My heart sank when I opened the text message on the last Sunday morning in February.
It was from Kim Williams, from Marianna, the talented travel writer whose father is the mayor of the city. Kim is the person I get in touch with whenever I take a group to town for dinner at the Jones Bar-BQ Diner. She will always advise James Harold Jones to save enough pork for sandwiches for the group.
“Jones BBQ wrapped in flames,” she wrote. “Mr. Harold is fine.”
I imagined the kind of fire that destroyed Scott’s iconic Cotham’s Mercantile on a Monday night in May 2017. The restaurant known for its fried catfish and giant hamburgers has never been rebuilt; a new place simply could not capture the atmosphere of the old store that stood on a marginal lake. I feared that the same fate would happen to Jones, the first Arkansas restaurant to receive the coveted James Beard award.
I posted the news about Jones on social media and people started sharing the post in minutes. Kim’s next message came 42 minutes after the first and was more encouraging. She wrote, “I just spoke to a friend who went there. It may just be in the back. My dad is leaving the church and went there. The community will have it rebuilt. I will start an online fundraiser if necessary.”
She didn’t have to. A message came from Mimi San Pedro, of the Venture Center in Little Rock, whose team I had made a barbecue pilgrimage to Jones just before the pandemic began. She offered to open an online account. Within hours, this account was activated. News of the fire spread throughout the country and the money went in. When the account was closed a week later, it contained $ 67,000.
Mayor Jimmy Williams, 71, wasted no time in reaching Jones after the church. The fire department did an excellent job of containing the flames. The fire chief estimated that 70 percent of the building was damaged. The front part – where there are only two tables – was fine. The James Beard award hanging above the window where orders are placed was still there. That afternoon, the mayor was receiving media calls from across the country.
“That little place brought a lot of people to this small town,” he told The New York Times. “I met people from all over the world here.”
James Harold Jones, 76, promised to rebuild quickly.
“I’m going back with another building,” he said. “I’ve been in this for over 60 years. I started when I was 14.”
The Jones family has been selling barbecue in the Delta since 1910. Walter Jones, the grandfather of the man known locally as Mr. Harold, opened the restaurant. Famous food historian John T. Edge, who runs the Southern Foodways Alliance on the University of Mississippi campus, fell in love with the place while researching an Oxford American article. Edge said he didn’t know an old restaurant owned by Black.
The James Beard Foundation’s America’s Classic Award was launched in 2012, and the barbecue pilgrims began to arrive. The restaurant usually runs out of food before 10am. The only change Harold made was adding a guest book for visitors to sign.
“As soon as we received the award, we started to have national coverage,” he said.
Brett Anderson wrote in The New York Times: “Adrian Miller, author of the book ‘Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue’, which will be released next month, said the restaurant is pulled pork in a hot sauce. vinegar and tomato based is similar to the style found in western Tennessee. Marianna is about 60 miles southwest of Memphis. The restaurant is culturally significant, Miller said, because there are fewer pitmasters who smoke their meat only in the fire, like Jones does, and because of his longevity. “
Miller said: “Black entrepreneurs have always had obstacles placed in their path that make it very difficult for them to survive. Therefore, having this place that has existed for over 100 years is really extraordinary. Often, when entrepreneurs are starting businesses, especially barbecue , they do this so that their children can do something else. It is hard work. “
Harold’s son, James Jr., 46, also started an online fundraising campaign. A $ 25,000 emergency grant came from Southern Restaurants for Racial Progress. The Arkansas Huckabee Foundation raised an additional $ 10,000. Rodney Scott, a James Beard Award-winning South Carolina chef, whose original family restaurant was damaged by a fire in 2013, called to offer advice.
“You just need to make things more combustible, with metal doors and fire resistant,” Scott told Anderson. “These are things that we, familiar places, don’t normally think about.”
Anderson wrote about how the “alarm has spread throughout the state and beyond about the fate of a historic place that serves only one dish – pork pulled from Wonder bread or pound – in a city in the Arkansas Delta with a population of 4,100 inhabitants “.
We’ve come a long way, Arkansas. There was a time when we did not appreciate our state’s rich culinary heritage. It took people from outside Arkansas, like Edge, to warn us about what we have.
When I was invited by the Southern Foodways Alliance in 2010 to write the introduction to the Arkansas section of the SFA’s Southern BBQ Trail, I said in part: “The strongest barbecue area in the state is the eastern Arkansas Delta region. barbecue is pork here (beef has spread from Texas to parts of southwest Arkansas), although the sauces vary from place to place.
“At Craig’s in DeValls Bluff, along US 70, you will enter a dilapidated building and be asked immediately if you want your light, medium or hot barbecue. The hot sauce is just that. Most regulars follow the path The crowd here is a mix of locals, Little Rock and Memphis hunters when it’s duck season and those who are wise enough to get off Interstate 40 and find their way to DeValls Bluff.
“In Marianna, however, Jones Bar-BQ is in an old house in a residential area. Jones has been around since at least the early 1900s. While it is difficult to determine the exact year it opened, there are people who believe it is the most old black-owned restaurant continuously operated in the south.
“In the far northeast of the state, you can find the Dixie Pig in Blytheville. For more than 70 years, pork sandwiches have attracted people from as far away as Memphis and the Missouri Bootheel.”
As Jones’ fire showed us, we can lose those classics in the blink of an eye. I still mourn the loss of Wayne Shadden’s home on US 49 west of Marvell. Shadden died in May 2010 at the age of 77. His restaurant, housed in an old country store, has never been reopened.
Shadden’s story is very familiar in rural Arkansas. An owner dies and the children have no interest in continuing. In cities across our state, all that’s left is convenience stores that sell fried food under heat lamps.
The wooden structure that housed Shadden’s is almost a century old and still exists along the highway. When it opened, the walls were covered with newspaper clippings, photos and magazine stories. Musician Levon Helm, who grew up in neighboring Turkey Scratch, had Shadden’s barbecue sauce shipped to his home in Woodstock, NY.
The atmosphere in places like this – an atmosphere that you can still find in Jones or Craig’s – cannot be matched.
I once took food writer Gary Saunders to Shadden. Here is how he described it: “Talk about the days gone by. The establishment looks like a store / gas station par excellence. A woman was sitting on the front porch when we entered the gravel lot in front of her. She slowly stood up and waved head for us before disappearing into the kitchen. His break from work was over, if only for a while.
“The woman soon emerged from the dimly lit kitchen with our sandwiches, each wrapped in waxed paper and punctured with a single toothpick.”
We must taste our beloved Arkansas arena masters, like Mr. Harold. They will not stay with us forever.
Rex Nelson is a senior editor for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.