[In the following essay, Hill discusses the significance of food in Mason's Shiloh, and Other Stories and In Country. In particular, Hill compares the modern-day meals in Mason's stories to more traditional southern fare, such as that of Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding.]

Southerners take their food and how they eat it very seriously. Traditional foods and food rituals are important parts of the southern identity. One would not find traditionalists drinking hot tea with cream instead of coffee for breakfast or steaming coffee for lunch when they could have “ice tea.” These southerners fry their catfish and eat it with hushpuppies; they do not poach fish in dill sauce with a side dish of “pasta.” Simple taste preferences aside, one would not want to eat “like Yankees.”

This facet of regional identity has contributed to family and community solidarity through eating rituals southerners use as touchstones of how “things ought to be”; these food traditions, rooted in agrarian necessities, have made for definition, security and stability in southern society. Southerners have expected to eat large meals of home-grown, home-cooked traditional foods, such as Virginia smoked ham, southern-fried chicken, black-eyed peas, okra and cornbread. They have observed the rituals of southern hospitality, the distinctions in race and class drawn by the kinds of food eaten and the ways it was prepared, the traditions of holiday dinners, elaborate, ritualistic celebrations of birthdays and weddings with the whole family gathered around a big table and the laying in of many dishes when there was a death in the family. Above all else, the woman did the cooking, and the man presided at the head of the table. If space was limited on special occasions, the men were served first. Gender roles were clearly defined: women were to be domestic “ladies” and men the “kings” of the home, according to the Cavalier myth of the Old South. The aristocratic expression of these traditions is seen in rich detail in Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, where the Fairchilds revel in such gastronomic delights as Aunt Mashula's coconut cake and banana ice cream while they observe the traditions within traditions called for by proper Delta weddings. A more mundane version of the extended-family ritualistic meal is found in Rebecca Hill's Blue Rise:

Family gatherings in rural Mississippi are sober to a fault … no exceptions arise. It is a certainty that iced tea will be drunk, just as it is a certainty that the men of the family will gather before the TV while the women cook and set the table and feed the children and call the men to come on and are themselves the last to sit down.

Groves women see to the men and the children and then proceed to take what is left of the fried chicken, fish the brown field peas from beneath the net of ham fat already beginning to congeal on the pot liquor, dig into the eroded mass of ambrosia salad … and eat, their plates wedged between serving bowls. And then they clean the table, leaving half-empty bowls of food where they are in case some of the men or children get hungry or want something else, and they wash the dishes … and trade vows of things they wouldn't do for love of children and Lord Jesus and family.

(13)

In the traditional, agrarian-based South, people “knew their places”: their food preferences, customs and roles were fixed. But as outsiders came to the South, old ways had to compete with new, more urban, eating habits and social customs, giving rise to the confusion a myriad of choices can effect. Just as southerners learned to eat blintzes and drink cappuccino, so too rituals and roles changed, sometimes with dizzying results. No recent writer takes these social upheavals more often for her theme than does Bobbie Ann Mason. She constantly uses references to food and food rituals to show how some characters are no longer at home in the bewildering multitude of choices offered to them as to rituals, roles and lifestyles while others relish the diversity conferred by the current milieu's “cafeteria of modern mores.”

