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The postwar New South boom compelled white people from the country to move toward the city—even Jim McCoy went briefly to Baltimore in the late 1940s to work for Bethlehem Steel. Byrd was always good for a speech about the value of rural work, but his decades of greatest influence corresponded with the era of disappearing farmers. He was now the paterfamilias of the so-called Byrd Machine, a political king-making operation that rivaled New York’s Tammany Hall in terms of overall influence over an entire state. No political decision in Virginia could be made without the participation and profit of Byrd’s network, and that was certainly true of immigration reform. Migrants from Mexico came in to replace the lost white workers, and Byrd brought them onto his orchards without question. In the late 1950s, he employed 1,800 men, women, and children picking his fruit from 200,000 trees. He had eleven orchards over 5,000 acres, plus five packinghouses, one cannery, three cold storage units, five camp houses, sixty 2-ton trucks, fifty-three high-pressure sprayers, 400,000 picking boxes, and 25,000 smudge pots. He opened a cannery to process lower-quality fruit into jelly, butter, and cider. He worked in the Senate to limit regulation on migrant labor, while opposing legislation that required that Mexican workers earn 90 percent of a state’s average farm wages.
Byrd’s end-of-year personal financial statement for 1963, the same year his newspaper compared Patsy Cline’s mourners to crazed bargain-bin shoppers, listed physical assets at $4.5 million and an equal amount in stocks. His apple business alone was worth $1.5 million. He gave more than $50,000 to charity. This unstoppable worker and builder had nothing left to push against, and only a dwindling claim to his long-held self-definition as a humble Valley farmer. As if in recognition of this, Harry Flood Byrd mounted one final obsessive campaign on behalf of his people, the vanishing white rural conservative class.
Virginia was spared the worst horrors and tensions of the civil rights movement. There were no commonwealth equivalents to the march on Selma, the brutal dog-and-firehose crackdowns in Montgomery, or the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The Ku Klux Klan was kept largely at bay thanks to antilynching legislation passed by Byrd himself as governor. But in 1959, at the peak of Harry Flood Byrd’s political and commercial control, the state experienced its worst episode of overt reactionary cruelty: Prince Edward County, down toward the North Carolina line that William Byrd II helped draw, decided it would rather close all of its public schools rather than accommodate desegregation. For five years, white families pulled together a makeshift private school operation that, by design, their black neighbors couldn’t afford. More than a thousand black children missed five years of formal education. For once, Virginians looked like plain old backwoods bigots: the county government even warned that integration would make “the people of America a mongrel nation.” Attorney General Robert Kennedy decried Prince Edward County’s actions as “a disgrace to our country,” while Time magazine called the school closings “the most infamous segregationist tactic in the U.S.”
Byrd saw it differently. To his mind, “the gallant little county of Prince Edward is fighting against great odds to protect a principle it believes to be right.” When the Supreme Court ordered the district to desegregate, he called the ruling “tyrannical,” just as, in the original wake of Brown v. Board, he joined with Strom Thurmond to write and distribute the so-called Southern Manifesto that decried the ruling as an “abuse of judicial power.” In 1958, Byrd claimed that racial equality was the South’s “gravest crisis since the War Between the States.” Byrd put a name to the proud effort to stop desegregation at all costs: massive resistance. In a speech on the Senate floor, he compelled all the “southern states” to join Virginia in collective opposition.
The effort was no match for the well-organized, morally upright movement for black equality. By the time that Prince Edward County was finally forced to enroll black students in 1964, this racist campaign had tarnished Byrd’s reputation as a benevolent businessman-king. Massive resistance was controversial even in his own party and his own state. Byrd’s sole Virginia partners were the so-called Southside Seven, a collection of deep-rural state senators who he met with in rooms with confederate flags unfurled on the walls. Together they proposed “compromises” that kept black kids out of public schools while rescinding the tax-exempt status of the NAACP. The blatant attack on civil rights put the decades-old Byrd Machine on the ropes at last. In 1960, the so-called Young Turks, a group of businessmen from the D.C. suburbs, ran a coordinated electoral campaign to undercut Byrd’s plantation-bound view of the world and the races. They couldn’t quite finish him off just then, but the man was getting old anyway. Byrd left office in 1965, and died of cancer in 1966.
Byrd’s personal prosperity obscured the fact that he actually lost all the major battles he claimed to stand for. Black children entered Virginia schools. Debt still drove political spending. And even though he embodied the rural patrician class, his tenure as a lawmaker coincided with the end of that class and the entire culture surrounding it. He was the most powerful man in the South as it underwent the transition from agrarian to urban—from battery-powered farmhouse Victrolas to neon-bedecked honky-tonks. During the 1950s, as Byrd’s wealth exploded thanks to limitless cheap Mexican labor and a stranglehold on all federal and state budgeting, southern cities expanded at thirteen times the rate of rural areas. By 1960, a majority of Virginians, including Jim McCoy and his young family, lived in cities and suburbs. With the growing urban population, the power center of Virginia shifted from Byrd country to the Washington beltway as soon as he was gone. By the end of the ’60s, Democrats couldn’t abide their southern senators’ hideous racism, and they abandoned the South altogether.
