Holy Thursday Greens & Blues

& Strangers passing through

"The best way to know people is through food. Get them to talk about food. Talk over food. It might be about food, but you're also talking about issues." ~~ Leah Chase

I am in the pink sweater at the middle table

In the years before the pandemic, I was part of a group of friends who gathered for Holy Thursday lunch at Dooky Chase’s Restaurant. Miss Leah’s Gumbo Z'Herbes and fried chicken is a New Orleans tradition on this day, with three restaurant seatings, and you’d best make your reservations way early if you want a coveted seat. Miss Leah would come out from the kitchen and make the rounds of tables welcoming everyone. She was a kind person and kick ass chef who is much missed in the city.

Top: Gumbo Z'Herbes and fried chicken / Bottom: Miss Leah & me 2013

While thinking back on those Holy Thursday luncheons, I remembered a story I wrote about a lunch in a small southern town cafe that’s loosely based on a cafe in my hometown. It was published in Dew on the Kudzu in 2012. You can’t talk about the South without talking about food.

2 Worlds

The outsiders blew into town drivin just a little too fast in their fancy foreign car laughin at our roadside yard sales and our little café, Lita’s Chicken Shack, where you can get a blue plate special of turnip greens, sweet potatoes, cornbread, your choice of three meats, sweet tea and a slice of Lita’s caramel cake every Friday of your life for $5.95. They stopped and nosed around the 45’s and the LP’s thinkin we wouldn’t know a “vintage” Blues record if it hit us in the face but, truth is, we’re the ones been singin that tune since we sat in the pea-pickin basket along side our mothers in the fields, daddy plowin with Ole Daisy pushin up clods of red earth gettin ready for the next crop to be planted.

They rifle through the clothes on the line makin faces and actin like we might have cooties but then they set their city asses down in the best corner booth in Lita’s, the one where the boys from the shirt factory in Pontotoc usually eat on Friday’s – they gonna be fit to be tied when they come in and find outsiders in that booth. But, bein brought up with good southern manners, they’ll just tip their hats to ‘em and take a table in the middle of the room where they have to watch out for the young’uns playin on the floor with their legos.

Seems like they don’t much like the menu but, bein’s this is the only place in town to eat, they ask for water (probly don’t know it’s from the tap) and eat most everything but the greens, makin their funny faces again, I guess they don’t know what real southern eatin is (like they don’t know real blues) but they sure did eat up that caramel cake, well, you’d have to be crazy not to like Lita’s cake anyway. They pay the check and flounce outa the café, get in their shiny foreign car and drive off, just like that. Us, we just smile and talk amongst ourselves ‘bout the funny ways of city folk, always livin life in a hurry and thinkin the blues is just “vintage music” played by some old Black men in the country, never thinkin any day they could be singin that tune, too.