Mason's stories are full of the ironies produced by changes in food and food rituals in her native Kentucky and the outside world. One of Kentuckians' favorite traditional foods is fried catfish. When Waldeen in “Graveyard Day” discovers the restaurant catfish she is eating is frozen “ocean cat,” she is perplexed about the modern propensity to import food that could be had fresh. She asks, “Why would they want to do that … when they've got all the fresh channel cat in the world right here at Kentucky Lake?” (166–67). Turning to In Country, we see these catfish have been reduced to ultramodern “shiny metal sculptures” that only “vaguely resemble fish” outside a V.A. medical clinic (70). A food once a source of local pride and identity has been turned into a rather empty status symbol. These stylized catfish may even represent an exploitation of regional chauvinism to make the clinic seem trustworthy in spite of the fact that it is a facility where the government's denial of the ill effects of Agent Orange is practiced with little regard for the real tragedy of the country boys who come there. Other traditional foods have become motifs for theme restaurants such as the Cracker Barrel and Country Kitchen, which have replaced the dining-room table as a location of family sharing. Here, people eat barbecued ribs and chocolate-pecan pie (“like Grandma used to make”), drink beer from fruit jars once used for canning (160–61) and select dishes from “pictures on [a] wall,” which faces another wall where “antiques” are arranged to carry out the old-timey decor: “farm tools … saw handles, scythes, pulleys” are “mounted on wood like fish trophies” to attract people who like to romanticize their parents' past now that they do not have to live it (“Residents and Transients” 129). This “artistic” use of domestic and agrarian objects sometimes carries even more ludicrous—if pathetic—overtones. A man trying to be modernly “sensitive” for his “progressive,” artsy girlfriend takes up photography; but when she sees his black-and-white snapshots of “fried eggs on cracked plates, an oilclothed kitchen table, a bottle of tomato ketchup, a fence post, a rusted tractor seat sitting on a stump, a corn crib, a sagging door, a toilet bowl, a cow, and finally, a horse's rear end,” all she says is, “I can't look. … These are disgusting” (“A New-Wave Format” 230).

In In Country, we find even more unsettling innovations when it comes to food and food rituals. Birthday parties are now held at McDonald's (48); cocoa-mix cans conceal little dabs of “sweetening” (marijuana) (34); Granny Cakes are not made by Granny but are moon pies mass produced at a factory by men—a factory whose sewer lines disrupt a local farmer's pasture (137, 148); a mockery is made of southern hospitality in a litigious society where Howard Johnson's waitresses serve tough fried chicken and then ask, “Is everything all right?” “just … so you can't sue them if it turns out there's glass in the food or something” (13–14); courtship rituals include going to “Shrimp Night at the Holiday Inn” and giving cheese baskets from the “Party Mart” instead of bringing one's beau home to Mama (36); people build up their glassware by collecting give-aways from the fast-food chains (41); women's jello wrestling is all the rage (108); the Baptists congregate at McDonald's between Sunday school and church instead of enjoying sober “fellowship” (144); and people put on theme weddings, such as the “jeep wedding” Sam Hughes is expected to attend, where the fare is “finger-food” (84–85) rather than a feast such as the Fairchilds of Delta Wedding prepare for their guests.

But these changes from tradition—important though they are in contributing to the overall sense of dislocation—seem trivial compared to more monstrous corruptions of old and new traditions. One realizes just how crazy the world is when s/he reads that the Vietnamese used one of America's most cherished symbols of its identity, the Coke can, to rig up a bomb capable of turning human bodies into hamburger just as efficiently as the Bouncing Betty mines, which were geared to bounce chest high before exploding (209, 102). In the Vietnam War, a southern favorite, ham and beans, came to be called “ham and mother-fuckers,” a singular symbol of alienation and displacement felt by the many country boys who were cannon fodder in a “conflict” which made them feel they could never again “go near ham and beans—of any kind” (112–13).

As we see, Mason's characters live in a protean world of rapid, dizzying change. Faced with finding their identities—the roles they will play—in the midst of constant flux, they seek to discover something to hold on to in this modern emotional environment where one must deal with new rituals and new family patterns. In “Memphis,” the protagonist, Beverly, realizes the old rituals of her life have been forsaken for new ones. She reviews the “mess” her life as a divorced woman with children is in and thinks of her parents' lives. She elevates her father's “routines”—or rituals—to the status of “beliefs” as she compares them to the routines that informed life with her ex-husband:

She remembered [her father's] unvarying routines. He got up at sunup, ate breakfast day in and day out, never went anywhere. In the spring, he set out tobacco plants. … She used to think his life was dull, but now she had started thinking about those routines as beliefs. She compared them to the routines in her life with Joe: her CNN news fix, telephoning customers at work and entering orders on the computer, the couple of six-packs she and Joe used to drink every night, Shayla's tap lessons, Joe's basketball night, family night at the sports club. Then she remembered her father running the combine over his wheat fields, wheeling that giant machine around expertly, much the same way Joe handled a motorcycle.

