The founder of a popular South Carolina barbecue restaurant was a white supremacist. Now that his children have taken over, is it O.K. to eat there?
Kathleen Purvis, a food editor, wrote, “When I learned about Bessinger’s history, I stopped buying his products.”Illustration by David Sandlin
In February of 2015, Kathleen Purvis, the food editor of the Charlotte Observer, drove to Birmingham, Alabama, to attend Food Media South, an annual symposium. The keynote session, “Hey, You, Pitch Me Something,” was meant to be a friendly wind-down to a weekend of talks. Participants were invited to get up in front of the editor of the Web magazine the Bitter Southerner and, well, pitch him something.
There were several hundred people in the room. Purvis knew that in the name of politeness she should probably stay quiet, but she couldn’t resist the opportunity to “toss a good word grenade,” she recalled later, into a clubby crowd that she felt tended to overlook, along with chiffon cakes and canning, some of the most complicated questions about Southern cuisine. She raised her hand, and the editor nodded her way.
“Men are the new carpetbaggers of Southern food writing,” she said.
He replied, “Sold.”
The resulting essay argues that “the Southern food-writing world has been unduly influenced, usurped, yes, even invaded, by a barbecue-entranced, bourbon-preoccupied and pork belly-obsessed horde of mostly testosterone-fueled scribes,” who dwell on hackneyed tales of Southern eccentricity without developing “the clear-eyed vision” to see them in a contemporary light. The piece generated controversy, though not as much as Purvis’s investigation into the racial dimensions of the practice of putting sugar in corn bread. “Honest to God, I really hate that hokey-jokey Hey-us-Southerners-aren’t-we-cute stuff,” she told me. “I’ve always said that my beat is food and the meaning of life.”
Gamely, the organizers invited her to the conference the next year as a speaker. “I was getting ready to get up and talk,” Purvis said. “I was sitting there very quietly in a corner, and a woman came up to me and said, ‘So, is it O.K. to go back to the Piggie Park?’ ”
The woman was referring to Maurice’s Piggie Park, a small chain of barbecue restaurants, established in West Columbia, South Carolina, in 1953. The original restaurant occupies a barnlike building on a busy intersection and is presided over by a regionally famous electric marquee that features the boast “world’s best bar-b-q,” along with a grinning piglet named Little Joe. The Piggie Park is important in the history of barbecue, which is more or less the history of America. One reason is that its founder, Maurice Bessinger, popularized the yellow, mustard-based sauce that typifies the barbecue of South Carolina’s Midlands area. Another is that Bessinger was a white supremacist who, in 1968, went to the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful fight against desegregation, and, in 1974, ran a losing gubernatorial campaign, wearing a white suit and riding a white horse.
In 2000, when the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina statehouse dome, Bessinger raised Confederate flags over all his restaurants. (By then, there were nine.) A king-sheet-size version went up over the West Columbia location, where he had long distributed tracts alleging, for example, that “African slaves blessed the Lord for allowing them to be enslaved and sent to America.” He was a figure whose hate spawned contempt, leading a writer from the Charleston City Paper to fantasize about how “Satan and his minions would slather his body in mustard-based BBQ sauce before they dined.”
In 2007, Bessinger, who suffered from Alzheimer’s at the end of his life, handed the business over to his two sons, Paul and Lloyd, and a daughter, Debbie. In the months before his death, in 2014, they took down the flags and got rid of the slavery pamphlets. “Dad liked politics,” Lloyd, who serves as the public face of the operation, told a reporter. “That’s not something we’re interested in doing. We want to serve great barbecue.”
By the time the news reached Kathleen Purvis, she hadn’t eaten Bessinger’s barbecue in nearly three decades. She grew up in Wilson, North Carolina, where her father was an R.C. Cola salesman and barbecue sauce is made with vinegar. Early in her career, she’d become a fan of the Bessinger family’s line of packaged foods—“handy for a quick dinner when I was working nights”—but, she wrote, in an article in the Observer in December, “When I learned about Bessinger’s history, I stopped buying his products. I followed a simple policy on the Piggie Park: I didn’t go there. Ever.” During the flag scandal, thousands of South Carolinians made the same call, going cold turkey. “I first made Maurice’s acquaintance when I was a child,” the barbecue expert William McKinney wrote, on the Web site of the Southern Foodways Alliance. “His barbecue was sold in the freezer aisle of the grocery store. It would bubble up in our family’s oven, its orange sauce as vivid as a river of lava. My mother would pack his barbecue in my lunch bag routinely, and I ate those sandwiches all the way through high school, wrapped up in aluminum foil and still a touch warm once lunch time came around.” It was as though Jif peanut butter or Katz’s Deli had become irredeemably tainted.
