Potlikker: A Monologue
Today, Salvation South brings you everything you will ever need to know about potlikker, thanks to Bonnie Schell.
“I have been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots.”
— Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
Listen and I’ll tell you about Potlikker. You spell it p-o-t-l-i-k-k-e-r, a fact established in 1982 when Zell Miller wrote to The New York Times. "Dear Sir: I always thought The New York Times knew everything ... Only a culinarily-illiterate damnyankee (one word) who can't tell the difference between beans and greens would call the liquid left in the pot after cooking greens 'pot liquor' (two words) instead of 'potlikker' (one word) as yours did. And don't cite Webster as a defense because he didn't know any better either. Sincerely, Zell Miller, Lieutenant Governor State of Georgia."
As Mr. Miller informed The Times, potlikker is the liquid left after boiling a mess of greens such as mustard, turnip, beet tops or collards, seasoned with ham hocks or salt pork and salt and pepper. The ’likker of those dark leafy greens, with their vitamins and calcium, would keep a child’s legs from turning knock-kneed or bowing out like a horseshoe. My Mama would stick the juice in the refrigerator and drink it for breakfast, or she would add water, sausage, leftover vegetables, and crumble cornbread or cornpones into a soup. A starving person may even lick the pot clean, while doses of potlikker and bone marrow broth will get a woman who has taken to bed, after childbirth or her husband running off with the church secretary, back up and back to work.
If my mother asked you to water her plants on the breezeway and came home to find that you had thrown away two of her 30 Mason jars rooting silver inchplant, she would say nothing but never speak to you again. If you stepped into her pantry and took it upon yourself to throw away all the cans several years beyond the “use by” date, she would bad-mouth you behind your back. But if you came into her kitchen to help clean up and threw away the ugly brown-green juice in the bottom of her pots, you had committed an unpardonable sin.
“What’s the matter with you?” she would shriek. “Are you a plain idiot? You do not throw away mine or anyone else’s potlikker. Never. Ever. You hear?!”
“What’s the matter with you?” she would shriek. “Are you a plain idiot? You do not throw away mine or anyone else’s potlikker. Never. Ever. You hear?!”
Wasting potlikker means you are plain sorry. A distant uncle met a bleached blonde with long scarlet fingernails at a truck stop and brought her home to the farm to set up housekeeping. Little Granny went over with a pound cake and saw that Sheila had thrown the potlikker through the screen door. Within a week, Sheila and all her belongings were on the Greyhound headed back to wherever she came from while my Uncle Lucius boo-hooed on the couch.
When a woman welcomes you to her home, she might say, “Come on in… Push the door to… Make yourself at home… I already boiled the pot.” A good woman always keeps an iron skillet of cornbread in the oven and a boiled pot of greens on the stove ready for any friend or stranger.
Don’t think potlikker is the same as what is left at the bottom of perked coffee or scuppernong wine. That’s the “dregs,” and that sediment gets thrown out, like the government does with those called the “dregs of society.”
Potlikker is the essence of the boiled greens much like the essence of a person, for the events in some people’s lives are like boiling water that simmers far too long: long whippings with hickory, kissing cousins going too far, abandonment, failure in school after learning to read at age 3, rickets, car and bank crashes, busted legs, club feet, bankruptcy, impacted teeth, dropsy, untimely marriage, eviction, filmy eyes, rheumatism, epizootic in your cows, ringing in the ears, gout, collapsed lung and roof, grippe, consumption, runaway son, apoplexy, blind staggers, hookworms, hardening of the arteries, hysterics, weak constitution, typhoid, fits, droughts, the runs, boils, stones in the kidney, enlarged hearts, stillborn babies, an angry uterus, suffocation by cats, a dry well, case of the nerves, lumbago, and lingering, lingering death. Still, some people are able to use their little portion of strength left to remain kind to everyone they meet.
And when those men and women pass, neighbors pitch in for their burial because they were at bottom “a good soul.” Never mind that the last-minute preacher does not know the deceased, for he reads the 23rd Psalm anyway whose verses promise the farmer he will lay down in green pastures, not upon clods of red clay. What is left in the bottom of the boiled pot, my mother said, is the food’s real value. After all, when people die, it’s the memories of their good works that are left and passed down to those who come after, eating their lowly greens.
I love this at face value, but also for its depths & turns, especially how those last two paragraphs kind of roll from the food-stuff to the catalog of humanity-stuff, and that legacy of essence. Amen.