KIM SEVERSON: Where Southerners go to fill the tank and feed the family
Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2023 -- Are they gas stations that serve food or restaurants that pump gas? A Durham photographer's new book explores the lure of these restorative community rest stops.
Posted — UpdatedNew York City has its bodegas. The South has its gas stations.
“These places hold great mystery,” she said. “You’re rolling down the road and they catch your visual attention. Then you wonder what’s behind that glass door when you hear that little bell ring. Is it the MAGA South? The welcoming South? Who’s at the cash register? Who’s at the grill?”
A dozen years ago, Medley discovered a Citgo in Durham that had become a Nicaraguan place called the Latin America Food Restaurant. She developed a theory.
“I thought I could chart the emerging immigrant foodways of the South by way of what was happening in the backs of these gas stations,” she said.
Some independent gas stations are fading in the fluorescent light of chains like QuikTrip and RaceTrac, with their cheap gasoline, hot-dog rollers and endless banks of soda machines. Some station owners let the gas pumps run dry or remove them altogether because the local economy is too depressed. Other gas stations have become churches or nightclubs, or have been abandoned altogether.
“I’d never thought about the fact that my favorite restaurants, as a child, as a teenager, as an adult returning to Mississippi, nearly all served gas,” he writes. “And I never, ever, thought of them as gas stations that served food.”
Hurricane Katrina hit the day after she started. She spent the next several months traveling the state to cover the devastation for The New York Times, her journeys fueled by rural gas stations.
They often run on a Southern “get ’er done” attitude. If customers want cakes, someone will start baking. A cashier in North Carolina figured out that she could make a little extra money buying some Bojangles sausage biscuits on her way to work, marking them up and selling them to the breakfast crowd.
“It’s just this ingenuity and resourcefulness you don’t find other places,” Medley said.
Two weeks ago, Medley took me to a place in the middle of Mississippi Delta farmland that also sprang from an immigrant story.
The restaurant takes up about half the building, and the family’s Italian immigration roots are all over the menu. There are grits and burgers, but also a rigatoni plate lunch and a po’ boy (their own invention) made with deep-fried balls of chopped black olives, shredded mozzarella and seasoned breadcrumbs bound together with a little mayonnaise and ranch dressing. Canvas-wrapped logs of seasoned, salted pork loin called lonza cure in the beer cooler.
Fratesi, 68, doesn’t think the place will last much past his retirement. Already, a chain gas station down the road has undercut his gasoline prices by a dime. And no one in the family’s next generation is interested in taking over.
“You have to be married to it,” he said.
About 15 miles away in Indianola, the future is brighter.
The restaurant walls are covered in the signatures of tourists from around the world who have come to learn about the blues. The family recently covered up the old garage bays, and are expanding the dining room to make room for the growing busloads of tourists.
Her younger brother, Otha, who is essentially the maître d’ at Betty’s, said they like to disavow travelers’ preconceived notions about racism in the South.
“Not only do Black travelers see Betty’s as a safe place to stop for lunch,” he told Medley for her book, “white travelers see it as safe place, too.”
Small Southern towns remain informally segregated, but not at the gas stations that sell food — or the restaurants that sell gas.
“There’s something about the accessibility and this coming together in a space the whole community shares almost out of necessity or at least convenience,” Medley said. “All are welcome every time, no matter what.”
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