HOT SPRINGS AND MOONSHINE LIQUOR BACKSTORY

 

I’m not sure what it was about my connections with southwest Virginia that in the 1970s sent me fleeing almost as far north as I could go without crossing the border into Canada. I married a Bostonian who is more likely to say “Pahk the cah” than “Bless your heart—you gone park that car or what?” It wasn’t the food that drove me away even though my mother’s delicious fried pork chops and gravy threatened to make me fat. I still like sweet potatoes, albeit not smothered in butter and brown sugar. 

But there are aspects I still love about the south—like bourbon.

For a dozen years I taught creative writing at a college in Louisville. During my first semester, I went with some other faculty members one evening to a fancy hotel bar on Fourth Street.

“What should I order?” I asked my colleagues, thinking some sweet southern drink.

“Bourbon,” one said. “It’s required that you drink bourbon in Kentucky.”

When the waitress came to our table, I ordered the only bourbon I knew—Jim Beam.

“We’re out of Jim Beam,” she said. 

How could she be out of Jim Beam—wasn’t that a popular brand?

            She named an airline whose crew were staying at the hotel. “They were in the bar earlier and drank all the Jim Beam,” she said.

            I tried not to look shocked. When I asked what bourbon she recommended instead, she replied, “Woodford Reserve. It’s the official bourbon of the Kentucky Derby.”  

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll have a Woodford Reserve. On the rocks.” 

            The waitress leaned back as if I had struck her. 

            “I suggest you have the bourbon neat,” she said. “Without ice.”

            Drinking bourbon in Kentucky requires a steep and rapid learning curve. It is a sin, I discovered, to dilute good bourbon with ice.  

            The aroma and taste of bourbon is reminiscent of caramel, and caramel is one southern delight I shall never relinquish.

After one residency, I drove from Louisville east across the Appalachian Mountains to visit an aunt in Southwest Virginia’s Blue Ridge. It’s a six-hour shot along Route 64 through eastern Kentucky and West Virginia to Covington in the George Washington National Forest. During the drive, the only entertainment I could find on the radio was preaching or hymn singing, so I turned it off and rolled down the window to let in mountain breezes. I had called Aunt Hilda, and she made up a bed for me in one of the rooms left vacant after her two grown children moved on. Hilda cooked for me, prayed over me, and coaxed me to church with her on Sunday morning. I was in good hands. 

Hilda was in her eighties then. She didn’t offer me a drink other than sweet tea. Her late husband had drunk his fair share of the local moonshine and she had sworn off any alcoholic beverages. But she knew about whiskey and the making of it. She showed me a photo of my great-uncle Bures Paxton sitting on a huge contraption with some of his partners.

“What’s that machinery?” I asked her.

“It’s a still,” she said. Having lived in Covington all her life, she was able to fill me in on how pervasive the cottage industry was. “Everybody made moonshine.” Her father, grandfather, and ancestors back as far as the Revolutionary War made their own liquor.

They were my people, too.

Many Virginians, she whispered, still engaged in the old tradition of making homemade whiskey. And many of them spent time behind bars rather than give up the business. The moonshine industry sounded like a book, and I started taking notes. 

Hot Springs and Moonshine Liquor reaches back to my southern roots by tracing the whiskey trail through my ancestors. From the Revolution to the Civil War, during Prohibition, and as far as the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol, illegal liquor involves women whiskey makers, prostitutes, and bootleg drivers as well as blacks and Native Americans. Due out in late 2020, the book can be preordered at https://www.blackrosewriting.com/nonfiction/hotspringsandmoonshineliquor. Use code PREORDER 2020 for a discount. 

 

 

Meeting Poet Wanda Coleman

          

 I arrived at Roscoe’s House of Chicken N Waffles a little before noon to find a line of people halfway down the block. Had Wanda Coleman, the author I was to interview, made a mistake? 

In a course I was taking at the University of Vermont on African-American women writers, I had chosen to write a paper on Coleman. In her twenty books of poetry and prose, Coleman’s bold truth comes alive, taking the reader from despair and tragedy to eroticism and humor. As a published author myself, I wanted to know more about her and her writing.

My husband and I had planned a trip to Los Angeles, and I wrote Coleman to ask if I could interview her in person. She agreed and suggested Roscoe’s. Our meeting happened two decades before George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. According to the U.S. Bureau of Statistics, from June 2015 through March 2016 there were an average of 135 deaths per month nationally, or four per day—more black people killed by police than were lynched in the worst year of Jim Crow.

While I waited in line at Roscoe’s, a woman over six feet tall wearing high-heeled boots approached and looked down at me. I recognized Coleman at once, but her eyebrows lifted when she saw me. I was the only white person in line.  

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” she asked. 

 “No,” I told her. “I’d like to eat here.” Why should we go to an eatery where she was in the minority? I had come for the black experience, and Roscoe's was the place to find it.

Once we were seated, conversation with Coleman was easy. She spoke about her muse and her life as a teenage mother in Watts. Her work is sometimes serious, sometimes playful, and spans a wide range of topics—sex, drugs, prayer, and the art of writing. Her poems, in lower case without punctuation, shine light on emotions and experiences that are very different from mine but that invite me into her work, like “Black Against the Night”:

                        what’s looked for is many bleeds ago

                        may never have evah

 

                        what you don’t see is what you get/an unrepentant

                        unresplendence of abortions and too-lates

                        what’s dangling status post lynching, the overweight, the

                        hanky-head, the dead on her feet (aka fat forty and

                        fucked up)

 

                        zero in on the left laughing eyeball, the right orb

                        bloated, purulent with hate

 

                        talk about reparations? hahaha

                        besides. there ain’t cash enuff

 

            Coleman’s father left Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1931 after a young black man was lynched from the church steeple, his body left hanging. When Coleman saw a car driving through town with a California license plate, he flagged it down and offered money for a ride. When he reached southern California, he never left, and neither had his daughter.

The writer's simmering eyes brimmed with intelligence. As the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles, she lived in the land she knew and was generous in sharing it, even with a white New Englander. As different as we were, we had the commonality of passion for the written word. Everything else melted away.

            Years later, I was teaching in a writing program when Coleman sent me her book The Riot Inside Me. Tucked inside was a postcard on which she had penned: “Dear Louella Bryant—I see you have blossomed! Congratulations! Wanda C.” She hadn’t forgotten our lunch at Roscoe’s. 

 In the book Coleman says, “In South Central L.A., people are dying—sitting in their living rooms watching TV and catching stray bullets. There’s no haven,no sanctity.” In the book Coleman tells of L.A. riots prompted by the arrest of Marquette Frye and the brutal beating of Rodney King. At the book’s center is an interview in which Coleman says: “If you ask a young person today, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ the assumption is that you’re going to live long enough to grow up.... You’re not going to be shot by a cop.”

I was grieved to learn that Coleman died in 2013. A posthumous volume of her poetry titled Wicked Enchantment was published in April by Black Sparrow Press.