I have been acquainted with Annie Cheatham of Conway and her spouse, Ann Gibson, for years, although I have never known them well.
Many readers will be familiar with Annie from her years running Annie’s Garden Center in Amherst or her work as executive director of CISA (Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture) and president of the New England Farmers Union.
I feel as though I know Annie a lot better after reading her touching, self-aware new memoir, “The Baby’s Gotta Have Somethin’: Glimpses of a Southern Childhood.” The book is a series of vignettes of the author’s childhood and youth in Smithville, North Carolina, in the 1950s and 1960s. Her father worked in the tobacco business and her mother taught school.
It also includes moving short stories based on places and people in her life.
I spoke with Annie last week and asked her what prompted the book.
“I started writing this about six, seven years ago. I was a child of the Jim Crow South. I was quite stunned by the rightward turn in our country,” she said. “I thought we’d gone past that. I thought we’d evolved beyond the hatred and bitterness and racism.
“I began to think about who were the people who helped me. I was always very confused about what was going on. I was always looking for people who would guide me through the myriad of rules, the minefields that were all around me. A lot of those people were Black.
“I’d take one of those people in my mind, and I started writing down those stories.”
She eventually moved on to include white people who influenced her life as well, but much of the book dwells on the contradictions she saw, even as a child, in race relations in and around her hometown.
On the one hand, as noted above, African Americans were omnipresent in her life … as domestic servants and as tobacco workers. Annie was in many ways closer to them than she was to family members. And yet, there were many facets of their lives, and about the social structure of that society, she found unknowable.
Her tomboy nature and her attraction to other girls added to the unknowability and uncertainty around her. These personality traits were not welcomed or even acknowledged in her home and its environs.
Her stories thus describe her life as a liminal person, both inside and outside the system in which she was brought up. It’s a fascinating perspective that clearly shaped a fascinating person.
By now, you may be asking what this book, excellent as it may be, has to do with food. Food appears in it many times. In fact, an entire chapter called “A Little of This, A Little of That” revolves around Brunswick Stew.
As Annie notes, this classic Southern dish has a complicated provenance. Both Virginia and Georgia lay claim to have invented it. Whoever first made it, it’s something many Southerners I know savor.
In the book, Annie recalls helping her father James, called Jimmy or Semi, prepare an enormous quantity of Brunswick Stew for a garden club fundraiser. True to tradition, her father went out and caught much of the meat included in the stew. Interestingly, he threw in a secret ingredient: possum.
Never fear, readers: you do not have to go out and catch your ingredients. As you will see from Annie’s recipe below, she uses meat from grocery stores to make her Brunswick Stew. And there is no possum in her pot.
I asked Annie what she missed about the South of her youth.
“The food and Black folks, I would say,” she mused.
The book mentions her loving to go back to a place called White Swan Bar-B-Q when she visits family in Smithville. I looked at its website, which brought back the North Carolina-style barbecue I relished when I lived in Tennessee. I salivated.
Below is Annie’s recipe for Brunswick stew. The secret is cooking it a long time. (Hers was in the pot for three hours last week.)
She observed that her family didn’t eat a lot of garlic. “If you like a lot of garlic, you can put garlic in [the stew],” she said, “but it won’t taste like what my father made.”
Annie Cheatham currently has three readings of her book scheduled. She will speak at the First Congregational Church on Main Street in Ashfield this Sunday, Oct. 26, at 3 p.m. She will appear at the LAVA Center on Main Street in Greenfield on Friday, Nov. 14, at 7 p.m. And she will be at Grace Episcopal Church on Boltwood Avenue in Amherst on Wednesday, Nov. 19, at 2 p.m.
Books will be for sale at the readings for $20. If you cannot come and wish to purchase a copy, you may send a check for $25 (this includes shipping) to Annie Cheatham, 292 Thompson Road, Conway, MA 01341. The book will also be available for $20 at Ashfield Hardware.
Semi Cheatham’s Brunswick Stew
(as adapted by his daughter)
Ingredients:
1/2 chicken or 1 pound chicken (more if you like)
3 links Pekarski’s sausage, cut into rounds (Annie uses the Southern breakfast sausage)
1 pint butterbeans (baby lima beans); use dried, frozen, or canned since these are hard to find, particularly at this time of year
1 pint sweet corn kernels (fresh, canned, or frozen)
1 pint okra (if not fresh, use frozen and cut into 1-inch pieces)
1 pint tomatoes, fresh or canned
1 pint chopped sweet, white onions
1/4 cup raw rice to thicken the stew (optional)
the juice of 1 orange and 1 lemon
Worcestershire sauce as desired (start with 1/4 cup and then add more to taste after it has cooked for a while)
1 tablespoon celery seed
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup sugar
1 pint white potatoes, chopped
Instructions:
Place a quart of water in a stock pot, and add the chicken. Cook gently, partly covered, for 1 hour. Toward the end of the hour, sauté the sausage pieces in a frying pan.
Remove the chicken from the pot, reserving the water, and let it cool until you can handle it; then shred it and discard the bones.
Add it to the pot, along with the sausage pieces, the juices, the Worcestershire sauce, the vegetables (except the potatoes), the rice (if you’re using it), the celery seed, the salt, the pepper, and the sugar. Reserve the potatoes until later.
Return the water to a boil and simmer, partly covered, for at least two hours, stirring from time to time to keep it from sticking. The stew will get thicker and should not be watery at the end.
About a half hour before you think the stew will be done, boil the potatoes, and add the cooked potatoes to the stew. If the stew can handle extra liquid by then, you may some of the potato water to the pot. Adjust flavors to taste.
Serves 8 to 10 generously.
Tinky Weisblat is an award-winning cookbook author and singer known as the Diva of Deliciousness. Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.