Writing a novel set in Nash County (Raleigh, Rocky Mount: sales, school)

[luckydog]

Luckydog... you brightened my morning! Some of that stuff is priceless!

Glad it was helpful. Some of it might be used moreso by the "old timers" versus young people now, unless they are very rural ex. haven't seen you in a coon's age. sorry, I don't know much specifically about Nash county.

my main character, Randy, has an amazing sweet tooth. Can you think of something unique to the region that he would crave?

not very unique but...peanut brittle, pecan pie, banana pudding, pound cake are staples. I'll think about it. Most communities have a church fundraiser cookbook & I'm sure Nash does. You'll find many of the local specialties there. Homemade peach ice cream using a crank ice cream maker is a summer fav. Maybe Dump Cake, Caramel Cake. Preacher Cookies are fairly unique, I think. I had only heard of them when I moved to Chowan County--don't know if they have them in Nash. Toasted Pecans (salty, not sweet).

Also, can you think of any special dish that would be served on Thanksgiving? I've got the usual turkey, candied yams, and green beans --

butter beans & corn (mixed together), angel biscuits, oyster stuffing (and regular), giblet gravy, collards, sweet potato casserole, prime rib, baked ham & country ham, green bean casserole, mashed potatos, bread & butter pickles, tomato pudding, corn pudding, congealed salad like watergate, cherry, junkyard salad, iced tea, pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie.

and green beans -- oh, are they called something else?

green beans, snap beans, string beans...if you're referring to the long, green beans, in the pod. If you are referring to the kidney shaped green beans, then Limas, Butterbeans.

How about soft drinks? Soda? Cola? Pop? Coke-Cola? Something else?

all of those...also, some say co-cola versus coca-cola & many just say "canned drink" At the old fashioned soda fountains, you'll find cherry coke & vanilla coke with the tiny crushed ice. Don't know if Nash has one.

Other food ideas...venison, baked rock, bbq sandwiches with slaw, fried okra, black eyed peas & collard greens (on New year's day), homemade sausage.

[Bethanytedder]

"Ray" would be like my grandfather. He hated how no one seemed to know how to "count out change" and relied on an adding machine or a newer cash register to tell how much change to give a customer. Also the fact that you have to pump your own gas at a convenience mart or service station. And another thing that I hadn't thought about in years, when soft drinks were in bottles, when a woman bought one, he would gently wrapped in around the bottle with a piece of paper sorta like tissue paper to prevent the moisture from leaking on the woman's dress. Get a convenience mart to do that now. LOL

[luckydog]

Oh for the Thanksgiving dinner, egg gravy. It is a staple here. Basically what it is, is gravy with sliced boiled eggs in it. It is served over the stuffing and turkey

What we call giblet gravy here. Never heard the egg gravy term.

The barns are tobacco barns.

[dianalee4jc]

ROFL!!! Thanks Bethany! I loved your take on the story! And now I'm thinking I should include "Ol' Ray" as a recurring character in the novels. What a charmer! LOL I'm going to have to give you a mention in the acknowledgements.

You mentioned something that made me remember a question I had. When I drove around Nash County, I saw a lot of these old, falling-down structures in the fields, usually fairly close to the road. Barns? Storage sheds? Do you know what I'm talking about? If so, do you know what they're called and what they were once used for? (One of them figures prominently in a scene since it prompts Randy to remember something that happened to him when he was a child.)

Ol' Ray! I can just picture him... his sun-etched features, a much-loved and worn out baseball cap, maybe white hair on his back and shoulders when he wears a tee-shirt in the summer... sage advice with a southern drawl, and he knows each and every kid by name from the day they're born. Love it!

[luckydog]

Randy seized the opportunity to grab a marshmallow from atop the candied yams

They might in Nash, but here, we don't prepare them like that. Never had them like that in my life. Candied yams are either whole or sliced, after being baked, & glazed with butter, cinnamon & brown sugar. Sweet potato casserole is more likely to have marshmellows on top, but here we really mostly use chopped pecans on top.

