In addition to being Emporer for Life on  Route 4, Piedmont, I am in complete charge when it comes to cooking pinto beans, cornbread, ao anythng to do with hog meat. Tonight, while i was sitting in the kitchen 'looking' a pot of pinto beans for the Wednesday evening meal, I realized the curent editions of the Greenville News are so thin, side by side, you have to open the paper all the way up just to pour out the beans in search for rocks. And I wondered how much the bean people pay for those little rocks the throw in very pound of beans. It just doesn 't seem cost effective to me.
Then I realized I getter get to 'looking'. I got my first cooking lessons from my 'Grandma Robie' Mama's mom, back years ago. My great grandmother, 'Miss Mollie' would always sit there and tell Robie she was wasting her time, that cooking was woman's work, not men's. But I learned, anyway, even how much fatback to put in a 'mess'. That got me to thinking about 'Miss Mollie'. She was born in 1882 and I've always been inquisitive about history, where people were when something happened and what they thought, and I bet I asked Miss Mollie thousands of questions about things that happened after she was born. This was only four years after Custer's last stand, and I asked about that a lot. She never said anything. Looking back, she never really said much about history, and how it effected people during her early years. I was lucky enough to have her alive way up in my 20's,  and it was only after she died thata lit suddenly hit my why she was always so vague about history. Miss Molly was born and raised in Demorest, Georgia, and with communication the way it was about 130 years ago, Miss Mollie probably never ever heard about most of the world's more important things. My Mama was born there, too, and when we would fuss I would somethings tell her they took the dumbest people in South Carolina and sent them to Georgia. And it raised the average IQ of both states.It was times like that when I really needed to know how to cook.
My Grandma Robie tired to teach me how to make biscuits like her's, too, but I never got that down. I watched her make biscuits twice a day every day, and she never measured anything, any time. She's get down that old wooden mixing bowl, open up the piece of cloth where she kept the rolling pin, and dig a hole in the flour. I'd ask how much flower and she'd say something like, 'this much' which didn't tell me anything.then the shortening and milk were poured in, and the mixing started. By hand. For while. Then she's slap the dough on that cloth, roll it out and start cutting biscuits using an old tin can she's cut bot ends out of . Perfect biscuits every time.
 After I great up and started writing a column for the Greenville News, every time I met a 'grandmotherly type' I'd try to get her to give me her recipe for biscuits. It was a game. I know she didn't have a recipe and she knew she couldn't tell me how much of anything she used, but it was lots of fun asking. Questions like that sometimes let me into other areas that turned into good stories, but what I have always thought was one of my better stories was out at the nursing home on Sulphur Springs Road. I was interviewing Paul Baker's grandmother. Paul was running the salvage yard on White Horse Road, and his Mom ran the office. We got to be good friends, and she was telling me about a story her Mom loved to tell about a wedding she went to in 1917. I couldn't stand it. I went to the nursing home and interview the lady, who had just celebrated her 88th birthday.
She told me about a wadding, in a textile community (mill hill. I can call it that because I came off of one. You try it and you are liable to get your eyes dotted.) Anyway, back then mill houses were usually four-room affairs built on brick pillars. There was no underipinning, or things like that. There weren't  inside toilets or runnig water, either on a lot of those mill hills. This wedding was being held in the bride's home, at night, and all of the neighbors were there. They had moved out all the furniture and put in chairs, and the preacher was standing at the outside wall. The bride and groom, both sturdy of frame, got the knot tied, then family and neighbors all rushed down to congratulate them.
And the world collapsed. There had been a couple of lanterns lit. luckily one went out and a man slapped his hat over the other one. People were yelling that the world was ending. People who had been inside were suddenly rolling around on the grass. The end of the world, as folks know it in Spartanburg County, was coming to an end.
It turned out the world didn't end at all. It didn't even slow down. What happened was, the weight was too much for the framing, and the floor collapsed. She told me how, the next day, people were walking around looking at the damage, and she said there a lot of 'rats' laying around in the yard. The rats she was referring to was those round things women used to roll up their hair into a ball at the back of their head. I knew what she ment right off, because I was lucky enough to live on B Street, Anderson Mill, while my daddy was off in the 'Big War'. German U-boats put him to swimming, twice, in the North Atlantic Ocean, and the first time he ever saw me he was home on Survivors Leave.
But on B Street, there was Miss Mollie, her daughter and my grandmother, Grandma Robie, Robie's sister, Nora, Mama, her brothers Howard and Charles and George and me. Our mill house was four rooms, too. Charles and George worked at the Anderson Independent newspaper, so their hours were different than normal people. I learned pretty quick I had to be quiet at times during the day, because they were usually laid sideways across Nora and Miss Mollie's bed, alseep. I guess that's where I first started inhaling newspaper ink, something I have never been able to get out of my system.
It was a most unusual house. Notice the only males were mama's brothers, and me. no grown men. My great grandfather was killed building a bridge across the Broad River, in Columbia, and I was told my grandfather was dead, as well. They never mentioned how he died. I fought out years later, after Diane and I had set up housekeeping ourselves, that he wasn't dead at all. Miss Mollie had run him off and he had been running a store up near the edge of North Carolina. Or maybe Georgia. Somewhere not too far off. That's when they started calling me Little Man, a nickname picked up and carried a long way by all of the cousins on my daddy's side of the family. They had all been girls, so Little Man was a good fit. Daddy's people, though, called me Fant. My grandfather, Reese Fant, was still alive, and my father, Reese Fant, was alive. So was I. Everytime someone  yelled Reese everybody in the house would answer. So they started caling me Fant. I stil prefer it.
I guess living was hard, back in those days. Grandma Robie and Nora worked in the Cloth Room at the mill, and their sister, Blondine, lived up behind us, on C street, and she was a weaver.
Blondine was married to Bob Smith, and he took drunk one time and told her he was going to hit her. Blondine came down across that back yard so fasy you could have played checkers on her dress tail. She wa only there long enough to tell what Bob intended. Then war was declared. At least two butcher knives went into apron pockets, and there was enough stove wood being carried to have a good sized fire. They  ALL went up to confront Bob. Miss Mollie, Grandma Robie, Nora, Mama, and me. I didn't have a weapon and had been told at least 40 times to go back home, but I wanted to see them kill Bob. But Bob either wasn't as drunk as they thought or more intelligent that anyone guessed. Bob had left. He came back a week or so later, and Blondine took him back, but I think right up until he died he was afraid Miss Mollie was going to have him poisoned.
But they were clear. Nobody has ever figured out how to give someone else cancer.
I'm going to think about that for a while, but right now I'm going to bed. And I still can't make biscuits.