(35)

In Beverly's contemplations, Mason compares elemental, seasonal cycles to social, man-made routines. Beverly cannot be sure her rituals are worthy of the word beliefs. And Mason's subtext suggests the “activities” families engage in these days may not fulfill them the way past generations' “dull” routines did. She underscores this idea by showing that even the current small-town rituals which try to replicate old agrarian customs cannot always nourish or hold families together. Beverly reflects on the “good old days” of young married life, when she and Joe drank beer and ate grilled steak on the patio, listening to music and playing horseshoes. On weekends, they and their friends had cookouts at the lake and went fishing. Now Beverly's marriage is typical of the general breakdown and confusion that have fragmented families into separate households with children moving back and forth like little particles of the original atom: “Most of the couples they knew then drank a lot and argued and had fights, but they had a good time. Now marriages were splitting up. Beverly could name five divorces or separations in her crowd. It seemed no one knew why this was happening” (38).

Mason's stories suggest that the reasons for the fragmentation of families are complicated. But one agent in this nuclear fission is the lack of “beliefs” such as Beverly's father relied upon. Without them, the family becomes like a physics formula. Mary Lou in “The Rookers” explains that the smallest “things in the world,” photons, disappear “if you try to separate them. … They don't even exist except in a group,” and she compares this phenomenon to the scattering of her family, worrying that what happens to photons is happening to her father: as his children have left the nest, he has begun to “disappear like that, disconnected from everybody” (27, 29). Many characters in Mason's fiction experience this fear of disappearing outside of a group, disconnected from tradition. Some do something about it: they reconnect with old traditions or make new ones by embracing new rituals, new roles, new family patterns. Others flounder in nostalgia, dissatisfaction and bewilderment. In three of Mason's best stories—“Nancy Culpepper,” “Drawing Names” and “Residents and Transients”—we find various responses characters make to culture shock in attempting to establish their identities and “beliefs.”

“Nancy Culpepper” presents a Kentucky girl who is college educated, married to a Yankee and living “up North.” A companion story, “Lying Doggo,” tells us that Nancy's Yankee has been instrumental in changing her and that she has worked on becoming a new self beyond his “honest” criticisms: she no longer “plays games with people,” “hiding her feelings behind her coy Southern smile”; she is too “sophisticated now to eat fried foods and rich pies and cakes, indulging in them only when she goes to Kentucky”; and her “cool reserve, her shyness, has changed to cool assurance” (200). But when “Nancy Culpepper” begins, Nancy is not happy with her “Yankeefied” identity and wants to move back to Kentucky—to return to her roots. She reverts to her maiden name and now wants to rescue some family pictures from her grandmother's house. Her grandmother is going to a nursing home, and Nancy feels that “nobody cares about [the pictures] but [her]”; she thinks they will be thrown away (180). One picture is of a distant relative on her wedding day, a young woman whose tombstone in the local cemetery is inscribed: “NANCY CULPEPPER, 1833–1905” (194, 186). “Going home again” causes Nancy more profoundly to reflect on how far away from home she has come and to assess who she really is.

An important section of this story (180–82, 189, 192–93) is made up of Nancy's memories of her own wedding, which is in marked contrast to traditional southern weddings such as Dabney Fairchild's in Delta Wedding. Nancy, married in 1967 in Massachusetts, discouraged her parents from coming; only “strangers” from graduate school filled the house. They danced to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, smoked joints and popped balloons in their state of stoned vagueness. The gifts were nontraditional on the whole, products of the sixties counterculture or status symbols of the pseudosophisticated: hand-dipped candles, a silver roach clip, Joy of Cooking and “signed pottery in nonfunctional shapes.” The minister chain-smoked, Grover the dog was a witness and the decorations included a Beatles poster. The only refreshments were “dope” and wine-and-7Up punch. The bride and groom did not go away because they had “exams on Monday.” A honeymoon was not needed anyway since they had already been living together. Nor did Nancy cook her husband a special “wedding breakfast” as her Granny thought she might. Jack felt Granny was “really out of the nineteenth century,” in spite of Nancy's explaining that in “her time, [a wedding breakfast] meant something really big.” Nancy had to settle for twentieth-century “smallness” and off-handedness: the wedding guests who spent the night brought doughnuts and wine back with the Sunday papers.

