By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
Photo: The ash door to the smokehouse in Historic Brattonsville.
To some, the smokehouse remains a symbol of the impoverished, rural South. Not me. I see it as a rustic savior, and I thank the late Harry Crews for my column’s title. I recalled what Harry wrote when I re-read for the 100th time a letter my Granddad Walker wrote to his local paper in 1978.
Granddad recalled his grandmother’s Civil War story about keeping what was yours.
“Once when the Yankees came through, her father sent her brother deep into woods with all their horses, including the stallion to keep him from whinnying to give away their whereabouts. Her father would hide his meat and lard in the branch to keep the Yankees from finding it. He would dam up the branch, bury the meat and lard below the dam with dirt and brush over it, then break the dam and let it cover the meat.
“He left one ham in the meathouse on purpose and when the Yankees came, they were heard to say, ‘This poor devil has just one ham. We won’t take his’. There were all the hams and meat, lard of 25 to 30 hogs buried in the branch.”
Meathouse and smokehouses are similar and I won’t waste space here detailing the difference. What I most remember is that sweet smell. Whenever I was visiting my grandparents and their smokehouse was open, I stuck my head inside. Harry Crews was right as rain. From it “came the sweetest smoke a man was ever to smell,” and on those momentous occasions when I sat down to smoke-cured ham, biscuits and honey, and grits and gravy, the fragrance of that smokehouse came to me stronger than ever.
In my back-road excursions I see fewer smokehouses. Like tenant homes and old country stores they fade from the Southern landscape. I have seen the common man’s smokehouses along dirt roads and I have seen an aristocrat’s smokehouse sporting a cupola that looked more like a pool house for the Great Gatsby. I have been in a smokehouse in Brattonsville where hams lay in drifts of salt. Melting snow came to mind.
Today’s cellular phone generations will never know the aroma of smoke-cured meat and I wager they’ll never set foot into a smokehouse. I suspect the sight of hams and hogs hanging from a beam would traumatize them. I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that the sight of cured flesh gave me apprehensions, but sometimes appetite gets the best of sensitivities.
Granddad Walker’s smokehouse sat just beyond his hand-dug well. It was a dark, sweet-smelling place. A crab apple tree stood to the right of the smokehouse and far to the right of it, the outhouse, the first one I used. The smokehouse was dark in appearance, inside and out, and the fragrances seeping from it fired up ham biscuit cravings. Shafts of light slanted from the roof and motes of dust sparkled like stars in the night sky as constellations of hams hung in the darkness.
Why do I write about old things and old ways long gone? Because the same thing will happen to us. Folks buy meat packaged in foam trays wrapped in plastic. And that’s not going away. Folks will continue to rely on others more than ever. So I keep searching for a place that represents the times my great grandparents knew. They may have seemed poor, but they were independent and could weather a storm like the Great Depression. Could we?
Someday I hope to discover an old home place with a barn, an outhouse, a hand-dug well, and a smokehouse. A stone fireplace and chimney sound good too. A stack of red-yellow sour-smelling firewood would be pretty to see. Life’s necessities all taken care of in a simple way. No need for electricity. If I find such a place, I expect to see an old country store down the road a ways, one with a vintage gas pump, a bench for whittlers and bull-shooting men, and vintage signs you see on the walls of Cracker Barrels.
It was good enough for them but not us. Well, that’s progress, isn’t it. Still, a price just might be paid down the road.