Turkey Craw Beans, Appalachian Language, and Writers Learning About People

Two separate incidents over the last week or so have led me to write this post which I find interesting whether you readers do or not.  On a Letcher County Kentucky Facebook buy, sell, trade group, I saw a person offering to sell what they were calling "Turkey Crawl Beans".  Although I have not seen Turkey Craw Beans to my knowledge, I knew instantly that this person had made a common mistake by either not understanding what they had been told about these beans when they got the seeds or they had just not bothered to learn their real name.  In my childhood, I heard hundreds of older Appalachian people sit in our country store and talk about thousands of different subjects and I learned an awful lot about the native Appalachian dialect.  So I did some research on the internet and found a website called "Local Harvest"  which has a pretty good description of Turkey Craw Beans and some excellent photographs of them. Not only was my first guess substantiated but the story got even better because there is some belief that the person who found the beans in the gizzard of a turkey was also a slave. The photos I have attached to this post are also from that website and, if you use them, you should also give Local Harvest proper photographer credit.   I also sent an e-mail to two of my friends, Bill Best, who is the author of two very good books about heritage Appalachian food crops,  and Frank Barnett, who is also an expert on Appalachian food crops and an expert on Appalachian Heritage beans.  Both responded and both have Turkey Craw Beans in their collections.  Frank has this to say in his response:

Roger,

Yep, we both have the Turkey Crawl (sp) bean. It is not an uncommon bean in the area. 

The seed I got was from Bill and I only raised it one year. However, in Lincoln County, WV the bean goes by the name of Harts Creek which I also raised. Same variety but a much better story about Harts Creek. I was underwhelmed by both.

This is what Bill Best had to say: 

 

Roger, I don’t remember who first gave me the Turkey Craw bean  but I believe it was Eugene Parsons of Lee County, Virginia.  Had he lived he would be a hundred years old this year but a (sic) died of Alzheimer’s several years ago.  There is a story about Eugene in my first book on heirlooms.  What to me is significant about the bean is that it seems to be the dominant bean in all three states of the Cumberland Gap area.  I remember as we walked through his garden Eugene had bean vines running up into nearby trees.  The Lee County ag agent, Harold Jerrell, took me to meet him at his home and in his garden.  Harold is also featured in the first book because of his seed saving and tree grafting.

I do think that turkey craw is the original name of the bean.

As you can see, I still listen to other older Appalachians, especially those who are experts on some narrowly focused subject such as heritage food crops or simply Turkey Craw Beans.  

Turkey Craw Beans, Photo by www.localharvest.org

One of the most common words in the Appalachian dialect is "craw" which is used as a synonym for several words including gizzard, throat, gullet, esophagus, etc.  A common use of the word when the user is upset is to hear them say "that sticks in my craw" which translates to "that upsets me" and is analogous to becoming choked on something which is difficult to swallow.  In fact, some of the very same people who use the previous expression, "that sticks in my craw",  might also use the similar expression "that was a little hard to swaller".  So when I saw the mistaken use of "Turkey Crawl Beans", I knew instantly that the person was actually trying to sell Turkey Craw Beans.  And, without any extensive knowledge of Turkey Craw Beans, I also instantly knew that the original person who recognized and named these beans had either found them the first time in the gizzard of a turkey they had killed or that some portion of the beans, at some time in their development, was shaped a bit like a turkey gizzard.  So I went looking for some answers on the internet and found a website called "Local Harvest" which has an excellent, but brief,description of Turkey Craw Beans.  The story got even better when I learned that Local Harvest believes the person who found and named Turkey Craw Beans was a slave sometime before the Civil War. There are several other seed saver and seed sales sites which carry some version of the same story about a turkey gizzard although all of the sites do not mention the possible connection to slavery.  Bill Best responded to me in a second e-mail regarding the possible slavery connection:

One comment on Turkey Craw beans:  I had never heard about the slave story and I’m wondering how it came to be.  Since the variety is located mostly in the Cumberland Gap area, and since that area was not known for having slaves, I’m wondering how that might have come to be.  I’m also wondering if many slave owners would have trusted their slaves with guns.  As a tiny kid I asked my mother how the Goose Bean came to be.  She told me that her grandfather had shot a wild goose and when she was cleaning it for cooking, she found the seeds in its craw and the bean had been part of our family collection since that time.  I later learned that thousands of children in the Southern Appalachians had been told the same story.  The Goose Bean is also called the Goose Craw Bean in many areas.

