Dame Wilburn - Blackie the Pig

 

So I'm a strange child. I think it's-- I don't know if it's obvious to you, but I'm a strange child. Okay. So, I had, like, dual citizenship growing up. I was born in Macon, Georgia, and would spend my summers there. And then during the school year, I'd be in Detroit, Michigan. [audience laughter] Now let's establish my life for a second, right? So I went to a private German school, the Detroit Waldorf School. So, everybody in my school spoke German. The Waldorf Rudolf Steiner method of teaching is from Germany. I would come home speaking German and my own father, who was paying the bill, would call me a communist. [audience laughter] Now then I would go to Georgia and visit my grandma, who we all called Neenanny. And she had a cousin who owned a jackass that used to wear pants like a straw hat. [audience laughter] And no one seemed to notice that that's what was happening. I'm sitting there, he's got on, no one saying anything. So, I didn't say anything. And then when I leave school and come home, I was in Detroit. Like I didn't live in the outskirts like some people say. “They're from Detroit” and they're like 70 miles out.” No, I was in Detroit.

 

I had this kind of weird multicultural upbringing and so things never quite made sense to me. Case in point, I'm in Georgia and we lived in Macon. And Macon at the time had not zoned itself yet to exclude farm animals. Now we couldn't have large animals. We could have something small. So, my grandfather was a hog farmer, but in the city. [audience chuckles] Now I'm going to paint a picture. So, I-75 cuts through my granddaddy's backyard. I-75 South. If you happen to drive through Macon and see Mercer University Drive, there's a storage facility. There's this weird looking house that looks like somebody put it together from a kit. There's a barn that does not look like a barn, but is the color of a barn. And that is my grandfather's house. [audience chuckles] 

 

When I was little, I'd go down and I'd stay for the summer and my mother wanted me to have a traditional Southern upbringing. She wanted me to understand my family, my roots and where I came from. So, that meant a lot of sweet tea, a lot of “yes ma'am, no, ma'am.” Pretty much being Southern is just eating a lot of food and thanking people for it. [audience laughter] Like that's 90% of the job. That's all you do. You just go to somebody's house and they hand you a plate of something and you say, "Thank you, ma'am." And you eat it and you don't know what it is and it's best not to ask. [audience chuckles] And you, that's why that tea is so sweet. Like just eat it, slam the tea and get out. [audience laughter] And that's the job. So, my parents, we lived in a two-family flat, so I could never have a pet. And I always wanted a pet.

 

And the lady across the street from-- she was, I'm not getting into that, that's another story. But she raised chickens and cats together. So, she had like these gigantic chickens and these big sort of alley cats. And then she had these little chicks and little kittens and everybody got along. The cat never tried to kill a chicken. Chicken never tried to kill a cat. It was pretty good life. And I called my mother and said that the lady across the street told me I could have a kitten. And my mother was like, "No, you can't have a kitten." I said, "Well, but I want one." She's like, "I understand that, but we don't live in the kind of place where you can have a kitten." I said, “Okay.”

 

My grandfather is listening to this and he says, "Well, your mama won't let you have a kitten, but you could have a hog." [audience laughter] And I'm like, "Yeah, that, yeah, like a hog." So, but now all the hogs had had babies, right? So, we got the little piglets, right? And they're all, I mean--, if you've ever seen a piglet before, piglet, not two weeks in, because two weeks in they look like monsters. But like, when they're little, little little, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that I could move it to a two-family flat with this little pig. I never thought it was going to grow up. I thought they just had sizes. Like you get a little one and then there's a bigger one, and then there's the one, the gigantic ones that are mean. I didn't understand anything.

 

Now, these hogs were-- we were already in trouble because they were smarter than us. Like, every day of my grandfather's life was a battle to outwit the hog so they'd stay in the pen, [audience chuckles] and he'd win that battle about 80% of the time, but 20% of the time, usually around 3:00 in the morning, you'd be in bed and you hear, [imitates truck horn], and that lets you know the hogs are on the freeway. [audience laughter] That's how you knew. That's how you knew. So, we wouldn't even, like, we wouldn't-- there wouldn't even be a startle. There was the first time it happened. I'm a little kid. I'm like, "Oh, my God. what's going on?” And after that, you just get used to it. You're like, "Oh, the hogs got out." So, you get up and you put your clothes on that you had the day before because you keep them out because the hogs might get out.

 

And my grandmother would go in the kitchen and start making coffee because it was going to take a minute to get them off the freeway. And the truck drivers would come off the freeway, walk down through the holler, come up through the backyard, come sit in the kitchen and drink coffee. [audience laughter] And my grandfather would go out there and say, "Well, boss man, we got to get these hogs off this freeway. You might well go in the house and have some coffee with my wife, because it's going to be a minute."

