Okra Is For
Lovers
By Cappy Hall Rearick
I had been engaged for less than a month when I
took my fiancée home to meet my family. It was a textbook example of what a
Pennsylvania Yankee should not do when meeting his soon-to-be Southern
relatives. It’s funny now but when it was happening? Not so much.
After sitting down to the mid-day meal at Mama’s
house, the token Yankee had the gall to bad-mouth okra. He might just as well
have peed on Robert E. Lee’s grave.
“What did he say,” hollered Aunt Polly who was
blessed with selective hearing. “I thought he said that okra is slimy.”
That was exactly what he said. In addition, he
ignored me kicking the daylights out of him under the table. The fool just kept
digging a deeper hole for himself, a hole I so wanted to crawl into.
“How can you people swallow that stuff,” he’d
asked. “It’s so slimy, how do you even get it from the fork to your mouth?”
You
people?
I looked around my mother’s large round kitchen
table where six of my Southern born relatives were staring holes straight
through my intended. Uh oh, I thought. The South is fixing to rise
again.
Aunt Polly chewed up and swallowed a mouthful of
butterbeans and rice, pointed her empty fork at him and warned, “You better
watch yo’ mouth, boy.”
I shoved a large dish of macaroni pie at the
Yankee. “Have some of this. It’s extra good.”
Oblivious to the hostile glares directed at him
from around the table, and having no prior knowledge that in the South we are
not in the habit of serving macaroni pie as an entrée, he proceeded to fill up
his plate.
“Boy, do I love Mac & Cheese,” he said, making
almost the same Southern epicurean blunder as when he had asked for UN-sweet
tea.
“Um,” I murmured. “Around here, we say macaroni
pie, not Mac & Cheese. And this family recipe of Mama’s has been handed
down since before the Civil War.”
Clearly disappointed, he said, “But I like the kind
that comes in a box with a blue stripe. Make a note of that, Wifey before we
tie the knot.”
Wifey?
Could things possibly get worse? I waited for Aunt
Polly to make a testy comeback and she didn’t disappoint. “I do hope he’s not
talking about that store-bought stuff in a box.”
Mama, striving for detente, glared at her sister
and then attempted to change the subject. “Polly, did you eat the only pulley
bone on the fried chicken? Didn’t I tell you to leave it for company? Where are
your manners?”
Aunt Polly squinched up her face and pressed her
lips together, her signature expression that made her look like a lizard.
Tossing her head, she quipped, “Yes ma’am, I sho’
did. Whatcha’ gon’ do about it? Pass me some more of that slimy okra while
you’re thinking,” she added, “and another helping of butterbeans. Tell you
what: I’d marry up with a okra pod quicker than I would a damn Yankee.”