Bill's comments about slavery being relatively rare in the Cumberland Gap area is dead on and so is his suspicion that few slave owners would have trusted a slave with a gun.  But it strikes me that on rare occasions with an older, trusted slave a slaveholder might have taught them to use guns and allowed them to hunt at times since one of the primary reasons many people in that area did not own slaves was related to necessity to provide slaves with at least a basic subsistence.  However, it is also possible that some slaves might have hunted with sling shots or even thrown rocks at game which was less flighty two hundred years ago.  There is also the well known fact that slaves performed most of the undesirable jobs on a farm such as cleaning all types of fowl whether wild or domestic and such a slave could have simply found the beans while cleaning a turkey (or goose as Bill Best mentioned) for their slaveholder.  Slaves also frequently did the great majority of work in tending plantation gardens and a slave could well have had sufficient leeway to plant a few seeds they found.   

In the other incident which triggered this post,  my wife and I have been reading a Pearl S. Buck novel called "The Long Love" which I will write about in a few days.  It is one of the five novels which Buck wrote and published under the pseudonym John Sedges.  I have written earlier on this blog about two of those novels, "The Townsman" and "Voices In The House".  I actually like "The Long Love" a bit better than either of the other two although they are also good novels. Also, I recently published a memoir piece called "Christmas On Beaver Creek" in a book from the Jesse Stuart Foundation called True Christmas Stories From The Heart Of Appalachia".  In that memoir piece, I talked about hiding behind a stand up Coca Cola Santa Claus in our store as a child in order to listen to older people talk about subjects like Old Christmas and the Biblical story of Christmas along with any other topics I could hear discussed.  And, to complete the loop back to the Turkey Craw Beans, I had learned enough about Appalachian dialect in those nights in the country store to know that the person trying to sell the beans had not known the actual name of the beans.  In other words, it pays to pay attention especially when you are young.

Turkey Craw Beans, Photo by www.localharvest.org

  The tie in between the Turkey Craw Bean story and "The Long Love" lies in the fact that in one fairly long section of the book Pearl S. Buck has a character who is a novelist who grew up in the town in which her novel is set and he talks at length about all the things he learned about the town and its people by listening to them talk in their homes and other settings during his childhood.  I laughed out loud as I was reading that section because it ties in closely with my previous mention of the memoir piece "Christmas On Beaver Creek" which was published as a chapter in the aforementioned book from the Jesse Stuart Foundation called "True Christmas Stories From The Heart Of Appalachia".  In that memoir piece, I talked about hiding behind a stand up Coca Cola Santa Claus and listening to older Appalachians talk about hundreds of subjects including Old Christmas and the Christmas story from the Bible.  I also learned enough while listening behind that Coca Cola Santa Claus to have sufficient knowledge about Appalachian dialect to know that the person trying to sell the beans did not know what they were talking about.  I realize I repeated the account of  the Coca Cola Santa Claus in two slightly different versions here but I wanted to make absolutely clear the connection between that incident and the Turkey Craw Beans.

This little experience has been educational for me and I hope it has for at least a few of my regular readers. 

"Burial At Sea", Speculative Historical Fiction by Roger D. Hicks

Burial At Sea

Robert Jordan, which had not been his name for the first fifty years, stood on the stygian deck of the anonymous US destroyer as it plowed its way at three quarter speed through a moonless night surrounded at excessive distances by the other members of its battle group cruising toward a ceremony which Jordan’s life and life’s work had brought him to by special invitation of President Harris herself.  As he waited for the captain, in whose quarters he had eaten a late dinner after his helicopter landed, Jordan quietly considered how thirty years of working devotedly for the greatest enemy of his new and dearly beloved country had brought about this ceremony and his attendance.  The ship was carrying the small group of principles to this ceremony along with its regular crew.  As the captain, soon to become an admiral, had explained to him during dinner no one on board even knew that a ceremony was set to take place except that small group of principals; Jordan, the captain, the chaplain, and six anonymous sailors all chosen for their top secret security ratings and all brought in with Jordan from other ships scattered over the world.  Those six sailors, despite their collective trustworthiness, did not even know the exact nature of their job that night.  It was 2035, more than fifty years after this long, despicable saga had begun and Jordan remembered that time, when as a young agent in Russia’s FSB or national spy agency, he had been chosen for what seemed a fairly simple assignment which, at the time, constituted only a small portion of his entire work load in New York City where he had been posted after a few years work post training in Moscow. 