Byrd’s beloved fruit industry fared no better. In 1937, back when the Valley apple industry was the envy of the world and Byrd was basically a living god, there were nearly 4,000 apple growers managing 4 million trees in Virginia. But by 2005, there were barely 200 growers managing 1.5 million trees. Cold storage and global shipping, Byrd’s biggest business triumphs, eventually became the Winchester industry’s executioner; growers in Washington State and China are now just as capable of holding hundreds of thousands of bushels indefinitely. Those places also have more open land for the industry to slowly devour, and their climates are better suited to apple growing. Over five decades, Byrd built a Virginia that served him best, and when he died all his supposed values vanished with him.
Surely he sensed this. By the 1960s, Byrd was the de facto leader of the entire southern political establishment. He spoke for the whole region, not only Virginia, and I give him the benefit of the doubt to assume that he grasped, in his senescence, that his own astonishing success had done nothing to enrich the sainted land to which he claimed such allegiance. Having sold out the South for personal gain, trampling its communal culture while privatizing his section of its lush green hills, this creature of Confederate Memorial Days and “war of northern aggression” revisionism made one last-ditch effort on behalf of southern valor. In an eerie parallel, his doomed resistance campaign coincided, almost to the year, with the Civil War’s centennial. In his own way, Byrd clung to past ideals as much as Patsy Cline’s devoted fans. As the world around him grew more complicated and foreign-seeming, and as he grew more isolated from his own upbringing, Byrd grew more committed to familiar, triumphant attitudes. Massive resistance, like opening up a mountaintop country bar or refurbishing a legend’s old house, was a way to feel strong again as the old order slipped away—with the obvious, tragic difference that Byrd had orchestrated the old order’s demise himself, nearly single-handedly, over long, cruel decades.
Byrd’s values, his way of life, his political will, and even his personal reputation were seemingly dead as dust by the time he retired. But no legend dies that easily in Winchester, where people still talk about George Washington like he just ran out to grab beer. When I first started visiting, it often felt like Byrd still ran the place. I would typically drive in on Route 7, the road connec
ting Winchester to Washington’s suburbs, which was christened the Harry F. Byrd Highway in 1968. Passing through Berryville, where Rosemont Mansion still stands as a historic site and popular event venue, I entered the city just north of Shenandoah University’s Harry F. Byrd, Jr. School of Business, named for his son, and drove past the offices of the Winchester Star, which remains Byrd-owned and nostalgically reactionary.
Downtown, I would park and walk along Piccadilly Street, where visitors are invited to pretend that apples still define the area. I’d stroll past the massive, gleaming fiberglass apple adorned with painted portraits of notable Winchesterites, including Richard Evelyn Byrd Jr., depicted in a heavily ruffed Arctic coat. Around the corner, near the George Washington Hotel, I’d see the little red offices of the Apple Blossom Festival, and then right before coming to the eastern end of the commercial district, the small headquarters of Glaize Apples, LLC, one of the last remaining dynasties of the Shenandoah produce boom. The Glaize family still operates a genuine growing orchard about 15 miles outside town; they haven’t sold all the land to developers, haven’t adopted the cost-effective but regulation-burdened model of mashing subpar fruit into sauce or juice or baby food, and haven’t sold the organization to an out-of-state behemoth. (The physical components of the famed Byrd operation now belong to White House Foods, which operates the huge red-brick factories and cold storage units near the stone wall that Jim McCoy’s guitar teacher, Pete Kelly, built.) But the Glaizes have diversified—into real estate, mostly, though also into corporate statesmanship. Because of their proximity to Washington, Phil Glaize Jr., the grandson of the company’s founding grower, lobbied Congress for years on behalf of the United States Apple Association.
I have walked through the Glaizes’ geometric tree rows, admiring the misty, gnarled beauty of an old-fashioned orchard during the late-autumn harvest season. I have eaten their fruit straight from the tree and had to close my eyes in ecstasy as I chewed. It tasted like pure cold sunlight and tart honey, and made me regret whatever fridge-bound Styrofoam I’d lately accepted as an apple. This privilege still exists in Winchester. The farmers’ markets abound with fruit and vegetables that make country life seem like the only sensible human pursuit. But it’s not getting any easier to grow the stuff or make a living off it. The smaller farmers wake hours before dawn to drive their product to markets in Maryland or Pennsylvania, while Glaize Apples, an operation that once rivaled Byrd’s for sheer market visibility, sells a majority of its fruit to Walmart.
One Sunday morning I was walking through Piccadilly Street in search of a meal that, for now, you still can’t find in any big-box store: an all-American breakfast. Even in these globalized times, every respectable Main Street in the country has at least one Formica-filled haven that serves coffee, pig meat, eggs, and toast until 2 p.m., and yet no such place appeared in downtown Winchester. Alone, I walked past storefront after storefront, wanting only a padded swivel stool and a laminated menu. Finally I arrived at the glass window that had once drawn JudySue’s ire, the place with the spray-painted name, JUST LIKE GRANDMA’S, and would have kept walking if I hadn’t glimpsed two figures moving at the far end of the counter. A small diner. The heart sings.
