Feed me on cornbread and beans,
Oh, feed me on cornbread and beans,
For I ain't gonna be treated thisaway.
The 11th Annual Cornbread Festival at South Pittsburg,
Tennessee, April 28th and 29th.
I went on Sunday, the 29th, and was treated very well.
Cornbread but no beans left at one food booth by late
afternoon when I was finally ready to eat. I should have
bought a hunk. By the time I'd made the rounds of the
other eateries, the first booth had beans again, but had
sold all their cornbread.
I passed by the deep-fried oreos and batter-fried dill pickles,
paused at one of the two vendors of cornbread salad, read
the ingredients: lettuce, beans, onions, a dressing of oil and
vinegar over crumbled cornbread. $3 to $5 per bowl. When
I kept standing there, undecided, I was offered a forkful to
sample. Tasted like cold, soggy cornbread flavored with
vinegar. No thanks. Only one vendor had coffee. With
styrofoam cup in hand, I made a trip down cornbread alley
holding out an plate for which I'd paid $2.00. When I reached
the end, the plate was filled with about a dozen little squares
of cornbread prepared in various ways: as pudding, deepfried
as a hushpuppy, with blueberries, cranberries, turnip greens
or jalapenos mixed in, or with a lot of sugar, supposedly
cornbread cake. They were filling, but I kept wishing I had
just plain cornbread and beans.
But I didn't go because of the cornbread, or the rows of arts
and crafts vendors lining the blocked-off streets, or the
music and singing one could stand in the hot sun and hear.
I went because 74 years ago my mother lived there, pregnant
with me.The cornbread festival provided a good reason to
visit the town again. I took the historic tour, riding on an air-
conditioned school bus to view some of the houses and
churches that my mother and father may have passed when
they walked about the town.
And I toured the Lodge Cast Iron Manufacturing Company
because my father had worked there- on my birth certificate
his occupation is listed as "moulder" - even though I knew the
facilities had been completely rebuilt sometime in the 1970's.
And I went so I could meet Mrs. Gladys Streeter Wooten who
had a display there for the National African American Historic
Association of Marion County. I had been corresponding with
Mrs. Wooten, who is President of the NAAHA, about our
mutual interest in Dr. W.J. Astrapp, the African American
doctor who tended the citizens of South Pittsburg from about
1910 until 1944, and who delivered both of us. She told me
that her father also worked at Lodge, and that at that time
the building was a huge wooden structure with a dirt floor
and there were rows of large windows to let in the light, for
there was no electrical power.
What I didn't see and could only imagine were the little
houses where lived our fathers and all the other workers who
made possible those fine, century-old homes that are shown
with such pride. For as Bertolt Brecht wrote, "Who built the
pyramids?" The Pharoahs get credit for them, but they didn't
push or lift a single one of those huge blocks.
After touring Lodge and admiring the skillets and the
two-story high conveyor that moved all the iron utensils
from the forge to the polishing machines, I asked the genial
official who waited just outside the door, "Do the workers
here have a union?"
"No," he said, and though he kept smiling, he no longer
appeared quite so genial and welcoming.