His superiors, including the man who would eventually oversee the entire agency before moving on to bigger and better things, had considered him a natural for assignment to America based on a carefully built shadow life as a minor anti-government dissident and mildly successful business man.  He had grown up traveling the world with his father, a career KGB officer.  Jordan attended the best private schools where he learned a multitude of skills necessary to an aspiring spy.  He spoke Russian in addition to English, German, and Spanish, all nearly without discernible accents.  He knew the law applicable to the United Nations and a dozen consortiums of colluding nations on both sides of the perpetual war of worldwide military, geographic, and economic influence.  He was an expert in the use of nearly every lethal weapon known to mankind although he rarely found the need to use one.  His work was much more subtle, subversive, silent, and yet equally important to his birth country and her security forces.  

In New York, he was provided a steady flow of rubles laundered through several ever changing agencies and individuals which was intended to make his source of wealth appear impressive and simultaneously indiscernible.  He came and went, a young, intelligent, handsome, and intriguing immigrant who could often pass for a native of his locale.  He remembered now that initial meeting nearly fifty years ago, in a failing casino in New Jersey, which had ultimately led to his standing on the blackened deck of a US destroyer, by invitation of the President, awaiting the final ceremony for the other attendee at their long past meeting.  He had received orders from Moscow to become an unsuccessful high roller in that slipshod operation in New Jersey and to make contact with its putative owner.  That man was to be characterized by his many weaknesses, dishonesty, unjustified ambition, amorality, and pathological lack of veracity.  Robert Jordan, in his old persona and with his original name, had gambled often and poorly until finally that casino owner, also characterized by his lack of business skills and deep in irredeemable debt, approached him at the roulette table one night, patted Jordan effusively and falsely on the back, introduced himself with the words, “I see you’re losing a little tonight, not like your usual big wins.  You’re a wonderful gambler, lucky, very lucky, my kind of gambler.”  If he had actually been a successful high roller, Robert Jordan knew he would have likely been spurned by this pathological liar and braggart because his wins would have further endangered the failing operation.  But the braggart was the object of his work.   His superiors, when they gave him the assignment, had provided some basic information about the man and ordered him to discern the rest.  The object of his attentions, as Jordan well knew, had applied to Alfa Bank, in Moscow, for loans which no American bank would give him, millions, many millions, approaching a billion dollars American had been his audacious and unjustifiable request.  But Jordan’s ultimate superior also controlled much of the commerce at Alfa Bank and was always seeking weak, manipulable individuals who could be controlled by fueling the sources of their greatest weaknesses, especially if they also had contacts which led to others who might someday be able to serve the FSB willingly or unwillingly.  

Robert Jordan’s assignment had been to lead this gullible bankrupt to believe he had powerful contacts in Russia and to fuel his weaknesses with gifts, bribes, and enticements intended to draw him in ever deeper much like a fly landing in the net of a hungry spider.  But Jordan also knew that the target’s gullibility, ignorance, and excesses did not preclude him from being the kind of person who would walk happily into that web if it were baited with rubles, women, and unjustified praise.  As a man of some established level of personal honor, Jordan had not particularly enjoyed some aspects of his work, finding beautiful women willing to go to bed with any man, no matter how reprehensible, for money.  But Jordan found such women, had them brought to New York from Russia and took two to the casino one night.  The bankrupt owner, never one to ignore what appeared to be a willing woman, approached the table as the two harlots hung on each of Jordan’s elbows.  Both were low level agents in the FSB and knew their work well.  With prompting from Jordan, they catered to this failing ignoramus and Jordan allowed them to leave him at the roulette wheel which he immediately abandoned as the three entered the elevator to the penthouse.  His work for that night was done and he had a positive report to write for Moscow. The women and the video, obtained too easily via cameras in their jewelry and purses, told Jordan the next day that he and the women had been successful.  That video was the first such which Jordan placed in an ever growing stockpile to be used by his superiors at some future time.   

Within a few weeks, Alfa Bank approved the loans which they never expected to collect on in monetary terms.  They knew the payback would not come in American dollars or rubles.  They were hoping for some other, yet unseen remunerations.  They were playing a long term game. They would wait. Jordan followed orders from his superiors explicitly and developed a reputation within the agency for quiet but important successes and a great deal of skill in handling an asset who did not even know yet that he was an asset.  Jordan traveled the world, played poker, pachinko, and roulette poorly on a few occasions until the casino changed hands, sought further contacts with this braggart, fed him the lies which Moscow required, and led the asset to believe that he was a very important man to Jordan.  Yet, at the same time, Jordan smoothly rebuffed the man’s persistent requests to meet someone who could introduce him to Jordan’s superior who, at that time, was not even recognized as being in that position by the braggart.  