“Please hurry—I don’t know how long my cat can keep him subdued.”
The Piggie Park had bad vibes, but it retained a pull on the community. For barbecue obsessives, it held a special fascination as one of the few restaurants in the country to still cook entirely over hickory wood, using no electricity or gas. One prominent Columbia resident, a black man, told me that he was addicted to Bessinger’s sauce, but that he would never admit it in public. The regime shift, then, represented a touchy moment. Some people wanted to go only if things had changed (but, if they were going to go, they wanted to get there before things had changed too much). For others, no amount of change was ever going to mitigate the legacy of a man who had caused so much hurt. Even asking if it was O.K. to return was a form of blindness to that pain. “They could change the last name, redo the building, then dig the old man up . . . it still wouldn’t matter to those who continue to carry the ‘chip on the shoulder’ mentality,” a man named James Last, of Wilmington, North Carolina, wrote in response to Purvis’s article, prompting Durward White, of Katy, Texas, to reply, “Are you saying no matter how vile and disrespectful his actions were we should move on? People still can’t move on from Tom Brady and deflate gate and that was 3 years ago.”
Barbecue might be America’s most political food. The first significant reference to it that the barbecue scholar Robert F. Moss has been able to find is in “The Barbacue Feast: or, the three pigs of Peckham, broiled under an apple-tree,” an account of a 1706 banquet in Jamaica. The revellers were English colonists, but the pigs were “nicely cook’d after the West Indian manner”: whole, over coals, on long wooden spits on which they turned as a cook basted them in a spicy sauce (green Virginia pepper and Madeira wine), using a foxtail tied to a stick. Native Americans on the East Coast of North America used similar cooking techniques. But the main thing about barbecues is that they were social affairs, a day’s entertainment for the community. Between 1769 and 1774, George Washington attended at least six of them, he wrote in his diary, including “a Barbicue of my own giving at Accotinck.”
A whole hog can feed as many as a hundred people. Barbecues, often held on the Fourth of July, became overtly political in the nineteenth century. As Moss writes in “Barbecue: The History of an American Institution,” they were “the quintessential form of democratic public celebration, bringing together citizens from all stations to express and reaffirm their shared civic values.” They adhered to a ritualized format: parade, prayer, reading of the Declaration of Independence, oration, and dinner in a shady grove near a drinking spring, after which dignitaries gave a series of “regular” toasts (thirteen of them, on patriotic subjects), followed by “voluntary” toasts from the masses (thirty or forty, on issues ranging from local elections to the free navigation of the Mississippi, or whatever else happened to be the day’s concerns). Often, the festivities turned rowdy. If an antebellum politician had wanted to rile folks up about building a wall, he would have done it at a barbecue.
Before the Civil War, enslaved men often cooked these civic meals. They prepared their own feasts, too, either sanctioned by their owners or organized on the quiet. Much of the planning for the rebellions organized by Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner took place at barbecues. After emancipation, black men continued to be some of the country’s leading pit masters, catering enormous spreads that featured everything from barbecued hogs, shoats, chickens, and lambs to stuffed potatoes, stewed corn, cheese relish, puddings, coffee, and cigars. In 1909, the Times noted the death of a man born around 1865, on a plantation in Edgefield County, South Carolina. “Pickens Wells, one of the most famous barbecue cooks in the South, dropped dead today while preparing a barbecue,” the item read. “Pickens prepared the famous barbecue at which President Taft was the guest of honor last Winter. White men here are raising a fund to erect a monument to the negro as a tribute to his fidelity and character.”
Barbecue restaurants, like lunch counters, played an outsized role in the desegregation battles of the nineteen-sixties. In Birmingham, in 1964, Ollie McClung, of Ollie’s Barbecue, challenged the legality of the Civil Rights Act, arguing that the restaurant’s practice of denying sit-down service to black customers was none of the federal government’s business, since Ollie’s, a mom-and-pop operation, wasn’t involved in interstate commerce. Pointing out that forty-six per cent of Ollie’s’ meat came from out of state, the Supreme Court upheld the act’s constitutionality in a 9-0 ruling. It included a concurring opinion from Justice Hugo Black, an Alabamian who reportedly voted over the objection of his wife, a regular diner at Ollie’s.
