I’ve often spoken of my bizarre Forest Gumpian past as it relates to famous people (especially Southerners), and I will not rehash that list of historical and cultural figures yet again. It is just not that interesting anymore, at least to me, anyway. But I have had one unmentioned encounter that warrants a story. To my recollection, I have not written about it before.
As a teenager, I was a fried chicken junkie. I could eat more chicken than any man alive, including Jim Morrison (check out The Doors “Back Door Man). I looked at the meat itself as a necessary evil. It was the wrinkled crust that twisted my tongue, shifted my gears and fortified my loins. Ophelia delivered.
Damn; she understand the delicate intricacies of fried chicken crust to the point where men would drive a hundred miles to touch their tongues to her goodies. She had a talent and a skill and a wicked obsession. What Colonel Saunders did with eleven herbs and spices, Ophelia did with far less.
I tried to get her to lay the secret on me but she just smiled and shook a crooked finger, saying, “Honey, if I give that up, I ain’t got nothing left in this world but a few gold teeth and a 1968 LTD.”
She worked alone in her kitchen and no health department official dared question her preparation techniques for fear she would cut them off. Her place was open when she felt like cooking and was filled with the rich, poor, famous and criminal.
Ophelia could do things to a chicken wing that would make Bill Clinton actually have sex with Hillary and convince George Bush to admit that Dick Cheney had his hand up his ass the whole time moving his lips like a puppet. I can’t even remember the side orders at Ophelia’s place, which wasn’t really a place at all, but a few tables under a bent grove of loblolly pines next to a ditch of a creek nudged beside a small wooden kitchen no bigger than a walk-in closet.
She served collards cooked in pork fat, yams swimming in cinnamon butter and cathead biscuits the size of a coffee saucer. I do remember her saying that mac ‘n cheese was for wimps, however, and if you ordered it, you could kiss her ass (she said that phrase with only her eyes). Unlike Burger King, if you wanted it your way, you would not get the damned thing. She served what she wanted and you, by god, loved it, or left. I never saw anyone leave except after their shirts and belts were tighter.
Ophelia is long dead now. A part of me died with her – a few inches of artery at a time. And I am not alone.
