Welcome to the SFA

Welcome to the Southern Foodways Alliance -- an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with headquarters at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.

The Southern Foodways Alliance documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor -- all who gather-- may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.

Over the moon, then under water; recognized with a prestigious food award, an 89-year-old cook basked in glory, then lost everything.

By JIM AUCHMUTEY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, January 29, 2006

New Orleans --- Willie Mae Seaton didn't have time to gather many of her belongings before the flood. She grabbed a change of clothes and scooped up some family photos, then secured her most prized possession: a bronze medallion attached to a loop of ribbon like an Olympic medal. She wrapped it in a napkin, sealed it in a plastic bag and put it in her purse. Only then did she join two carloads of loved ones as they fled the city ahead of Hurricane Katrina.

The medallion came from the James Beard Foundation. Seaton had never heard of the group that sponsors the prestigious food awards, but she was overjoyed last spring when it named her little soul food restaurant one of "America's Classics." At the awards banquet in New York, she limped to the ballroom podium on bunioned feet and broke down crying as she tried to express her gratitude.

It was the high point of her life.

Four months later, Katrina brought the low point. After the levees failed, 4 to 5 feet of water inundated her street in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans and soaked the double shotgun house where her residence and restaurant sit side by side under the same roof.

"I lost everything," Seaton says.

Not quite.

The storm couldn't destroy her reputation for cooking some of the best Southern food around. In recent weeks, that reputation has drawn an unlikely group of food enthusiasts from across the nation to help rebuild Seaton's restaurant in a Habitat for Humanity-style construction project that has given a devastated city a hopeful scene of rebirth.

At 89, it seems, Willie Mae Seaton hasn't fried her last drumstick.

Beloved, but not famous

In a city of famous restaurants, Seaton's is not one of them. Visitors to New Orleans know about Antoine's, Galatoire's, Commander's Palace, Emeril's. Willie Mae's Scotch House --- the name refers to its 1957 origins as a bar --- isn't even the best-known restaurant in her neighborhood; just two blocks away is Dooky Chase, a black Creole landmark, which also was flooded out.

It was the locals who knew about Willie Mae's. For decades, an interracial crowd including judges and lawyers and several mayors has gone there for lunch in an eight-table dining room decorated with religious art and a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. The menu is as down-home as Seaton, a gray-headed Mississippi native who smiles under big glasses and calls everyone "baby." She serves country vegetables and old favorites like pork chops and smothered veal and fried chicken, her specialty.

"Nobody fries chicken like I fries chicken," she says, refusing to divulge any secrets except to say that she uses a wet batter and a deep-fryer. "You couldn't pan-fry as much chicken as I've got to fry."

Seaton's following broadened in recent years as New Orleans journalists like Lolis Eric Elie, a Times-Picayune columnist, started to champion her restaurant. Influential food writers like Vogue's Jeffrey Steingarten and The New Yorker's Calvin Trillin dropped by. The James Beard Foundation, which stages the food world's equivalent of the Oscars, took note.

Elie accompanied Seaton to Manhattan last May to accept the prize. "She was the belle of the ball," he says, remembering how she charmed the food glitterati and kept her stamina during the swirl of cocktail parties.

After the award, New Orleans leaders threw Seaton a birthday gala. Tourists flocked to her corner cafe and sang her praises on Internet food sites.

"I just proposed marriage to Willie Mae after eating her fried chicken," wrote Diner Girl on eGullet.org. "I love this woman, and if there was ever a reason to approve stem cell research legislation for cloning, this is it."

Then came Katrina.

'We need to get back'

On the last Sunday in August, Seaton heeded the city's evacuation order and drove with her family to Shreveport, La., a trip that usually takes six hours but lasted 15 because of the exodus of traffic. Over the next few days, she watched on TV as her hometown descended into chaos.

Even then, she was itching to return.

