Poke Sallet

I will never forget the smell.

It didn’t drift through the house. It invaded. It came through the kitchen door and took the hallway by force, and lingered in my bedroom. It was metallic, like somebody had boiled a jar of rusty nails, a car battery, and a handful of pennies that had been sitting in a fountain since 1952. I could taste it through my nose. Eggs and bacon were used to ‘fancy’ it up. But did not do a damn thing to mask the taste.

My first reaction was survival. I knew what it was from an experience at my grandma's house years ago. I bolted out the front door, gasping like I’d just been rescued from a burning building, and immediately started working the phone tree in my head. Tammy’s mama made meatloaf on Tuesdays. The Ross’s ater at 4:30 like retirees, but I was willing to eat early if it would save me from the weeds my Daddy was cooking.

But I was too late. Daddy had already spotted me through the window, and he was waving me in with a wooden spoon smiling and obviously overjoyed with his find of the day.

He was standing at the stove glowing with a pride I had only ever seen on the faces of men who’d landed an eight-pound bass or shot Bambi’s daddy. He’d found a whole patch of weeds on the other side of the pond, and you’d have thought he’d discovered a treasure chest and a pot of gold all in the same afternoon.

“Poke sallet,” he declared, holding up the pot like it was the holy grail.

Now, I did some reading later, which I recommend doing before dinner. Pokeweed, Phytolacca americana, is basically poisonous. The purple berries will take you out. The roots will take you out. The leaves will take you out too, unless you cook them exactly right. This is not a vegetable. This is a dare with chlorophyll. This is a plant that grows in a field, looks at poor farmers, and says, “Go ahead. Try me.”

And my Daddy said, “Yes, sir. I believe I will.”

He boiled those leaves. Then he poured the water off and boiled them again. Then he did it again, like a preacher at a revival who wasn’t satisfied the sinner had been properly baptized. Every round released a fresh wave of that smell, each one worse than the last, like the plant was fighting back from beyond the grave. I would not have been surprised if the paint had peeled from the walls, the houseplants wilted and our dog had packed a small bag and headed for the woods.

Mama didn’t say a word. She just set the table with the calm, faraway look of a woman who’d made her peace with God years ago and wasn’t about to start worrying now if a southern dish was about to kill her.

When it hit my plate, the poke sallet looked like collard greens that had seen combat. Dark, limp, and haunted. Daddy had fried it up in bacon grease with scrambled eggs, which was like putting lipstick on a pig. Nothing was going to tame that smell.

Everybody stared at me. My little brother had his fork held in the air, waiting, the way you’d let the new guy cross the frozen pond first.

So, I took a bite and the betrayal: it was not as horrible as it smelled or what I remembered. Earthy, a little bitter, like spinach that had lost its confidence. The bacon grease did the Lord’s work. I ate as much as I could stomach and spread the rest around my plate and the rest was hidden under my mashed potatoes. I spent the rest of that night lying in bed with my arms crossed over my chest like an Egyptian in a tomb, but checking for symptoms every fifteen minutes.

But morning came. We were all alive. Every one of us. And Daddy walked into that kitchen like a general returning from victory, coffee cup raised like a trophy.

I’ve thought about that night a lot since Daddy’s been gone, and here’s what I’ve figured out.

Daddy didn’t cook poke sallet because we needed it. He cooked it because his mama cooked it, and her mama before her, back when a field of free greens in the spring meant something. He knew those three boilings weren’t a guess. Somebody had to taught him that, standing at a stove a long time ago, the same way he was trying to teach us. That smell was the smell of somebody passing something down through generations of poor farmers when the crops did not produce as they should.

And that pride on his face wasn’t really about weeds. It was about walking across that field, spotting something everybody else would’ve mowed over, and knowing exactly what it was and exactly how to make it safe. That was Daddy all over. He saw value in things other people overlooked. He knew how to take something that could hurt you and make it into something that fed you.

I never did make it to the Ross’s that night. I’m glad I didn’t.

I’ve never seen poke sallet on a restaurant menu, and I hope I never do. It wouldn’t be right. It belongs on one stove, in one kitchen, stirred by one proud man with a wooden spoon, making his whole house smell like pennies and love.