In 1964, Maurice Bessinger was the president of the National Association for the Preservation of White People. On August 12th of that year, Anne Newman and a friend drove to the West Columbia Piggie Park. They stopped outside the lot for curbside service. A waitress emerged and, seeing that they were black, returned to the building without speaking to them. Then a man with a pad approached the car but refused to take their order, even though white customers were being served. In Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc., the district court asserted that “the fact that Piggie Park at all six of its eating places denies full and equal service to Negroes because of their race is uncontested and completely established by evidence,” but it concluded that the restaurants, because they were principally drive-ins, weren’t subject to the public-accommodation provision of the Civil Rights Act. When a higher court reversed the ruling, Bessinger appealed to the Supreme Court, claiming that being forced to serve black people violated his religious principles. He lost, in a unanimous decision. (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently cited the case in her Hobby Lobby dissent.) In “Defending My Heritage,” Bessinger’s 2001 autobiography, he claims that he and his family always treated black people well, citing his father’s practice, at a restaurant he owned, of giving a black employee discarded food and old grease. (Then he says that they fired her for stealing half a ham.) He writes, “I have concluded that the civil rights movement is a Satanic attempt to make it easier for a global elite, a group of extremely wealthy men with no Constitutional or national or cultural loyalties, working at an international level to eventually seize power in this country.”
Bessinger launched his run for governor from his cattle range, which he called Tara, after the O’Hara plantation in “Gone with the Wind.” One of his opponents remembered the primary race as “something between a comic opera and depressing satire.” Out of seven candidates, including a competing barbecue baron, Bessinger came in fifth, garnering 2.5 per cent of the vote. Business suffered, whether from his notoriety or his distraction. He decided to focus on rebuilding his restaurant empire, betting that people—white people, at least—would eventually forget about his period of activism. Many of them did. The corollary to white innocence is white passivity, the feeling that what one’s ancestors did was so messed up that it couldn’t possibly make a difference where one eats a barbecue sandwich.
According to his birth certificate, Maurice Bessinger was born on July 14, 1930, on a farm near Cope, South Carolina. It occupied land that had been willed to his mother, Genora, by her grandfather, a veteran of the Civil War. Maurice thought that his real birth date was probably closer to July 4th, as his father, Joseph, went to the county courthouse, where births were recorded, only a couple of times a month. Maurice was the eighth of eleven children. In his autobiography, he says that he helped pick cotton from the age of four, using a “small, ten-pound little cloth sugar bag,” and graduating, at six, to “a full, 100-pound bag like the grown-ups used.” The family ate clabber, corn bread, grits, and vegetables that they grew in their garden. Meat was scarce; eggs, occasional. Maurice’s grandmother told him that, anticipating the arrival of Sherman’s troops, she and her neighbors had buried smoked pork shoulders, hams, bacon, and sausage, covering them with desiccated leaves to disguise fresh digging.
When Maurice was nine, his father gave up farming, selling the family’s cow to buy a roadside café from a widow in Holly Hill, about halfway between Columbia and Charleston. Maurice started to work that year at the Holly Hill Café, swatting flies and bussing tables. By the time he was twelve, he was living in a small room in the back of the café, getting up at 5 a.m. to run the breakfast shift, spending a few hours at school, and then returning to the restaurant to work. Tired and skinny, he failed fifth and sixth grades. Two Saturday nights in a row, the local policeman shot a black man dead. Maurice wrote, in 2001, of one incident, “The perpetrator ran, and Mr. Workman dropped him with one shot at about 150 paces!”
By 1946, Joseph had sold the Holly Hill Café and opened Joe’s Grill, where he perfected the secret recipe—its mustard kick supposedly inspired by his German roots—for which the family was coming to be known. In 1949, in Maurice’s senior year of high school, Joseph died of a heart attack. Despite Maurice’s insistence that his father had told him that the business would be his, the restaurant went to one of his brothers, who was seven years older and had come back from the war with three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart. Furious, Maurice joined the Army and shipped out to Korea.
