GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER
Thomson, Peggy Bebie
Guess who s coming to dinner by PEGGY BEBIE THOMSON Washington, D.C. MORRIS RUBIN EDITOR PROGRESSIVE: HAVE JUST ASSISTED PREPARATION MUSTARD GREENS FOR THREE THOUSAND RESURRECTION CITY. 432...
...Stephen's stove...
...Spirits were high...
...But visitors are here all right, at the encampment on the Mall at Lincoln Memorial...
...Inez Drummer clamped a double layer of foil over the pots...
...As you know, that tourist traffic has fallen way off this year...
...The Greyhound tour people are grumpy...
...As he did so Mrs...
...In other years housewives here have been busy putting on bathtub-size stews for all the house-guests who flock to the nation's capital through the spring-blooming months...
...He said, grinning, "I guess I eat so badly all the time, I don't hardly miss nothing...
...For this month of May, or until mobile units can be rolled in to permit home cooking by the resiPEGGY BEBIE THOMSON is a free lance writer who lives in Washington, D.C...
...As I watched, Charles Reed stirred eighty gallons of cheese sauce into his macaroni with a five-foot paddle...
...Peggy...
...I hitched a ride that afternoon in the food van...
...POT LIQUOR SEASONED TO TASTE...
...If they don't like these greens," she told the Benedictines, "I'll be down there in five minutes to hear about it...
...432 POUNDS GREENS, 28 POUNDS CUT-UP FATBACK...
...I bring my own food...
...Drummer is a cook with a generous figure who has quit work, now that her husband has a steady machinist's job, to spend three afternoons a week at St...
...Over at Howard, where I looked in the next day, there was not quite the same air of steamy domesticity...
...I thought you might be interested in the loaves and fishes aspect of feeding them...
...The mud was, temporarily, drying up...
...dents, the meat and potatoes are taken care of at Howard University, the sandwiches at St...
...LETTER FOLLOWS...
...You can hear your heels echo as you circle the marble fountain at the National Gallery of Art where ordinarily you would be tramping hipbone to hipbone...
...And he is entirely congenial to the notion of food as an avenue to salvation...
...she screeched, rattling a tattered shopping bag at me...
...I looked in at St...
...There in the basement kitchen—it was three in the afternoon—the mustard greens were bubbling along nicely in eleven huge pots, the ten-gallon size, on a stove that wasn't really all that big...
...They just ought to give us more greens, maybe lunchtimes, too," said a Louisville man on crutches...
...PEGGY THOMSON Dear Morris: Yesterday's mustard greens were a success and were eaten to the last shred by the residents of Resurrection City...
...Things were pretty frantic, and no wonder...
...Only one lady rejected the steaming plate...
...Burns, "they wouldn't be fit to eat...
...On the other hand the Reverend Ralph D. Abernathy says he wants his people to get steaks...
...Do you think I'm out of my mind...
...The aroma rising up the stairwells had apparently just reached the offices on the third floor, because runners from the medical team working up there on the Poor People's records were appearing at the door to ask for samples...
...Sitting across from me at a long table was a sheetmetal worker from Newark presently living, he boasted, at "000 Poor Street, around the corner from Starvation Avenue, in the only shack with a sun-porch...
...Those are the happiest people on this earth and you know it...
...Stephen's and the Incarnation churches...
...Hotels and motels too...
...As she cut rind from the pork, the Californian reported on a good breakfast at the River Road Unitarian Church in Maryland...
...John's College high school (mostly by suburban and inner-city teenagers and their teachers), and the vegetables at St...
...Assisting with the greens that afternoon were three suburban housewives, two neighborhood mothers, and a young-looking woman who had just bussed in from Los Angeles as a representative for the Welfare Rights Group of the Aliso Village public housing project...
...Around four o'clock the Brothers James and Christopher arrived from St...
...Robert Burns, who runs the whole show from a little glassed-in cubicle in the kitchen, has plenty of cooks but not enough burners for the broth...
...S first...
...I do know it," Father Jerr agreed...
...The first day she got television crews and no salt pork...
...The run from Howard to the Resurrection City site takes forty-five minutes, through heavy traffic...
...The Reverend William Jerr was very much in charge, poking here, sniffing there, shifting a pot to a faster burner, all the while swapping recipes for poke greens and pokeberry wine with his housewifely crew...
...And as I served some of the old people (they are excused from standing in line) I heard a lot of compliments on the greens...
...Burns plans to cook grits but hasn't been sent any yet...
...She added, however, that a Mexican woman from her caravan had been afraid the breakfast would make her sick, since she was used to chili and beans, and the coffee cake looked suspiciously "sweet...
...Lines in the food tent were orderly...
...She expected to have the whole kitchen but got one corner of it...
...Father Jerr still had to sample each batch of his greens and tune up the seasonings before releasing them to the Benedictines...
...With an elderly couple who came to shuck the corn Simmonettee discussed the need to honor the marchers' preferences for food like ham hocks and grits...
...That's where the mustard greens that I wired you about come in...
...The day I visited, an unexpected truckload of fresh corn (1,500 ears) and 365 crates of escarole were delivered...
...And because of donations, the menus are unpredictable...
...Father Jerr is a white, skinny New Englander who has lived twenty years in the South...
...He regularly breakfasts eighty pre-schoolers, lunches fifty senior citizens, and serves light refreshments following such ecclesiastical happenings as electric and African masses...
...Two young sisters from Mississippi reminisced about the good gravy the pinto beans make when they have simmered for three hours...
...He is experienced in fried chicken-and-chitterling soul food...
...It is a dingy brick Episcopal church on 16th Street with a banner on its front door that says "alleluia he is risen...
...He dodged the ladle...
...If I sent down 3,000 steaks in these garbage cans," predicted Mrs...
...When the District of Columbia health inspector plunges in his thermometer, the brew has to register 160 degrees or it can't be used...
...It was a sunny Sunday...
...They'll like them," she added, waving a spoon jubilantly...
...Helping him as a daily volunteer—and a believer—was a Jamaican, Waranzaumees Simmonet-tee, who chefs at Union Station...
...One man said his ulcer was acting up for want of pinto beans and grits...
...Neighbors are taking care of her ten children "so I could come here and be counted...
...This far from home, practically everyone misses something...
...Her daily deliveries are cliff-hanger affairs—850 cans of ham may get to her in mid-afternoon...
...They put on some pretty good barbecues of their own...
...Anselm's Abbey, their van loaded with 350 pounds of braised beef, done at Howard, and with garbage cans of boiled potatoes...
...Father Jerr volunteered to do the Poor People's vegetables when he learned that ninety per cent of the sauerkraut served for their first dinner was rejected...
...He came out of retirement at seventy-eight not because he believes in the marchers' cause ("They're just here to mess things up") but because his union asked him to...
...A number of the residents, who apparently suspect the mass food isn't clean, prefer to do their own cooking and have improvised grills and pots from bedsprings and buckets...
...Her last article in The Progressive was "Language and the Negro Child," in the February issue...
...I asked him what he missed...
...I just want to fatten them up a little before they go home...
...It is being done by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), on a budget of $1 per person per day, with the daily services of 100 volunteers and the assistance of the mayor's ad hoc food committee, chaired by Giant Food's president, J. Danzansky...
Vol. 32 • July 1968 • No. 7