In the end, Nancy embraces her heritage and is proud to be related to the Nancy Culpepper in the picture, for her likeness reveals that she was a woman ahead of her time, with sparkling eyes “fixed on something so far away.” This woman would have been “glad to dance to ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ on her wedding day” (195). Thus, the contemporary Nancy has integrated her past with her present to form a new identity with which to face the changes she cannot escape.

In “Drawing Names,” Mason shows how a number of characters, equally unsettled in this new era, cannot quite achieve the resolution Nancy Culpepper creates for herself. In this gem of a story, Mason uses the ritual celebration of Christmas to objectify and comment on the diverse responses they make to the changes in their lives. Since the family's farm has not been “profitable in years,” they have decided to draw names for the giving of gifts (94–95). This departure from tradition disturbs the matriarch of the family: “It don't seem like Christmas with drawed names.” And her feelings of anxiety about other changes in this traditional family celebration are given form in the various fretting comments she makes throughout the day. Ever mindful that “the Mother” has always been responsible for the “success” of such occasions in southern society, she castigates herself for not “keeping up the standard” of past Christmases. Her meal, properly big enough for Coxey's Army, is still a source of worry: “I think my Oriental casserole was a failure. I used the wrong kind of mushroom soup. It called for cream of mushroom and I used golden mushroom” (105). Mother cannot quite accept other changes which are beyond her control. She is “bumfuzzled” by the drink offered to her by one daughter's “significant other”; she throws up her hands at the sight of a bottle of Rebel Yell bourbon brought as a Christmas courtesy gift: “Oh, no, I'm afraid I'll be an alky-holic.” And when she finally accepts a sip to be polite, she cries, “Law, don't let the preacher in. … Boy, that sends my blood pressure up” (98). A good-natured soul wanting this Christmas to be as “happy” as all other Christmases, Mother cannot take in that her daughter is “stacking up” with her boyfriend, who brought this “alky-hol,” and so she drops the potato masher on the floor when the subject is broached by another daughter in the kitchen (96). Mother is overly concerned that this Yankee's coming has gotten Dad “fit to be tied” with disapproval (100).

The old patriarch, Pappy, makes known his complaints about deviations from tradition when he says, “Use to, the menfolks would eat first, and the children separate. The women would eat last, in the kitchen” (103). Pappy remembers when the man was the “king” of the family and the woman knew her place—and wishes it had stayed that way. He gets his usual buttermilk and his ham cut up for him by Mom. But no one asks him to “turn thanks” anymore at holiday dinners though he waits for them to do so. Now one of the daughters cuts the ham with an electric knife, and they all sit at the same table, women or not (101). Pappy is reminded that “times are different now” by his granddaughter, who tells him proudly, “We're just as good as the men.” Her husband apologizes for this unseemly disrespect: “She gets that from television” (104).

This assertion of male dominance is undercut by the knowledge that these two are getting a divorce and have shown up simply for form's sake one more time, hating to hurt Mother and Dad with news they know will “kill them” (100). In fact, only one daughter in the family has done the “right thing.” Peggy had “a real wedding”; her husband, Cecil, owns a Gulf franchise which has allowed them to buy the requisite status symbols of middle-class success: “a motor cruiser, a pickup truck, a camper, a station wagon, and a new brick colonial home” (97). Peggy never stops telling her sister Carolyn, the protagonist of the story, that she needs a man like Cecil. Cecil plays the role of dutiful, respectful son-in-law, but he is put in the shade by Laura Jean's Yankee, who makes a point of being sensitive and polite to everyone. Jim's outgoingness and empathy threaten Dad, however, for Dad is “awkward” with his daughters (95) and cannot be the open-minded, caring hero to women that Jim is.

