“I Took the Pieces you Threw Away”

Well worn roads and hard boiled egg gravy

In a town called Ringgold, which sits just about nine miles across the Tennessee-Georgia border from Chattanooga, you’ll find a kind of light brown pan gravy - the kind you’d typically find poured over standards like chicken fried steak, cube steak and meatloaf – but with hardboiled eggs grated into them as if it’s a perfectly normal way of being gravy.

It only seems curious on the third bite when you realize, well yes, actually, that’s a hard-boiled egg in my gravy and, actually, you’re the wrong kind of southern for this to be normal.

In eastern Tennessee and northwest Georgia - which, to my mind, are a beautiful, tangled mess of culture that defies any kind of political union of governmental jurisdiction as basic as a state border - you’ll realize all too soon that you’re in a territory that moves its own way, a distinct eco-system that has a preserved culture that I am left to believe, by pure proof of what mine own eyes have seen, the rest of the country might have breezily dozed over, simply ignored into extinction or just plain mocked into the kind of regurgitated, uninspired and overpriced trash culture that now prevails in Nashville and, well, most places really. Most places, it seems, but out here.

I’ve wandered out here many times. And many times, I’ve felt feverishly protective of this place. Fearing if I whisper its name, it’ll be ruined forever more. Not because its mine, but because it was gifted to me by someone who is so of this place that, truly, it feels (to me) like my friendship with her is forged in these hills and in these diners and in these side roads. I’m not in the business of exploiting my friends, so I never wanted to write about this place. But I am in the business of celebrating them. And, currently, skepticism has settled deep in me – the kind that keeps me from writing. Here now, I find myself wanting to celebrate this place because there is so little left that feels as honest as this in our country anymore. Hard-boiled eggs in gravy feels like the best place to start undoing this weird urge to stop exploring my life on the page right now – “what’s the point” and the truth of an over-saturation of earnest, redundant food writing is enough to make you just decide the world doesn’t need any more of your kind. Such an insufferable Gen-X take, I know.

In the face of eggs chopped up in gravy, though, I force myself out of that space of cool dispassion as it simply is not my most honest way of living. I am an enthusiast. I get genuinely wide-eyed and stupid over shit. These last couple of years truly have got people bugging, though – self-conscious as fuck, getting scared away from themselves, away from wonder and curiosity, shoving it all in little scribbled notes instead of sharing with anyone, because everyone is so goddamned dismissive, hard and pious anymore. I am a writer and I have to write, even if the food writers don’t think I’m sexy enough and the writer-writers don’t think I’m smart enough. It’s all truly so boring, my god, the way we’ve become artists and writers in this country, the “freest” thinkers caught in a capitalism loop of perpetual self-promotion that they are too young (or too old and scared) to understand (or dismiss) is the opposite of how real art and real writing has always been made. How could I give it a single other thought when there was this weird hard-boiled egg situation in what was clearly a powdered gravy mix before me as I sat across from two women - sisters if I ever had them - who have seen me through most of my life. It was a freeing moment, to be sure, in a place called Bailey’s Bbq, which hardly shows up on a map, outside of Ringgold, Georgia.

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Alisa Martin used to be a burlesque dancer. Her act included hot dogs. Hot dog tiaras, hot dog pasties, hot dog ditties, hot dog props of all shapes and sizes. Not shockingly, but delightfully, she went on to open a hot dog stand in Nashville called I Dream of Weenie, which still exists today under different ownership. She now mines for minerals and stones deep from the ground and polishes them until she finds something like the constellations in them - bits of sky in the earth as it were. These little rocks are like her, containing multitudes of life and she works hard to bring out something beautiful in what was buried and covered in dirt for too long. Like a lot of the people from this enchanted neck of the woods, she is a Quiet Legend with a particular understanding of why we are here.

The place I’m telling you about is her place. That part of the country – from Chattanooga to Thomasville to the other far corner of north Georgia - is hers, her kin’s, and her kin’s kin. It belongs to other people’s kin, too. And their kin. I, myself, come from a long line of forced transience, erasure and invisibility in many, many different ways – from my mother’s lost stories of displacement in this country as the daughter of indigenous women and Mexican men, to my own army brat upbringing, I find myself constantly searching for places to feel seen, to feel the sense of belonging that Alisa has so naturally as a part of her being. I have never, not once, felt that feeling of belonging to a place. It’s why I move around so much. Travel is the only actual place I feel at home.

This place, despite all of that, feels rich in permanence, and despite my homeless, scrappy nature I find that I still can recognize it, even yearn for it sometimes. This permanence seems to stick to people and those people seem to stay, seem to commit, seem to stick right back to it. The people of that place are what some might call hillbillies – foothill hillbillies. Not even the kind of hillbillies that live in the actual hills. They rolled down from the high hollers – where my daddy’s family was from (a galley of staunch and firm bootleggers with a wildness quite their own, but a stiff upper lip and reserved distance that still prevails today) - and tucked into the nooks and crannies in the valleys. They settled by the rivers and the tall trees and they became storytellers, artists, the strangest, most beautiful birds even in a South full of strange, beautiful birds. From Wayne White, the banjo-picking puppet making artist who housed an entire playhouse for Pee-Wee with his (this region’s) particular flavor of outsider looking into a world he wanted to make a bit more colorful and eccentric, to our country’s beloved Leslie Jordan, who has not once in his life hid from a chance to accentuate his accent, flip his southern wrist with a dismissive but loving and open and welcoming “well shit” that, while speaking to a whole nation, was really a rally cry for a little nook of Queer kids in the curves and corners of Chattanooga, I am certain. And around those parts, less “accomplished” people like Floyd Banks Junior who built his remarkable Fortress of Faith – a literal brick and bric-a-brac castle a little above Chattanooga that he claims Jesus appears. He will tell you himself, in person, with newspaper clippings in hand while his silver, untrimmed bangs flop over his elderly eyes. If he likes you, you can collect some dirt here from the place he found God.

