Plantation Myth
By: Terry Barr
Tags: Nonfiction, Southern Culture, Racism, Food, The Junction

Plantation Myth

How memory “serves” us

Old Plantation BBQ, Birmingham (Author’s photo from old postcard)

“Another old BBQ restaurant. The ‘Old Plantation’ downtown had great BBQ. Opened in the 20s, it stereotyped blacks and did so until near its demise in 1972 when ownership changed. It stayed open several years after under new management. The “Yes suh, it was cooked in da pit” sign was removed. Too little too late I suppose” (From Hahn’s Historic Birmingham Facebook page, public group).

You can see the words as clearly as I can; as I did every time we drove past the Old Plantation on Birmingham’s First Avenue. The hickory smoke hit you full in the face if you kept your car windows rolled down, which we always demanded when we neared the joint. Such a sweet aroma, tempting, though to my memory, my family never ate there, or at least never went inside.

When I worked for my father at Standard Jewelry Company, roughly six blocks from the Old Planation, sometimes the elders would order takeout, and that’s my only memory of eating this old style pit barbecue. You know they used a pit and real hickory wood because of the brick chimney you see to the right in the photo, and because I vouch for the smoke aroma and taste.

Though Alabama does wrong so often, people in the state know how to cook real pit, delicious barbecue.

But taste and cooking techniques aren’t the issue here.

When I got the notice from Hahn’s Facebook group about this new entry, I logged on to see and to remember. The window to the far right, I think, is the one where the cooks would stand chopping the pork they had just taken from the pit. They wore white aprons, I remember, and those fluffy high chef’s hats. In those days of my childhood — the 1960's — if you passed one barbecue joint and were tempted, you needn’t worry: there was another one just up ahead.

Carlile’s, The Golden Rule, Ollie’s, and many others whose names escape me now. The Birmingham area still boasts a number of excellent barbecue places from Dreamland, to Leo and Susie’s Green Top, to Bob Sykes in Bessemer, and to Rodney Scott’s new place on the southside.

I remember eating at Ollie’s often when I was a kid, but it was only as an adult that I discovered that Ollie McClung was the McClung in McClung v. U.S., a landmark Supreme Court case about segregated lunchrooms and interstate commerce.

So on the Facebook page about the Old Plantation, there were many, many comments about it, about Ollie’s, and how good the barbecue was — and how old Plantation also made real cracklin’ cornbread. I can attest to that, too, because I actually bit into a cracklin’ on the day we ordered that BBQ takeout. I had no idea what I was biting, and pit the greasy thing out.

“That’s just a cracklin’,” one of my co-workers said.

In that moment, I wondered whether i was really a southern, Alabama boy.

But I was, am, and so as I scrolled down the comments section about the historic Old Plantation, I found some people talking about the original post which stated that the sign “stereotyped blacks.”

Believe it or not, some people took issue with that statement, saying that they never thought about the sign, but only focused on the good barbecue. Others claimed that the sign wasn’t racist language, but “rural southern” dialect.

I wrote a comment, too, which said in part that every time my family drove past the Old Plantation and saw its trademark slogan written boldly on the roof edge, one of us spoke those words in a clear, distinctive dialect:

“Yas Şuh! It’s Cooked In De Pit.”

One commenter said that this was just a reference to the old plantation days when the black cooks were assuring the plantation owners that they were getting the best cuts of meat straight from the pit.

Okay.

What I know, though, is that when we recited this slogan, our accent was a mimicked Black one.

What I’m saying is that we knew whose accent/dialect we were speaking in. This was 1962 or 3, in Birmingham. Alabama. Even as a kid, I knew how to mimic Black speech, and I also knew it when I heard others mimic it.

Clearly, the Old Plantation could have written,

“Yes Sir. It’s Cooked in the Pit.”

And if they had, wouldn’t we have known that the speaker was white?

Back to the commenter above: after all, what did happen on old plantations? Who was who in the house and in the fields, or barbecue pits? What hierarchy existed on those plantations?

And what images and references and social order were suggested, alluded to, and conjured up by calling this BBQ joint the “Old Plantation?” Knowing, as the owners did, that only white patrons would be allowed in to eat, cooked for and served by a black kitchen staff?