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Interviews by Amy Evans.
This project was produced in conjunction with the Smithsonian's
traveling exhibit "Key Ingredients"
and
is sponsored by the
Mississippi Humanities Council,
the
Yoknapatawpha Arts Council,
the Southern Foodways Alliance, and
the Lafayette County City of
Oxford Public Library
Isaiah's Busy Bee Cafe : Charles Reagan Wilson
Oxford, MS
1971-late 1990s
"I was staying [in town] late, right before Christmas in Oxford... So I asked [Mrs. Isaiah], "Are you going to be open tomorrow night?" And she said, "Yes, I will be." Well, I got there, uh, and it was closed up. But there was a note on [the door], "Charles, please come next door." So I went to her house and knocked on her door, and she had cooked dinner for me, and we had it in her home." -- Charles Reagan Wilson
Born in Oxford, Georgia Isaiah spent thirty years cooking for two chancellors at the University of Mississippi. When she finally retired, she still had the urge to feed her friends and neighbors and opened her own cafe, Isaiah's Busy Bee, on Christmas Eve 1971. For the next twenty or so years, she plucked vegetables from her garden, fried chicken, and baked pound cakes to the delight of the greater Oxford community. Mrs. Isaiah is gone and so is her cafe, but memories of this woman and her glorious food still swim in many hearts and stomachs around this small college town.
What
follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for
length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please
click this link. (Adobe Acrobat Reader required)
Subject: Dr. Charles Reagan Wilson, regular customer
Date: August 13, 2004 @ 2:00pm
Location: Dr. Wilson's office at The Center for the Study of Southern
Culture - University, MS
Interviewer: Amy Evans
Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Friday, August thirteenth, two thousand and four. And I'm at The Center for the Study of Southern Culture with Dr. Charles Reagan Wilson, and we're here to discuss his experiences at Mrs. Isaiah's Busy Bee... [Could you] describe for us your experience there at the Busy Bee because Annie Isaiah mentioned you, um, very quickly [in her interview] as being a regular there[.]
Charles Reagan Wilson: I moved to Oxford in August of nineteen eighty-one, and I ate out quite a bit. One of my favorite places I discovered very soon after I got here -- from word of mouth -- was Mrs. Isaiah's Busy Bee. Mrs. Isaiah had been the, um, cook for Chancellor J. D. Williams [at the University of Mississippi], and she told me one time that she started her, uh, cafe after her mother died. And she was grief stricken and wanting to take her mind off of all of that, so she started selling sandwiches first and then developed the idea of doing a set meal. And so, this was one of those dependable things one could count on, no matter what kind of craziness was happening in your life or work. Uh, you could go out there and depend on Monday night being roast beef; Tuesday night, pork chop; um Wednesday night, um -- what was Wednesday night? Thursday night was fried chicken. Oh, ham was Wednesday night. And you'd get two or three vegetables from her garden and, uh, a delicious little dessert, and a big glass of mint tea. And, uh, she cooked just one set meal every night, and there were, I think, uh, for or five, uh, tables in the Busy Bee. And there was a little group of us that were regulars. Not necessarily there every night, although many of us were there many nights. And so it became a little community -- a Mrs. Isaiah community. And, um, people like Larry DuBord and his wife Betty, uh, ate out there frequently. Bill Ferris, uh, from the Center [for the Study of Southern Culture], um, my colleague, he ate out there. We were both carefree bachelors in those days, so we would eat out there some. Um, when Jack Bass, who came here to teach in journalism, uh, when he moved here, he ate out there often. Uh, and we would have visitors from out of town come, and that was one of the stops we would make often. I remember, uh, R. J. Apple, who at that point was the chief political correspondent for the New York Times, and is now of -- the chief food writer, one of the food writers for the Times, he came here giving a talk and so several of us took him out to the Busy Bee. And he loves food, and so he did, uh -- uh -- uh, a good job of having, I think, several of the set meals. Maybe, I don't remember. But, uh, he had a healthy appetite, I do remember. And we had a very good time whenever we would take people out there. They just loved it because of the character of the place. I'm trying to remember, um, what it looked like inside. [Short pause] A very small space. There was a, uh, counter, uh, that separated the four or five tables, where people sat, from, um, the -- just a small space in the back. And the -- the kitchen was the real, you know, where she was active. Um, but there was a little counter there. There was a, uh, calendar, I believe, with, um, Dr. Martin Luther King -- an image of him on the calendar. Um, there were various, um, things she had cut out and put on the wall -- university stories or stories of her church. She was a very active churchwoman at the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. And, um, she would sometimes, um, take off if there was a friend of hers ill in the church. And she would just be closed for a few days as she was tending to someone who was ill. And then we all understood that was part of the deal. That is she was closed, we understood she would be back. And, uh, so we would keep going out there. Many students would go. Undergraduates sometimes. It was a part of the experience of many undergraduates, uh, in the nineteen eighties. And, um, and into the nineties, I guess. And also graduate students. Um, it was a very warm kind of atmosphere. She was a very maternal kind of figure. Um, she was she had been born nearby. Uh, the Busy Bee was on the top of a hill and she told me once that the area that is now a shopping center, uh, with Big Star [grocery store], um, on the east side of Oxford, um, that had once been little houses -- small houses -- and her family had lived there. So she was born not far from where the restaurant was. And she had, uh, by the time the restaurant opened, she had, uh, next to it, her home, which was a nice brick home. That meant that she could walk from her house to her cafe with just a few steps. One Christmastime, I remember -- one of my favorite memories of the Busy Bee is, um, the university had closed, students were gone, many people were gone, and she usually closed sometime around Christmas. You know, when every -- so many people left. But it was never quite sure -- clear when she would close. And so, um, I was checking on her schedule -- and I was staying late, right before Christmas in Oxford. Right before going somewhere. So I asked her, "Are you going to be open tomorrow night?" And she said, uh, "Yes, I will be." Well, I got there, uh, and it was closed up. But there was a note on it, "Charles, please come next door." So I went to her house and knocked on her door, and she had cooked dinner for me, and we had it in her home.
