Guest Writer: John T. O'Neal
Shelling Peas
My wife often accuses me of growing up in the 1950s. I’m only 43, so absent a flux capacitor, it is demonstrably untrue. But, to be fair, there’s some metaphorical truth there, I suppose. I was lucky enough to have the classic “nuclear family.” Both of my parents were in my life and my house. I grew up in rural Florida, where there were far more cows and orange trees than people. My mom stayed at home until I was in high school and cooked a meat-and-two meal every night. My dad was the breadwinner, working long hours in Florida’s citrus industry buying fruit, supervising pick-n-haul, and running tests on fruit. After we consumed delicacies of (often) fried meat, a vegetable, and starch(es) at the kitchen table, we’d retire to the “TV Room” for game shows, Nick-At-Nite reruns, or, if one was on TBS, a John Wayne movie. Dad loved John Wayne and Andy Griffith. Mom loved Designing Women and Mama’s Family. Mornings before school were spent with sugary cereal, cartoons, and some last-minute play with my G.I. Joes. Afternoons were spent either playing baseball on Spring Court, playing Dixie Youth Baseball at the Bartow ballfields, or watching the Braves play baseball via the aforementioned TBS. Sundays, mornings and evening, were for church. All kinds of churches: Baptist, Assembly of God, back to Baptists, then Methodists. My therapist and I are still working through my experience at that second one. But one of the more unique pastimes personal to me, cementing my 1950s-in-the-1980s childhood, had to be the annual summer ritual of shelling peas and snapping beans.
Black-eyed peas and green beans were staples in my house growing up. Included in everything from a normal weekday meal, to Easter, to Thanksgiving, and, of course, as every good American Southerner knows, New Year’s Day. But to have a year-round supply, there had to be frozen beans and peas available past their seasons of summer and early fall (“fall” in Florida is still hot, but with pumpkin spice in your iced coffee). Of course, we could have just gone to Publix to get fresh or frozen peas and beans. But try telling that to your grandparents who grew up in the Depression, and you’ll get looks that make you feel like the soft, candy-ass you are. Might as well go ahead and skip church to listen to rock-n-roll while you’re at it, hippie.
For the uninitiated, shelling black-eyed peas and snapping green beans is a monotonous, albeit physically undemanding, chore which sounds exactly like it is: removing peas from their shell and snapping longer green or string beans into more manageable bite sizes. Placing the black-eyed pea pod in your hands and using your fingers and thumbs to open the shell; the raw materials of black-eyed gold are removed and put into bowls to be washed and frozen. Bean snapping, well, if you’re able to read this, then you’ve figured that out. Shelling and snapping have absolutely nothing to do with technique, and everything to do with tempo. And tempo in the hot and humid air of a Florida July afternoon is dictated by one thing and one thing only—the conversation.
To properly shell and snap, one must move quickly, because the sheer volume can be overwhelming. We ain't talking about vegetables purchased in tidy, plastic-wrapped Styrofoam (it was the ’80s) containers; weighed on spotless scales in a climate-controlled supermarket where shopping is a pleasure. We are talking about bushels bought in the summer from either a roadside stand or a farmer’s front porch under a shade tree. Metal washtubs filled to the brim; weights measured out on rusted scales that you’re certain date back to the 1850s and placed in the back of a two-toned 1982 F-150. A literal truckload. So, there must be not just movement, but movement of a group: no way someone gets this done in a day alone.
Once transported, the now scorching-hot washtubs are moved to your maternal grandparents’ screened-in back porch, where family gathers around rocking chairs, metal folding lawn chairs, and the floor if you’re a kid. Each person takes as many beans or peas as they can hold with two hands out of the tubs and places them on old “mullet wrappers,” a.k.a. the local newspaper. Now you have your people. Glasses of iced tea are poured (sweet, we aren’t animals, or worse, from Ohio), the porch fan is turned on high, and the work begins.
As I said, this is monotonous work. So, to achieve a flow, Zen-like state, where your fingers move effortlessly through the task, you need the opposite of mindful meditation. You need noisy distraction: namely, talking. Lots of talking. About anything, really. Weather of course to start, but once it’s agreed that July in Florida is in fact hot and miserable, you move on to the next favorite topic: family gossip. Inevitably, some poor cousin’s shameful and misguided impregnation of their unwed significant/insignificant other is discussed in as much detail as known, with the rest filled in with conjecture pitched as certainty. Which members of the community stopped going to church at First Baptist and switched to the Presbyterians; and why that was predestined, or not. Who drank too much at the beach; or who drank at all, really, because, well, Baptists. Grownups don’t think the kids pay attention, but we did: especially at the shameful impregnations.