"She kept saying we need to get back to New Orleans," says Kerry Seaton Blackmon, a great-granddaughter who worked in the restaurant. "And I'd say, What are you going to do in New Orleans? Look at the TV. People are screaming to get out of there."

Seaton tried to return several times but was stopped at roadblocks. She moved from motel to motel in Mississippi and Louisiana before ending up in Houston with her son Charles, who also works in the restaurant. One day she overheard someone say that flights to New Orleans had resumed. She took one on the spur of the moment without telling her family, who were understandably alarmed, and hired a cab to drive her to her place on the corner of Tonti and St. Ann.

The neighborhood was deserted. Downed trees blocked the sidewalks. Abandoned cars lined the streets. The air reeked of sewage and decay.

Seaton stood in front of her property and stared at the water stain circling the building 4 feet above the ground. It looked like a scummy ring on a bathtub.

She didn't bother going in.

A police cruiser pulled up. The officers asked what she was doing.

"This is my place," she told them. "I was in Houston, and I had to come back and see about my business."

They said they couldn't leave her alone, so they picked her up and arranged for emergency lodging. Seaton eventually moved into an apartment across the Mississippi River in Algiers. She returned to her neighborhood in January, moving in with an old friend whose home sat higher above the floodwaters.

"She wanted to keep a closer eye on things," says Seaton Blackmon, who also returned, from Atlanta, where she and her husband rented an apartment after the hurricane. At 26, she wants to run the restaurant whenever her great-grandmother decides to step aside.

Seaton's home and business were uninhabitable after Katrina. The deluge ruined the interior. Like so many others on the Gulf Coast, she had no flood insurance and little in the way of savings.

As word of her plight spread, two organizations united to get her back on her feet.

The Heritage Conservation Network, a preservation group based in Colorado, proposed a work project to repair the 1890s structure. The Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi put out a call for volunteers to work a series of weekends in January and February. Some 120 people responded, three times the number that could be accommodated.

But the job is proving more expensive than anyone expected. The cost is estimated at more than $100,000, says alliance director John T. Edge. So far, his group has raised about $10,000 through the sale of pickles (www.southernfoodways.com).

"Mrs. Seaton wants to cook again," he says, "and we want to help her."

Lifted up by volunteers

It's an overcast Friday morning as the work project enters its second weekend. Heaps of lath board and plaster have already been removed from the building, along with a sodden jukebox and a grease-encrusted stove hood that still smelled of chicken. On the sidewalk out front, a dozen volunteers gather over coffee and Mardi Gras king cake to get their assignments. The workers include two graduate students from North Carolina, an Episcopal priest from New Mexico, a couple who ran a bakery in northern California and one Beard award-nominated chef, John Currence of City Grocery in Oxford, Miss.

For at least two of the laborers, this dank scene of destruction is all too familiar.

"We were doing this kind of work in our home last fall," says Becky Feder, whose bottom floor was flooded by Katrina's storm surge in Ocean Springs, Miss.

Suited up in white coveralls and respirators that make them look like hazmat technicians, she and her husband, Ron, get busy gutting Seaton's kitchen. Becky takes a whack at a partially rotted 2-by-4 and laughs. "This is a good way to take out our frustration."

At lunchtime, someone goes down the street to fetch Seaton. For the next hour, she sits outside the restaurant in a lawn chair --- an elderly peacock in red sweater, white kerchief and burgundy slacks --- and holds court.

"Y'all didn't throw away my skillets, did you?" she says. "You know I can clean those up."

Seaton is so cheerful, it hardly seems possible she was washed out of her home and business less than five months before.

The reason? The volunteers.

"These people have put me up on a golden platter and carried me around," she says. "And I want to do something for them. I haven't got any money. But when I'm up and running, I want everyone to come back so I can fix them a big dinner. Pork chops, smothered veal, limey beans, string beans..."

She rises up in her chair, excited by the mere sound of her menu.

"Baby, it isn't just going to be chicken."

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