Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 9, 1993 TAG: 9306090034
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BOISSEVAIN LENGTH: Long
"It keeps you regular, like taking a laxative."
"It creates virility. You look at my father: He's been eating poke salad since 1911; he's fathered 13 kids - and he said that's just the ones here locally."
"The ideal thing is to pick poke before it peaks - or it'll make you puke."
Flour up the leaves and fry it: "It tastes just like fish."
Flour up the stalks and fry it: "It tastes just like asparagus."
What is poke salad, and why's it such a big deal here lately?
Just ask Dave Phipps, the Hopkins Holler native - "that's holler with an E-R, not an O-W," he says - a man who thinks it's high time Southwest Virginia residents start cashing in on their hillbilly image, instead of shying away from it. Phipps went before the Tazewell County board of supervisors last month and talked them into giving the wild, ubiquitous poke green official vegetable status.
And if it boosts the popularity of Boissevain's second annual poke salad festival coming up this weekend - not to mention the Coal Miner's Memorial Museum and Park, both of which Phipps spearheaded - well, that's fine by him, too.
Phipps and the supervisors made national news last month with their poke pontificating, in part because of one supervisor's refusal to sanction the green.
"People from Roanoke east, they sorta still think we're hillbillies anyway," says supervisor James Hale, the lone dissenter and poke opponent. "I just don't think it's a good image for us to be promoting."
But Phipps and the other supervisors, it turns out, do.
They're getting some decent country mileage out of it, too.
We were greeted in Boissevain by a committee of poke protagonists, with instructions to make this story "as hillbilly as you can." That, from retired postmaster and keeper of the poke-lore Bo Harmon, sitting on a bench under a tree in front of Phipps' convenience store and Boissevain's central meeting place, the Friendly Oak Store.
"Back in the early '30s, right after Hoover was president, work in the mines wasn't but two days a week, and you had a bunch of kids to raise," 67-year-old Harmon says.
"They didn't eat poke because they liked it. They ate it because they had to."
Free, wild and as resilient as the miners themselves, poke helped families make it through those rough spring days, after the canned goods had run out but before the garden produce had come in.
As Phipps likes to say, " 'Round here, growing up with poke salad is sorta like being born a Democrat in the hills."
Poke grew near miners' homes and flourished on discarded coal ashes. Thus, Harmon philosophizes, the miner fed the poke plant and the poke plant fed the miner.
The leafy, tobacco-like plant - the stories go - has also been used to cure male-pattern baldness, round worms, obesity, wrinkles, gray hair, hot flashes, unwanted dreams, insomnia, black lung and bad toenails.
The origin of the phrase "poke salad": People would set out to pull poke with a small knife and a brown bag, called a "poke." When they got home with their pokes full of poke, it was time to fix up a "mess" of poke.
For how-to advice on poke, Phipps took us home to his 75-year-old mother, Armeta Phipps, who fixed up a mess of poke salad, along with fried fatback, beans, cornbread and buttermilk.
For plain poke salad, boil the stalk and leaves, chopped up, for 20 to 30 minutes. Meanwhile fry the bacon or fatback in an iron skillet. Fry the boiled poke in the leftover grease, with salt.
Serve it with vinegar sprinkled on top. "You have to pour it directly out of the vinegar bottle," Phipps says. "We try to be down-to-earth about it and keep our humility."
Phipps' father, 82-year-old Bill Phipps, worked in the nearby Boissevain coal mine for 28 years, retiring in 1954 with black lung disease. He recalls the 1932 mine explosion at Boissevain, which killed 38 of his friends and relatives in the daytime disaster, but not him because he was working the night shift.
"I was always lucky," he says, narrowly missing accidents in which miners working right next to him were killed.
Adds Armeta, "Every time he left, I never knew if he'd come home again or not."
Raising 13 children on a dollar of scrip a day wasn't easy, and free poke salad definitely helped stretch the budget, they say.
It's the type of lifestyle that young Dave Phipps couldn't wait to get away from when he left the mountains to study sociology at Indiana University in the '60s. "We grew up poor, and I went through the phase where I had to leave and think I was too good for my heritage," Phipps, now 45, recalls.
Phipps went into the Marines, then got a job as a labor contract administrator with U.S. Steel near Chicago. "As I got older, I realized it was nonsense to have a complex about coming from a coal-mining community."
He came back to Boissevain eight years ago, and he hasn't looked back.
Nor has Boissevain.
Before Dave Phipps, the town's post office was a trailer. There was no town park, no memorial for the killed miners, no stores, no community festivals, not even a "Welcome to Boissevain" sign on Virginia 644.
"Let me tell you about Dave Phipps," says county supervisor Jim Jones. "He's a ball of fire. He gets things done. He has singlehandedly built this coal miner's museum to put Boissevain on the map.
"And he can talk the leg off a horse."
With all his one-liners about poke salad, with all his tireless poking fun at poke, Dave Phipps gets serious when he talks about what the vegetable is doing for the community of Boissevain.
For the festival this weekend, he's lined up 70 to 100 volunteers to cook the beans, cornbread and poke salad. There's Robert Farley's secret-ingredient cornbread, his wife Hazel's fried apple pies.
"Nobody's turned me down yet," Phipps says. "These people are proud of their coal-mining heritage. They're getting involved.
"This is how you motivate a community. Without this kind of thing, there's very little socializing that goes on anymore; people will just sit in their houses and stare at the TV."
The same activity-based strategy worked for the 13-acre park, a former coal-sludge swamp. Phipps got grants, land and equipment donations. He even talked the Tazewell County Vo-Tech students into building the picnic benches for the park.
"This place is worth half a million, but we've spent less than $100,000 in actual dollars," he says, standing on the Coal Miner's Opry stage he had built for gospel sings and bluegrass gatherings.
He points to the swing sets, the ball field, the picnic shelters and the hill over yonder, where ground is scheduled to be broken next year for the coal miner's museum.
"See that basketball goal over there? I did the court, but I had the kids raise the money for the goal; that way they'll take care of it better."
"We laugh about poke salad, but we're serious about it, too," he adds. "It represents the spirit of a community of working people, the heart of Appalachia."
"Poke salad, it always manages to grow and prosper, it doesn't matter how bad the soil gets, how poorly it's treated. That's the way it is with us in the hills, too."
Then, without any prodding, Phipps looks out into the field from his spot on the stage, stomps his foot and starts crooning: "I'm proud to be a coal miner's son . . . "
Poke Salad Bluegrass & Country Festival, Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., Boissevain Coal Miners Memorial Museum and Park, admission $2. 945-2671.
by CNB