Barbecue in Black and White

It wasn't what I was looking for. In fact, it ruined my whole neatly organized book outline. If blacks were cooking barbecue on cotton plantations in Texas in the mid-1800s, then how could I write that German butchers invented Texas barbecue half a century later?

And how did it happen that we forgot blacks used to cook barbecue in Texas in the first place?

According to University of Texas history professor Neil Foley, "African-Americans have been completely erased from the meta-narrative of Texas history." Foley is the author of White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture. I was intrigued by a couple of paragraphs in the book's introduction about the way Texas reinvented its history after the Civil War, so I called Foley to see if he could help me understand the strange disparities in Texas barbecue history.

"You want to hang your mythological hat on something you can be proud of," Foley said. "The image of the rest of the South was cotton, the Confederate flag, overalls and mules. But Texas had something no other Southern state had: the Alamo. Texans were the men who won the West, the men who defeated the Mexicans.

"So in early-20th-century Texas," he continued, "Texas started to consciously reshape its history." The melancholy Confederate symbolism was swept away in favor of the mythology of the cowboy.

Of course, Anglo Texans didn't actually invent the cattle culture, as some American history texts claim. "What did Moses Austin from Connecticut know about cattle?" Foley chuckled. "There was already a thriving cattle culture in northern Mexico before the Anglos ever got here…But there's nothing new or unusual about this sort of thing; it's been going on forever. You expropriate the cultural material of the people you subjugate and then repackage it as part of your own culture."

And so it was with barbecue. Mexican barbacoa was probably common in South and West Texas before open-pit barbecue arrived. Foley believes that whites and Mexicans have struck a Faustian bargain in Texas: Mexican-Texans play the role of the colorful minority, and in exchange, Anglos acknowledge that much of the state's heritage is actually Mexican. But blacks were an inconvenient reminder of cotton and slavery and poverty. So they were left out of the story.

"Once the myth becomes accepted history," Foley told me, "nobody questions it anymore. College-educated people from all over the country still see Texas as the wild West. There's a reason for that. Tourists come to Texas to see San Antonio and the Alamo. There are no African-Americans in the Alamo scene."

Texas was settled by brave Anglo pioneers and rugged cowboys, our history books told us. So Texas barbecue must have been invented by Anglos, too. Lacking any specific details, many creation stories emerged. In the proposal for The Chuck Wagon Cookbook of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch, author Jane Sherrod Singer wrote:

"In the cattle raising country of Texas, each owner of a ranch brands his calves with his own insignia, a Texas-kind of heraldry. Legend says that in the early days, a cattle owner, a Mr. Bernarby Quinn, used a branding iron with his initials B.Q., with a straight line under the B. He also served the best steaks for five-hundred miles around. Thus the Bar-B-Q is synonymous with excellent cook-out foods."

The Bar-B-Q ranch story is also recounted in Jane Butel's 1982 cookbook, Finger Lickin' Rib Stickin' Great Tastin' Barbecue. Only in Butel's version, the rancher is named Bernard Quayle. But no one seriously believes this tall tale anymore. Now we dubiously thank German butchers for inventing Texas barbecue.

"The ultimate roots of barbecue can be traced back to the Stone Age…its more immediate Texas origins date from one hundred or so years ago, when meat markets cooked and smoked their surplus stock…," said Texas Monthly in May 1997. Gourmet magazine's Jane and Michael Stern also have credited "East European immigrants" for definitive Texas barbecue.

I called the author of the New York Times article about the best barbecue in the Lone Star State to ask him how he had picked his winners. Steven Raichlen, author of many books on the subject of barbecue, said he had visited a few black places but that the white-owned barbecue joints he'd chosen were classic examples of the Texas style.

"When you're in Florence," he said, "you go see the Michelangelos."

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It's a Saturday-afternoon carnival at Burns Bar BQ on De Priest Street in the Acres Homes neighborhood. There's music coming from a jam box out front and more music coming from the cars in the parking lot.

"What's good today?" my companion asks a woman in gray sweats climbing into her car with a pile of Styrofoam containers.

"This time I got ribs," she giggles. "But this is my second trip. It's all good, and they really pile it on!"