In the aftermath of the fight over Joe’s Grill, many of the eleven siblings struck out across the state to set up their own enterprises. The Bessinger name now dominates South Carolina barbecue, presiding over a complex diaspora of interrelated but not always amicable interests. “I grew up being told that yellow sauce was my heritage,” the journalist Jack Hitt, who was raised in Charleston, wrote in the Times Magazine in 2001. “But it’s clear that without the siblings’ anxieties and their nomadic habits, Joe Sr.’s recipe would have died out after Joe’s Grill closed. South Carolina would have remained just another outpost in the national camp of red barbecue sauce.”
By 2000, Maurice was easily the most successful of his generation of Bessingers. In addition to the nine restaurants around Lexington County, he had the frozen dinners, a mail-order business, and a bottling plant that distributed his Southern Gold sauce (with a Confederate flag on the label) to three thousand grocery stores along the East Coast, making him the largest barbecue wholesaler in the country. People called the Piggie Park “the best all-in-one barbecue restaurant in America.” Pat Buchanan, running for President on the Reform Party ticket, held fund-raisers at the main restaurant, whose pits burned non-stop. When an economic boycott of South Carolina, led by the state’s N.A.A.C.P. chapter, resulted in the removal of the Confederate flag from the statehouse dome, Maurice acted quickly. “I surrounded the city of Columbia with Confederate flags,” he later said. “I didn’t even tell my wife. I had it all planned.”
Acting on a tip, John Monk, of the State newspaper, went to the Piggie Park and discovered Bessinger’s stock of revisionist literature. The N.A.A.C.P. decided to challenge him next. “We didn’t have any idea that we would change his mind,” Lonnie Randolph, Jr., the chapter’s longtime president, told me. “The goal was to make South Carolina, if there’s such a thing, whole again—to let folks know that this isn’t the way life should be.”
Under pressure from the association, Sam’s Club, Walmart, Winn-Dixie, Food Lion, Harris Teeter, bi-lo, Kroger, and Publix stopped carrying Southern Gold. Piggly Wiggly, the lone holdout, said that it would continue to stock the sauce, owing to customer demand. Bessinger was defiant. He likened his treatment to that of Jewish merchants during Kristallnacht, and told a newspaper, “Winn-Dixie is going to have to take that name off and call it Winn-Yankee.” Eventually, Piggly Wiggly dropped his products, too. Only months earlier, John McCain’s Presidential campaign had been ruined by a series of robocalls that asked voters, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain . . . if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” Still, the views that a person could get away with espousing, at least in public, had changed since the nineteen-sixties. Joe McCulloch, a Columbia attorney, recalled, “After that, Maurice became radioactive, as did his barbecue.”
In 2000, when the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina statehouse dome, Maurice Bessinger raised Confederate flags over all nine of his restaurants. A king-sheet-size version went up over the original location, where he also distributed tracts alleging that “African slaves blessed the Lord for allowing them to be enslaved and sent to America.”Photograph by Rich Glickstein / The State
Bessinger claimed that his business shrank by ninety-eight per cent, amounting to a twenty-million-dollar loss. Eventually, he closed several restaurants and shut down the bottling plant. Nonetheless, he held his ground, portraying himself as a champion of free speech and state sovereignty, and vowing, like proud Southerners after Sherman’s march, to “root hog or die.”
In the wake of the controversy, the Bessingers were able to cultivate an alternative clientele. If some diners continued to patronize the restaurants in spite of Maurice’s views (“Elton John’s gay, but I still listen to his music,” one customer told the Baltimore Sun in 2002), others showed up explicitly to support his cause (“The man’s got the guts to stand up for his beliefs,” another said). Glen McConnell, then a state senator, began stocking Bessinger’s sauce at CSA Galleries, a Confederate-memorabilia store that he ran with his brother. (I Googled McConnell, and was shocked to learn that he is now the president of the College of Charleston.)
Even today, a rump of supporters regard Bessinger as the heroic victim of a liberal conspiracy. In 2014, a reader wrote to a local paper that “after Bessinger publicly supported keeping the Confederate Battle Flag on the S.C. Statehouse, his business was sabotaged by anti-Southern activists who would go into grocery stores and surreptitiously open a bottle of Maurice’s barbecue sauce and lay it on the top shelf, ruining a section of merchandise and creating a mess for the store to clean up.”
