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By her own choice, Margaret's workday began at five a.m., about the
time that Louis, the janitor, began buffing the terrazzo floor of
the lobby of the Selby Reflector. Her job, transcribing four to
five hours of thick, middle Georgia patois, required great
concentration, and the daily arc of life in the newsroom did not
begin until around nine o'clock, when the first reporters, still
puffy-eyed from indulgences of the night before, began to mill in.
Clutching brown-stained, steaming coffee mugs from Starvin'
Marvin's, they would walk into the darkened room and find Margaret
sitting at her computer, headphones on, her face ghostlike from the
glowing, gray light of the monitor. The only sounds were an
occasional squawk from the police scanner and the whispering
clickety-clack of Margaret's keyboard.
For three months, Margaret had been editing the new
phone-in-and-vent column named Chatter, and in that time it had
grown to be one of the most popular features in the Reflector.
People quoted it on elevators in the Perry County Courthouse
downtown and on the benches outside Johnny Chasteen's Seafood
Shack. Local disc jockeys called it the redneck Internet, quoting
it daily with a whoop and a holler. One day, when Margaret was
picking up a pair of leather slides she had had resoled at The
Peach Cobbler, she overheard a woman say, "Y'all treat me good or
I'm gonna call Chatter."
Anywhere from fifty to two hundred people called the Chatter
hotline each day to leave a comment or query at the sound of the
beep. They wanted recipes for homemade fried pork rinds. They
wanted to know who stole the sofa off their front porch or who
could tell them where to find the best barbecue in Perry County.
They called to condemn the owners of the new We-Bare-All that had
opened up in the old Stuckey's building on the interstate west of
town.
Lonely alcoholics would call in the middle of the night, verbally
stabbing at anything that might make them angry: news anchors who
talked too fast, teachers' vacation time, a neighbor's barking dog,
an editorial that frightened them, dishonest refrigerator salesmen,
Dillard's underwear ads. As the first and only Chatter editor,
Margaret felt like Selby's psychiatrist. Despite her newcomer
status, she had a feel for this city's collective values and
paranoias, a verbal patchwork quilt composed of nonmatching yet
oddly compatible sound-bite squares: Jane Fonda and guns and
smoking and Jesus Christ and rude cashiers and chitlins and birth
control and kind strangers on the corner of Mulberry and
Second.
" 'Mornin', Margaret."
Harriet Toomey walked up and set a pile of manila folders onto her
desk, then patted the back of her impeccably tamed silver beehive.
Even after three months, Margaret still could not stop staring at
Harriet's hair, voluminous and oblong like the cotton candy she
remembered from the Erie County Fair. When she first saw it, she
thought, "So this is why it's called a beehive!" It was easy for
Margaret to imagine something going on inside.
The Reflector's food editor for sixty-one years, Harriet appeared
to be about eighty, and she produced on her own an entire page of
food news for central Georgia readers every Wednesday. Her column,
Thanks for Askin', answered readers' questions about the food in
their lives, even though for lunch each day Harriet ate Wheat Thins
topped with processed cheddar cheese from a can she kept in her
desk.
Margaret took off her earphones. "You're here early today," she
said.
"I'm fixin' to leave town," Harriet answered. "I'm goin' down to
Valdosta to see my great-granddaughters, and I got to get these
pork recipes done."
Harriet sat down in the cubicle next to Margaret's, the only other
cubicle in the newsroom free of rebellious, visual declaration.
Most journalists seemed to have a burning desire to be noticed and
unique and irreverent, and they used their desks to make statements
about themselves. Some had pinned up cutouts of comic-book strips
with disparaging remarks about some authority figure. There was
also a dancing porcelain hula girl on springs, and a bust of
Shakespeare entwined with a feathery purple boa. Jason Nohr, the
education reporter, kept a headless Barbie on his desk to use as a
stirring stick for his coffee. The doll's legs, permanently
stained, appeared to be covered in suntan-colored pantyhose.
"You look tired, Margaret," Harriet said.
"I was up late, Harriet. My cat's stuck in a tree behind my
house."
"Oh, no!"
"He's been up there for five days."
"Five days!"
Margaret nodded.
"Five?"
"Shouldn't I be worried?"
Overnight, while dusting Harriet's desk, Louis had nudged a bookend
of gold-painted plaster hands in prayer from its position, and the
cookbooks had fallen over and lay on the desk like a row of expired
dominoes. Harriet set about pushing them back into place and
aligning the spines so they were flush.
"Well," she said, "everything's gotta come down some time or
other."
Harriet then shook her head and looked into the air with a
quizzical expression, an index finger on her closed lips, as if she
were searching for a book on a high shelf. Suddenly, her face lit
up.
"Did you call the fire department?" she asked.
"Do they really do that kind of thing? I thought that was a
myth."
"Ben Tuckabee's cat got up in a tree and they got him down."
"Good morning, ladies."
As Randy Whitestone approached, Harriet quickly turned her focus to
the pile of folders before her. Margaret realized early on that the
new executive editor, with his un-Southern, brusque delivery and
the impatient, staccato manner in which he chewed his gum, made
Harriet nervous. He also bombarded her with constant requests to
add an international flavor to the food page. Randy was a foodie.
