Lazy Wife Greasy Beans, A Lesson In Appalachian Nomenclature

 I was just offered the opportunity to buy a freezing sized amount of what are called Lazy Wife Greasy Beans from my friend Bill Best, whom I have written about several times on this blog.  Bill is a nationally recognized expert on saving, propagating, and growing Appalachian Heritage food crops, a prolific author, retired Berea College professor, and farmer.  I have never had any personal experiences with Lazy Wife Greasy Beans but I just cannot resist the opportunity to learn about them, write about them, freeze them, and eat them when the snow is on the ground.  From Letcher County on the Virginia border to at least Rowan County on I-64 and west to about Adair County, Kentucky is famous for having a people who have, over the last 300 years, grown and managed to save hundreds of varieties of Appalachian Heritage food crops, especially beans and tomatoes. 

For instance, the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center website sells seed beans for about twenty separate varieties of greasy beans including a Lazy Wife Greasy Bean, a Small Lazy Wife Greasy Bean, and a Lazy Daisy Greasy Bean.  The website does not specify which was small, the bean or the lazy wife who originally grew it.  But the website of Sow True Seed gives the best description of the Lazy Wife Greasy Bean.  They say it is "One of the largest of all the greasy varieties, it's called Lazy Wife because the gardeners (who were traditionally the women of the family) could wait longer to harvest and get more food per harvest as these beans are just that big. Thick, fleshy, and stringless, pods remain tender until the beans are quite large. A great shelling bean as well. Originally from Madison County, NC"  They also give the scientific name, Phaseoulus vulgaris, which could mean that the person who produced the scientific name and catalogued it felt that it was vulgar to name a bean in a manner which could be considered demeaning to women. However, an internet friend of mine who goes by the moniker Greenbriar Jim and happens to be a doctoral level retired scientist for the federal government corrected about the meaning of the Latin word "vulgaris".  Jim says that the word simply means "Common" in Latin.  I'm willing to take his word for although the Lazy Wife Greasy Bean is anything but common.  But at the time in Appalachian Folk History when this bean got its colorful name, it was not a particularly offensive thing which also supports Jim's information.   By the way, Jim has a wonderful photography based blog with a little history thrown in for good measure. Although he hasn't produced much on the blog in recent years, it is still well worth visiting at this link.  The blog is named "The Wayfarin' Stranger" and is well worth an extended visit.  The website of the Burpee Seed Company, from which I would never buy an advertised heritage seed because of their long history of hybridization and crossbreeding of many crops, does make a statement about the somewhat inappropriate nomenclature of the Lazy Wife Bean:  "Were these pearls, what a necklace they would make. These are the true ‘Lazy Housewife’, originally introduced by W. Atlee Burpee Co. in 1885, which explains the antiquated moniker. Plants bear green, entirely stringless pods of exceedingly fine, buttery flavor when cooked. When dried, the beans are perfectly round and white, like little pearls, with a heavier, richer, creamy taste. For longer cropping periods, greater yields, and easier harvesting, use a pole or trellis system. Pick them young for snap beans (80 days), or let them dry for shelling beans."  But the Burpee Company also attempts to take credit for  having "originally introduced by W. Atlee Burpee Co. in 1885."  There is little doubt that the Lazy Wife Greasy Bean was a heritage bean which was simply appropriated by Burpee in their ongoing commercial zeal because they knew it was being widely grown in the Appalachian region.  Several other seed sales and preservation companies also sell the Lazy Wife Greasy Bean and some have decided it seems better to them to call it the Lazy Housewife Bean.  Use of the word "housewife"  instead of just "wife" is a relatively more modern term and was not used three hundred years ago when Appalachian subsistence gardners isolated the bean for its unique qualities and began spreading it across large portions of the Eastern United States.  

Shortly after I posted this blog post, I had a question from a reader in Pulaski County, Kentucky, who wanted to know if I had ever heard of White Snowball Greasy Beans.  I had not but I was able to find a small amount of information on the internet.  Without disclosing any personal information about the reader other than their general geographic area, I am posting here our exchange and my exchange with my two Appalachian Heritage Bean experts, Bill Best and Frank Barnett, who are always the first and generally the last people I go to with questions about Appalachian Heritage crops.  I sent them the following e-mail question: Hello,  Do you two know the White Snowball Greasy Bean?  It is possibly a Pulaski County KY bean.  Roger

Here is the message I got from Frank Barnett:

Sure do. I was given one such named variety by Bill years ago which I assume is from his home turf in NC.  And in 2019 when I went to Mitchell County, NC another 2 going by that name, and one of those was from Yancey County, NC.  One thing about bean variety names, before the internet and the big bean swaps, names were local, even to the holler level.  Good example varieties were from older folks called John or Maggie. You know like the Amish the same names were used over and over in each generation. Big John might mean the eldest John or the heaviest John and of course there was Little John, maybe Big John’s son.  So I have 5 bean varieties called Big John. And 3 or 4 Aunt Maggie bean varieties. I had an Aunt Maggie but she was not a seed saver. I had 4 Raleigh Barnett relatives, Big, Junior, Little, Little Junior. None them gardened.  I know of a relative in my Mom’s family , George, who always wanted a son but he had all daughters ( a bunch). When his daughters got married they each named their first born son, George. Now all the Georges were differentiated by nicknames, Big Nose George, Horny George (warts across his forehead), Big Foot George, Pleasant George, and I have forgotten the rest. Just a good thing they were Not bean seed savers. Nope, no regulatory organization to control name naming.  That is apparent with names like Dog Eye or Eagle With Wings ( Red eyed fall bean to non bean person) or Cousin Jed and Aunt Onie (Ona, I assume). (Personal E-mail from Frank Barnett)

This morning, September 29, 2020, I received a response to my e-mail question from Bill Best about the White Snowball Greasy Bean and here it is in its entirety: 

Like Frank, I have grown the Snowball greasy to see if it was the same as the Lazy Wife Greasy.  The jury is still out but my son’s colleague at Tennessee Tech is doing DNA analysis of several of our bean varieties.  I’ve heard of the Snowball Greasy being from Mitchell and Yancy Counties in NC but now from Pulaski County, KY.  I like Frank’s discussion of bean seed names and am still waiting for him to write a book about his knowledge of beans and their keepers that he has met over the years. I had Lazy Wife greasy beans for supper tonight and they are still as good as they used to be. Roger, I’m looking forward to seeing you and Candice this Thursday.  Weather permitting you can drive within two feet of my Lazy Wife greasy bean rows.  We picked some for you today and will pick again Wednesday if the weather allows so that you can have the freshest ones.  We are stringing and breaking many every day to make shuck beans, since I’m down to two packets and need more to replenish my supply.  I keep them all in a freezer where they will last indefinitely."

My response to Bill's message is fairly simple since I am not the Appalachian Heritage Bean expert.  I am simply an expert on Appalachian Culture and have an interest in all aspects of it including Appalachian Heritage crops which came about primarily because I met Bill Best because he and I both had stories in a book from the Jesse Stuart Foundation and Bill introduced me to Frank.  They are the two best experts in America on Appalachian Heritage crops, especially beans and tomatoes and whatever they say is gospel, has been traced and certified before they say it, and should always be considered to be the final answer.  

I also received a second response to my e-mail from Frank Barnett this morning, September 29, 2020, which has some more information about his wide ranging search for Appalachian Heritage Beans and also contains  some pretty good humor.   

"Oh sorry for the long winded discussion about bean names but I needed a break from shelling out beans. I hope all this rain does not damage the 5 varieties I have yet to pick for seed.   In April 2019 when I went to Mitchell, Yancey and Madison counties in NC I felt right at home. I had good visits with everyone and besides talking about beans also had   discussions about about chickens, tobacco, old Ford trucks, and oh the manager at the state liquor store in Burnsville. He sounded like a moonshiner, he said he really objected to buying his whiskey from the state, state has no business making whiskey.  The bulls*** got really deep, next trip I will have hip boots.  And I left for Tenn over one of the last two cow path dirt roads in western NC.  Oh but no coal trucks. Yep I know about those WVa roads marked as coal haulers."

I think Frank Barnett's  e-mail tells you a lot about how serious he is about Appalachian Heritage Beans, how far he is willing to travel to find a variety he does not know, and how hard he works on his farm, as does Bill Best, in order to preserve and pass on what they know about these hard to find crops. 

Let me go on to say that these posts about Appalachian Heritage beans have always generated a lot of readership and several such exchanges with my readers about the particular bean variety I might be writing about or others which I had not even expected such as the White Snowball Greasy Bean above.  That is a very good thing!  If one of my blog posts about such topics generates questions for you let me know.  If the post contains what you perceive to be an error, also let me know.  Or if it reminds you of information you have about some related topic, also let me know.  I love to see this happen and I love to learn as do most of the readers on this blog.  I have never intended this blog to be typical or to be only my opinions especially about topics rooted strongly in Appalachian culture, agriculture, history, literature, or any other topic within the greater field of Appalachian Studies.  Here is also a photo Frank sent me on October 8, 2020, of our mutual friend, national Appalachian Heritage crop expert Bill Best with his freshly made shucked beans.

 

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.