In January, I called Lloyd Bessinger, Maurice’s elder son. Our conversation began smoothly, but, after a few minutes, he asked me if there would be any political angle to the article I wanted to write, and, when I said yes, things got uncomfortable. He sounded anguished as he said that, while he was no racist, he did not want to dishonor his father, whom he had known as a good and loving man. When we hung up, I was left uncertain whether the changes that Lloyd and his siblings had made at the Piggie Park were business decisions or evidence of a genuine transformation. Even if he had taken down the flags, Lloyd had never really explained why he made the move: out of principle, or pragmatism, or even, as a local news channel had reported, because of the rising cost of dry cleaning. (“I think we should all be united by one country and one flag, the American Flag,” he said later.) I wrote to him, asking if I could come to see him in Columbia. “It was nice talking to you today,” he replied, declining. “Hopefully time will heal the past.”
One of the reasons I’d become interested in the Bessinger story is that it struck me as a small, imperfect test case for how to act in our political moment. Of the many moral issues that have beset Americans since November, one of the most nagging is that of the once beloved relative who appears at the Thanksgiving table spouting contemptible ideas. When something or someone you love troubles your conscience—when your everyday relationships are political acts—do you try to be a moderating force, or are you obligated to make a break entirely?
I decided to visit some less fraught outposts of the Bessinger barbecue empire, hoping to get a sense of what makes yellow-sauce barbecue—a seemingly minor comfort—something that, like Amazon or Uber, even some people who consider themselves hugely opposed to the ethics of its purveyors find difficult to renounce. I grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, eating barbecue at Flip’s Barbecue House. It occupied a cinder-block building with an orange sheet-metal roof, and its hulking stuffed bear, reportedly shot by Flip himself, was once named one of the “seven wonders of the Cape Fear region.” Because barbecue is an intensely regional food, it’s also an intensely emotional one, the sort of thing you wake up in the middle of the night fiending for when, say, you’re pregnant and living three thousand miles from home. I got that. Still, I’d always got over it, even when Flip’s closed, in 2013. (If Eastern North Carolina-style barbecue is your thing, and you can’t have it, dump a pork shoulder and all the vinegar you’ve got into a Dutch oven and let it cook, low, on the stovetop for as long as you can stand to.)
My first stop was Bessinger’s Barbecue, which two of Maurice’s brothers opened in 1960. I ordered a large barbecue plate. I also got a banana pudding. The restaurant’s Web site features testimonials from customers, including Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Beazley, of Evans, Georgia (“We flew in our private plane to shop for rugs. You were near and looked interesting. best bbq ever!”) and the television personality Andrew Zimmern (“The best spicy sauce I’ve ever tasted!”). I found a seat, tore a paper towel from a roll that sat on the table, and started eating. The barbecue was satisfying, full of browned bits and ends, but ever so slightly dry. I kept daubing on more sauce—its bright color suggested a starring role in a stain-removal infomercial—which may have been exactly the point.
Lonnie Randolph, the N.A.A.C.P. chapter president who led a boycott of the Piggie Park, saw Maurice Bessinger as part of an ideological lineage that stretched back to the Civil War. “He represented a hate that was so deeply-rooted,” Randolph said. “I knew it was dangerous.”Photograph by Jacob Krejci
After the meal, I asked at the counter if any Bessingers were around. Michael Bessinger, a third-generation barbecue man, appeared, with an apron tied around his waist, and led me to an upstairs office. Near the cash register, amid pictures commemorating visits from Elizabeth Dole and Mitt Romney, I’d seen a framed newspaper article in which a relative had spoken frankly of the Bessinger schism (“Everybody wanted to be a chief and not Indians”). Michael told me that his branch of the family wasn’t close to Maurice’s—they never got together for the holidays, for example—but he seemed to regard his uncle with a sort of detached amusement. “Maurice always liked the spotlight, positive or negative,” he said. He said that he, too, was trying to move forward without disrespecting the past. He was thinking about introducing alcohol and had recently added brisket to the menu—a concession to modern customers’ expectations of barbecue, however regionally dubious.