Jordan moved steadily up the ranks of the FSB, came to know several of his upper level superiors quite well, developed a growing reputation as a skilled agent, and traveled the world on various brief assignments which also served to reinforce the asset’s mistaken belief that Jordan was a successful Russian business man who simply loved New York. 

Finally, with some minor, overrated and overt support along with even more clandestine support, not all of which was known even by Jordan, the asset came to be mistakenly seen as a success by many people on both sides of the Atlantic.  He managed to manipulate his way into management of a second rate beauty pageant and a terrible television show which painted him as a masterful business man.  He persistently requested Jordan to grant him access to the key players in Moscow which Jordan failed to perform but very successfully managed to present as failures of other contacts rather than himself.  Their relationship grew and the agency head advised Jordan to both nurture and create unreachable dreams for the asset.  Eventually, the man came to believe he was capable of becoming the leader of the entire free world after he had been given copies of the biographies and literary works of Hitler, Milosz, and Machiavelli although Jordan always doubted his ability to read and comprehend such pithy writing. The braggart hired a second rate ghost writer to pen what he was certain would be an autobiographical masterpiece, dictated numerous grandiose lies which converted his multitudinous failures into unrivaled successes, and finally needed the ghost writer to invent a minimally flowery and false title for the book which more accurately would have been labeled fiction.  He even invited Jordan to attend his announcement to the world that he aspired to be its most important citizen.  Jordan arrived at the announcement as late as possible, elbowed in as far as possible from the press corps, skillfully avoided being photographed, and watched as his intelligence asset, if that were not too magnanimous a descriptor, rode grandly down a gold escalator, spoke in a rambling fashion to the press about his ambition, and induced them to graze over a buffet of his poorly made, over priced, and failing commercial assets.  A few days later when he and Jordan met again, he regaled the FSB agent with a grand description of his plan to become the most important man alive.  

Meanwhile in Moscow, the man in charge assigned a small team of computer experts to assist the braggart by hacking and placing grand stories about him in a large group of media services which catered to the most marginal and least intelligent groups of citizens of America.  The agency director had no belief, perhaps not even hope, that this work could be successful until one night while drinking his nightly single shot of Russo-Baltique Vodka he decided to have his computer experts hack into the state election systems of several key American states.  He rolled the alcohol around his teeth and tongue, smiled his chilling smile, and realized that he was a genius, probably the greatest and most devious genius in the history of Russian intelligence. That very hour, he awoke his chief computer expert, gave him his marching orders along with a list of the key American states he wished to steal an election from, and slept like a baby for the first time in years.  

On the morning after the 2016 election, the most important man in Russia awoke to news that his computer hackers had all earned promotions, smiled his nefarious smile, and finally deigned to make a brief call to this braggart who had gone to bed the night before, for the first time in his life, with the full realization that he was unfit to handle the chore he had usurped.  Jordan read his marching orders from the secretive communication channel with Moscow and learned that he had been recalled to headquarters for a “much needed and well earned vacation”.  After that, he found himself receiving no meaningful assignments other than sometimes giving boiler plate lectures at the FSB training academy and transporting unimportant people to their unknown assignments around Eastern Europe.  The few agents he considered to be his friends never invited him to their dinner parties and he realized that, despite his role in the installment of a Russian agent in the White House, he was now persona non grata within the FSB.  Based on his years of experience, he realized that he was considered to be dangerous to the agency because he knew too much.  Although he slept little, guarded his safety at a level which he had never before been required to do, and wondered when he would be eliminated as had a dozen others who had also known part of the story.  He considered his options, death by an agent assassin, banishment to the gulag, suicide, or defection.  In memory of his father and his illustrious career, Jordan did not act rashly, made no immediate decision about his fate which he considered to be the one decision which he was still capable of making, carried out his low level assignments just as diligently as he had at twenty-five, and hoped that somehow he would be allowed to escape the usual fate of an agent with excessive knowledge of any major operation.

As he stood on the deck of the destroyer feeling the throb of the massive American engines, listening to the sound of hundreds of tons of steel cutting the ocean to foam, and marveled that for twenty years he had been able to live, escape elimination, and actually defect to this country which he had come to love and which now considered him a hero worthy to attend this event.  In late 2020, shortly after the election which unseated his former asset, Jordan during a minor assignment  to Ukraine happened to encounter a man he knew to be a CIA agent who masqueraded as a millionaire dilletante and world traveler.  This was not their first encounter but Jordan realized he did not wish it to be their last.  He took a step only a half dozen or so FSB and KGB agents had ever done and approached the US agent in the restroom of an opera house, slipped him a message on edible rice paper, and went to his hotel to wait.  Within six hours, a bellhop opened his door without knocking, spoke to him in perfect English, and offered him a life once more provided he made up his mind within three minutes.  Jordan used two of those priceless minutes, left the room as instructed, climbed into the taxi which miraculously appeared as he stepped out the hotel doors, and left Ukraine, Russia, his homeland, his identity, and his dilemma forever.  The taxi dropped him at a nondescript warehouse which was held under a non-existent corporation but used by American intelligence and two hours later he found himself being transported to an airport in a wooden shipping container complete with sound proof walls, food, water, bedding, and a chemical toilet .  After a long, jarring flight, the container was opened in Seattle and Robert Jordan learned that he was considered a very important asset to the American Director of National Intelligence and to the Attorney General.