For Dad, the changes in society are just too overwhelming and frightening. He likes and needs tradition in all its forms. When Carolyn's date is late, he says, “When's this Kent feller coming? … It's time to eat. … When the plate rattles, we eat” (99–100). Dad likes to eat at a set time with a “normal family.” He cannot understand why Carolyn's marriage failed, why she wants to get mixed up with a new guy who is not “dependable” and why Laura Jean wants to live with a textiles salesman “up North” and study art. His anxieties are manifested in a number of ways throughout the day. Though Dad tries to be modern by calling the traditional chocolate-covered creams in Mom's candy dish “toes” instead of “nigger toes” as he has always done (95), he cannot maintain his equilibrium enough to sustain this liberalism. First, he refuses Jim's bourbon and boiled custard (99); then at the table, he tells a patronizing joke about Trappist Monks. Eager to take part, Jim, the earnest, educated outsider, innocently and unwittingly embarrasses and annoys Dad by responding to the joke with “interesting information”: “The Trappist Monks are really an outstanding group … they make excellent bread. No preservatives.” Dad just does not want to be instructed by some upstart “feller” about men who bake bread—with no preservatives! He stops eating. But a revelation of an even more disturbing trend in society comes on the heels of Jim's remarks about the monks. “Dottie Barlow got a Barbie doll for Christmas and it's black,” a granddaughter announces. When it is ascertained that Dottie Barlow is not black and that she got a black doll just because she wanted it, this is too much for Dad. He abruptly leaves the table to sit in his recliner in front of the TV. He wants to watch the Blue-Gray game (102–03). In this new world, comfort is not found at the table with the family for Dad, but in front of the television, where battles are clear-cut, where one can at least tell who is “us” and who is “them.” On television, it is still possible for the South to win the Civil War, if only in a football game.

Carolyn observes these manifestations of conflict and unease and experiences her own feelings of dislocation and yearning. Kent never shows up, and Carolyn decides that, for all his artistic sensitivity—he likes to look at sunsets—he has never grown up. The boat he claimed needed attention on this holiday is really just a “toy” which means more to him than “family obligations” (106). Carolyn gazes at the old-fashioned winter scene depicted on the Rebel Yell box, wishing she, Laura Jean and Jim could enter it and float away in Kent's boat. She would like to accompany them to St. Louis just to experience their conversations, for she has realized that Jim is the kind of man she wants. He has taken time to comfort Carolyn, telling her he knows she has had a “difficult day” and saying she is better off without Kent when he learns that Kent purposely did not show up. Moreover, in spite of the rebuffs and awkwardness he has experienced in visiting this family, who seem to have forgotten their southern hospitality, Jim still declares, “I think your family's great” (107–08). Mason implies that Carolyn may have to “light out for the territories” to find what she needs. She may have to do what Laura Jean has done: become a “transient” rather than a “resident.” This is the choice facing Carolyn at the end of a disquieting family holiday.

The narrator of “Residents and Transients,” Mary, also must decide if she is a resident or a transient. Having been away from the South “pursuing higher learning,” Mary is typical of Mason's modern expatriates. She too has married a Yankee—one of those following jobs into the Sun Belt (121). Stephen travels around demonstrating word-processors and believes in consulting “investment counselors” (122). Mary is not happy with him, and she takes a local lover after moving back to her parents' farm amidst Kentucky cornfields while Stephen looks for a “suitable” house in Louisville. Mary has played several nontraditional roles in her thirty years: a commune dweller in Aspen, a backpacker in the Rockies and one of the first female porters on the National Limited (124). But now she wants to settle back into her old home. She tells Stephen, “I can't imagine living on a street again. … I need cornfields” (122). Mary loves the farmhouse and dreads leaving after the corn is harvested and the farm is sold.

Mary's parents, like many older southerners, have retired to Florida. Upset that they have embraced a new lifestyle and left her to dispose of the homeplace, Mary falls into “cockeyed” routines and eats “strange foods” when she is on her own. “Supper” is pork and beans, cottage cheese and dill pickles at 3:00 p.m. (124). Her lover, Larry, a modern man who is not afraid to play the roles of cook and nurturer, brings her grilled-cheese sandwiches and choc-o-mint ice cream; they drink Bloody Marys made from her mother's canned tomato juice on the old canning porch; they go out to a restaurant in Paducah, decorated with farm implements (123, 127, 129). Mary feels confusion and unease about what she is doing in her mother's house and swallows her food “as if it were guilt” (125). But she cannot seem to lift herself out of a languid fog until she has to make a decision when Stephen calls to say he has found a perfect house: “a three-bedroom brick with a two-car garage, finished basement, dining alcove, [and] patio.” When Mary asks if it has a “canning kitchen,” he says, “No, but it has a rec room” (125).

