By Scott Graber
It is Wednesday, April 30, and I’m at the Waterman’s Grill in Edenton, N.C. This evening, I’ve ordered the “crab bites” and a glass of Pinot Noir. In a little while I’ll approach the owner, Brian, and tell him I enjoyed my meal and my experience in his cozy, brick-walled, black and white photo-enhanced restaurant. But tonight my mind is elsewhere.
Tonight I’m thinking about my barbecue lunch at the Skylight Inn.
One finds this barbecue — spiced, vinegar infused pork — in Ayden, N.C. Ayden is located just south of Greenville, N.C., which is to say this particular barbecue is peculiar to Eastern North Carolina.
The Skylight comes with a dome-like roof, but if there is a skylight I didn’t see one. There is, however, a room with a counter where two young men quickly take your order. Behind that counter is a chopping block where big pig parts are chopped into smaller, nickel-sized bits of meat.
This chopping process is continuous. Indeed the sound and smell of the chopping pervades the ordering room and extends into a modest dining room where one can sit and consume their just-chopped pork.
If one has ordered the “medium meat dinner” as I did, one pays $10 in cash.
One gets this pork in a small paper tray; together with second paper tray filled with cole slaw. Finally, there’s a flat rectangle of corn bread that is placed atop the pork tray.
I know there are Southerners who love pork chops, their heavily-salted ham; but the first bite of this chopped pork, taken with a little bit of cole slaw on the same fork, is almost hallucinatory in its effect on me. And as I took a second and third forkful of this transcendental protein my mind took me back to my childhood.
We were a military family that returned to Ocean Drive Beach (now called North Myrtle Beach) every June. Most of the time I was on the beach, or in the water, getting a sunburn that would required a night of Noxema. But at some point during our month long visit at my grandfather’s cottage we would drive up to Kinston, Goldsboro or Rocky Mount (North Carolina) in search of barbecue.
In those days the “restaurant” we usually found was of white-painted cinder block construction. There was always wood stacked in the side yard — so much wood that parking was often a problem. Behind the low-ceilinged, linoleum-tiled building, there was a pit where the pigs were cooked overnight.
I remember these visits because the taste of the meat was — even for a child — a wildly pleasurable experience. I remember that my father, usually discriminating about what he put in his mouth, loved barbecue. He loved it so much that he came with a laboratory-grade cooler — usually used for transporting body parts — and would distribute 10 one-pound bags of chopped pork among chunks of dry ice. He and I would wrestle this cooler into the back of our Oldsmobile, and in this fashion we would transport the meat back to Ft. Sam Houston or Ft. McPherson or whereever we were then stationed.
I remember the other diners — mostly large, red-faced tobacco farmers who ate their meat and cole slaw on these same, ubiquitous paper trays. I remember the only available beverage was sweet tea that came with an inch of undissolved sugar at the bottom of the green-colored plastic glass.
In those long-gone days (the 50s), these farmers were raising some of the best Brite Leaf tobacco on earth. And almost every adult in America was smoking it. And those North Carolina farmers were doing well — very well.
But that would change.
Many years later I was in law school where I gravitated into the orbit of Professor John Banzaf. In Banzaf’s free time he lobbied the Federal Aviation Administration in an effort to stop smoking on commercial airliners. Eventually the young professor succeeded and that success led to the prohibition of smoking in just about every closed-in space in the United States.
Eventually that would end tobacco farming in North Carolina.
Today the diners are still big and they wear baseball caps — John Deere is a favorite — as they eat their cornbread. I suspect they raise soy beans, hogs, or chickens that end up as McNuggets. But at noon they stop, leave their well-kept red brick houses, and take their barbecue at the Skylight.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