His Russian life was dead forever.  But Robert Jordan, as he was now known, was alive, had an identity constructed over the next six months as he was searched for by the FSB all across Ukraine, Russia, and anywhere else they had an agent.  His Russian identity no longer existed and eventually with plastic surgery, intense reading and testing on this fictional life of Robert Jordan, he came to understand just who he was and would be until the day of his death, by whatever means it came.  He told American agents everything he knew about their former putative leader, how he had become a traitor, who handled his treason, how his assets were diverted and concealed as they left Russia for his use, and just how much he had given the FSB over the last several decades.  The worst part of the entire ordeal was the time he spent, concealed in a series of remote locations, testifying over closed circuit television to the grand juries and trial juries which indicted, convicted, and sentenced the braggart and nearly a hundred of his co-conspirators.  The remote location was changed daily, sometimes his testimony was cancelled when suspicion of his discovery made his American handlers jittery.  But after months of testimony, the braggart was convicted of treason, and Robert Jordan was handed a new life as a retired plumber from another state who decided to live his remaining years on a small farm growing excellent tomatoes from heritage seeds along with beans of similar history.  He never went to movies or a store.  He had no wife, no children, no amusements other than his garden.  But he had self-respect and he had his new country which he came to love and which had offered him this last opportunity to be in the same location as the braggart who had died in a prison cell in Colorado after spending thirteen years in solitary confinement.  

As Jordan heard the footsteps of the captain and a chaplain on the deck behind him, he smiled and remembered the voice of President Harris as she had asked, “Would you like to attend his burial, Mr. Jordan?  If so, myself and our country would be very pleased to give you that opportunity.”  Jordan accepted without hesitation, found himself whisked off his little anonymous farm in a blacked out Chevy Suburban by four well armed agents, driven to a small military base where he was put on a plane to another plane at another darkened airport, and thence to the Chinook helicopter which took him at nearly 200 miles per hour to the deck of the destroyer along with the plain, well weighted canvas bag which contained the remains of the old braggart and traitor, and the six anonymous sailors who would be key players in this last ceremony.  

The captain approached silently from the darkness and stopped beside Jordan.  The chaplain strode to the rail over the water and turned toward the soft sounds of six men carrying a burden across the deck toward the rail.  When they stopped beside the chaplain, the captain uttered his only words on deck, “Proceed chaplain.”

The chaplain quoted from memory in a soft voice which barely made it the ten feet to Jordan and the captain, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven, A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;  A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. Amen.” 

The six anonymous sailors lifted their burden over the rail, released it, turned to salute the captain, before disappearing into the darkness with the chaplain.  Jordan followed the captain back to the companion way leading to the officers’ quarters in silence.  As the door closed behind them, Jordan heard the captain say quietly, “Beside Osama, as it should be.”  

Copyright August 18, 2020

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Author’s Note: While this story is copyrighted, the copyright is intended only to protect my authorship.  Anyone, any time, anywhere has my unrestricted permission to disseminate this story on any medium whether now known or created in the distant future.  You may share it on social media, e-mail, websites, books, magazines, literary journals, or other forms of mass communication.  I do not seek or require any form of remuneration for this work other than dissemination of the work.  This permission is granted in tribute to my mentor, Don West, who published his life’s work without a copyright.  The only thing I ask is that you give appropriate author credit and my brief bio is below.

   

Biographical Statement: Roger D. Hicks is an Appalachian writer, blogger, and auctioneer living in West Liberty, KY.  His work has appeared in “Freshwater”, “Mush”, “Bryant Literary Review”, “Orpheus” at Lindsey Wilson College, “Now And Then”, “True Christmas Stories From The Heart Of Appalachia”, “Wingspan”, “Across The Margin”,  “Mildred Haun Review Journal”,  “River Babble” and numerous other venues.  He is currently working on a final edit of a short story collection and a biography of an Appalachian coal camp town.