Harriet would come to work two or three days a week and find
hurriedly-torn-out clippings on her desk from Cook's Illustrated
and Saveur, recipes for kimchee and Vietnamese beef soups and
low-fat pad Thai. Harriet responded by pinning to the gray fabric
walls of her cubicle certificates of appreciation from the Middle
Georgia Muscadine Growers Association and the Georgia Pecan Board,
among others.
"What deep-fried delicacy are we planning for this week's food
page, Harriet?" Randy asked. He leaned forward, resting his arms on
the top ledge of her cubicle.
"Well . . ." Her hands, usually as steady and fluid as a heavy door
on hinges, shook slightly as she looked at a press release from the
Peach State Pork Council. "See, next week is National Pork Week. I
was gonna write up some recipes for pulled pork."
Randy ignored her, turning his attention to Margaret. "Have you had
the barbecue here yet? It's incredible. Tangy, not sweet like you'd
expect it to be. Why is that, Harriet?"
"Sir?"
"What's the story behind the barbecue in central Georgia? How did
it get so tangy?"
"Just always been that way," she said.
"No, no, no, there's got to be a reason for it. It's got to do with
ingredients or influence of some culture or something. You need to
call a food historian."
Harriet wrote on her yellow legal pad—Call food
historian—in slow, curvaceous letters that reminded Margaret
of the young, delicate tendrils of a vine.
"What about next week's page?" he asked.
For the first time in the conversation, Harriet looked up at him.
"I was gonna write a story about an artist in Vidalia who's makin'
fake food."
"Fake food?"
"Yes, sir. They call it faux food. He makes polymer fruits and some
desserts that look real as can be."
Randy laughed and started to shake his head. "Why would anyone want
to use fake food, Harriet?" he asked.
"For decoration," she explained. "People like to use fake food in
their decoratin'. Like a bowl of fruit out on the counter."
"But why not use real food?"
"Because it'll spoil," she answered.
"That's okay, Harriet. Never mind. It must be a cultural thing. . .
. Did you get that article I put on your desk yesterday?"
"Yes, sir."
"And?"
Harriet stared at the blinking cursor on her screen for a moment.
Her chin began to tremble slightly, and her eyes grew shiny with a
coating of tears. Finally, she looked up at Randy.
"Mr. Randy," she blurted. "I just don't think my readers are gonna
wanna read about raw fish."
"It's sushi, Harriet."
"I already write about fish."
"There's only so much you can say about fried catfish."
"There's no need to get ugly with me."
"I'm not getting ugly, Harriet. I just know that three hundred
Japanese families now call Selby, Georgia, their home. We've got to
diversify our food coverage to meet their tastes."
Just two months before Margaret arrived in Selby, the Toyota
Corporation opened its newest North American auto assembly plant
southeast of town. Along with the executive families relocated from
Osaka, nearly twelve hundred workers from a closed plant outside
Camden, New Jersey, followed their old jobs south. Shortly
thereafter, the rest of the world discovered Selby, Georgia.
In these tumultuous, post-Toyota days—Randy referred to them
as A.T., After Toyota—a Japanese grammar school moved into
the abandoned Ponderosa Steakhouse on Cusetta Road. Walgreens
bought out a local four-generation drugstore chain named
Ringleman's and not only stopped home delivery but replaced the
adjacent Hallmark card shop with liquor marts. Natives were
boycotting their banks because the new out-of-state owners fired
the receptionists and installed voice mail. Selby's first X-rated
video store opened in the old post office on Pio Nono Road. New
Yankee parents at Ronald Dunwoody Elementary School started a
petition to fire the principal because she refused to abolish the
moment of silence that followed the Pledge of Allegiance each
morning. Four sushi restaurants opened in the affluent, northern
part of town, and the Selby roll was born—a marriage of
barbecued pork, tempura-fried Vidalia onions, and rice wrapped not
in nori but in a ribbon of steamed collard greens. And, for the
first time ever, it was possible for Selbyites to get their hair
cut and car washed on the Sabbath.
Two months after the Toyota plant opened, the Reflector, a
family-owned newspaper that had seen just six publishers, all with
the same last name, in its one-hundred-eighty-year history, was
sold to Granite-Peabody Communications of Washington, D.C. On the
day the sale was announced, they brought in Randy Whitestone, a
Pulitzer Prize–winning editor from the Philadelphia Inquirer
who, unfortunately for Harriet Toomey, knew the difference between
a serrano and jalapeño chili. It was Randy who took the daily
Bible verse off the front page. He cut the society column that
featured monied Selby enjoying themselves at Sugar Day Country
Club. He directed the features editor to include a men-seeking-men
and women-seeking-women section on the personals page in the
weekend entertainment guide. He started Chatter and hired Margaret,
despite his concern that she was vastly overqualified with her
master's in women's studies from SUNY-Buffalo.
Excerpted from SOUTHERN LIVING © Copyright 2003 by Ad
Hudler. Reprinted with permission by Ballantine Books, a division
of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Southern Living