Across town at Melvin’s Barbecue, I ordered another barbecue plate, this time with a side of butter beans. It arrived on a stylish brushed-metal tray, instead of a plastic plate. A list of the Ten Commandments printed on the side of my cup momentarily counteracted the progressive atmosphere, but then I walked over to the condiments bar, and, scanning vats of pickled peppers, noticed a bullet-shaped bottle with a green nozzle. Sriracha! I wondered if Melvin David Bessinger, who in 2004 inherited the business from his father, Melvin, might be the family’s great unabashed modernizer, the King Abdullah of yellow-sauce barbecue.
Melvin, who died in 2012, was the fifth child of the eleven Bessinger siblings—the older brother who, after their father’s sudden death, Maurice wrote, “was conspiring against me to move me out of the business and take it for himself.” (Melvin was equally confident of his status as rightful heir, claiming that, when he was ten years old, his father had entrusted him with the secret recipe, promising, “Son, this sauce is gonna make you a million dollars some day.”) In 2000, when the N.A.A.C.P. initiated the boycott, Melvin swept in, picking up much of Maurice’s forfeited business. Melvin’s sauce was called Golden Secret, instead of Southern Gold. To dispel the suspicion that the business might be a front for Maurice’s—same sauce, Confederate-flag-less bottles—Melvin David issued a press release: “Melvin and his brother do not share political or social views. Despite their being brothers, they do not speak to each other. Melvin’s views on the Confederate flag, slavery and race relations are not those of his brother.” Maurice angrily told reporters, “I taught Melvin everything he knows about barbecue sauce—but I didn’t teach him everything I know.”
Melvin David was out of town the day I visited the restaurant, but I reached him on the phone later. “When you come from a large family, not everybody’s going to agree,” he told me. “Some people can’t even get along with a brother and sister—how about if you have eleven and you all went into the same business?” Whatever the extent of the brothers’ animosity, he said, Melvin and Maurice had reconciled before Melvin died. “I’m ashamed to use my last name,” Melvin David had said, in a 2001 interview, a statement he now regretted. “I was being accused of a lot of things, a lot of negative things were coming my way, and it just kind of got to me,” he told me. “No doubt this was a great name that we were given when we were born.”
Lexington County, which encompasses all but one of the dozen Piggie Park restaurants now in operation, remains a bedrock of hard-right politics. It is the home of Donnie Myers, the prosecutor known during his decades-long tenure as Dr. Death, for his zealousness in pursuing capital punishment; and Joe Wilson, the congressman who heckled President Obama during a speech to a joint session of Congress, shouting, “You lie!” In the 2016 Presidential election, 65.6 per cent of the county’s residents voted for Donald Trump.
Lake E. High, Jr., the president of the South Carolina Barbecue Association, agreed to meet me at the original Piggie Park, in Columbia, one day in January. That morning, while renting a car in Charleston, I struck up a conversation with a late-middle-aged white man behind the counter. When I told him I was writing about Maurice’s Piggie Park, he reminisced, “You’d get a few cocktails in you, drive up, get that big-ass fried tempura onion ring, and yum, yum, yum.” He continued, “All that stuff you see on CNN, the liberal side—that division, that prejudice, that’s not who we are.”
I took the keys and headed up to Columbia. When I reached the Piggie Park, I pulled the car in under the same formerly futuristic drive-in canopy where, fifty-three years earlier, Anne Newman had been refused service. I walked into the restaurant, where High—a big man in a sweater vest, with a mottled complexion and an omniscient smirk—was sitting at a round table. He explained that he’d got into barbecue as a challenge. “Somebody said, ‘We got the best damn barbecue in the nation, and the worst judges,’ and I said, ‘Well, I tell you what, I think we could fix that,’ and we started the South Carolina Barbecue Association in 2004.” When Anthony Bourdain visited South Carolina for an episode of “No Reservations,” he asked High to show him around. (As for his name, which he shares with his father, when his great-grandmothers were squabbling over what to call the coming child, High’s grandfather banged a fist on the table, pointed to a map that was hanging on the wall, and said, “What’s behind me?” “Lake Erie,” one of the great-grandmothers answered. “Well, that’s his name.”)
