research would have suffered. I especially thank Andrea Cantwell and the staff at the University of Arkansas, Shannon Wilson and the staff of Berea College’s Hutchison Library, everyone at Mississippi State University’s Special Collections and University Archives, staff at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Boyd D. Cathey and the staff at the North Carolina State Archives, public librarians at the Chattanooga Public Library, Henry Fulmer and the rest of the South Caroliniana Library, and volunteers at the Henderson County Genealogical and Historical Society. My academic home, the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin has hosted both quirky meals and my quirky projects. I am deeply grateful to be around the table with Bob Abzug, Cary Cordova, Janet Davis, Steven Hoelscher, Randy Lewis, Nhi Lieu, Stephen Marshall, Jeff Meikle, Julia Mickenberg, Naomi Paik, Mark Smith, and Shirley Thompson, acknowledgments x acknowledgments as well as staff members Stephanie Kaufman, Cynthia Frese, Ella Schwartz, and the incomparable Valeri Nichols-Keller. Thanks always go to my mentor, Frances Smith Foster. It has been enormously helpful and inspirational to be a member of the Southern Foodways Alliance. My new co-conspirators in the sister organization, Foodways Texas, are ready for me to be done with this and turn to our next projects; they inspire me as well. Students, graduate, undergraduate, and especially the members of the Republic of Barbecue team, made me an altogether better scholar, and I am grateful to them. The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, knew they gave me a fellowship to work on this project. So did the University of Texas, through the Dean’s Fellowship program. The lodge at Charit Creek in TennesseeandthefinehomeofJessicaSwiggerinCullowhee,NorthCarolina, gave me the same luxury, albeit less formally. I officially thank all of them. Very great appreciation goes to John T. Edge and Marcie Cohen Ferris. Not only are they fellow members of the Southern Foodways Alliance, who were among the first to hear me talk about this research, but also, they and other anonymous readers helped make this book manuscript much better than it would have otherwise been. I am also grateful to the tag team of Erika Stevens and Laura Sutton who, along with the rest of the University of Georgia Press, shepherded this manuscript along its way. I thank editors at Southern Cultures and the Journal of Appalachian Studies, as well as anthologists Sherrie Inness and Ronni Lundy, all of whom read and helped improve earlier, smaller portions of this work. Psyche Williams-Forson and Carolyn de la Peña both helped me at crucial points in this research, with friendship and inspired intellectual conversation. Most importantly, Betty and Bob Delwiche, my parents, and Imogene Eaker, my godmother, were always game to answer my strange food questions (including “Did you ever eat fiddleheads?”; “Where exactly did the solder go on the can?”; and “In which cemetery is that female moonshiner buried?”). Jennifer Steadman, Julie Clarenbach, Jolie Lewis, Cynthia Riley, and Jaime Madden took me out for many a hike or walk after too much southern food acknowledgments xi or too much writing about southern food. Although Cynthia might consider adopting a name that begins with a J, I am grateful to all of them. Finally, I want to thank my fifth-grade school picnic. To celebrate “pioneer days” in the mountains of North Carolina, it featured girls packing baskets of homemade food on which boys bid. That made me...