Fried Chicken by John T. Edge Page A

sole town that fostered such entrepreneurial activity. Natives of Corinth, a onetime railroad town in northeastern Mississippi, tell tales of Julia Brown, who in 1867—just two years after gaining status as a freed-woman—began meeting trains at the depot, selling drumsticks and wings. Ditto long-tenured residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who speak fondly of the kerchiefed women who greeted new arrivals at Reading Terminal with baskets of tissue-wrapped thighs priced at a nickel per piece.
    These women came of age when rail lines had not yet adopted the niceties of service that came to define mid-twentieth-century travel. There were no Pullman car berths for overnight passage. No dining cars boasted tables napped with linen and set with crystal and china. Instead, as Barbara Haber revealed in her recent book From Hardtack to Home Fries, in 1857 The New York Times reported that many travelers endured long days, with “hot cinders flying in their faces” before approaching a station “dying with weariness, hunger, and thirst, longing for an opportunity to bathe their faces at least before partaking of their much-needed refreshments. . . . The consequence of such savage and unnatural feeding are not reported by telegraph as railroad disasters; but if a faithful account were taken of them we are afraid they would be found much more serious than any that are caused by the smashing of cars, or the breaking of bridges.”
    The African American women of Gordonsville were among the first entrepreneurs to define and satisfy the nutritional needs of travelers. Without a doubt, thousands of other women, in hundreds of other towns, tried their hand at the same. (My colleague Psyche Williams-Forson has written a dissertation on the subject of black women and chicken, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs .) But a peculiar confluence of capitalistic hustle, booming rail traffic, and proximity to the media outlets of nearby Washington, D.C., gave rise to Gordonsville’s unmatched reputation for poultry cookery. Indeed, by 1869, essayist George W. Bagby was calling the town “the chicken-leg centre of the universe.” It was a title to which the city would lay claim long after the last Gordonsville train boarded passengers.
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    visiting Gordonsville, I take stock of the legacy of those cooks, talking to their descendants and admirers. Key to my visit is the afternoon I pass in the company of octogenari-to ans Mildred and Pete Avery. Mr. Avery’s mother, Elsie Swift, and her sister, Mamie Swift, were veterans of the local fried chicken trade, and were, along with their fellow townspeople, known as waiter-carriers. The moniker may have come from their practice of carrying trays of chicken and pie and coffee from their homes to the train platform where they would wait on passengers.
    Over the course of the afternoon, I learn much about the idea of waiter-carriers. I begin to understand that the frying of chicken was a step toward independence for African American women during the dark days when labor and the products of labor were the property of slaveholders. Talking with Pete—who recalls plucking the chickens his mother and aunt killed and scalded—I realize that these women were employing a sort of vertical business integration, raising fryers from chicks, feeding them out to a weight of two or three pounds, and then cooking them and serving them to travelers. It was an early and important underground economy that leveraged self-reliance and rewarded its practitioners with an independence that many of their sharecropping husbands could not muster.
    Pete tells me of the seemingly superhuman strength of those waiter-carriers. They were able, he says, to muscle a tray stacked with baskets of fried chicken and pots of coffee above their heads, to carry them from home kitchens to the station. They would heft them again when a train arrived, so that customers leaning from passenger