Betty Bivins Edwards: Food, Ritual, and the Southern Experience

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Joiner, Dorothy

In Yearly Reunion at Grandmother's House (1994), thirteen blank-faced male "apostles" sit around a circular table flattened against the plane. Dominating the upper tangent, Grandmother embraces the nearest grandson with her left arm, while her right pours "ahse " tea, which falls in a womb-like stream. Chalice-shaped glasses establish the sacred character of the meal while a card table set up in a distant room becomes the proper place for the women, banished from the matriarchal feast.

Just as Grandmother dominates her offspring, gathered like Arthurian knights at the round table, so does the waitress overshadow the male clients in Monthly Meeting at the Catfish House (1992). Balancing in her right hand an oversized, elliptical tray of fried fish, glasses of iced tea with prominent lemon slices, and an orange "plastic" basket of hush puppies, the woman flashes a good-humored Southern smile. Hair of light brown corduroy, saucy eyes a lively green, earrings aqua crystals, and her dress a well-filled garment of large red and white checkerboard squares, the waitress charms her customers just as the eighteenthcentury Parisian hostess entertained literati in her salon. Throughout the composition, Christian symbols call to mind the Fundamentalism which permeates Southern life. Seed pearls, used by the artist for salt, refer to Jesus's injunction that his followers be "the salt of the earth" as well as to His comparison of the heavenly kingdom to the "pearl of great price." The catfish, moreover, reflect Jesus's biblical association with fish, fishing, and fishermen. And the crossed pane in the plastic window behind the upbeat waitress is, of course, the central symbol of the Christian religion.

Assuming his role as head of the household, the father of Sunday Dinner (1990) turns eyes heavenward as if pausing for the blessing before carving into a brown flannel turkey. His prematurely gray hair a sign of righteous distinction, the man sits higher in the composition than his long-suffering wife, whose yellow cotton dress decorated with nondescript flowers causes her to blend into the tan trapunto floor boards, a kind of "floor flower," as it were. Further militating against glamor, the nylon stocking skin of the woman's chin is caught up in a wart. The child in the lower left, her hair a darker, more rebellious red than her mother's, looks up with a caged expression, her hands like her mother's, spread crab-fashion on the table.

As though shoring up their identity against the dominance, albeit unconscious, of the female, men gather in Winter Ritual (1990) around a grill, whose burning embers are conveyed with orange stitching. Red, white, and blue cars, the visible extension of the all-American psyche, complete the spokes of the wheel-like composition. Wearing hats and zipped up against the cold, the fellows huddle around the fire. A smiling grandfather holds up on the tip of his knife a succulent roasted oyster, age-old symbol of the womb and lovemaking. Underscoring the fact that male bonding crosses the boundaries of age and educational background, the artist adds an infant boy and children to the group. The "redneck" rebel flag and yellow satin grinning faces on the blue truck contrast, moreover, with the learned caption on the license tag of the red van, OIKOS, the Greek word for ecology.