I’ve made this way with Alisa four times now. In the land of Chat-n-Chews, lazy-susan meat & threes, accents as thick as mud and the finest opportunities to eavesdrop on loud café conversations between people who have known each other their whole lives, nobody is too important, the hair is still big, the fried chicken is always hot and fresh and everyone – and I mean everyone - has a story.

We found the egg gravy – which she was already familiar - as we paved our way down familiar paths, may as well have been in wagons bumping down red dirt roads. May as well been. Even on concrete and pavement and asphalt, I think we’ve left our tire marks plenty, worn the land down enough to call it a road we know. Our road. Familiar trees flit by the window. Music plays and she’s kind enough to put on my favorite songs – all cheesy Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald numbers that she hates that I un-ironically love and an old song by an old country & western singer that will be my anthem until the day I leave this earth, the one where he says “We’re gonna leave sodbustin’ behind..” at the end and it feels like the thing I cling to every day of my life, the thing I hustle for when others assume its fame or glory. I just don’t wanna be bustin’ that sod no more, and I don’t want my babies to have to bust it either, so I chase a lost horse, one that my people lost a long time ago, one that belongs to me, one that I have to find to be true again, do ya know? Alisa knows. And she plays it loud for me while I look out the window at my familiar trees - trees I only know because of her. For a kid without a home, she has given me some of hers and I find it often in the passenger seat of her car as we birth ourselves toward a place, a farm, a garden, where a man born in these parts busted a different kind of sod.

We always arrive at Paradise Garden, Howard Finster’s home and mecca to outsiders and artists and also (for a minute in the 90’s) “art world people” who wanted desperately to own it all, to understand how to market it for a world Finster mostly preached against. We artists can claim Finster all we want, but every time I leave Paradise Garden, I’m more convinced that, unlike Wayne White, he didn’t make art for art’s sake - he just really, truly wanted people to believe in god. I hope he wanted everyone to believe in the concept of god, because my recovered anarchist ass cannot associate with a dastardly religious cause and I make a lot of room for Finster in my scope because, while I do think he wanted everyone to subscribe to a Christian god in most ways, I believe in singular vision and Finster had it. His god is not my king, no. I have no king. But I think I might know God. And they are in these foothills. Christian or not, Howard Finster definitely knew this God, too, but maybe his heart needed it to fit a certain bill, maybe he had to give it shape, fine. That’s fine. I guess. All I know is, I first understood the word Almighty in these hills, with these women.

In the same way I feel a strain to write about food in conjunction to my feelings these days, it is worth noting (to myself above all) that this is still, no matter the cultural lack of need for it, where I find my answers. It’s not forced. It’s not an affectation. I stared into that plate of food – most of which I can no longer eat because I’ve aged out of doing whatever the hell I want – and I found something true. Probably can be whittled down to tradition or basic need or something like that. People definitely (and desperately I’d imagine) chopped up goddamned eggs and threw them in the gravy because they had to – why else would you, I deduce. There are stories in this gravy about need and want, all things that deserve writing about even if it’s been done since the days of MFK Fisher, et al. But, truly, I had a symphony of thoughts as I sat in Bailey’s Bbq, as my two dearest friends sat across from me and we did the opposite of blend in with the locals who all knew each other’s name – Kenneth at the bar was particularly fond of Kim the ornery waitress who took your order by shouting at you as she walked toward your table “What ya having guys, give it to me!”

I thought something about habits, about new traditions, about paving new roads out of someone’s old road, something about how we reinvent and rediscover ourselves as we need, sometimes out of desperation, and I thought about how no one cares around here if you like your gravy with eggs or not. It is simply how it is done. Not a single complicated thought around it.

I wonder often why traditions like eggs and gravy survive. It’s delicious in its own particular way. It really probably is just a matter of nutrition, culinarily speaking anyway. There’s not a lot of finesse to it. There’s nothing that actually seems correct about it. But it’s a habit. It’s a scrappy habit, at that. Maybe that is where I find myself in that weird, gelatinous moment. The need was met by what was on hand – the definition of scrappy. Scrappy shit is how I’ve built my whole life – putting pieces together sometimes out of things that have no business being put.

Finster has a quote painted in white and blue on a found piece of construction wood at his slowly aging Paradise Garden. The last time I saw it, it was hanging on a back shed dripping with detached and dangling rear view mirrors. It is written exactly like this:

I took the pieces, you threw

Away and put them

Together by night and day

Washed by rain, dried by sun

            A million pieces all in one

There is a sense of comforting redundancy about the trips that Alisa takes us on, the same path that we always seem to go down always ends up leading to something different, though. It always ends up leading to the things I needed in every different and individual moment. I know that probably has something more to do with me than the road itself, but the road is a conduit. And so maybe eggs in gravy is a conduit, too. A conduit for memory. A conduit to make someone feel as if they have a home, they have a place, they have a memory that includes something beyond them, because other people eat the eggs in gravy, too. Maybe it’s none of that. Maybe I’m just a food writer looking for meaning in something so small and seemingly so insignificant as the way that people make gravy in a very small part of the world. But I’m not really sure where else to find meaning anymore. So, I’m going to keep looking in these places. And right now, what I needed to know is that I have a home, built from the things most people throw away and sometimes even of things people deeply cherish. Egg gravy isn’t mine. But the moment, poking at it with a fork with my own kin across from me – kin made from scrappy, found & kept life stuff, not birth stuff, washed by the rain and dried by the sun - is as much of a roof over my head as I’ll ever have. We made it ourselves. With our own hands. It is our garden. It is our gravy.