In High’s estimation, the Piggie Park was “hundred-mile barbecue”—worth driving a hundred miles for. “It’s the iconic South Carolina sauce is what it boils down to,” he said, surveying the restaurant, with its lazy Susans, ceiling fans, and brown linoleum floor. Country music was playing on the radio; a muted television showed Fox News. The crowd was white, mostly older. In the guest book, I found comments that read, “Where’s the flag??!” and “Thanks for Taking It Down! God Bless!!” Near the entrance, a portrait of Maurice presided over a shrine of sauces. I ordered some barbecue. The chop was delicate, and the sauce was nearly fluorescent. “It tastes like mustard that’s got some mouthfeel to it,” High continued. “I’d say it’s somewhere in the middle of the light-to-sharp spectrum.”
High spoke favorably of the Piggie Park’s new management—“Paul and Lloyd, and he’s got a daughter whose name I forget, cute girl. They’re real dedicated.” He had also thought highly of Maurice, who, he said, was always friendly and insisted on top-of-the-line ingredients. “He and Strom Thurmond were talking about all-natural thirty years ago,” he said, which seemed a bit like remembering Oswald Mosley for his advocacy of brown bread. I asked whether he thought Maurice’s political legacy posed a problem. “It wasn’t nearly as bitter as modern day makes it seem,” he said. He went on to talk about the trouble with racially interbred societies, the genetic basis of criminality, and his belief that the South should secede. After a disquisition that touched on everything from slavery (“It’s been around since Day One, and they talk about it in the Bible”) to Trump (“I happened to see him speaking to a crowd before he declared, and I came into the kitchen and I said, ‘Lovebug, that man’s gonna be President’ ”), he returned to the Piggie Park. “This is the most taken-for-granted barbecue house in America,” he said.
Lonnie Randolph, the N.A.A.C.P. state president who had led the boycott of Piggie Park, told me that Maurice Bessinger was part of an ideological and economic lineage that stretched back to before the Civil War. “He represented a hate that was so deeply rooted,” Randolph said. “I knew it was dangerous.” He didn’t think that it was possible to let the past be the past. “ ‘It doesn’t affect me’—white people can say that, because it didn’t affect them. But, when I think of the damage that has been done, it cannot be undone,” he said. Things might be different, he conceded, if the new generation of Bessingers were taking some sort of active steps toward reparation. “But I’m not familiar with them supporting any issues that support the lives of the people he abused for so many years.”
Representative Joe Neal, a longtime member of the state legislature and the chairman of the South Carolina Legislative Black Caucus during the flag battles of the early aughts, placed a similar emphasis on the younger Bessingers’ actions, or lack thereof, when I got him on the phone in January. (Neal died the next month.) “I don’t think they have to apologize,” he said. “I think what people are waiting for is to find out who they are.”
After talking to Randolph and Neal, I couldn’t stop thinking about Nat Fuller’s Feast. Nat Fuller, born in 1812, was a slave who became a celebrated restaurateur, opening the Bachelor’s Retreat, a Charleston catering hall famed for its pastries, game, and turtle soup. In April of 1865, two months after Charleston surrendered to Union forces, Fuller orchestrated a grand meal—historians have remembered it as a “reconciliation banquet”—to which he invited dozens of the city’s prominent citizens. A society doyenne wrote in her diary of the “miscegenat dinner, at which blacks and whites sat on an equality and gave toasts and sang songs for Lincoln and Freedom.”
The evening’s menu has been lost to time, but, in 2015, a group of chefs and scholars tried to re-create the meal, using dishes that Fuller had served at other events. On a drizzly April night, forty Charlestonians gathered for the feast. “This is the beginning for all of us,” B. J. Dennis, a black chef, said, making a toast. Fifteen days earlier, Walter Scott, an unarmed black man with a broken brake light, had been shot in the back by a white North Charleston police officer. Two months later, the white supremacist Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and killed nine people, including Clementa C. Pinckney, Mother Emanuel’s pastor. Pinckney was at the dinner that night, trying to acknowledge and refute history over watermelon brandy, chowchow, shrimp pie, chapon chasseur, and truffled squab served with silver ewers of walnut ketchup.
Before I left West Columbia, I decided to try Lloyd Bessinger one last time. In the wood-panelled office at the main Piggie Park, a secretary invited me to have a seat. Lloyd walked out: trim, mostly bald, wearing navy chinos and a red Piggie Park polo.
Lloyd was as unassuming as his father had been outlandish. His ambition, it seemed, was to be left alone. When I asked about the 2000 boycott, he said, “I try not to think about it that much anymore.”
