Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing

Grace

260 Grace Jake Adam York Because my grandmother made me the breakfast her mother made her, when I crack the eggs, pat the butter on the toast, and remember the bacon to cast iron, to fork, to plate, to tongue, my great grandmother moves my hands to whisk, to spatula, to biscuit ring, and I move her hands too, making her mess, so the syllable of batter I’ll find tomorrow beneath the fridge and the strew of salt and oil are all memorials, like the pan-fried chicken that whistles in the grease in the voice of my best friend’s grandmother like a midnight mockingbird, and the smoke from the grill is the smell of my father coming home from the furnace and the tang of vinegar and char is the smell of Birmingham, the smell of coming home, of history, redolent as the salt of black-and-white film when I unwrap the sandwich from the wax-paper the wax-paper crackling like the cold grass along the Selma to Montgomery road, 261 grace like the foil that held Medgar’s last meal, a square of tin that is just the ghost of that barbecue I can imagine to my tongue when I stand at the pit with my brother and think of all the hands and mouths and breaths of air that sharpened this flavor and handed it down to us, I feel all those hands inside my hands when it’s time to spread the table linen or lift a coffin rail and when the smoke billows from the pit I think of my uncle, I think of my uncle rising, not falling, when I raise the buttermilk and the cornmeal to the light before giving them to the skillet and sometimes I say the recipe to the air and sometimes I say his name or her name or her name and sometimes I just set the table because meals are memorials that teach us how to move, history moves in us as we raise our voices and then our glasses to pour a little out for those who poured out everything for us, we pour ourselves for them, so they can eat again. This page intentionally left blank ...