My New Love Language: Southern Road Trips
Kentucky Bourbon, Mississippi Catfish, Louisiana Blues
Dear Reader: If you’re in the U.S. and haven’t voted yet, put down your phone/tablet right this minute and get out there and save democracy. I’ll wait.
Hello friends,
Like six million other Black Americans, my mother’s family came north from Mississippi to Chicago during what became known as the Great Migration. My great-uncle Homer came first; he was young and hot-headed and apparently back-talked a white man about, of all things, the age of the pig they were slaughtering. A whisper spread that he’d soon be a target of the vicious white mobs under the cover of night, and my Uncle Willie — the eldest sibling and the steady hand — stuffed Homer onto a dark railroad car and sent him North. It was 1936.
“I didn’t know where the train was headed,” Uncle used to chuckle when he’d tell the story to us kids in the 1960s. “Willie said I had to go, so I went. Detroit, St. Louie, I didn’t know. I hoped it was Chicago. I knew a young lady in Chicago who mighta been glad to see me.”
Willie and Herman and their wives Judy and Rosanna came next. They built a small repair business, found a home church, bought property. Month after month, they sent for two or three more, until everyone was together again, and no one was slopping hogs. Leroy and Beulah, Lola and Bernice, Bessie and Edna and Thelma. My mother arrived as a toddler in 1939, weak from rheumatic fever, the youngest of them all.
My uncles loom large in my memories. They were big men, big where it counted, in their hearts and in their resilience. In their devotion to their families, despite the constant threats to their Black lives and livelihoods. And yesterday when I stepped into Brough Brothers Distillery — the first Black-owned bourbon maker in Kentucky — I was overcome with a sense of their presence.
Rich, sugary scents bombarded me, yanking me into the past. Corn mash and alcohol and charred wood. The earthy smell of hard-working men, and the hiss-drip-hiss of the kettles. My uncles making moonshine in the back shed, jangling along to Mississippi blues on a tinny radio, barking at me to “git yo nosey li’l tail back in dat house, Boom.”
Boom. They called me Boom right through my teens because of the way I learned to walk: step, step, boom! I hadn’t thought of the nickname in years, but one moment, one deep breath in this distillery, and I was Boom, and Boom was home in the South. Feeling the soil between my fingers where the collards grew, smelling red dust and magnolias and boiling hocks from Aunt LaVerne’s back porch, hearing the catfish splash and fight while my uncles reeled them in.
As a Black woman raised in the North, I used to have mixed feelings about the South. It was a place I learned to both fear and disdain, and simultaneously, it was a warm river of memories and cherished stories my aunts and grands used to tell. My time in New Orleans has bridged the gap between the past and the present. As I’ve aged, I’ve realized that it’s easy to admire the adventurers, the Black women and men who strapped together their meager belongings and put their faith in the future up North, not knowing what new terrors they would face.
But what of those who stayed behind? I find myself reaching for them now, longing to hear those stories too. This road trip through the South is taking a new turn, as I plot my path back to Louisiana through Tennessee and Alabama and Georgia.
Back in 1936, Homer got his wish; the train’s last stop was the Windy City. His young lady was found and later married; he connected with relatives and friends from the South who had come before him. He found work as a mechanic, and one day, he built that shed behind the big brownstone the family pooled their money to buy.
In the end, Brough Brothers Bourbon tasted nothing like Homer’s incendiary concoction, and not a bit like deeper, well-aged distillations. Brough is sweet and lively in a lemonade cocktail, but it’s far too light for a serious whiskey drinker like me.
It’s a young bourbon, only aged for 6 months, so it’s perfect for someone just starting out. And as it happens, perfect for setting me off on a glorious, winding road trip through the South.
My October stories
My thanks to Debbie Walker at Middle-Pause for publishing Did I Skip Menopause? Maybe I Just … Forgot.
Hugs to Nancy Peckenham at Crow’s Feet for giving I Am the Obituary Whisperer a home.
And it’s always an honor and a pleasure to be noticed by Andrew Jazprose Hill; check out his latest, The Devil Loves Midterms.
That’s all for now friends. I’m following the Bourbon Trail through Kenucky, and then heading to Tennessee — to a dry county where they can make Jack Daniel’s Old №7, but they can’t sell it.
As Uncle Homer used to say, “Y’all be good now. And if you can’t be good, at least lie good.”
Warmly,
Kay
My travel memoir, Breakfast with Alligators: More Tales of Traveling After 50, is available now on Amazon.
