I

My family's barn burned down in 1962, lit aflame by a heat lamp hanging in the hog pen. It was one of their first years in Todd County, Kentucky, and, like every other farmer, they raised hogs. Chester Whites, black Hampshires: they were big-shouldered breeds with oversized, floppy ears for the hot summers and skinny legs that gave the hogs' scrounging an unexpected delicacy. The lamp provided extra warmth for the piglets when their pile of sleeping bodies didn't generate enough heat, but one winter night the lamp lit up the nearby hay bales, and flames devoured the barn. A premature pig roast.

I've asked my mother to tell me the fire story several times, in nighttime conversations as the cicadas screech outside and during formal interviews in the quiet, tall-ceilinged farmhouse.

Jesse Reeves was the first man to come bring us hay the morning after our barn burned down. The Reeves lived across the road on the other side of Highway 848; Jesse was a hard-working dirt farmer [with] a very religious Baptist wife. Jesse's son, Mike, rode the school bus with my mother and aunt. Today Mike roasts pigs for a living, smokes pork shoulder and prime rib in a pit of hickory coils, and serves them with his famous vinegary barbeque sauce. We buy the pulled pork regularly and serve it at terry-tableclothed family reunions. Mike's done well for himself, and he no longer farms the neighboring land.

The fire story moves me every time my mother recounts it. I imagine the trapped piglets, curly-tailed and squealing, the barn a charred heap the next morning, and I am struck by the tenuousness of wealth and the hardness of poverty in Todd County. People cultivate certain kinds of faith to survive here. Mike inherited his mother's devoutness, adopting the nickname "Pit Master Pastor." In his BBQ joint off Highway 848, there hangs a sign quoting Psalms 37:4: "Delight yourself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart".

II

If those piglets had lived, my grandfather and his sharecroppers would have killed them eventually. Hog killings were yearly rituals, done once the summer heat had retreated and August's tobacco leaves hung drying in the barns. Hog killings were a family event, and most everyone has pictures of them in their family albums. I've sat with people and scanned through pages of black and white photos: overalled men inspecting the hog carcass with furrowed brows like doctors in an operating room, a disemboweled hog hanging upside down, its slashed head dangling precariously from blubbery neck. Oh, and this one: black sharecroppers hoisting the hog's heavy body to hook up to a rail, the sharecroppers' breath smoky in the November cold. These are the pages of the photo album that remind us of histories we prefer to ignore, that ask from us certain strains of faith or, perhaps, blindness.

Hogs had poor eyesight but made up for it in other ways. They were stubborn and smelly but profitable, and the joke goes that you never heard a farmer complaining about his hogs' odor unless they weren't selling well at market. They were often part of the unwritten sharecropping agreement: in exchange for the sharecropping family's labor, farm owners gave sharecroppers a small house to live in, space for a vegetable garden, credit at the general store, coal for the winter, and hogs. At the end of the year, the sharecropper would also receive half the profit of the tobacco crop after seed and chemical expenses were taken out. Sometimes it was a very, very long wait.

Hogs would eat trash, would grow fat in spite of it all. Hogs would provide just enough sustenance that one's faith might be sustained. Hogs reminded one of who provided and who owed. The hog killing, then, was a ritual that marked the end of life (the hog's and the growing season's) but also shaped the social landscape.

The colored fellows would help us kill hogs and would kill their own hogs. To slaughter the hogs you'd stick 'em through the throat and let them bleed to get all the blood out. We'd take the edible parts out and wash 'em and hang 'em to dry out. And then we'd hang the hams and the jowls and the side meat and the shoulders up in here and smoke 'em for about two weeks. The smoke would help you keep your meat. When it come out of that barn you'd salt it down; you'd run it all over with salt. And that would preserve it.

Salt the meat in November. Eat it come hunger time in February.

This was well thought out, calculated.

III

I sometimes worry that asking people to tell me about hardship is like salting an open wound. Were there times when sharecroppers didn't get their share at the end of the year? I want to know, what do those pictures hide?

I always said my daddy didn't get his share. He wasn't gettin' no money for it. He just work. Work, work, work.

We wasn't treated right, I know that for a fact. I mean the boss man took advantage of my father; I know he did. I don't even want to go into it because all that's done past, and I don't even want to think about it, but I know for sure.

This is not so much blindness as it is the careful tending of wounds not yet healed. I am wary of willed forgetfulness, but here one might forgive it, appreciate its complexity and its suggestions of strength. The questions that emerge from these conversations undo faith, eat up innocence, but I continue to ask them in search of sustenance and a truthful account of this county's history. I ask Calvin to resurrect his memories, again and again.

Some of them raise the crop-work all year-and then didn't have nothin' comin' out of it, you know. They had to live the whole year and then by the time they got through takin' up stuff to get their food, when they sold tobacco they still didn't have nothin' comin'. A lot of people did that, or so they say. That was a little bit before my time, but I heard the older people say that -they raisin' it and didn't have nothin' comin' but still they kept on raisin' it.

They just kept on raising tobacco. At first this sounds near-sighted; it suggests an absence of self-awareness and foresight. But Calvin is none of these. There were no nearby factories, no loans for black farmers, no inherited wealth. What else was there to do than have faith that next year might be better?

