Before we had even reached Asheville, NC, I had read on the web that the locals considered Tupelo Honey Café as one of the best in the city. So when a worker at our hotel also suggested it, my traveling buddies Valorie, Kristin and I knew that we had to make a stop.
It turned out to be a neat trendy restaurant like many you’d find in any larger city. When I saw grits and fried okra on the menu (along with sweet tea), I knew I was back home. Mac ‘n cheese was also on the menu, and I’m always on the lookout for the “good-like-my-mama makes it” version. Sometimes, though, it can be hard to find.
Our waiter told me that the mac ‘n cheese was good, but “it ain’t my grandma’s. She won’t give anyone her recipe.” He was a nice friendly guy, a true Southerner, unlike the rep behind the airport Alamo rental car counter who – devoid of a southern accent – was downright inhospitable (but the Alamo van driver and parking lot attendant showed true southern form).
So, I decided to try Tupelo’s mac ‘n cheese (which didn’t pass the test), grits and the fried okra. When the grits arrived, Valorie was surprised by the way they looked. “I thought grits were smashed rice,” she said.
Valorie is a Northerner, and she was not brought up on grits. Us southerners were raised on little else. Her encounter with grits reminded me of an experience I had years ago when I moved to Tampa, FL, and found people eating grits and fish for dinner. In the culture I grew up in, grits were breakfast and fish was dinner, and the two never met. It’s a southern treat, so much so that the state of Georgia in 2002 made grits its official prepared food.
So, I told Valorie that grits were made from corn. They’re actually ground corn, which tastes even better with cheddar cheese – and when cooked precisely. I’ll never forget the actor Joe Pesci’s first look at grits in the 1992 movie “My Cousin Vinny,” in which he played a New York attorney with a Brooklyn accent who used what he’d learned about cooking grits in the defense of a cousin accused of murder in Alabama.
This was only one of the discoveries that Valorie – and in other ways the rest of us – made during our little excursion to western North Carolina. I had lived in the eastern half of the state for a year or so some years ago but had never made it to Asheville, although I had always heard good things about it.
While in Charlotte a few days later, we learned from a guidebook that there was a plantation just northwest of the city in Huntersville. Valorie was curious to see it because some decades ago, she had traveled with friends to a large antebellum mansion on a plantation in Virginia owned by a white family that had been a benefactor to the friend’s father.
When they arrived, a female descendant of the family – now old in years – was sitting on the porch, recognized the father and invited them in to look around. Inside, Valorie saw paintings of the woman’s ancestors that seemed to stretch from ceiling to floor. The woman was “the queen of southern hospitality,” Valorie recalled.
The drive to the Latta Plantation outside Charlotte took us up a long road with seemingly impenetrable trees and brush on both sides. We wondered aloud how anyone could have found their way out of that thicket, understanding the difficulty enslaved Africans must have encountered trying to escape under much worst conditions.
When we parked the car in front of the welcome center, we spied a small white frame building; I assumed that the “big house” was somewhere out of view. Then I believe it dawned on us that this was “the big house.” Valorie was obviously disappointed.
She was expecting an antebellum mansion like the one she’d seen in Virginia those years ago. But this was a “little house,” small and unpretentious. A staffer at the visitor’s center said plantations in the area were modest compared to those in Virginia and other places.
Latta was a 19th-century cotton plantation built in 1800 by an immigrant from Northern Ireland, according to its website. The owner had 742 acres and 34 enslaved Africans. The plantation passed through several hands before the buildings were shuttered in the 1950s. In the 1970s, a nonprofit organization was formed to restore the plantation and open it to the public. The site offers tours, summer camps, workshops and other activities.
The Kinsey Collection of African American art and artifacts
Back in Charlotte, light years away from the plantation, we saw a wonderful exhibit of African American art and artifacts from the Bernard and Shirley Kinsey Collection at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture.
The California couple have collected historical items that chronicle 400 years of African American history, including a first-edition 1773 book of poetry by Phillis Wheatley and letters written by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The exhibit is headed to the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore, where it’ll be on display from Nov. 2, 2013, to March 2, 2014.
YMI Cultural Center
Whenever I travel, I always seek out the history of African Americans in the town. Although I knew that the black population has always been small in Asheville – the city does have a black female mayor Terry M. Bellamy who’s been in office since 2005 and has announced a run for Congress – I knew that even those few folks left their mark.
We found one notable bit of history at the YMI Cultural Center, where LaVora Elliott Smith, a transplant from Atlantic City who is the administrative assistant at the center, took us on a tour.
The center was built in the late 19th century by George W. Vanderbilt for the African American community and the craftsmen who were working on his mammoth Biltmore Estate. Two men in the community – Isaac Dixon and Dr. Stephens – asked Vanderbilt to build a structure for his black workers to “improve the moral fiber of the black male through education focusing on social, cultural, business and religious life,” according to the YMI center website.
Vanderbilt agreed, and the building was designed by a supervising architect working on his estate. The black craftsmen did the actual work, according to a history panel on the walls of the YMI gym. Construction on the 18,000-square-foot $32,000 building was started in 1892 and completed in 1893.
The institute offered a day school and kindergarten, night school for adults, a library, gym, doctor’s office, drugstore, sleeping rooms, and more.
According to the history panels, the building was located in the midst of other black businesses that at various times included a barber shop, pool hall, tavern, cafés and restaurants, funeral home, residences, shoe design and repair shop, doctor and dentist offices, service station, theater, hotel, ice house, beauty salon and a cab stand with space below street level for parking cabs.
The institute seemed to have flourished in its early years because the workers were required to join it. As the work slackened and then evaporated, financial troubles ensued. Around 1900, Vanderbilt was ready to close the center when a group of ministers organized to save it. They bought it from him for $10,000 in 1905.
The institute closed during the Depression and reopened in 1945, according to one of the history panels. The name was later changed to the YMI Cultural Center by a group of churches, renovated and rededicated.
Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, Asheville, NC
When Smith took us outside the center to show us where the library was located, we spotted a nearby church that had been there for years – Mt. Zion Missionary Baptist Church, founded in 1919.
Inside, the church sanctuary was magnificent. From where we stood in the back, it was expansive, spotless and seemed to have been newly renovated. Behind the pulpit were massive brass organ pipes. On both sides were beautiful stained-glass windows. At the back in the balcony was a giant arched stained-glass window. The ceiling was darkened narrow slats of wood.
The church was peaceful in its loveliness and a proud place to pay homage.
Other blog posts from my North Carolina trip:
A Gideons Bible in my hotel nightstand
A taste of Appalachian culture in the Blue Ridge
