Fried Chicken by John T. Edge Page B

coach windows might reach down and serve themselves. When I hear Pete talk of the beautiful dresses the women wore beneath their starched white aprons, and the multicolored hats they donned to cover bandanna-clad heads, I imagine a band of regal women in whom the whole community might take great pride.
    When Pete describes the preparation of chicken—how the birds benefited from two soaks in salted water and how the women battered them with water and flour and fried them in locally rendered lard—my mouth waters for a taste of bird as prepared in the Gordonsville style. But luck is not with me. It seems that the last of the businesses connected to the trade, Hattie’s Inn, closed a while back. And while Pete’s wife, Mildred, does fry chicken in the traditional Gordonsville manner, she does so—on order from Pete’s doctor—just one day a week. Since that day is Wednesday and my audience with the Avery family takes place on a Thursday, I am, for the moment, out of luck. (I did, upon returning home, develop a Gordonsville style recipe based on Pete’s description and a few tricks of my own; turn to page 104.)
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    i don’t know why no progeny came forward to carry on the tradition, after the Swift family stowed their trays, when Hattie closed her doors. (I am reminded again of Calvin Trillin’s observation that “a superior fried-chicken restaurant is often the institutional extension of a single chicken-obsessed woman . . . it is not easily passed down intact.”) When I query Pete, he just mumbles about changing times. He is similarly inscrutable when I ask why the Gordonsville Fried Chicken Festival, established in June of 2001, has failed to garner strong support from the local African American community.
    But after pondering these developments for a while, I believe I may have tentative answers. The matter of the annual festival is simplest. Some locals see it as a grand ruse staged to ferret out the fried chicken recipes perfected long ago by the waiter-carriers. That may be a bit harsh, but, to my mind, the festival—driven by tourism funds and executed by the local visitors’ bureau—fails to pay appropriate homage to the waiter-carriers. Maybe before you can pay tribute to these women, you must first acknowledge that they thrived at the margins, beyond the gaze of the city fathers, taking pride in a sort of renegade capitalism that was quite the opposite of a city-sponsored event.
    This distrust of officialdom is deep-rooted. Many have posited that the waiter-carriers met their demise as trains modernized, first adding dining cars, then closing carriages and restricting easy passenger access to the foods vended by the women, and finally, in the 1930s and 1940s, introducing air-conditioning and sealing the carriages. But there are others who believe that the real culprits were local laws and sanctions that appear on the books as early as 1879, when the city fathers began to grasp the impact of the waiter-carriers, and the town council began requiring snack vendors’ licenses, and collecting a tax thereon.
    This alternate explanation gains strength when I find a 1970 interview from the local newspaper with Bella Watson, described as the sole surviving waiter-carrier. The article refers obliquely to early struggles for vending franchises that exiled waiter-carriers to the opposite side of the tracks from the platform. The eighty-year-old does not mince words about the end of the era. “There was a health officer from Richmond,” she recalls. “I still remember his name, but I won’t say it. [He] used to make me so mad that sometimes I would cuss and sometimes I would cry. They made us wrap our chicken in oilpaper and even wanted to see where we cooked it. Of course, we had our secret ways of cooking that chicken and I believe he just wanted to find that out.”
    A cynic might say that little has changed in the intervening