The Curious Sweetness of the Deep South
By Phoebe Baker Hyde

If you ask South Georgians about their legendary Tupelo honey, most will tell you, “The taste is hard to des-crawb. You’ll have to taste it fo-ah yer-say-ulf.”

I’ll admit that as a liberal Yankee I was nervous about visiting the intersection of South Georgia, Eastern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. I was there to research a novel— and to learn about my great great grandfather who ran steamboats along the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers to the Gulf in the days before railroads. In the library in Bainbridge, GA I found cargo records from the early 1900’s reporting shipments like 1,000 watermelons and forty-six passengers, one barge load of gravel, 9,000 lbs. of fresh channel catfish and a seemingly endless stream of naval stores: masts, resin and turpentine harvested from longleaf pines. Most remarkable, though, were the two hundred-plus occupied beehives loaded on the boats’ decks each spring. These were then painstakingly dispersed near stands of flowering Tupelos so bees could collect the ultra-sweet nectar. It seemed to me—as I stood later on the banks of the murky, alligator-infested Flint river—that this hive-shipping was an awful lot of trouble to take for a culinary luxury, especially before penicillin and reliable telephones.

But trouble is a relative term. My progenitor and other post-Civil War businessmen in Bainbridge also took the trouble to protect the town’s 200 year old live oaks and erect churches with imported stained glass—and all of them are still there. They built a massive and elegant hotel facing a miniscule town square. My great grandfather’s “Steamboat House” still floats at the top of Evans Street like a brand new seventy-ton, sixty horsepower behemoth, decks and railings whitewashed for an inaugural cruise. Like the South itself, the house has been slated for demolition, staunchly defended, partitioned up awkwardly for economic reasons, had its foundations bludgeoned for the sake of retrofitting and now the couple who live there and have restored it are thinking about putting it on the market for the first time ever. The problem, these distant relations told me, is that the original cut velvet curtains and steamboat murals in the sitting room should be maintained just as they are. If Bainbridge becomes a bedroom community for nearby Tallahassee, they fear these treasures will disappear.

But half of what gives treasure its appeal is its anachronistic quality—historical baggage, which is almost always part windfall, part curse. Two blocks out from Bainbridge’s picturesque historic district are Battle’s Quarters and MLK Boulevard, which to this day remains the separate center of black life. Mixed among tidy homesteads and spotlessly maintained churches are the classic signs of poverty: roofs bolstered with tarps and tin, jobless teenagers skulking in lawn chairs, a market with cheap foods providing minimal nutrition. Confederate flags can be spotted around town and back a second time at the excellent public library—a place staffed by a diverse cross-section of residents—I learned separate water fountains for white and “coloreds” were not removed until the 1970s.

Unsettled, I followed the current of the rivers south to their terminus at the Gulf, passing horses grazing under giant pecans and vigorous new-growth forests meant to replace the pines decimated by that brisk trade in naval stores. Some call Florida’s Forgotten Coast “The Redneck Riviera” or the nation’s armpit, but hot new real estate discoveries are made there every day. Saint George Island, separated from the mainland by Apalachicola Bay, is already saturated with gated communities and resorts. Cape San Blas to the west has powdery white sand and low surf, perfect for families; and although sunbathers were few in late March, the sounds of concrete mixers and workers hanging sheetrock in new condos filled the air. Only the village of Apalachicola sits in a marshier setting, surrounded by the sweetest oyster beds in the eastern US (so say the residents) and 246,000 acre National Estuarine Research Reserve. Maybe these natural buffers are what trapped the flavors of my great, great grandfather’s era and still send it inland in the evenings: salty, muggy, lackadaisical and thick with the sounds of oyster tongers sorting their harvest, anhingas and pelicans splashing down in sawgrass. As I sat on the porch of the Victorian Coombs House Inn, I swore I could hear men in waistcoats fanning themselves, ladies out taking the air in rustling skirts, children slapping down a long wooden pier barefoot, then paddling a dinghy out into the lapping waves in hopes of hooking a flounder.

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