During the Depression African Americans Robert and Gladys Walker (who went by the names Bill and Geraldine) started a cash-only barbecue stand that specialized in hot pork sandwiches. Bill Walker first started accumulating capital in Athens working for “white folks” at the age of ten. He took jobs “rolling an afflicted white man around in his wheel chair” for a dollar a week, then as a “houseboy for the white folks my mother worked for” at $2.50 a week. After that he took a job doubling as a butler and a chauffeur for friends of his mother’s “white folks,” where he earned $7 per week. When his employers fell on hard times, he departed Athens for Atlanta, where he worked briefly at a barbecue stand, a fraternity house, and other sundry places for two years. “I was saving my money all that time to set up a barbecue stand of my own some day,” he told WPA writer Sadie B. Hornsby
After Bill married Geraldine, he and his wife decided to open up a barbecue stand that would sell sandwiches, hash, Brunswick stew, and other dishes he learned how to make when he worked at the barbecue stand in Atlanta. No one is sure of the origins of Brunswick stew. Natives of Brunswick, Georgia, claimed it came from there. Similarly, natives of Brunswick County, Virginia, trace it back to their region in the 1820s. Some suspect it is derived from Amerindian cookery, because the earliest recipes called for squirrel meat as the stock of the stew, typical of Amerindian cookery. Brunswick stew is “almost as necessary to a barbecue dinner as the barbecue itself” says one unidentified Alabama WPA writer:
Those parts of the meat unsuited to barbecuing form the stock of the almost-inevitable Brunswick stew. Added to the meat, in boiling pots, are canned tomatoes, and corn, potatoes, onions, bell pepper, black pepper, Worcestershire sauce, catsup, vinegar, lemon juice, butter and cayenne pepper.
In Athens, the Walkers recalled digging their “first barbecue pit in our own backyard, and that good old meat was barbecued in the real Southern style.” Southern style barbecue required as much as fifteen to twenty hours of slow cooking over hickory or some other hardwood embers. Precooking preparation could take almost half that time. Both precooking and barbecuing required skill, but precooking, seasoning, and mixing the barbecue basting sauce drew upon techniques passed down from West African ancestors, such as using lemon juice and hot peppers as essential ingredients. As in Africa, sauce recipes differed across regions of the South. “We done so much business that first summer,” recalled Bill Walker, “that we decided to keep our stand going through the winter with home barbecued meat. We already had it screened but when winter comes we boarded our pit up.” In two years, the business literally grew out of a hole in the ground that was their barbecue pit into a corner restaurant. “When we sure opened up for business, I had 500 circulars distributed in a radius of 10 blocks around here, and then we went to work, day and night, to build up our trade.”
Flyers and word of mouth had the couple doing a brisk business in ten-cent barbecue sandwiches. In addition to barbecue, the Walkers sold corn bread, fish, cooked liver, bowls of hash and Brunswick stew, bottled beer, soft drinks, and candy. Geraldine Walker, originally from Bogart, Georgia, was raised on a farm not far from Athens. When she was old enough, she started doing farm work, which she never liked. Soon thereafter she worked for a white lady for sixty cents a week “helping with her work, such as toting water to the house, bringing in stovewood, and tending the food after she put it in the stove, to keep it from burning; She learnt me to make my first corn bread.”
Before she met Bill, she was married to her first husband and worked as a cook for five years. After the death of her first husband and her subsequent marriage to Bill, she kept on working as a cook for whites. “The reason I stopped working out was to help Bill in our barbecue stand,” she recalled. They had to hire three delivery boys to serve customers who preferred their barbecue delivered. “Some of the nicest white people in this town send us their calls for lunches to be sent out to their offices and homes,” declared Geraldine, “and to tell the truth the white folk buy more of our barbecue than the Negroes does.” She added, “I’ve had at least a dozen calls for liver at the lunch counter, since I sold the last piece of it I had cooked up. These white folks around here sure do eat up liver fast as I can keep it cooked for ’em.” (For more see my book Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, Barbecue segment from America Eats Project, WPA State Records, Georgia)
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