The Chow Chow Table Under the Oak
I set Mama’s picture down on the folding table at seven forty on a Saturday morning, and my daughter-in-law looked at it like it was a summons.
Her table was right against mine, a hand’s width of gap between them. Her jars were lined up in rows of eleven, the gingham lids all turned the same way, the way I had taught her to do it back in August.
Mine were lined up the same way. Same pint jars. Same yellow-green chop showing through the glass. Same gingham lids, because I had bought both boxes of them at the hardware store myself.
The only differences were the labels, the prices, and the black-and-white photograph of an old woman in a white blouse that I had just stood up in a dime-store frame at the front of my table.
Ashlyn stood behind her table in her green flannel shirt with her arms hanging at her sides and her belly round under the flannel. She is twenty-seven years old and six months along with my first grandchild.
She did not say a word. I did not say a word either. The Spanish moss hung down off the big live oak over both of us, and the sun came through it in pieces.
I want to tell this right, because I was not all the way right in it. But I was not wrong to set up that table. I have thought about it a good deal since, and I still believe that.
My mother was Ida Mae Parrish. She put up chow-chow for fifty years, from the summer she got married until the summer her knees would not let her stand at the stove anymore.
If you did not grow up in the South, chow-chow is a relish. You chop green tomatoes, cabbage, sweet peppers, a few hot ones and onions, salt them down overnight, then cook them in vinegar and sugar with mustard seed and celery seed.
Mama added turmeric. That is what gives hers that yellow-green color, like the first leaves on a pecan tree. She said a jar ought to look like something before you ever opened it.
She ran a table at the Saturday market on the courthouse square for thirty-one years. Same spot, under the same live oak, right where the sidewalk bends toward the war memorial.
She sold her chow-chow for four dollars a pint for most of those years and then five, and she would not go to six no matter what anybody told her about the price of sugar.
She also gave away about as many jars as she sold. Every widower in the county knew that if he came by her table looking thin, a jar was going to end up in his sack whether he paid for it or not.
She kept the recipe on one index card. Blue lines, her slanted handwriting in pencil, and a tomato stain on the bottom corner the shape of a little thumb.
When she died three years ago this past spring, my brother took the guns and the truck and I took the card. That was the whole of the argument over the estate, and it took about four minutes.
I also took her garden, more or less. Her house sold to a young couple from Valdosta, but I had already been working a plot behind my own place for years with seed she saved.