IV

Calvin sharecropped on my family's farm but didn't stay there. He lived on his own property near other black landowners, on a dirt road that wound through pasture for cattle and hogs and small plots of tobacco. He worked several public jobs, sold barbeque, and raised tobacco. As a sharecropper, he shared the cost of the tobacco seed and fertilizer and provided all the labor to receive half the profits of the tobacco crop.

My wife got sick and I sharecropped and still had another job. Everyone asks me how I did it and I say, 'I had to do it! Didn't have no money so I had to do it.'... Sometimes had to work on Sundays. Didn't want to but I did.

People resented working on Sundays, the supposed day of rest. Sunday was church day, eat-barbeque day, drive-to-town-once-a-week day. My grandfather, an agnostic writer-turned-farmer, stayed home on Sundays while most sharecroppers and farmers traveled to town for church. He would smoke cigars and drink gin and tonics with a few untraditional farming friends, men who might have prayed in town but then came to grandfather's farm to ignore the dry liquor laws and talk about hogs. They discussed other subjects, too - soil erosion, no-till farming methods, what cattle to keep for breeding - but my grandfather seems to have taken a particular interest in hogs. Cookie Askew convinced him to buy Landrace hogs, delicate Danish breeds with two extra ribs. More meat but less sturdy.

He also wanted to start a ham smoking operation, but the labor situation was wearing on him. In other words, the sharecroppers showed signs of discontent. My mother describes one sharecropper as lugubrious and aggrieved; the other was brilliant but alcoholic. They hated each other, and my grandfather was apparently too interested in the human condition (in the writerly sense of the word) to recognize that perhaps one of them needed to go. His kindness had viscous consequences. The sharecroppers remained unhappy, and my grandfather spiraled into deep depression. He saw no end in sight.

V

I don't think barbeque is an inherently religious experience, but the symbiosis between the church and the barbeque pit is, like the symbiosis between hog and human, hard to ignore. You cannot go to church events and avoid the greasy barbeque. Pulled pork, soft white buns, coleslaw, turnip greens: the menu is nearly the same everywhere but it's known as southern country cookin' for the white churches, soul food for the black churches. I imagine most churches get their barbeque from the same men, but perhaps this doesn't matter; the ritualistic nature of barbeque obscures the identities of all those who created it - hog and human - so we are left to devour it mindlessly and sightlessly. Eat and pray.

"Pit Master Pastor" Mike has a riproaring business, his BBQ joint located at the intersection of all the roads that lead from the country to town, from the farm to church, from sin to redemption and back again. Calvin has never had a restaurant like Mike. Calvin says he can't raise tobacco anymore - arthritis got in my bones so bad I had to give it up - so these days he sets up shop at the corner of towns, sometimes illegally, and sells his barbeque out of a transportable pit hooked up to his pick-up truck. Recently a man from up north offered to buy Calvin's barbeque sauce recipe but Calvin refused to sell it, said the only people who know how to make it are his two daughters and himself. After he passes away, they'll keep making it.

Calvin explains that he began making his secret barbeque recipe after his father died when he was twelve. Suddenly his family no longer had a sharecropping agreement - no shack, no hogs, no pretense of being taken care of by the farm owner - so Calvin started barbequeing to help support himself. When he began to sharecrop on his own, he still barbequed for extra income, and until these arthritis days he never did one without the other. Church and pulled pork, sharecropping and barbequing: these hog-human relations seem impossible to disentangle.

VI

I've never seen Chester Whites or Hampshire hogs before the pulled pork stage, at which point they are unrecognizable. People don't raise hogs anymore; now the land supports thousand-acre crops of soybeans, corn, and wheat. My mom calls it a no-man's land. There aren't any sharecroppers around, but their shacks still remain, squat and tilted, to house farm tools or broken equipment, or, in some cases of ironic continuity, bunk beds for Mexican migrant workers who have come to harvest the tobacco.

I am not the only one who seems struck by the hogs' absence. There is some sadness, some twisted nostalgia, that enters old people's voices when they remember hogs. The space hogs have left behind is murky and confused: if hogs validated and supported a system of poverty, must we grieve their passing? But what if their leaving also marks other sorts of exodus, human ones? Hogs marked calendars and marked the social landscape. Now their decline marks the demographic changes, the county census records that show the dwindling numbers of black landowners, the deterioration of farms, the growth of housing developments. And so one cannot recall hogs without also recalling the human relationships and experiences - both good and bad - that constituted this community for many decades.

I would like to see the decline of the hog as some kind of emancipation. I would like to think that in pulled pork, we have preserved what was beautiful about the hogs - sustenance and community - and discarded all else. But even if the discarding has happened, the remembering hasn't, and this forgetfulness worries me. I ask everyone for memories. The barbeque man. My aunt. The farmhand. Wizened grandmothers. Former sharecroppers. Old suspendered white farmers. We stumble through romance and silence and willful blindness; I do not want to hear just about how good it was, because I do not believe you. Tell me about the hog killing. Tell me about sharecropping. Tell me about my grandfather. Tell me what the farm looked like.

Tell me what you saw, so that we can begin to see ourselves today.

Well you look outside your window and you see things and it makes you wonder. And you start asking questions "why" and sooner or later you're gonna get answers. I rode up and down the road for years and never paid much attention to the little falling down houses. It grieved my heart to know that my people lived that way, and not only lived that way - they had to thrive that way: raise their family, go to church, go back to work in a harsh environment in the work field. Those conditions are not here now, but it's the reason why we don't have what we should have.