Barbecue in Black and White

Carving the racism out of Texas barbecue mythology




Daniel Kramer
Daniel Kramer
Daniel Kramer
Texas State Archives
Courtesy of Nina Sells
Black and Hispanic cotton pickers made Texas barbecue a big business.
WPA Collection, Library of Congress
Black and Hispanic cotton pickers made Texas barbecue a big business.
UT professor Neil Foley is the author of White Scourge.
John Anderson
UT professor Neil Foley is the author of White Scourge.
Roy Burns sold barbecue on the side of the road before starting his restaurant.
Daniel Kramer
Customer J.W. Peters and Roy Burns chew the fat on a Saturday afternoon.
WPA Collection, Library of Congress
Look for William Littles trailer on Highway 3 near 27th Street in Dickinson.
Daniel Kramer
William Little offers up one of his masterpieces.
Daniel Kramer
William Little offers up one of his masterpieces.











"Are any of the judges black?" I wonder.





"Did anybody give you trouble?" I ask.

























So why is Texas barbecue different?






"That's Dummy Wright making sausage," she says.

"Dummy?" I ask.









"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."

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!"

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.

In fact, barbecue seems to have been just as common on Texas cotton plantations as it was in the rest of the South. "De sarvants had lots ob picnics an ole Marse ud gibe us meat fer barbecue," former Texas slave Winger Vanhook of Waco told an interviewer for The Slave Narratives. This series of interviews with more than 2,300 former slaves, conducted in the late 1930s by writers working for the Works Progress Administration, contains several references to black barbecue by former Texas slaves and their offspring.

Steve Williams, a slave in Goliad County, described life after being driven away from the plantation. "So we jes' scatters 'round, here and yonder, not knowin' zactly what to do. Some of us works on one farm and some on another for a little co'n or some clothes or food. Finally I works 'round 'til I comes to San Angelo, Texas and I cooks barbecue (at a barbecue stand) for a long time 'til I jes' finally breaks down."

Barbecue sellers and outdoor food vendors of all varieties began to thin out in Texas, as in the rest of the country, when state and county sanitary regulations were introduced around 1910. The German and Czech butchers, on the other hand, smoked meat in brick enclosures and were already subject to whatever regulations various Texas counties chose to enforce.

In the 1920s, a Beaumont barbecuer named Joe Burney taught Houston blacks how to construct cinder-block pits that would pass inspection, old-time Houston barbecue man Harry Green told me. During the era of segregation, these black barbecue restaurants in black neighborhoods were quite successful. The Fifth Ward alone supported six famous black barbecue joints.

But with desegregation, African-Americans began to desert the old neighborhoods, and by the early 1970s black-owned barbecue joints started closing their doors. Today, few of the once famous black barbecue restaurants in Houston still exist. Many black barbecuers either gave up or went back to the tradition of running a roadside stand, either on an irregular basis or in a trailer duly licensed by the health department.

"In East Texas, white barbecue is served in restaurants. You get nigger barbecue from a stand by the side of the road -- usually about the size of an outhouse, with a hand-lettered sign," Bill Bridges told me on the phone from Palestine. "In the old days, white barbecue was brisket, the same as it is now. Black barbecue was hot links and the stranger parts of the animals."

Bridges is a very likable and knowledgeable guy, and he doesn't consider himself a racist. But he was born in 1925 and can't break certain lifelong habits. Although his use of the N-word is deplorable, ironically he is one of the few white Texans I've talked to who understand the key role blacks have played in Texas barbecue history.

"Nigger barbecue isn't a derogatory term in East Texas," Bridges says when I ask him about his use of the word. "It's like calling Brazil nuts 'nigger toes.' If anything, the term is used with affection."

Smoke billows from a camper-trailer parked in a vacant lot on the side of the road. I've been hearing about this particular trailer, and the barbecued brisket sandwiches that get handed through its little window, for quite some time now. I park my car, walk up to the window and stick my head inside. There I see William Little watching television.

Little ambles over and opens the steel doors of a smoker that has been improbably welded right into the trailer's frame. When the sweet-smelling smoke abates, I see foil-wrapped packages and charred hunks of meat waiting to be sliced. The doors of the smoker open into the camper's kitchen, which has a multicompartment sink, counter space and a refrigerator. The firebox is fed from the outside. The back of the pickup truck that pulls the trailer is loaded with oak and pecan logs. William Little has been working out of this trailer six days a week for the last 15 years.

I first tasted Little's brisket when I begged someone who was going to Dickinson to bring me back a sandwich. I had heard Little had some of the best brisket in the Houston area, and I wasn't disappointed. The meat was incredibly smoky and very tender, and the sandwich was loaded with a huge amount of it. Barbecue sauce had been drizzled on the bun, and the whole thing was topped with raw onions and dill pickles. It was one of the best brisket sandwiches I'd ever had.

I had no idea if the man was black, white or Hispanic when I first heard about his brisket sandwich. Nobody bothered to mention his race, or even his name. They only told me about the barbecue and where to find the trailer.

Little's trailer is usually on the side of Highway 3 at 27th Street in Dickinson. If he isn't there, then he's probably off at an event, like the rodeo in Pasadena. "Did you ever think of entering the Houston rodeo cook-off?" I ask him.

"Nah, I can't afford it," he says, but he doubts he would win anyway. "Black people know how to cook brisket, but the rules for judging are not really about how it tastes. It's all about how pretty it looks. I've eaten brisket cooked by a team that won, and it was nothin' special," Little says as he hands the coveted sandwich and a package of ribs through the little window.

I take a huge bite leaning over the trunk of my car. "Damn, that's some smoky brisket!" I mumble to myself. Black East Texas barbecue doesn't need any help from affirmative action, I reflect as I wipe the sauce off my chin. An unbiased opinion and a map drawn on a napkin will do just fine.

For the best black East Texas barbecue within an hour of downtown, see "A Dozen Brisket Sandwiches."

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