Bitter Acorns

Euell Gibbons made the point in "Stalking The Wild Asparagas" that there was, actually, the occasional sweet acorn. He's correct, they're rare, but I've found at least one everyplace I've ever lived. They make a good meal and you can make an acceptable Bible Cracker (a simple, long-keeping thing) out of them, a kind of survival food like hard-tack. I haven't found a tree that bears them here yet, but I've tasted a lot of bitter acorns. In Missip, Roy had taken me over to meet Big-Head White, an ancient curer and smoker of pork, must have been 90 years old and didn't much like a white guy standing in his yard. I won him over after a few visits. I always called him sir and he always giggled at that. His cured and smoked hams were as good as anything I every tasted. After smoking, he coated them with many layers of a flour and water paste, with a lot of black pepper, carefully dried between coats, to "keep the weevils out". There was an old white oak tree in his yard, probably first growth, a monster, and we were sitting under it one day, drinking home-brew, telling stories about giant catfish and snapping turtles. The ground was littered with large acorns and I picked one up, scraped off a sliver with my pocket knife and tasted it. I remember the moment vividly, Roy was telling a story about digging a 78 pound snapper out of a creek bank, Big-Head was watching me take off a second then a third shaving and finally said -boy, what the fuck you doing?- and I told him about the occasional sweet acorn. He didn't believe me but asked for a sliver, got a big grin on his weathered face and said -now, how the hell would a white boy know that?- He called out to his wife, I loved her dearly, Emma, she made the best Hush Puppies I've ever eaten, we shared recipes for various forgotten dishes, to come outside. A beautiful, stoic, old, old woman with arthritic claws for hands, who moved slowly, with great precision. He asked me to slice her a sliver, which I did, she smiled when she tasted it, said her grandfather, a Chickasaw, had once mentioned that no one ate acorns anymore. Ask me what I did with them and I told her about Bible Crackers, next time I was over there, I didn't see them often, she brought out a plate of what I'd have to call cookies, way better than anything I'd ever made, said she'd added "some rising and a bit of honey" to my meal and water recipe. In hindsight, I'm amazed I wasn't lynched in Missip, this was the 80's and it was still completely segregated, but most of my friends were black, they came to my house, I went to their houses. Roy and I were tight, the Mutt and Jeff of Duck hill. When his brother died, in a knife-fight outside a roadhouse, I helped him cook for the wake, he called on me to help, wanted me there, and the only incident was when a cousin questioned his choice of assistants, and Roy swatted him across the yard with a backhand, -Tom- he said, -is good people, don't matter what color he is- and I was proud to be his friend. Choppers over the clear-cut, looking for illicit crops, blatant blat bleat echoing through the hollows, surely they have something better to do than nailing a bunch of rednecks for earning a living. A couple of pot plants can't possibly be more important than a failing economy. Far as I can see, pot is the economy, look at the numbers, tax it and you've got a windfall. If I were President. A fat joint in every hand and a chicken in the pot. Wait, that's not what I meant. Root beer in the soda fountains. A great dipping sauce. Maybe it is what I meant. No one is better off than they were but the .001% who should be shot, the rest of us eat acorns and wait for change. What percentage of that 700 billion will actually do anything? Most of it is profit. I was expecting you'd bail me out. I love the boat, I love the skimpy bikinis. I understand Monaco is nice, this time of year.