Waiting.

Line culture at Franklin ...

There are discussions on websites like Chowhound on the subject of selling spots in line. How do you feel about that?

That's so wrong. Wow, that's wrong. We have this customer who's the first to get here every Saturday. He comes out with his laptop and a lawn chair at about 7:45, and it keeps getting earlier and earlier every week. He lives in California, but he flies in every Friday night to see his wife. He comes in and gets enough food to last the week.

He came in one day and told me, "Last weekend, this guy waiting was talking about selling his spot. The line shut him down pretty quickly, saying they'd beat the shit out of him and his friend."

What if people are actually doing it.

[Laughs a ton] If we knew who they were, we'd tell them it wasn't cool. There are so many people who come wait, have fun, make friends, eat together. A lot of people show up on mornings and start seeing the same people. They get to know each other. They bring each other bagels.

It's kind of like a rock and roll parking lot or tailgating. It's a scene. The great thing about it is that it weeds out the impatient people.

We've been putting out a sold out sign maybe thirty minutes before we open. People show up at like 7AM and bring lawn chairs and ice chests full of beer. There's like 200 people out there before we open.

Build.

One of my earliest memories is my father cooking a whole hog in a refrigerator. He gutted one of those old white International Harvesters, took out all the insulation and plastic, and put metal pipes through it with pieces of wire. On the farmland where I grew up in Clarendon County, South Carolina, we used it as a barbecue pit—a reusable update on the traditional method of digging a hole in the ground. Other places use cinder blocks. In Chicago they use fish tanks. You can trace the ingenuity of Black people through barbecue across the country.

I barbecued my first hog when I was 11 years old. We’d cook them nice and slow—12 to 15 hours each—and use literally every part of the animal. It was always one of the biggest things that brought my family together. But being a Black farmer in America, like my father was, comes with many injustices and little economic viability. In the 1970s and ’80s, Black farmers were constantly denied loans. They made less than their white counterparts on the same commodities: tobacco, cotton, hogs. My father became a welder to make ends meet; he held on to our land out of passion for it. And like most farmers of his generation, he wanted his children to get an education, which took us away from that land.

So I went to college. Then I took it a step further, got my Ph.D., moved to New Orleans, and became an aerospace engineer for NASA, where I still work full-time. But about six years ago, I asked myself: How can I use this education to go back home and build up my own community? My answer: barbecue.

CONNECT

Until.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

Plato