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Well you mentioned she had a garden. That's the first I recall hearing that. Um, where was the garden in proximity to the cafe?
It was behind and to the side of the cafe. Um, when you're facing the cafe, her -- her home was on the left, and there was a gravel driveway, uh, that let up from a, uh, uphill kind of driveway. And it circled a tree -- a big tree -- and people would park around the tree and in the driveway. And the -- the, um, the garden was on the right side of the cafe and then behind the cafe. And she would grow, uh, collard greens and turnip greens and, um, peas and beans and tomatoes and, um, I'm not sure if she had corn or not but probably some corn. And okra. And, um, just a lot of different things, but especially greens. I remember she always had fresh greens.
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[W]hen you said that she closed to go tend to people in the church, would she put a closed sign up with an explanation or was it just... understood.
Just understood. Yeah. Yeah. She especially did that toward her latter years. Um, and so whenever it was closed -- and -- and the word would go out among the kind of word-of-mouth community. If somebody had gone on Monday night, and she wasn't there, a lot of times we would figure well, she's going to be gone for a while. Whenever -- this happened several times -- we got used to where we weren't surprised at it. And then she would just reopen without any word. She never advertised, you know, in the paper or anything. Uh, no radio announcements for Mrs. Isaiah. It was all word of mouth. But, uh, you would just see friends that you knew went out there and you would tell each other, "Well, she reopened last night," or whatever. And so then you would know that, uh, to -- to go out and get your -- get your food.
Do you remember the last meal you had there before she closed?
[Sighs] I'm afraid I don't remember the last meal, although it was a little melancholy, you know, becau -- in the last year or so -- because she was closed so much. And we always regretted we didn't -- you know, the system broke down a little bit... Uh, because the more she was closed, the fewer people would go out there after a while because you never a -- a -- never quite sure when she was going to be open. So it was all a little melancholy. And I had been going out there for so long, of course, it made me think back on all the wonderful meals and experiences I had. But I can't remember exactly, the last meal.
Did you see Mrs. Isaiah after she closed?
I did. I used to see her in the grocery store. Uh, hovering over the vegetables. [Laughs] I guess she stopped having her garden after a certain point. But she always had a sharp eye for the fresh vegetables... So we would see each other there and, uh, have a nice visit and catch up. Um, so -- she was a very sweet lady.
Well and her daughter-in-law, Annie Isaiah, said that she was a talker and could carry on a conversation. Did you have many nights where you'd stay late and sit at a table with her in the cafe?
We did that. We did that some. She was very, uh, um, she was very unobtrusive. I think her attitude was that people came to the restaurant to have their food and to talk among themselves, so she stayed in the back -- usually in the kitchen -- and she would, uh, the -- the food was all fixed, of course, so she would sit back there and read or read her bible and -- and, uh, and if there was somebody helping her that night, then they would talk or whatever. But, um, she also was always ready to talk if you wanted to talk so -- especially when there weren't very many -- when there wasn't anybody else in there or whenever I stayed late. She would, uh, we would have very nice talks about, uh, Oxford and -- and, um, about her church and about different things. And -- and, uh, so she was always willing to share her own kind of, uh, experiences, as well as share her food.
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Well, when the cafe closed, where did you go for your plate lunch?
I went to, um, different places. I went to A -- Abbeville to Ruth and Jimmy's, which was another wonderful place to get a plate lunch a little further away. And I usually would go there for -- for lunch instead of dinner. Mrs. Isaiah only served dinner. Um, so I would go to Ruth and Jimmy's and, uh, again, a lot of us from Oxford went. And then, at some point, the ladies who worked there kind of split off and came down to Oxford and -- and established Ray's Truck Stop, uh, and so I got the same vegetables and meats there. And wonderful desserts. That's one of the things I remember about Ruth and Jimmy's and Ray's Truck Stop is wonderful cobblers and banana puddings and, uh, those kind of desserts. And, um, where else? Used to go to Smitty's sometimes for a plate lunch. You would have a, uh, counter, uh, she -- first she would, uh, you would order the plate lunch, and they would bring it out to you. But at a certain point in the [nineteen] nineties, she had a, um, buffet tray, but she would always serve you, uh, from behind and ask you what you want, and so that also was at lunch, uh, where I got my plate much there. SO those are the main places, I guess, for plate lunches. Uh, I've always gone to the Beacon -- some. More for breakfast probably than, uh, for supper or lunch but some of all of that. Um, when I first started going out with Marie Antoon, who became my wife, she was impressed with how, uh, I knew so many restaurants and cafes around Oxford and ate out at -- at them. After she moved here she was discovering that -- she'd say that wherever there was a pot of greens on, I knew where they were.
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What was your favorite night to have supper at Mrs. Isaiah's?
Thursday night was fried chicken, and the fried chicken was always very, very good.
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So is there then anything that has matched your experience at the Busy Bee, since that was in operation?
Mmm, nothing in -- I guess nothing in Oxford quite has that combination of wonderful food and warm character. And, uh, I think the kind of space of it also. It was out a little bit on the edge of town. Um, it was under this big tree. Uh, had the garden that you could see as you walked up. Uh, it was a small intimate place in terms of the space itself, and her presence kind of was there everywhere. And, uh, and then that little community of people that supported it and shared information about it. Uh, so I don't think there's been anything quite like that, uh, since then.
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