Once the adults catch on that we know what beer is and what “living in sin” means, the conversation quickly shifts again to sports or politics. Of course, such topics come to their inevitable points of awkward silence as soon as someone disagrees with the groupthink. Then the final shift comes, and the stories about the past emerge. The aforementioned Depression, and how Papa almost starved to death in Waycross, Georgia. Or about World War II and manning the boat’s machine guns in the Pacific. Maybe about ill-tempered bulls my dad, in his cowboying days, wrangled with and got to the sales in Lakeland. The kids, entranced, shell and snap with the same rapid fire they’d exhibit eating popcorn and candy at a matinee movie.
This is when kids and adults both hit their strides, and the trance-inducing sounds of snaps and peas dropping into bowls begin humming their own rhythm, mixed with melodies of gossip, tall tales, and old stories from other childhoods and adolescent days long ago. Before we know it, hours have passed, the peas and beans are in the freezer. The chore of preserving rations for holiday dinners and suppers was now complete.
As we slowly emerged from the Zen Flow rhythms of shelling and snapping, stretching and “oh, me!”s abound as tired bones and younger bodies stand up in a last act of unison. Now is when we notice our hands hurt, sore from the constant movement and raw from the countless repetitions. Papa, now more interested in reclaiming his home than having a freezer full of beans for winter, begins gathering up the newspapers and other waste to move the party indoors to A/C for more tea and more concerned gossip. After another half hour or so, eventually all of us no-longer-wanted guests begin easing out the front door to various vehicles for our respective trips home.
Another day of a 1950s childhood ritual in the rural 1980s comes to an end. Freezers full, fingers sore, and sugar levels through the roof, this annual custom of my family was a true oddity amongst my peers. I cannot remember a single other person talking about doing something similar with their families. None of my friends did, or their families so far as I know. But we did, by God. Every summer until I was a teenager. By then, interest in my legume-less friends, cars, football summer workouts, and girls took a firmer hold. That’s when the “1950s” began slipping away, and the late ’90s became my reality.
Looking back now, three decades on, the rhythm of those afternoons shelling and snapping still flows in my mind. The cadences of the voices and the vegetables are as sharp and fresh as they were the days that music was made; and that is still stuck in my head to this day. Like a pop song, but instead of a generic, catchy melody, these memory-songs sing back to life stories from those whose blood made mine. Through those conversations I learned so much from shelling and snapping—things about where I came from, what my elders believed and why, and how I was different. Just as much was learned from the words, as from my disagreeing with them. There’s an immense pride there; pride not found in a BOGO on beans. It’s found in the humid air and smell of the soil on your hands. Conversations brought that pride to me, pride about knowing what made me and what I am. That pride lingers to this day.
At the end of this jaunt down memory lane lies the lesson. So much of my life is spent not talking to those who matter most. Friends, family, mentors, teachers, and even people I don’t like. Every time I’ve opened myself up and listened to the conversations of the groups I am in, I learn more about others, life, and myself. And what I’ve seen, heard, and learned made me all the better. Conversations make the music by which we learn. And we’ve lost a lot of that, stuck in our offices, on our phones, and in our houses. Keyboard warriors, punching boards and tapping screens, have us talking at, rather than to, each other. And you cannot actually talk to a person, to create that connective verbal tissue that allows you to understand, unless you are physically with that person. Without being next to or across from another honest-to-God human being to sense their reactions, anticipate their next words, or see the looks their face makes, we cannot know the effects our words have and cannot share the effects another’s words made on us. Conversations with, not to, people set the tempo, create the flow, and engage us in ways conscious and subconscious.
If what we’ve experienced since the early ’00s is a technical revolution of impersonal connectivity via phones and 5G, I hope that the next technical revolution is no revolution at all, but a regression. Maybe even some time travel, back a few decades when conversations were communications that connected us as people in places together. At ballgames, concerts, restaurants, and each other’s homes. Just watching a sunset over sweet tea or shelling some peas while old people tell lies. Things I did and learned as a child. Things I hope I can pass along to my own kids now that they are observing and learning more around them. If I grew up in the “’50s,” maybe I can raise them in the ’80s. It’s certainly something worth having a conversation over.
Now, if we could only get the Braves back on TBS.
*John has been an attorney for 17 years but is still pondering what to be when he grows up. When not lawyering, John wonders how he out-kicked his coverage with Elizabeth, his wife, and tries to be a good dad to two incredibly sweet, stubborn, and opinionated children—as well as a good owner to a needy Boxer and a yet-to-be-named goldendoodle puppy. John loves live oaks covered in Spanish moss, seersucker, orange blossoms, wheated bourbon, America, and them Dawgs.
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