“Do you support white supremacy?” I asked.
“No! Of course not,” Lloyd said. “White supremacy is totally wrong—and my father was not like that. He was a Southerner and a South Carolinian. He enjoyed reading about the history and the heritage of America.” Lloyd had recently been to a friend’s funeral at a black church, and “two hundred people were there, and”—he chuckled—“ninety per cent of them were black, and that was fine.”
I told Lloyd what Lonnie Randolph and Joe Neal had said, that people needed a tangible sign that the Bessinger family understood the pain they had caused, and that until they gave one it would persist.
“Mmmkay,” he said. “Well, I don’t know how I can do that. I’m not objecting to doing that. I just need to know what that is.”
“Excuse me, sir—care to take a moment to check out my new clipboard? Ma’am? I just got a new clipboard. New clipboard, anyone? Anyone?”MAY 3, 2010
That Lloyd could afford not to have much of an opinion—that he simply didn’t have to think about race while making choices big and small—was a privilege he had never considered. He seemed caught between the worlds of his parents and his children, the values with which he had grown up and those he now perceived to be ascendant. I recalled what Kathleen Purvis had said to me about Lloyd: “I felt very sympathetic to him. My family’s from Georgia—I have family members who had beliefs, used language that was awful. My grandmother, the last thing she remembered about me when she was disappearing into dementia was ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the girl that loves black people so much.’ That was a very painful thing, and to ask me to denounce my grandmother for that—you can’t. So being Southern always involves that complicated dance.”
“I can’t change anything,” Lloyd said, before I left. “All I can do is speak for myself today. I don’t look at race. I look at people. We’re all equal, O.K.?”
In 2009, the Daras family, of Fort Washington, Maryland, moved to Orangeburg, South Carolina. Tommy Daras had just retired from running gas stations. “I’d come down here fishing, and I liked it,” he said recently. “I always thought the people were nice, and Florida was too hot.”
For a while, he and his wife, Deborah, enjoyed the weather and their newfound freedom. Then, in 2015, they spotted a cute brick bungalow on John C. Calhoun Drive, an out-of-business Piggie Park. “We were at home, bored, and decided to clean it up, fix it up, and make some money on it,” Daras said. They added teal-and-white awnings and named the place Edisto River Creamery & Kitchen. Daras recalled, “An ice cream shop near a park, how hard could that be?” They hosted such events as Bible studies and a Pokémon Go tournament. Their outdoor sign welcomed hunters and advertised a bacon palmetto burger. Daras said, “I did notice that there were no black customers”—the population of Orangeburg is eighty per cent African-American—“and I was trying to figure that out. Man, why am I not getting their business?”
The Darases bought the property from Maurice Bessinger’s children, knowing that a Confederate flag flew on a small bit of land in a corner of the lot. From what Daras understood, the parcel, through some quirk of local real-estate history, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, having been donated to them by Maurice Bessinger in 2005. Daras wasn’t a fan of the flag, but it didn’t really bother him. It became impossible to ignore, however, when, shortly after the massacre at Mother Emanuel, members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans showed up, took down the flag, and replaced it with a new one that was three times as big. “Before, I’d just sucked it up, but then it was, like, ‘Man, I’ve got to try to do something here,’ ” Daras said, explaining that he could no longer abide “this huge flag sticking up in the air telling everyone to screw themselves.”
Daras reëxamined his deed. With the help of a lawyer, Justin Bamberg, he is filing a lawsuit arguing that the corner parcel belongs to him. (The Sons of Confederate Veterans maintain their ownership.) Bamberg, who is thirty, grew up near Orangeburg and now serves as a Democratic member of the South Carolina House of Representatives. I called him to discuss the details of the lawsuit, but, as our conversation went on, he started talking about what the Piggie Park had meant to him as a young African-American man. “It was one of those places I remember as a kid, always riding by there, feeling like in some people’s eyes I was less a person. I did not go into Maurice’s until I was in college,” he said, recalling one afternoon when he had felt compelled to just walk into the restaurant, leaving without ordering anything. “It was a personal thing—for so long, this place always had control over some part of how I felt. For me, it was like, ‘It’s gonna end today.’ ” It will be up to a court to conclude the story of Maurice Bessinger’s flags, the last of which is, for the moment, still flying, his final provocation. ♦
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