A hog breeder from Decatur County in South Georgia brought a special breed of hog to Atlanta for the Atlanta Zoo. He flew the hog into Hartsfield Airport but the flight was late and he had another appointment in town. So he took the pig out in front of the airport and hailed a cab and told the cabbie, “Look, I’m running late. How about taking the pig to the zoo.”
He put the pig in the cab, gave the driver some money and off they went.
He had his meeting, went to dinner and spent the night at the Buckhead Ritz. Next morning he gets up and walks out of the hotel. There’s the cab driver and the pig’s in the back seat. He’s got on sunglasses, a baseball cap and a fielder’s glove on the seat next to him.
The farmer was stunned. He ran up to the cab driver.
“Hey, I thought I told you to take that pig to the zoo.”
“He had a wonderful time at the zoo. Today he wants to go to a Braves game.”

Blueberry Pie. In the Dillard House Cookbook and Mountain Guide, Henry Dillard of the Dillard House in Rabun County reminisced about his mother, Carrie, and the wonderful blueberry pies she used to make:

Back during the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration days Mother started the county’s first school lunch program. Before she finished, she established six lunchrooms. She prepared the best meals for the lowest cost anywhere. Kids would bring what they could from home, like jelly, jams, cornmeal, and so on, then W.P.A. set up some money to help pay for other food.

One day they had blueberry pie. Mother asked one little boy named Jack Darnell to say grace, which they did before every meal.
Mother said, “Jack would you say the prayer?”
Old Jack said, “Oh, Lord, look on us this blueberry pie. Open our mouths and eat blueberry pie. One more time we thank you, Lord, for this blueberry pie.”

Hog Killing Time. This recollection by novelist Harry Crews describes the ritual of killing and processing hogs on the farm where he grew up in Bacon County in rural south Georgia.

Farm families swapped labor at hog-killing time just as they swapped labor to put in tobacco or pick cotton. Early one morning our tenant farmers, mama, my brother, and I walked the half mile to Uncle Alton’s place to help put a year’s worth of meat in the smokehouse. Later, his family would come and help us do the same thing.

Before it was over, everything on the hog would have been used. The lights (lungs) and liver – together called haslet – would be made into a fresh stew by first pouring and pouring again fresh water through the slit throat – the exposed throat called a goozle – to clean the lights out good. Then the fat would be trimmed off and put with the fat trimmed from the guts to cook crisp into cracklins to mix with cornbread or else put in a wash pot to make soap…. After the guts had been covered with salt overnight, they were used as casings for sausage made from shoulder meat, tenderloin, and – if times were hard – any kind of scrap that was not entirely fat…. Whatever meat was left, cheeks, ears, and so on, would be picked off, crushed with herbs and spices and packed tightly into muslin cloth for hog’s headcheese. The fat from the liver, lungs, guts, or wherever was cooked until it was as crisp as it would get and then packed into tin syrup buckets to be ground up later for cracklin cornbread. Even the feet were removed, and after the outer layer of split hooves was taken off, the whole thing was boiled and pickled in vinegar and peppers. If later in the year the cracklins started to get rank, they would be thrown into a cast-iron wash pot with fried meat’s grease, any meat for that matter that might have gone bad in the smokehouse, and some potash and lye and cooked into soap, always made on the full of the moon so it wouldn’t shrink.

“Hog-Killing Time” is from A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews. Reprinted in The Best of Georgia Farms Cookbook and Tour Book and used by permission. Buy a copy of A Childhood from Amazon.

By Reece Turrentine
The Urban Chattahoochee is one of the most unspoiled, scenic and historic rivers running through any major metropolitan area of the United States. Exploring the East Palisades, storyteller Reece Turrentine pauses to observe that he is standing between two different worlds.

Not long ago, I was walking upstream along the East Palisades river’s edge trail, looking for a better location to beach canoes. When I’m guiding a group down this “city section,” I always like to stop them along here for a short hike back into the woods and up to the cliffs of the old “Indian Shelter.” It’s a 30-foot deep rock overhang archaeologists determined had been used for shelter for six to seven thousand years by nomadic Indian tribes following the river’s course. The trails along the river were Atlanta’s original interstate highway.

I had just seen the bridge of I-75 in the distance. Where I stopped along the trail, I could no longer see it around the bend, but I could still hear the roaring engines and speeding tires slap the bridge joints of the pavement. So close and yet so far. They couldn’t see me. When you’re bumper to bumper at that speed, nobody has time to look out at a river.