Inside, a young black man was cleaning his kitchen while an older black woman watched. Slowly, drowsily, he collected his stainless steel bowls and wiped down the hood of his grill. The woman, his only customer so far, sat at the counter eating a simple egg sandwich and talking about their mutual friends. I took a seat at the opposite end of the counter to grant them their privacy, between the window and a small radio mounted on a wall shelf. A contemporary gospel station played as the young man, dreadlocks tumbling out through the back of his bandana, came over with a menu, a mug, and a coffee pot.
“Take your time,” he said, turning back to his housekeeping. I took a small sip of my scalding, perfectly brewed coffee and consulted the offerings. The glory of an all-American breakfast is its balance of extremes: salty and sweet, formulaic and customizable, as plain as Shaker furniture but as indulgent as a birthday cake. It’s only eggs, meat, and carbohydrates, none of which require special culinary skill, but this is America damn it, so you—the strong-willed, self-made breakfast eater—are implored to assert yourself. What kind of meat? What manner of eggs? White or wheat toast?
When the cook returned I ordered the same combo I always do: eggs over easy, bacon, wheat toast. I added two pancakes to compound the hedonism. Then I gently tossed the menu on the counter with satisfaction.
As my host turned back to the grill and began assembling his tools for the job, I looked up at the wall, where a framed article from the Winchester Star hung just below the stereo speaker. It was a scissored-out clip from the Food section, page C5, dated September 26, 2012.
CAFE MIXES THE OLD THE NEW
WINCHESTER—Perry Davis likes getting different opinions before he puts new items on the menu at Just Like Grandma’s Cafe and Carryout in Winchester.
Customers are frequent taste-testers, and Davis values their input. But whenever possible, Davis likes getting the opinion of someone he knows will tell the truth—his great-grandmother, Viola Lampkin Brown, 100, of Berryville.
“She will definitely tell me what she thinks and if something’s missing or needs to be changed,” Davis, 29, of Winchester, said.
Brown’s picture and another great-grandmother of Davis’, the late Betty Killam-Rogers, sit on a shelf overlooking the small kitchen and 15-seat counter that take up most of the diner at 46 E. Piccadilly St. The photos are a tribute to the two biggest culinary influences in Davis’ life and a constant reminder of what he is trying to achieve with his restaurant, which opened July 27.
I read that Perry inherited a meat-and-potatoes menu from the Piccadilly Grill, a twenty-year-old institution that had held the property until its owner’s death. The rest of the article included a list of the dishes that Perry had slowly incorporated into the repertoire: fried catfish (imported from Louisiana), curry chicken salad, a frittata, baked tilapia topped with crabmeat. He spoke about using real vanilla bean in his French toast, turmeric in the chicken, mace in the baked goods, and mango and pine nuts in a specialty salad. He was incorporating his relatives’ personal recipes as well, including meat loaf, pound cake, and lemon meringue pie. He’d also spent some years in the kitchen of the Dancing Goat, the luxury restaurant on the first floor of the George Washington Hotel across the street.
At the center of the newspaper story was a picture of Perry with his surviving great-grandmother, the woman who taught him how to cook. They both looked focused and proud. And why not: watching him begin his work, I considered how rare it was to see a black-owned business in town. Discussions of race in Winchester tend to focus on Latinos, since immigration from Mexico and Central America has been the leading source of demographic change since at least the 1980s. The bulk of Philip Glaize Jr.’s congressional testimony involves immigration reform, which he favors, since his entire apple-picking workforce is foreign-born. But black and white issues are trickier, subtler, in keeping with the grand Virginia tradition of simmering racial tensions rather than explosive ones.
Perry clicked the burners on and reached under his counter to pop open the fridge doors. He pulled out a few eggs and a tub of butter, from which he spooned out a golf-ball-size chunk and placed on the shining silver grill top. It instantly bubbled and slid as he commenced a batter in a steel bowl. Flour, soda, a small pinch of salt, white sugar—they all entered the bowl in quick, economical motions, unmeasured but precise. Then he cracked in a couple eggs and reached back into the fridge for a carton of buttermilk. He stirred with an old wire whisk, not too fast but steady, until the batter seemed to almost move on its own. Then he reached back into the fridge and pulled out a package of thick-cut bacon, pulled out four slices, and laid them down like newborns on the buttered, rumbling range. They popped and puckered and the room smelled like fat and smoke. Then he grabbed a small ladle and added three dots of pancake batter t
o the glistening surface, spreading them out with the utensil’s bottom until they achieved perfect roundness. Then he set everything down, grabbed the coffee pot, and walked over to fill my mug back up.
I could have paid then and there. It was a pleasure to watch him work. The woman at the other end of the counter sat there bending his ear the entire time. She was missing at least two teeth, and from her conversation—about friends, wrongdoings, old memories—I gleaned that she was a lot younger than she looked. Perry had little to say, but he laughed with her, smiled, and agreed with every characterization as she told every story. She clearly needed to talk, needed to speak out loud and add to the atmosphere. As Jim said, some folks need to get it out.