Southern Dining

A Round Table Again

    A while back I posted a short piece about a lazy-Susan-type-table I read about in a book about the South. Reading another book about the area, I have again encountered such a table. It does make some sense to be able to twirl a large bowl of ‘taters around, rather than attempt to lift one to pass along. Here is a description of the table that appears in the picture above and a brief discussion of the conversation that was held around it.

    

“The Delta: The Round Table” (p.109)

  “I joined eight strangers for lunch at the family-style Round Table at the Walnut Hills Restaurant in Vicksburg. Anyone at all could sit at the Round Table, among strangers or friends, and eat together. This bungalow on a side street had been recommended for its home cooking. Introducing myself, I said where I’d come from.

  “Set yourself down,” one man said.

  But an older woman muttered in a resentful way, “You know what you did to us?”

   The memory had become a taunt. The others at the table, all of them local, and most of them strangers to each other, although chatting amiably, went silent, waiting for my reply. They knew she was referring to the long siege of Vicksburg by the Union Army in 1864…. “I personally did not do anything to you. The South seceded. The North responded. All’s well that ends well.”

    This sort of response -- sometimes heartfelt, sometimes a bitter joke, sometimes spoken with defiant nostalgia -- is so commonly uttered in the South, always by whites, to a Northern visitor, that I learned not to say, “That was a hundred and fifty years ago,” but instead listened with sympathy, because conquered people feel helpless, and the proof of this is in the monotony of their complaint. The nagging on this point, ancient to me but fresh as today in their minds, gives the North -- of which I was the embodiment that morning -- a fresh magnitude.”

    More important than my reporting about my less-than-astonishing experience of reading about two round tables in two separate books in a very short period, is the conversation. It helps those of us way up above the Mason-Dixon line understand why there is such a current kerfuffle about the removal of statues in New Orleans. I also wrote about statues a while back and, as I said then, perhaps there should be a statute of limitations on the elimination of statues.

Sources: The book from which this discussion is taken is Deep South, by Paul Theroux. The photo is found on the site of the Walnut Hills Restaurant in Vicksburg. The posts you will find below.

    By the way, I enjoyed the book and you likely will as well. It is unfortunate, however, that some of the descriptions of the decaying conditions Theroux  found on his road trips, rival in their bleakness, those found in The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.