Barbecue in Black and White

Outside the front door, a guy in a black Oakland Raiders shirt and matching hat is standing at a card table, selling CDs at three for $18. There are lots of Marvin Gaye, Temptations and Stevie Wonder albums, along with a little rap. Inside, 20 customers are waiting in line.

I find Roy Burns, the patriarch of Burns Bar BQ, sitting in a plastic chair in the back. Burns, 65, grew up in Midway, Texas. He's been selling barbecue for more than 20 years. "I used to set up a smoker on the side of the road, but my arthritis got to me," he says. So he settled down and opened a restaurant and brought in some family members to help. He has been at this location for the last 12 years.

We eat at a picnic table under a canvas tent in front of the restaurant. The ribs are well done, but the meat holds together under a sweet and subtle glaze of sauce and smoke. They are among the best ribs I've tasted. The brisket falls apart on the way to your mouth; it's as soft and wet as pot roast.

"That's the difference between white and black barbecue," Houston artist Bert Long once told me. "White people don't cook it as long. And they doctor it up with marinades. Blacks cook everything to death." At Goode Co., every piece of meat is served in a perfect slice, he said. In the black East Texas style, they don't mind serving you a messy pile of meat debris.

As I learned at the barbecue symposium, the epitome of Deep South barbecue is pork, slow-smoked to stringy mush. In the black East Texas style, this original Southern cooking tradition is preserved, but with the substitution of beef, which was cheaper and more plentiful here.

"Need no teef to eat my beef" is a favorite slogan of black Texas barbecue men. If the beef isn't falling apart, then it simply isn't done enough. Black East Texas barbecue has its own aesthetic. If you're judging it by the standards of white barbecue, then you don't get it. Put some of that falling-apart brisket on a bun with barbecue sauce, pickles and onions and think of it as Texas's answer to a Carolina pulled-pork sandwich. Suddenly, you'll understand.

Except for my friends and me, everybody at Burns Bar BQ is black. And everybody seems to be having a good time. The cars in the parking lot remain long after the sandwiches are eaten, and there's a basketball game shaping up on asphalt nearby.

A plume of rising oak smoke, liberally scented with spicy meat, has long been the beacon of black celebrations in East Texas. "We ate barbecue at every wedding, funeral and family reunion I can remember," says Garry Reese, a local black writer who grew up in Conroe. "My uncles would stay up all night cooking the meat."

Of course, whites also held huge barbecues in Texas. Barbecues attended by thousands of people, for which whole herds of cattle were slaughtered, marked major occasions of all varieties. But the open-pit cooking style used at these events, and the traditions of barbecue as a focus for civic gathering, came to Texas with the cotton culture. And the people doing the cooking, in the Old South and in East Texas, were black.

"My grandfather Emmett Turner had a pit in the backyard, and I mean a hole in the ground," remembers Bill Bridges, a 77-year-old food writer and photographer from Palestine, when I ask him to describe old-fashioned white barbecues in East Texas. "This would have been around 1930. He used to barbecue a quarter of beef; he wouldn't bother with anything smaller. We'd go to the butcher shop and poke around until he picked one. Then he'd pick up a colored guy named 'Lijah who actually did the work. Grandpa would sit in the shade and drink beer all day and tell 'Lijah what to do: 'Time to turn it over, 'Lijah. Time to mop it.' Grandpa would invite people over and they'd all sit out there and watch it cook. It's hard, sweaty work, and people got blacks to do the work even if they were going to supervise."

When the facts as you understand them don't fit into the existing meta-narrative, you write a counternarrative, a different version of history, Neil Foley told me. Based on oral traditions and other evidence, African-Americans can present a convincing counternarrative of Texas barbecue history.

"After the cotton was all picked, the slaves on the ranches were given meat, whole steers and pigs to barbecue. It was a big party at the end of the harvest," says black cook-off competitor Louis Archendaux.