The Pat Conroy Cookbook (12 page)

“Have you ever gone to school with black kids, Pat?” he asked me at lunch one day.

“Yes, sir, I have.”

“What did you think about it?” he asked.

“I never thought anything about it, Mr. Dufford,” I said. “I’m Catholic. It’s a sin if I believe in segregation.”

“That’s what they teach you? I’ll be damned,” he said, amazed. “What kind of sin?”

“The mortal kind. The kind where you burn in hell,” I said.

“What a hell of a way to handle it,” Dufford said. “Why didn’t the
Protestant church think of that? Did you go to school with black kids in Washington last year?”

“Yes, sir. There weren’t many in Gonzaga, but every class had some.”

“So what did you think? Did you get to know any of them personally?”

“Louie Jones was in my class,” I said. “He was a great guy.”

“What kind of student was he? Could Louie Jones keep up with the rest of the class? Was he a troublemaker? How’d he get along with the other kids?” Mr. Dufford said, fixing me with his fully engaged gaze.

“Louie was the smartest kid in the class, Mr. Dufford,” I said. “Maybe Mike Higgins was as smart. But everyone liked Louie. He was elected secretary of my homeroom. You’d’ve loved Louie Jones, Mr. Dufford. He was your kind of kid.”

“It’s coming,” Dufford said. “It’s coming, and it’s coming soon and I don’t think anyone in this whole damn state is ready for it.”

“Are you ready for it, Mr. Dufford?” I said, the first time I remember teasing Bill Dufford. He looked at me oddly, then said, “You sorry damn little pissant, you’re damn right I’m ready for it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, Pat. I’m Southern to the bone and was raised to defend the Southern way and I’ve done it my whole life. I’ve defended segregation my entire life, until lately. I think of segregation and then I think of words like ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ I think of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. I think of the teachings of Jesus Christ. See where I’m going with this, Pat?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“If people in this restaurant heard what I just said to you, I’d be fired tomorrow,” he said. “Could you have brought Louie Jones home to your house? To eat dinner? To spend the night?”

“Yes, sir. Everybody’s welcome at our house,” I said.

“Have you ever used the word ‘nigger’?” he said. “And I want an honest answer.”

“When I was five, I used it and my mother heard me. I thought she was going to beat me to death. She wore my fanny out with a switch.”

“Why’d she beat you?”

“Said she was raised colored. That her folks were poorer than all the
black families around them. She said the black families brought food to her house during the Depression. Said she’d let us be anything but white trash. She doesn’t tolerate white trash.”

“Your mother sounds like a hell of a woman,” he said.

“Mom’s something,” I said.

I spent that summer so full of joy I never wanted it to end. I moved dirt in wheelbarrows and planted and cut grass with my principal coming out to help me in the fields. Dufford loved physical labor and the outdoors and sweating in the man-eating Beaufort sun. I would hitchhike the ten miles into town early each morning, receive my assignments from Mr. Dufford, work hard until lunch at Harry’s, finish my work in the afternoon, then hit the gym at three, where I would spend three hours trying to turn myself into the best basketball player in the state. My ambitions exceeded my talent by a long shot but I didn’t know that then, and I drove myself to the point of collapse each day. I worked on going to my left all summer, and during one of those hours each day I would only dribble with my left hand and only throw up left-handed hook shots off the drive. I invented dribbling and passing drills for myself, and I played imaginary games from start to finish in my head. Those imaginary games, populated by a whole nation of made-up players, were my first attempts at writing short stories, and all the games ended the same way, with me in a heroic, winner-take-all, last-second shot on a drive down the lane with my invisible enemies closing the lane down around me. Hard labor, great food, basketball—I had everything—the best summer of my life.

CRAB CAKES
Somewhere, lost in the high alps of
Beach Music
, the narrator, Jack McCall, evidently gives out his recipe for crab cakes to someone. So when I sign books in faraway cities, people often ask me about that recipe for crab cakes, and I write it out for them. I think I make the best crab cakes and shrimp salad in the world, and I will take on all comers.

I became so connected to the crab cake during the
Beach Music
tour that I was invited on the
Good Morning America
show to cook crab cakes for Charlie Gibson. I love everything about Charlie Gibson except the time I have to get up for the show. It is usually five in the morning, and my habits are such that years go by when I never see the planet at five in the morning. But, for the crab cake session, they forced me to rise at 4 a.m. so I could prove to a staff member that I could actually cook a crab cake. I learned this only when I got to the studio and was met by the staffer herself, a pretty, self-confident woman dressed in a chef’s apron.

“Do you really know how to cook a crab cake?” she asked. “If you can’t, I’ll show you how to do it.”

“I’m from the coast of South Carolina,” I said. “In the summer I set a crab pot every day.”

“But can you cook a crab cake?” She pointed to three containers of picked blue crabmeat.

I washed my hands thoroughly and began to pick over the crab, removing all shell fragments and ligaments.

“Why are you doing that?” the young woman asked me. “No one’s going to eat them.”

“Then I will eat them,” I said. “This is beautiful crabmeat.”

“Ah!” she said. “Why don’t you use any breading, like sodacrackers?”

“If I wanted soda crackers, I would eat a soda cracker. I like crab, just crab.”

If memory serves me right, I used a scallion that day instead of the snipped chives in the recipe below, and I tossed in some capers and chopped red pepper for effect.

I gave the young woman one to taste; she said, “This is delicious!”

So I went live on TV across the nation, where my only surprise was that Charlie Gibson peppered me with so many questions I discovered I could not cook and talk at the same time. Charlie is animated and cheerful in the early-morning hours, and he asked questions about every phase of the assemblage of the proper, well-schooled crab cake. When the ordeal was over, I was exhausted, but edified when a charge of cameramen who descended like vultures for the carcass of a possum devoured those crab cakes in the time it took to do one commercial.

One of them said, “No one is hungrier than cameramen who work the morning shows. No one.”

And the pretty young woman who made me prove that I knew my way around crabmeat? I did not get her name at five in the morning. I was channel-grazing years later when I saw her on the Food Network, and I recognized her immediately. Whenever I see Sara Moulton on her wonderful cooking show, I always think of crab.     
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MAKES
8

SHRIMP SALAD

  
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SERVES 4 AS A FIRST COURSE OR SANDWICH FILLING, 2 AS A LIGHT LUNCH

SWEET POTATO ROLLS
       
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MAKES 24