Color me provincial. I am a son of the Deep South. Born in Georgia, my wife and I are rearing our son in Mississippi.
I’ve seen the wide world. At least some of it. I’ve eaten pho from a street stall in Saigon. I’ve drunk myself wall-eyed in the Montmarte neighborhood of Paris, bouncing from wine bar to strip joint with a pack of French truck drivers.
But the American South is the place I know best. And when I travel, I can’t help but wear yam-colored glasses when I compare and contrast what I see, not to mention what I eat and drink.
Last week, I traveled Arizona, between Phoenix and Tucson. I didn’t expect to find the South in the Southwest. But there it was.
At Ranch Market, an enormous store that’s like a Whole Foods for the Latino masses in Phoenix, the fish monger was peddling mullet and gasper goo, inexpensive fishes beloved by working-class southerners. And, in the center of the store, near the conveyer-belt tortilla factory, stood a hutch stacked high with monstrous fried pork skins, which, in width and length, recalled the shape of the pig from which the skins were stripped. Those gargantu-rinds trumped any I have ever seen in pork-rind-mad Mississippi.
On the drive south to Tucson, I passed through groves of pecan trees that evoked the vistas of my Georgia youth. And just past the turnoff for Red Rock, amid a rugged desertscape pocked with scrub, I spied a pileup of cotton modules, those long rectangular bales that, come harvest time in Mississippi, line the roadways.
And so it continued. In Tucson, over a breakfast of chorizo and eggs and flour tortillas at the restaurant Little Mexico, I learned, from Big Jim Griffith, dean of Arizona folklorists, that my sightings of the South in the Southwest were not wholly delusional. Turns out that, between the World Wars, a good many black southerners made their way west, in search of more hospitable racial and economic climes.
What’s more, I learned that Little Mexico’s chorizo and egg scramble, the one I came to love so, the one Big Jim declared to be “the best in Tucson,” was at least half-Southern. “We go half hamburger meat, half Jimmy Dean sausage,” the waitress told me. “A little vinegar, the usual spices, too.”
Now, I’m aware that while Jimmy Dean was born of the South, it’s now owned and operated by mega-grocer Sara Lee. And yes, I’m aware that one can’t build an entire South by Southwest rationale on the ingredients in an ersatz but delicious chorizo.
No matter. Let’s just say that a week of eating my way through southern Arizona has left me anything but homesick.
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