White Trash Cooking, Twenty Years Later

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2007 by Edge, John T

Mickler, baby-faced with the unstudied good looks of a country boy come to town, was born in 1940, in Palm Valley, Florida, near St. Augustine. His father was a shrimper. His mother worked as a cook and a filling-station attendant. Mickler was fond of telling interviewers that his family lived without electricity until he was seventeen or eighteen, in "the middle of the swamp," at "an old fish camp." He described the buildings as "crude-cut cypress," the family privy as "out-of-doors."

Mickler's father died when the boy was six. Mickler called him a "mean S.O.B." Mickler once called his mother, Edna Ray Mickler, "the lowdowndest White Trash that ever walked the face of the earth." But he aimed to flatter. "Mama was a great fisherman," Mickler said, "redfish, bass, trout, drum on the hook and line. Mullet in the net. And she shrimped too. Caught tubs of fish."

Although Mickler took great pride in place, he was not wholly provincial. When he was a teenager, Mickler, along with Petie Pickette - daughter of the woman he called Momma Two, the woman who gave the world Tutti 's Fruited Porkettes - scored a regional country-and-western hit with the single "Our Love." The duo toured the South and, depending upon the story told, either opened for, sang backup for, or merely conversed in a hotel lobby with Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison. "We were not big time," Mickler said later. "We elbowed with them."

In his mid-twenties, Mickler went to college, earning a bachelor's degree at Jacksonville State. At the suggestion of his primary professor, Memphis Wood, he applied for and won admission to the Master's in Fine Arts program at Mills College in Berkeley, California.

While in Berkeley, Mickler likely concocted the idea for White Trash Cooking. Mickler and his friends first envisioned a campy television show, a kind of drag queen riff on the Galloping Gourmet. The book came into focus later, as Mickler traveled the gay vagabond circuit from the Bay Area to New Orleans and on to Key West. He shopped the project for a couple of years, soliciting introductions to editors and publishers. To no avail. And then, while working as a caterer in Key West, Mickler received a call from Jonathan Williams, who, on behalf of the Jargon Society, offered a modest contract, a poet's-eye edit, and, no matter the ruckus, a pledge to retain the original title.

Williams understood the power of the title. He knew that printing the epithet was an act of transcendence, a marker of movement beyond the constraints of stereotype. Mickler proclaimed White Trash to be a badge of honor. Black Southerners responded positively to the book, recognizing the ascendance of white trash as concomitant to the liberation of their people.

What's more, Mickler delineated lowercase white trash and uppercase White Trash, arguing that "manners and pride separate the two. Common white trash has very little in the way of pride, no manners to speak of, and hardly any respect for anything or anybody." White Trash, however, "never fail to say 'yes ma'am,' and 'no sir,' never sat on a made-up bed (or put your hat on it), never opened someone else's icebox, never left food on your plate, never left the table without permission, and never forgot to say 'thank you' for the teeniest favor. That's the way the ones before us were raised and that's the way they raised us in the South."