Saturday - Heading North

There are times when traveling that the gods and the stars conspire to give the traveler a small treat. Today, they were on my side.

I left Ocean Springs regretfully, wishing the weather forecast were good enough to encourage me to try to charter a small boat and head out to the islands. No such luck. Gloomy skies and predictions of storms sent me north.

I also considered staying around to help pick up trash. My friend Clive was going out on his boat this morning along with many other boaters to pick up any trash and tree limbs from the marshy areas around the town. If the oil hits, everything contaminated would have to be specially disposed of. The goal for this morning was to rid the area as much as possible of anything that could become contaminated and have to go to a special landfill area.

I passed on that, too, and headed north, munching Cheez-Its for brunch. Along about 11:00 I decided to find a place to stop, maybe find some good Southern barbecue. The town of Scooba was coming up, and how could I resist stopping in a town with such a name?

Besides that, I was traveling Highway 45, a nice divided four lane highway, moving along at 65. However, there were stop signs on the highway at the crossroad into Scooba. To the west were two gas stations with mini markets, a Chevron and another. I chose the other. I went inside and asked a young attendant there if there was any really good barbecue in town. She grabbed me by the arm, pulled me outside, and pointed. "There. Just the other side of that Chevron."

I looked, and just beyond the gas station lay some trees (most of Mississippi is covered with trees). At the edge of the trees I could see a metal meat smoker, and above the trees, a wisp of smoke.

I headed right on over. Nine times out of ten, I'll take food in a roadside stand over any restaurant in the area. I have rarely gone wrong. I won't talk about that place in Imuris, Sonora.

Behind the trees I found a smoker about ten feet long and a small travel trailer with a tarp attached to create shade. Under the tarp was a long folding table, and behind the table was a large black man in a cowboy hat. I asked what he had, and the list was long, including chicken, brisket, and ribs. I finally chose a BBQ sandwich.

Leonardo (I get on first name basis with food people pretty fast) ambled over to the smoker, raised the lid, and inside were about a dozen packages of meat wrapped in foil. He opened one, carved off some meat, and then deftly diced it up and put, excuse me, piled the meat onto a hamburger bun. He pointed me toward the sauce, and asked for $5.50.

I squeezed on some sauce, and took my first bite. I think I moaned. Actually, I think I moaned with every bite. This was absolutely the finest barbecue I've ever had, and boy have I had some good barbecue. It was tasty. It was tender. The sauce was perfect. It was probably the most tender meat I've ever encountered. It was heaven.

I ate every last bit and sopped up the leftover sauce with the bread. Didn't eat all the bread - why waste the room in my stomach with white bread (even though it was perfect under all that beef)? I wanted every last possible bit of that delicious meat and every lick of sauce.

I had to go back and take a picture of Leonardo at work. I"ll send him a copy when I get home and can print one - Leonardo doesn't cotton to email. I didn't even try to explain my blog to him.

There is one other amazing part to this story, and that was the young woman who pointed me toward the barbecue. She was young, and she was black. Clearly, I am neither. What made it interesting to me is the way she was so comfortable grabbing me by the arm and hauling me out the door.

On my last trip through the south - the late 1970s, blacks and whites still didn't mingle. At all. I even witnessed a white man beating a black man with a stick. I started to intervene, but a woman (white), wiser than me, grabbed me back and said I'd get beat too if I tried to do anything. When I first attempted to intervene, I yelled something smart like, "Hey!" which distracted the white man for a moment and allowed the black man to escape.

This image of one man beating another, a crowd looking on, still haunts me.

The point is, the South has changed. In both Louisiana and Mississippi, I witnessed blacks and whites together, talking, eating, laughing. This is so not the South I saw thirty-some years ago. I saw a billboard advertising an insurance company, and it contained a huge photo of the agents - a black, a white, and an Hispanic. All together and smiling.

I was repeatedly, and pleasantly, surprised by the racial interactions I saw. I also walked through integrated neighborhoods - something that was out of the question my last time in the South.

So, things do change. I have had days of frustration, disappointment, and terrible sadness. But I have also had the magic of what may have been the world's finest barbecue, and I have witnessed the New South.