BEEF ROAST

I had just traveled from Raleigh to Brunswick, Georgia, and got hired on at the shipyard there. The furthest I had ever been away from home was the distance I could ride on a bicycle. At the end of the first day, I was hungry. I had bought some peanuts and there was something wrong with them. I was just about to starve to death, and I didn’t know where to go to get something to eat, and I thought, “My Lord, what have I done?”

I stood there so long, waiting for the shipping crowd to change, till the crowd thinned out. Just standing there looking around, I noticed a place over on the side. It looked like a place to eat, but I didn’t know anything about it.

I was as shy as shy could be. My whole world was within a twenty mile radius of where I was born and raised, and whatever was in that was the only training I had. I never went to cafes, other than barbeque stands.

But I finally went in that place. And they had a beef roast. You know how they have a beef roast. They cut slices off of it, and you get exactly what you want as you come down the line.

I stood inside there for a while to get some bearing as to what was going on and what to do. And I got it in my mind and went down there and got in line.

When I got down there to the beef, I looked at that thing, and the blood was running out of it! I’d been around cows all my life. And we didn’t have no such looking beef as that! I mean, when Mamma cooked it, she cooked it.

And I thought, “My God! These damn folks haven’t got a bit of sense. Eating damn raw meat!” But hell, everybody was happy about it, you know. I stood there a minute. The man looked at me and I looked at him and I looked at that beef with the blood running out of it.

He said, “What’ll you have, son?”

I said, “Some of that, I reckon.”

He cut me off a chunk of it and put it on there, and I went on down. I don’t remember what else I ate. But I tell you what’s the truth. I hated mighty bad to try to eat that raw meat.