I am pretty sure we never, ever did it at my grandparents' house in Houston, which is where I spent all of my New Years for the first 18 years of my life. That we did not owes nothing to them being Yankees or something like that -- my grandfather was from Fort Worth and my grandmother is from Beaumont.
As I recall I was introduced to the tradition by my Atlanta-born stepmother Melanie Wells, who served them to us in Nashville, where I spent my first New Year's in 1990, when I was 20 years old. I don't know if it was one of those things where when you see something once, you start seeing it everywhere, or if the tradition coincidentally started picking up steam at the same time I first came across it, but I've every New Year I've spent stateside since then, BEPs on NYD have been the order of the day. Some years I've gone to town and whipped up a slow-cooked batch myself, complete with ham hocks and such, and served them up along with a mess of greens and home-made cornbread, and others I've just eaten a few token spoonfuls out of a can, but eat them I have. (Except for this year -- travel allowed for no such indulgence for what for me what was a lately-adopted superstition.)
When I first heard about the tradition, I was told that it was an ancient Southern folklore, and that it dated back to before the Civil War, if not even deeper back into the moonlit and magnolia mists of Dixie time.
I kinda wondered at the time why it was so late in coming to my attention, but not too surprised. Both sides of my family stand a bit apart from typical Southerners in many ways, most notably in that neither has so much as a whiff of hellfire Protestant Evangelicalism to them, so I have often felt a bit of a stranger in a strange land even when right there at home. So maybe this was just another of those times...
Or maybe not. Maybe the ancient origins of this ritual weren't so ancient after all. At some point in the last decade or so, the story started circulating in and around Central Texas that public relations man Elmore Torn Sr., the father of actor Rip Torn, had more or less invented the tradition out of whole cloth in 1947.
As near as I can tell, the revisionist history of BEP/NYD springs from the typewriter of professional Texan Charley Eckhardt. His 2007 story "The Great Blackeyed Pea Hoax" is oft-cited in now au courant debunkings of the tradition's allegedly venerable origin.
According to Eckhardt, the elder Torn was tasked with singing the praises of Henderson County, Texas, which in 1947, had little more to offer the world than farming, oil, and 200 gigametric fucktons of black eyed peas. And a cannery for those peas. And so Torn made the most with what he had.
Eckhardt said that the canned peas of 1947 were quite unlike those of today, in that they were damn near inedible:
When you opened a can what you saw was something that looked like lumpy, grayish-brown library paste with dark brown spots scattered in it. What you tasted was, in essence, salty tin. The canning process picked up the taste of the metal the cans were lined with. In other words, that stuff was downright awful and it's a miracle anyone ate it at all.
And so Torn weaved a romantic tale of their origins deep in the Spanish moss-draped past, that they were, in Eckhardt's words "a long-standing Southern culinary delight that graced the tables of high and low society all across the ante-bellum South, particularly on New Year's Day, when no proper Southern table would be without them." If you were wondering why you'd never heard of that tradition, you had the damn Yankees to blame for that. Eckhardt says that Torn claimed that the occupying Federals put the kibosh on blackeyed pea consumption during Reconstruction, and were so effective in doing so, the tradition was teetering on the brink of extinction.
According to Eckhardt's account, the Yankees did so because they had learned that Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee had enjoyed this traditional January 1 repast, and stamping it out was a petty form of payback. And so, in the spirit of letting bygones be bygones, as the Centennials of Fort Sumter, Gettysburg, and Appomattox approached, why not revive this relic of the antebellum South? And what easier way to do it than with a can of Henderson County's finest blackeyed peas?
Torn printed all this up in the form of a pamphlet -- Eckhardt explicitly called it a "scam" and refers to it as a "hoax" in the headline of his story -- and dispatched it along with small cans of peas to food editors at big city papers across the South right after Thanksgiving. Up until then, Eckhardt points out, unlike Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, and the Fourth of July, New Years Day lacked a traditional meal, and Torn was determined to fill that void.
Eckhardt continues:
Exactly how many food editors bit Elmore's hook we don't know, but he continued mailing copies of his scam and the 2-ounce cans of blackeyed peas to food editors across the south for several more years. Each year more and more food editors got on the bandwagon. Elmore started the 'tradition,' not of eating blackeyed peas per se, but the specific 'tradition' of eating blackeyed peas for good luck on New Year's Day-a 'tradition' which had never existed before 1947.
Okay, there is little I have enjoyed more in my career than a good old-fashioned debunking. Reading them, and even more writing them. There are few more thrilling prospects than standing tall and all but alone in a vast tide of buncombe while armed with nothing more than the incontrovertible truth. I've written a few in my time, but none I am more proud of than this one: while the smart and swanky set in New York, Hollywood and London were gaga over "J.T. Leroy," an allegedly trans allegedly white trash allegedly former child truckstop prostitute memoirist and fiction writer, yours truly, the lowly music editor of the Houston Press, blew the whistle and called a technical "flagrant bullshit" foul on the whole charade, weeks ahead of the New York media. It was and is a highlight of my career.
Conversely, there is little I dislike more than falling for a hoax or fake news or any other variety or degree of bullshit. One of the only things I know about James Avery Lomax, my great-great-grandfather, an illiterate sharecropper born in South Carolina, bred in Mississippi, and deliverer of my family to Texas, is that "he loathed sham and pretense of every sort." So does my dad, and so did his dad, and his dad's dad, James's son John Avery Lomax, the folklorist, who built his life on seeking out what was real. It's the family business, and I think it's more than something we've passed down from one generation to the next through teaching. I can see it in my children too -- I believe it is hardwired into our DNA.