For a moment, my imagination ran away with me and I thought I could hear the traffic of I-285 upstream and around the bend to my right. I was hearing some kind of distant roar from up there. It was giving me kind of a stereo effect from both directions, but I looked under limbs upstream and saw the source of the muffled roar. I was relieved. It was not from the traffic. It was from Thornton Shoals, bubbling over its rocks. It was sounds of wilderness, not the interstates. Although the two worlds are competing for dominance out here, this spot at least looked and sounded like wilderness. It occurred to me, what a strange place I was standing on. To my left, downstream and around the bend, was a mixture of Long Island Shoals and I-75. To my right, upstream and around the bend was Thornton Shoals and I-285. What a mixture similar sounds from different worlds. But that wasn’t the end of it. In front of me was the river, teeming with fish and wildlife.  Just beyond the river and over the hill was Rottonwood Creek and the old flagstone foundations of the Akers gristmill, which operated until the late 1800’s. But almost scraping the mill’s foundation stones was the gouging of giant earth-moving machines, carving out yet another larger and longer multi-lane interchange for the surrounding interstates. The creek and mill foundations were saved by a matter of feet. The worlds are competing in this “city section,” but as of now, the river rolls on.

But there was more. Behind me was yet another contrast. Some of Atlanta’s finest homes are just beyond the river and occupy streets like Mt. Paran, Harris and Northside. But before you can get to them are the cliffs of East Palisades, containing Atlanta’s oldest home: the old Indian shelter. Worlds collide, but as of now, the river rolls on. I was standing on a strange, almost holy place. Just beyond ear and eye a great city was grinding away. But where I was standing was a pocket of pure wilderness.

Links:

• View a map of the area Reece’s reflection is about. Be sure and see it in “satellite” format.
• Learn more about Atlanta’s Chattahoochee National Recreation Area.
• Learn more about the Chattahoochee River, one of Georgia 14 major watersheds.
• Join the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper and help protect the Chattahoochee.
• Read storyteller Reece Turrentine’s narrative of a canoe trip on the Flint River in “A River Makes up Its Mind.”

Walt Grindle of Dahlonega, Lumpkin County, Georgia
Recorded by Jean Bieder

Great-uncle of mine, he liked pepper – any form of pepper. He ‘as crazy about pepper. And his name was Hiram, and his wife was named Elizabeth. So she was always grumbling; she ‘as just a chronic grumbler.

Come spring of the year, and he told her one day, he said, “Elizabeth,” said, “it’s time you’s sowing pepper seeds now.”

She said, “Oh, Hiram, it’s no use.” Said, “I won’t live to see no pepper grow this time.”

He didn’t say any more about it.

So after wadn’t no pepper come that fall, when he had something he ’specially wanted pepper with, they set down to the table and he looked around and said, “Elizabeth, here you are still a-living, and no pepper.”

Recorded in 1975 by Jean Bieder from Walt Grindle, then sixty-eight, of Dahlonega, in Lumpkin County, “Fruitless Prophesy” is one of 250 authentic folk tales and stories recorded by the students of Dr. John Burrison at Georgia State University and published in Storytellers, Folktales & Legends from the South. Copyright by the University of Georgia Press and used by permission.

• To buy a copy of Storytellers from the University of Georgia Press, click here
• To buy a copy from Amazon, click here.

Links:
More on John Burrison and his projects at Georgia State University and the Folk Pottery Museum of Northeast Georgia at Sautee Nacoochee Center.

Editors Note: Dean Brown grew up in Fayette County, Georgia, when it had only one paved highway and horse drawn wagons mingled with a few automobiles on the roads - quite a contrast to the Fayette County of today, which is often ranked as one of the fastest growing and most affluent counties in the state. Now in his 70s, he has assembled a collection of “Little Stories”  that are entertaining tales and snapshot history lessons about how much the South has changed in one man’s lifetime. Here’s his recollection of riding the train to Atlanta as a small boy. If you enjoy this “Little Story” there are more on his PopSpin website. Mr. Brown would like to hear from you with your Southern Stories and so would Brown’s Guide.

The Southern Railway ran a route passing through Fayetteville to Atlanta in the morning, coming back through Fayetteville in the late afternoon. When I was about four or five I went to Atlanta on this train and remember it very well.

Atlanta’s Terminal Station, the station where Dean Brown disembarked after his train ride from Fayetteville. Terminal station opened in May 1905 and served Southern Railway, Central of Georgia, and Atlanta & West Point railroads. It closed in June 1970 and was demolished in 1972. Read the rest of this entry »

From a tape-recorded interview with Lake Seminole legendary fishing guide Jack Wingate.

