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Bicentennial Pie
Written by Tim Bascom
In the summer of 1976, I spent a lot of time at our town pool next to the brown-baked fields of the 4H Club, where I kept cool by dunking or getting dunked. I was a 15-year-old Kansas boy with a 15-year-old’s perspective on the world, much of it filtered through the pool’s PA system. Radio DJs were still interrupting songs two years after the Watergate scandal to insinuate that President Ford had made a secret deal with Nixon: a full pardon in exchange for keys to the White House. They were also joking about the Statue of Liberty needing a facelift before the Bicentennial celebrations.
I hoisted myself out of the water and pattered down the hot concrete in my dripping swimsuit, glad to hear Bachman Turner Overdrive come onto the PA, shouting over the pool-side screams “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.” I did my own mock rendition as I ran. Then I gave 25 cents to the pretty 17-year-old at the concession window and asked for a “Suicide,” watching in a cheerful way as she twisted in her yellow bikini to mix a cup of Coke and Dr. Pepper and Root Beer, sun-bleached hair bouncing to the music.
The singer on the radio stuttered out his signature “B-b-b-baby,” and I was struck suddenly that this girl was so wondrously tan she might as well be from the family of Bertie Hamilton, one of the four black residents in Troy, Kansas. Eighty-year-old Bertie, whose skin was close to the color of caramel, attended our church, and she was one of my favorite old people—in part because of her famous peach cobbler. In fact, just a few days later I would see her down at our church—“Troy Baptist”—for a Sunday evening potluck, where she appeared in her standard pink dress and white go-go boots.
Bertie’s cobbler was one dish I absolutely knew I had to sample, so I didn’t wait for dessert, placing some cobbler next to a scoop of chicken casserole and green beans. I opted for her dessert over all the brownies and Bundt cake and pineapple turnover, and as soon as I had done the required damage to my main dishes, I forked into that luscious stuff, savoring its balance of dumpling-like crust and succulent fruit. All the acid of the peaches was buttered and sugared away, which meant that I felt lifted into culinary heaven, raised to a rapturous bliss even though seated on a metal folding chair in a paneled basement.
It’s amazing how, even while eating underground in a dark hall-of-a-room with polyester suit jackets all around, those soft-baked peaches could taste like sunlight and honey. They sang on my tongue like the music down at the pool, full of let-go-of-all-your-worries exultation.
Of course, everyone at our table had something worrisome to say about the moral decline of the nation. This was a Baptist gathering, after all. They feared that, if our founding fathers could see the state of things, they would roll in their graves this Fourth of July, 200 years after Independence. What would George Washington think of Nixon and his stooges, not to mention the Doobie Brothers or Cheryl Tiegs wearing virtually nothing on the cover of Sports Illustrated?
I noticed, though, that Bertie didn’t jump into this running commentary. She just smiled an enigmatic seen-it-all smile and said, “What goes around comes around.”
I happened to know, through my parents, that Bertie had once had a baby who died, and that her husband had left her long ago. Also that she had worked for decades as a housemaid, cooking and washing other people’s clothes. She had a proven graciousness that gave her an almost regal poise, so I found it paradoxical to think she had practically leapt right out of slavery, a fact she had shared with my parents earlier that year while we were helping her move a broken clothes drier. “You know,” she said to them as I kneeled with her two collies, ruffling their ears, “my mama was actually born a slave! She didn’t get free until after the war, when her parents moved out this way.”
Of course, with 1976 being the year of the Bicentennial, our teachers at Troy High School had made a big deal about history all spring, but to hear Bertie describing her mother as an actual slave was to feel that legendary past stepping up close and personal, important enough to fight over, which is what some of Troy’s residents had done back in the 1850s when an abolitionist minister came to town and ended up being thrown into the river tied to a log. Bertie’s account of her mother pressed home the life-and-death importance of the abolition era, and that is probably why I smirked when July Fourth arrived and the town fathers made a big to-do about burying a stainless steel time capsule under a flagpole in front of our courthouse. That capsule included, among other oddities, what seemed to be an overly sincere description of a Doniphan County home-economics club known as the Pollyanna Club, renowned for prize-winning pies. Sure, I loved pie, but did that qualify a seemingly insignificant news clipping to be memorialized and dug up 200 years later as a representation of the life we had once lived?