And so my feelings on the Torn story and Eckhardt's debunking are complicated and ambivalent. At first I swallowed the story that the custom was so old its origins were lost in time, and in more recent years, I have just as eagerly propagated Eckhardt's revisionism as fact, when, I am now afraid, that is patently false.
I think what we have here is a failed debunking, albeit one created with the best of intentions.
It's readily apparent that Eckhardt did not regard Torn as malicious or that his alleged "hoax" or "scam" was some great calumny. On the contrary, Eckhardt's goal was to exalt Elmore Torn's slickness as a PR man and to highlight how this Henderson County country boy pulled one over, first on the city slickers in the big cities of Texas and the South, and then the whole country.
The thing is, he really didn't.
Elmore Torn may well have done an amazing job of popularizing the tradition of eating blackeyed peas on New Year's Day, but he most certainly did not invent it out of whole cloth, as Eckhardt has characterized it. (Eckhardt and the Associated Press, which had this to say in its 1971 obit:“Mr. Torn was known for having started the custom of eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day.”)
Well, note the weasel words: "Mr Torn was known for having started" is not the same as "Mr. Torn started..."
A quick glance through the database of Newspapers.com turns up several examples predating Torn's legume jihad by years, decades even:
To wit, an item from a January 1904 issue of a Salt Lake City paper reveling in the name The Broad Ax:
So, here we have a Southern woman touting blackeyed peas as bringers of good luck if eaten on New Year's Day four decades before Torn's spiel. The odds against Torn simply inventing such a tradition that coincided exactly with this account are infinitesimally small, but hey, million typewriters, Shakespeare, and whatnot. Maybe it was just a coincidence.
But this is not the only account.
Here's an H.G. Hill's Grocery ad from the Chattanooga News on the first day of 1926:
Same grocer, same paper, almost three years later:
Of note, that same paper contains two pages of recipes "appropriate for the first day of January."
Among them:
Note: no blackeyes. The next page features about a half-dozen cake recipes; the ad alone touts the peas.
As the Twenties roared on, the peas made their Gotham City debut, courtesy of young African American women, holding up the culinary end of the Harlem Renaissance. Clippings from the New York Age, January 5, 1929:
(I think they might be insinuating that there was alcohol on the premises, Prohibition be damned.)
In 1930, the Birmingham outlet of the newfangled Piggly Wiggly chain of supermarkets was peddling them, along with hog jowls, for their lucky properties and as "a time-honored tradition of the 'Old South'."
On New Year's Eve 1930, the Charlotte Observer offers up the earliest origin story I was able to turn up:
Which is sort of frustrating because it offers no explanation as to why this became an ironclad rule, apparently across wide swaths of the Dixie of yore. It's also intriguing to me that these newspapers felt duty-bound to spell out to their own readers about this ancient tradition. Wouldn't the people of Charlotte and Birmingham know that already? Wouldn't that be like telling a Boston Irishman about the time-honored tradition of getting sozzled on St. Patrick's Day?
Maybe, maybe not. Neither Charlotte nor Birmingham are typical Southern cities. Both are in the upland South, and Birmingham was a steel town with lots of migrants from all over the country and immigrants from abroad. Piedmont North Carolina was not plantation country, and so lacked the Big House traditions of the Tidewater to the east.
That could explain why the readers of those papers needed to be told about these traditions, or maybe not. Maybe Torn had a fore-runner in the invented tradition game. What can be said with certainty is that the tradition's origins predate his wildly successful campaign.
On New Year's Day 1932, a writer for the Knoxville News-Sentinel was as puzzled as I am right now:
In that darkest depth of the Depression, the writer noted that "elusive 'good luck' was being sought more ardently than ever."
And as for Herbert Rhea's bewilderment over what started it, I am beginning to believe that it might have been the owner of his company, the Nashville grocery / real estate mogul H.G. Hill.
Note that the first account we have of black eyed peas and good luck dates back to 1904 and is sourced to Salt Lake City woman who came there from Tennessee. HG Hill's grocery empire started up in Nashville in 1895 and by 1906 it had cornered the Nashville market with 12 locations. By 1926, it had spread across Tennessee and the Mid-South, first to Knoxville, Chattanooga, Birmingham, and Huntsville, and then to Montgomery and even as far west as New Orleans: 500 stores in all, at its peak, at least some of them running ads touting the lucky properties of blackeyed peas and hog jowl on New Year's Day. (Hill's empire contracted greatly, but was still very much a player in the Nashville of my youth, and after a hiatus from the market of a decade or so, once more exists.)
So that's my theory -- Rip Torn's dad picked up where H.G. Hill left off. As to where Mr. Hill got the story, further research is required. Some have said that the tradition may have started in Africa and come to America on slave ships, and some credence is given to that theory by the fact that this tradition also exists in the former British and Dutch South American slave colonies of Guyana and Suriname, but again, that's another story for another post.
Note: Andy Hall came to similar conclusions on my Facebook page a little after this notion was borne in my head. I started research on this story in Nashville this morning, then piled in my Accord with Harriet and John Henry and drove through six or seven hours of more or less continuous downpour to Jackson, Mississippi, where I type this now, at midnight.
I feel funny explaining this, but I don't want the estimable scholar Mr. Hall to think I am jacking his idea without crediting him, nor, in my vanity, do I want him to think that I did not come to this conclusion or launch this foray into the newspaper archives without his prodding. It was a case of great minds thinking alike, though I say so myself.
There's an Arby's casino alongside the freeway West of Jackson--can't recall whether it's in Mississippi or Louisiana--but I've always wanted to stop and check out whether it was as seamy and pathetic as it appeared. Maybe you could do a special out-of-state chapter of your food reporting?