[Granville-Hough] 20 Sep 2009 - Pokeberry

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

  Pokeweed/Pokeberry plant, technically Phytolacca Americana of the 
family Phytolaccaceae. “T. J.” grew up in Mize, so I doubt that he ever 
had one of the Sullivan Hollow delights which grew near old cotton 
houses or in the zig-zag corners of split-rail fences. This was poke 
salad, made from the tender young shoots from the pokeweed plant. 
Actually, it was not really a salad but a potherb, cooked exactly the 
same as you would cook young turnip greens or collard greens. The roots 
were poison, but the shoots came up and were delicious when cooked with 
a few little pieces of salt pork. The Choctaws taught us how to eat them 
long ago.
The plant, when not cut back, would grow to be three or four feet tall 
and have bright red berries. You could dye anything with the juice of 
these red berries, but the colors did not hold fast unless you used some 
sort of stabilizer such as copperas to anchor it. My mother would let us 
decorate our faces, or dye boiled eggs, or draw pictures, anything we 
wanted to do with poke berries, as she knew everything would come clean 
in her next washing with lye soap. I suppose the Choctaws also taught us 
how to use the juice as dye.
Once in the eighth grade in 1937, I was invited out to have supper with 
my pal Douglas Gibson, along with several other boys who were working 
with us on a school project. We had some very good poke salad, which 
Mrs. Ed Gibson, Douglas’ mother, had prepared. May God help us remember 
our ethnic foods!

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The new version of Lot's Wife. The Sunday School teacher was describing 
how Lot's wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt, when little 
Jason interrupted and said, "My Mommy looked back once while she was 
driving, and she turned into a telephone pole."

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If you grew up in the South in the 1930 decade, as Jimmy Carter and I 
did, you remember a lot of things about racial discrimination, and the 
veiled messages with racial overtones. You remember about poll taxes, 
enforced school segregation, miscegenation, states rights, the lost 
cause, state flags, separate rest rooms, and all the other baggage which 
enforced the separation of the races. If you were born after WW II, you 
did not see and learn it the same way. The old Confederate veterans were 
gone, and their stories fading away. But Jimmy Carter and I remember and 
we both say that what acts like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a 
duck, associates with others of the same ilk, must be a duck.
 From his autobiography, Jimmy grew up in a more tolerant community than 
I did, or maybe he had some advantages I did not have. We graduated from 
the service academies in 1946, he at Annapolis and I at West Point. I 
never met him, though I voted for him and later supported his efforts to 
reduce disease in Africa and improve nutrition there. It happens that my 
wife and children share a common ancestor with Jimmy Carter about seven 
generations back. My Cole ancestors who with six other families fled the 
Revolution by floating down the river system from the Holston River in 
Virginia to Natchez in British West Florida about 1774/75 included a 
Carter family which subsequently intermarried with my relatives so that 
I am kin to lots of Carters, but I do not know that they are related to 
Jimmy's family. As his and my families were traditional Southern 
Baptists, it is possible they were related. Certainly there were 
cultural similarities.
I am sure both he and I deeply regret what we are witnessing in the 
public dialog. It is a backlash against our Christian heritage, a 
backlash against hard-won progress, and a regrettable example for our 
children to see and hear.