 

So these guys, all the northbound, southbound traffic, some of the northbound traffic would come over, get in the kitchen, drink coffee. My grandma would start making breakfast. She just-- we always have eggs. Like, it was just that-- that was normal. And then all of us who weren't making breakfast would go out with the buckets of slop, walk through the backyard, go down the holler, get up on the freeway [audience holler] and start trying to get them to come off the freeway. Now, if I had-- I know that was good, wasn't it? [audience laughter] That's how you know this is not a lie. [audience chuckles] But it was just normal. Like, that was a normal thing and I would go to school, and when I got back home, and I'd say, "Hey, we had to get the hogs off the freeway." And my friends-- my Detroit city friends would say, "Your family is country as hell." [audience chuckle] I'm like, "Yes, I know. It's you don't have to tell me that."

 

But anyhow, I called my mother and I said, "Well, Granddaddy says I can have a piglet." And my mother said, "Your granddaddy's a liar." [audience laughter] And I said, "Well, he said I could bring it home." She said, "Your granddaddy's a damn liar. Put him on the phone." [audience laughter] So the two of them get into some sort of heated conversation, and I'm not even there because I'm in the backyard at the fence picking out my piglet. [audience chuckles] And granddaddy comes out. I've talked to my mother and says, "Now, your mama is right. You can't have no pig in the city. They won't let you have it. But if you leave him here with me, you can have him, but he'll still be yours. But he'll be with me." And I'm thinking, “This feels like a divorced parent thing, but it's the best I'm going to get because this is the closest thing I'm going to get to a pet.” So, he said, "Go ahead and pick him out."

 

So, I pick out this little piglet that's all black, and I name him Blackie because that's what you do when you're a child. Simple things. [audience chuckles] What's the name of your black pig? Blackie. Simple and easy to remember. [audience chuckles] And I stay for the rest of the summer, and Blackie's starting to get a little bigger, and I can't wait, because it's going to be about nine months, and then I'm going to come back and see Blackie. So I go to school, I tell everybody about Blackie. I'm going on about Blackie. I'm telling my mother and father about Blackie. “I saw Blackie. Blackie did this, Blackie did that.” I called my granddad. “How's Blackie?” “Blackie's doing real good.” “Okay, so tell me something else about Blackie.” “Blackie's good, and he's getting real big.” “Okay.” So that's all he keeps saying. I'm like, "Yes, Blackie's getting good. I'm going to school every day. My pig is getting big." "He's so smart." "Pigs get out and get on the freeway." "Your family's country as hell." [audience laughter] It's just this cycle just keeps happening.

 

So, long before anybody really trusted the post office, because there was a minute when no one trusted the post office. This is like the late '70s. You didn't mail nothing. You put stuff on them. Don't lie to me. Y'all did it. You put it on the bus. [audience chuckles] If you were sent something serious, you put it on the bus and you go down to the Greyhound station and pick it up. So, my grandfather calls and tells my mother and my father that he's sending us a package. [audience chuckle] And I am--, I know I'm in the future with you. I know. And I am-- my grandmother had crowder peas and purple hulls. And she would shuck all these peas and send us peas and okra and anything out of her garden. They would freeze it and send it to us. So, I hated peas. So, I was already uninterested in what might be coming. And we get down to the bus station, we pick up this cooler, and it's like double wrapped. There's all kinds of tape and stuff on it. So, we bring the cooler home, and my dad pulls out his pocket knife and he cuts open the cooler and he starts taking out all this stuff wrapped in butcher paper.

 

And it's, it's obviously meat. And I'm like, "Oh, Granddaddy sent us meat." And then my dad gets through the first layer of papers. And then as he starts pulling stuff out, each package says "Blackie." [audience awe and chuckle] Now, I'm too young to read, but the look of horror on my mother's face pretty much let me know what that said. And there's sausages and smoked pork chops and ham hocks and tons of bacon. Like, lots of bacon, because Blackie got real big. [audience chuckles] And I'm mortified. I'm at the kitchen table petting the paper. [audience laughter] Like, really in my mind, I decided my grandfather was a cannibal. Like, there's something wrong with him. My grandfather's mentally ill and I'm pet. I'm just petting this paper.

 

And my mother looks at me and she says, "Damie. Granddaddy doesn't really know what 'pet' means. [audience laughter] Like, if it's a dog, he thinks that's a pet. If it's a cat, he thinks that's a pet. Now, just about anything else that you can cook with a bucket of peas, he probably doesn't think is a pet." And I was done. I was a vegetarian. I'm like, "I'm done. I'm done with you savages. I'm done. I'm not eating. I'm not eating no more pig. I'm done." And I want to tell you that I held that line. I want to tell you that. My dad, in the middle of March in Michigan, dusted off the grill on the back porch of that second-story flat, and he put a couple of rounds of sausages and a couple of slabs of ribs on that grill. And by the time he brought it in the house and put some Mrs. Griffith's barbecue sauce on it, which you could only get in Macon, Georgia, my granddaddy sent along with the pig, [audience chuckles] I pretty much just said, "Well, here's to you, Blackie." And I ate everything on that plate.