This house in town lacks two things Mary needs, a canning porch and a place to keep the many cats which have become her constant companions. For Mary, the canning porch is an emblem of her mother's laudable domesticity, forsaken now in a new age of store-bought food: “The canning porch was my mother's pride. There she processed her green beans twenty minutes in a pressure canner, and her tomato juice in fifteen minutes in a water bath. Now my mother lives in a mobile home. In her letters she tells me all the prices of the food she buys” (123). The canning porch has become a place to feed the cats, and Mary's life has become a floating suspension of time in which she identifies herself in a rather eccentric way: “I am nearly thirty years old. I have two men, eight cats, no cavities. One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself” (127). Eccentric though she may be, Mary is a feeder. She nurses sick kittens with her father's old “teat extenders” once used on absent cows that haunt the place like ghosts now (128). But Mary does not cook or can, for all her nostalgia in regard to the old ways; she leaves the cooking to her lover. Still, she “quakes” at the thought of a “rec room” as compensation for the lost canning porch and tells Stephen that they must get a kennel to keep the cats out of the city traffic (125).

Though the cats are very important to Mary, Stephen is not crazy about bringing them along. He thinks Mary is “carrying this [cat obsession] too far” (125). In contrast, Larry likes cats and, while he and Mary play Monopoly, shows interest in her explanation of the two kinds of cat populations—residents and transients (128–29). Mary has read that some cats live on “fixed home ranges” while others are on the move. She points out the irony that while the “residents” were once thought to be the better-adapted group, scientists now think the transients may be superior, possessing the most intelligence and curiosity. But, like Mary with her options as to lifestyles, the scientists cannot be sure: “They can't decide.”

“Residents and Transients” presents Mary's perplexing choice: should she be a transient with Stephen, moving from “investment property” to “investment property”—in a real-life game of Monopoly—or should she be a resident and stay down on the farm with Larry and the cats? The choices do not fall into neat categories. If she goes with Stephen, she ostensibly plays the traditional role of wife—but with no cornfields or canning porch from which to feed her “family.” If she stays with Larry, she can continue her idiosyncratic nurturing while he does the cooking. At the end of the story, Mary's posture is an emblem of the modern woman's dilemma. She sees her “odd-eyed” cat coming down the road. It has one eye which shines red and one eye which shines green, “like a traffic light.” Mary stands poised on the street corner of a decision, looking at the cat's eyes, and tells us, “I realize that I am waiting for the light to change” (131).

Mary would like to have an absolute sign to show her the best direction so she will not have to lament the “road not taken.” But Mason, in her artistic wisdom, will not give Mary—or us—that clear signal. In the New South, there are no clear signals, only a buffet table of choices. Southerners can still dine on sweet-potato pie, collards and chicken-fried steak; they can eat at McDonald's or savor nouvelle cuisine. The women can serve the men and children first and then fish through the leftovers, or they can take turns with their men at cooking or carrying home take-out meals. With all the relish and gusto that southerners bring to any table, Bobbie Ann Mason's fiction explores the dilemmas—and the challenges—that change and choice have brought. Mason finds as much delight and significance in the new rituals of Saturday night before the television with Doritos and Pepsis as she does in old-fashioned family meals of ham, field peas, fried okra and banana pudding. She knows southerners can never return to the well-defined world of Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding with its fixed rituals and roles; so she celebrates the freedom of menu selection gained when many southerners no longer enjoy the delicious taste of Grandma's down-home cooking at every meal.

Works Cited

Hill, Rebecca. Blue Rise. New York: Penguin, 1983.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. “Drawing Names.” Shiloh 94–108.

———. “Graveyard Day.” Shiloh 165–78.

———. In Country. New York: Harper, 1985.

———. “Lying Doggo.” Shiloh 196–212.

———. “Memphis.” New Yorker 22 Feb. 1988. 34–42.

———. “Nancy Culpepper.” Shiloh 179–95.

———. “A New-Wave Format.” Shiloh 213–31.

———. “Residents and Transients.” Shiloh 121–31.

———. “The Rookers.” Shiloh 17–33.

———. Shiloh, and Other Stories. New York: Harper, 1983.

Welty, Eudora. Delta Wedding. New York: Harcourt, 1979.