I saw five eagles diving in a school of coots out on the lake. Five bald eagles working on one raft of coots. It’s a sight to behold. Made them coots a nervous wreck, I’m tellin’ you. We got probably 200 osprey nests here, and I’ll venture to say that in the Lake Seminole area there’s 100 bald eagle nests. Unbelievable. There’s an osprey to your left now. He’s fishing. He’s fixin’ to catch him something. We got the great blue heron, just loads of them, and the little blue heron. I remember one time there was four photographers, each one loaded with cameras, got out of their cars and was about to jump over one another to get shots of the blue heron sittin’ around the basin there. The white egret, the crooked beak ibis, the wood stork. Wood storks migrate but they have certain places they come back to every year. Read the rest of this entry »

Harmless but abundant, may flies are native to the Lake Seminole area. Their presence is an indicator of good water quality. They appear in swarms. They do not bite, but swarms can be so thick they can impede breathing.

One night the Corps of Engineers got a call from a campground where may flies were clustering around an electric light. Campers complained that the odor from dead flies was bothersome. When Corps workers got to the site, they found a pile of expired flies three-feet deep that had to be hauled away with a front loader.

John Burrison, professor of English at Georgia State University, estimates there are dozens of stories involving preachers and chicken, but he selected the best of the bunch for his book Storytellers: Folktales and Legends from the South. This story was told by Don Buchanan of Decatur, who heard it from his father, a Baptist minister:

Once there was this preacher who loved fried chicken, as all preachers are supposed to love fried chicken. And he was invited to eat at the house of one of his parishioners one Sunday. After church he made his way through the country to this house, and it so happened, as he was crossing this particular creek, right in the middle of the bridge he stumbled and he lost his false teeth, and they fell in the creek.

Well, ‘course he couldn’t eat, but he couldn’t turn down this invitation either, so he went on to the house. And, as they ate dinner, he ate what he could eat—mash potatoes an’ things that weren’t so hard to chew—but he didn’t touch the fried chicken. Well, he had a great reputation for eating fried chicken, and so, of course, everybody at the table was amazed and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t eating any fried chicken. So finally they asked him. And he said, “Well, I just have to tell you the truth. I lost my teeth goin’ across the creek down here, an’ I just can’t eat any.” Read the rest of this entry »

By Richard Stenger

A talent show, fishing rodeo and photo contest take place every year at the annual watermelon festival in Cordele. But there’s just one real competition, the one people talk about the rest of the year–the expectoration of the watermelon ovules, better known as the seed-spitting contest.

Skill, style, technique and luck all have their role in the main event, drawing competitors from as far away as China and press from as far away as England. Greg Leger, a local melon grower with national and Georgia spitting titles under his belt, offers some insight to those seeking to unseat the champion:

What are some of your best performances?
I spit forty-two feet one time in the state finals. The Georgia Watermelon Association sponsors that. The Nation Watermelon Association (in Morven, Georgia) hosts a national convention for watermelon growers and I won that two years ago. It was in Nashville, Tennessee, at the Opryland hotel. They put out a big sheet of paper in the lobby. That was a big deal. Bragging rights are fun.

How about your competitors?
One guy from Chicago spit sixty feet on top of a hotel in New Orleans. He spit between two buildings. He set it up in the wind and it caught it. No one ever spit that far, I think. The wind really got a hold of that one in what was left of a tropical storm.

Does the event draw a lot of press?
The BBC called one time. They were rather intrigued. I told them it’s kind of similar to their Wimbleton. We have a foot fault occasionally.

Any tips for tenderlips in the event?
Some people try to bounce the seed if the wind is in their face. They try to aim low and let it roll. Bounces count for distance.

Do you have a personal spitting method?
I guess the technique I use is roll the tongue to blow seed through. You can’t just put it between the teeth. From the back of tongue, direct air flow through the tube of the tongue. That works pretty good. Of course we’re in the business. We’re eating watermelon all year long and blowing seed.

Some rules of competition provided by the National Watermelon Association:

• Official spitting seeds will be provided.
• No one will be permitted to use their own seed.
• Contestants who accidentally swallow seed while sucking in air prior to seed launch will be given one extra seed.
• Denture wearers whose teeth go farther than seed shall abide by the judge’s decision.
• No running, jumping, skipping or lying down while spitting.