I was too self-important, in a 15-year-old way, to see the irony of my own enthusiasm when it came time to make a personal contribution to this small-town celebration—that is, by playing trumpet on the courthouse lawn alongside Dad and my older brother and the other members of the Troy Summer Band. When our turn came, we carried folding chairs onto the grass then sat down and played very intently, wet at the armpits. We played “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Stars and Stripes Forever.” We played “America, the Beautiful.” Then we stood and bowed to a hearty round of applause.
Concert over, I walked around the edge of the milling crowd, finally joining a long line so that I could reach a table where members of the still-functioning Pollyanna Club were setting out slices of pie. When I finally got to the front, one of the servers winked, whispering that I could have more than one kind, plus a scoop of ice cream—that is, if I wanted.
I certainly did. I had spotted Bertie close by, in a blue and red dress with white, patent-leather sandals, which meant I could get not only a piece of cherry pie but some cobbler. I waited, facing the late-afternoon sun, until the plate had traveled down to Bertie then to one of the men in the background, who were palming ice and salt off the lids of hand-cranked buckets, then lifting out metal paddles to scoop spoonfuls of frozen vanilla.
My friends from the brass section had perched on the upper steps of the courthouse, but I waited by myself and started into the cherry pie, chewing on a tart forkful with a dollop of cold cream. All quiet there, I savored the sheer Americanness of the moment: flags in the wind, sun lowering over the horizon, trumpets scattered on the lawn.
I had the faith of a young man, which is a powerful but short-lived thing, and I could already sense the never-again nature of this moment. That sensation was magnified powerfully because I was now carrying a life-changing secret—something that no one else knew except my parents and brothers. Just a few days earlier, Dad had called us into the living room to announce that a mission organization in Africa was requesting him to serve as a doctor in Ethiopia, a country going through a full-scale Marxist revolution.
As I stood on the courthouse lawn in Troy, relishing bites of that soft-baked cherry pie with its flaky crust, I began to feel the lure of going to a place where history was getting defined more dramatically, but I also felt what could be lost by leaving. I bit into Bertie’s cobbler—shifting to its softer, warmer taste, so rich with butter and brown sugar—and I felt actual grief. Even without having left Troy, I missed this town that had been my one true home. I missed Bertie and the graceful way she went about life. Missed the ladies in the Pollyanna club, with their inherited Kansas recipes. Missed the church members grumbling about the decline of the nation. And the pretty girl at the pool, humming along with Bachman Turner Overdrive. In a few short months, I would be looking back from the other side of the globe, exiled to a place where everything tasted of red pepper and cumin, and pie could never taste the same.
Tim Bascom is a Des Moines writer who directs the creative writing program at Waldorf College. The University of Iowa Press will publish his new memoir, “Running to the Fire: Memories of an American Youth in Revolutionary Africa,” in the spring of 2015. This essay appeared originally in “Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie: Midwestern Writers on Food,” edited by Peggy Wolff and published by the University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
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A botanical tapestry created by visitors to the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden. Whitney Bouma, the Botanical Garden’s education and outreach manager, made the cedar loom, and visitors wove the plant material through it. “I came up with the idea when I was planning a youth program at the Botanical Garden centered around ethnobotany and how people use plants,” Bouma explains. “I wanted to find a fun and interactive way to illustrate that people use plant materials for textiles and weaving. I love this loom idea because it not only is educational but artful. The nature tapestries that we make from it are beautiful, and the fun part of it is that they are a collective art project.”
Photo by Kelly Norris.[/tab][/tabs]
