Spit, Scarey Ann, and Sweat Bees: One Thing Leads to Another (review)

A P R I L 2 0 1 0 157 clusion, leaving the reader wondering just exactly how “savage barbecue” morphed into “pit barbecue,” among other questions. Perhaps this lack of conclusion is another postmodern touch. That said, Savage Barbecue is an important contribution to the growing body of literature on food culture, and I would recommend it to people interested in foodways, transatlantic culture, and imperialism. Despite the aforementioned problems of methodology, it is impossible to reject Warnes’s larger claims that barbecue is inexorably linked to European and American colonialism and racial ideologies. This is by far the most academic treatment of barbecue to appear so far, and its unique argument should become a model for other studies into the social and cultural ramifications of that quintessentially American food. ANDREW M. BUSCH University of Texas at Austin Spit, Scarey Ann, and Sweat Bees: One Thing Leads to Another. By Kathryn Tucker Windham. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2009. 112 pp. $20.00. ISBN 978-1-58838-240-5. Kathryn Tucker Windham continues to pursue many professions: author , radio commentator, journalist, photographer, historian, entertainer , storyteller. Regardless of the genre, she succeeds. If there is a thread running through all of her work, it is her storytelling. Through her stories , memories, reminiscences, recollections, and even her photographs, she captures her South with all its richness and complexity. In Windham’s most recent book, Spit, Scarey Ann, and Sweat Bees, she synthesizes these various pursuits, with storytelling enlivening the cultural history of small-town Thomasville, Alabama, between World War I and World War II, fully illustrated with photographs from her family’s archives. Economics, education, medicine, modern conveniences (electricity , running water), businesses, professions and trades, together with customs, family sayings, traditions, games and toys, pets, and superstitions are set in the human context of stories illustrated by family pictures. Windham grew up among people who told stories—stories that instructed , informed, and entertained. When she was twelve, in 1930, she added journalism to her interests. That year she began to publish movie reviews for the Thomasville Times; she continued to refine her journalistic skills in the following decades. In 1940 she became a trendsetter as she invaded a traditional “good-ole-boy” profession when she became the T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 158 first female journalist, assigned to the police beat, with Montgomery’s daily evening newspaper the Alabama Journal, after she graduated from Huntingdon College in 1939. She later worked on the Birmingham News and published features in other newspapers and magazines. Coincidentally, 1930 also marked the beginning of Windham’s interest in photography. When Eastman Kodak celebrated its fiftieth anniversary by giving away Brownie cameras to twelve-year-olds, Windham was first in line at People’s Drug Company to receive her new camera. In addition to the family pictures, this book reprints two of Windham’s favorite photographs: “Woman with Spinning Wheel,” one of her first taken at the age of twelve, and “Woman with Rooster,” taken some fifty years later. She believes that the earlier one is “perfect,” accomplishing a degree of excellence she has never matched with more advanced equipment (p. 83). The stories reflect the diversity of Windham’s interests. The “chapter ” titles imply separate sections: “Superstitions,” “Spit,” “Interlude,” “Varmints,” “Lightning,” “Scarey Ann,” “Rooster and Tom Walkers,” “Interlude,” and “Running Away.” As the subtitle of the book says, however , “one thing leads to another,” with the stream-of-consciousness storytelling leading readers smoothly from one section to another. For example , stories in the first “chapter” move from Windham’s earliest memory of being “terrorized” by a grasshopper to her nurse Effie, Old Testament plagues, superstitions, the family cook Thurza (to whom the book is dedicated ), playing with fire, the family well, electricity, and events from her children’s experiences—all in one section (p. 9). If something other than storytelling unites the chapters of the book, it is the description of superstitions. Sophisticated readers may smile condescendingly at the very idea of superstitions. Who would consider spitting in a hat if a rabbit crossed your path? Who could possibly believe that spitting...