Sil would be a good nickname for Silvia.

[Bethanytedder]

The structures that you are describing sound like abandoned tobacco barns. Back when I was young, the tobacco had to be harvested in about the last of June through August. Schools back then didn't start until September because the teens were involved with the harvesting of tobacco and the farmers needed them badly to finish the crop. They would start with the bottom leaves called lugs and work their way up to the top of the stalk when the field was "ripe". Once it was loaded into a tobacco truck as they were called, And this was pulled by either a tractor or a mule to the barn, you had about 4 loopers and 8 handers. The handers which were two to the looper would gather about 5 leaves per hand full and hand it to the loopers and they in turn looped the tobacco around a stick with tobacco twine. There might also be a person on the barn ground to take the finished stick to a rack that held the days works. At the end of the day, the croppers would come back to the barn and with the longer legged men and in some cases women, they would climb into the barn and straddled the tier poles or racks. We would hand up the sticks and they would put them in the barn. Obviously this required a lot of courage not to mention balance. Once the barn was finished, the owner would light the burners and "cure" the tobacco. In a couple of days maybe, the barn would be cured and ready to be taken out to another thing they called a pack house. The women in there would take the tobacco off the stick and take about 10 leaves and wrap another leave around it all and then place it in a burlap bag. Then it was collected and taken to market. And the cycle with that field and that barn would start again until it was all harvested. We don't do that now at all. Bulk barns were used for a while and tobacco is on its way out up here. I was born in 1951 and the last year I harvested tobacco was in 1968. And it was done as I described. My mother would cook dinner (lunch) for the crew and my grandmother did the same thing on her end of the county. They normally took off about hour to 90 minutes for lunch. They started around 6 Am unless they had to take out a barn of tobacco first and then it could be as early as 3 AM when you started. Finishing time was around 6 PM unless the weather was bad. Oh and tobacco has this horrible black gum on it. You can't get it off completely although Lava soap was really good for it. Most of your clothes were ruined for this occupation. Then there was topping and suckering. Tobacco grows to a height of about 5 1/2 to 6 feet tall topping out at with these little pink and white flowers. Suckers are a little harder to explain. But they had to be picked off and there was no way at the time I was doing it but to go row to row and pull the little monsters off and break out the top of the flowers to make the tobacco perform better. Oh and lets not forget about the tobacco worms. Fat little worms that ate the tobacco. And you were suppose to pull these of and kill them too. And they were the color of the tobacco in the field. Most of the time you had one in your hand before you even realized it. If the structures were tall, had green materals as outer covering and if you opened the door and it had a row of burner and racks on top of it, it probably was a defunt tobacco barn.

[luckydog]

worn out baseball cap...he wears a tee-shirt... he knows each and every kid by name from the day they're born.

Old country men in an old country store around here are more likely to wear... a mesh "trucker" style baseball hat with an agricultural logo on the front or camo hunting hat/trucker style or blaze orange hunters hat/truckers style...dark green dickies shirts/pants or navy dickies coveralls....they know each kid by who their daddy, grandaddy is...."who's your daddy?" or "you're david's grandson".

[luckydog]

he wears a tee-shirt...if he does wear a tee-shirt it's a white hanes undershirt.

[dianalee4jc]

Yikes! No marshmallows on the candied yams? Must be a mid-western thing, then... that's how my mother always made them. (Cut up yams layers with butter, brown sugar, and pecans, then the marshmallows on top. Yum!) Maybe I can just have Randy grabbing a marshmallow out of a bag on the counter instead of off the yams.

Bethany... that egg gravy sounds yummy! (And of course, with all yummy things... totally fattening too!) And wrapping the drink in a paper towel... what a gentlemanly thing to do! I love this guy... LOL

[luckydog]

(Cut up yams layers with butter, brown sugar, and pecans, then the marshmallows on top. Yum!)

Sorry, I've definately never, ever seen them that way here.