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You can just see it all in your mind's eye, shimmering out there on the horizon like a hot-asphalt highway mirage: the perfect pit; the ultimate pork shoulder or rack of ribs or beef brisket; the original secret sauce revealed at last; the invincibly gifted and endlessly quotable 'que wizard pouring out his wisdom to you; the whole wonderful and doomed way of life rescued from the precipice of oblivion just at the very last moment, as civilization itself hangs in the balance.
Besides which, you're eating all the way, and a lot of it is bound to be memorable, maybe even immortal.
Until now, Vince Staten and Greg Johnson came closest to this movable-feast ideal with their Real Barbecue in 1988, but that noble effort fell victim to a certain urban provincialism when the editors overruled the authors and gave the book a prosaic title instead of the preferred and infinitely more evocative Barbecue and the Meaning of Life.
Now comes Lolis Eric Elie, a native New Orleanian (what better food credential could a body have?) to try his hand at this holy-grail pursuit. Predictably, he falls short of perfection, as every Utopia-seeker does-but his wonderfully written account of the 'que quest from Memphis out into Greater America and back is a Homeric odyssey that has more staying power than a great hot sauce.
Smokestack Lightning (the title is borrowed from a Howlin' Wolf harangue) ambitiously aspires to be "a metaphor for American culture," and in many ways it reaches that level of vision. "Barbecue alone," Elie asserts, "encompasses the high- and lowbrows, the sacred and the profane, the urban and the rural, the learned and the unlettered, the blacks, the browns, the yellows, the reds, and the whites."
So our man Quixote sallies forth, accompanied by a pit-wise seeing-eye cameraman named Frank Stewart. They start and finish with a pork shoulder sandwich from legendary pitman J. C. Hardaway at Hawkins Grill in Memphis, Stewart's favorite joint from his growing-up days. In between, they ramble off to Texas and the Carolinas, to Chicago and Kansas City, to all manner of off-beat places. And everywhere, they capture an essence that you read and look at with growing assurance and a certain delight. This, you say to yourself, is the way it truly is out there in the great sprawling subculture of 'Quedom.
Some things about the design of the book are a bit distracting to me. Stewart's powerfully composed photographs, reminiscent of the inestimable Al Clayton at his best, are printed too dark, robbing them of sharpness and definition and depth. The mixture of typefaces and the overuse of vertical and horizontal line rules also take away from the overall quality.
But nothing can diminish Lolis Elie's prose, or the unpracticed eloquence of the people he interviews; their words sing, rising and falling in shouts and whispers, lingering in the air like the unmistakable aroma of a real hickory pit.
Just to show you that these are multitalented young men, I'll let Frank Stewart take the benediction.
When Elie and Stewart finally find themselves back at Hawkins Grill late one evening, the booths and the dance floor are crowded, glasses clink and voices rise above the blare of the jukebox. The kitchen is closed for the night, but their main man J.C. serves them a couple of shoulder sandwiches just the same. Right about then, Howlin' Wolf himself comes on with his "Smokestack Lightning, shining just like gold," and it is Stewart who captures the moment. "You know," he says, looking around, "what we have here is a dinosaur without a mate."
And what we have here is a book that every barbecue fanatic from the Eastern Seaboard to the Near West will love to read-and every food and culture writer in the country will enviously wish he/she had written.
John Egerton is the author of Southern Food.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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