Biscuits and grace
Generations in St. Petersburg have savored Annie Wright's cooking. Generations to come will be thankful she was a good teacher.
By JEFF KLINKENBERG
Published July 18, 2004
ST. PETERSBURG - Give a man a biscuit and he eats breakfast. Teach a man to bake a biscuit and he never goes hungry. Maybe that's not in the Bible, but it always was the gospel according to Annie Wright.
A wonderful cook, she may have been an even grander teacher. In her day she cooked soul food in two restaurants well-known to gray-haired African-Americans in St. Petersburg. She and her husband, Wilbur Wright, opened their hole-in-the-wall cafe, Squeeze-In, near the end of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency. In 1952, the Wrights established the Harlem Restaurant on 22nd Street S at a time when American citizens with black skin often were unwelcome in white restaurants.
Mrs. Wright fed thousands of diners over the decades. They included laundresses, dishwashers, maids, janitors, nannies, porters - and the future deputy mayor, Goliath Davis. They included James Brown, Ray Charles, Little Richard and other entertainers who walked to her restaurant from the Manhattan Casino next door for a quick bite before their performances.
"Sit yourself down, baby," she'd say. "How about some stew beef?"
She gave jobs to young, neighborhood folks who needed work or just wanted to learn something practical. She taught them how to properly prepare collards, black-eyed peas and fried chicken. People still talk about her biscuits.
"Now, baby, don't spare the bacon grease," she'd tell a timid cook.
Most of Mrs. Wright's pupils moved on or passed away. But Elzo Atwater Jr., 49, is going strong. He and his siblings still run Atwater's Cafeteria on Martin Luther King Boulevard in the Midtown neighborhood of St. Petersburg.
"When I was 10 years old," he says, "I'd stand next to Mama Wright and she'd show me how to grill liver and onions. I was cooking scrambled eggs when I was 10! I can still cook her biscuits, man."
Elzo Atwater Jr.'s parents, Elzo and Mattie, bought the Harlem Restaurant from the Wrights in 1977. Mrs. Wright stayed to cook. "When somebody sells you their restaurant," Elzo Jr. tells people, "usually, and I'm just guessing, they really don't want you to succeed. That's the human nature of it. But Mrs. Wright was different. She wanted us to succeed. And the fact she stayed on to cook gave us a lot of credibility in the community."
The Atwaters closed the Harlem on 22nd Street S, moved to what became Martin Luther King and used their own name on the new marquee starting in 1980. Of course, Mrs. Wright went with them to help. Elzo Jr., who had attended cooking schools in New York and California, by then was a formidable cook. But in the kitchen he paid attention to his mentor.
"When you eat my food," he says now. "You're eating Mama Wright's food. Sure, I do my own thing with it. But the whole idea of Atwater's was based on her recipes. Everything flows from her."
It is natural to assume that Mrs. Wright, whose grandmother was born a slave, is deceased. After all, even decades ago she was a wisp of a woman, tiny, frail and squeaky voiced.
Surely Mama Wright has to be living with the angels.
She lives on through her old recipes, certainly. In fact, she lives on, period. You decide on the angels.
A different time
You there - you who are sitting at the breakfast table in your air-conditioned downtown condo, sipping gourmet espresso brewed in that Williams-Sonoma percolator - listen up. You there - you who are sitting elbow to elbow comfortably with people of other races at that trendy Beach Drive pub - kindly pay attention.
Try to imagine what it must have been like to have been born black in 1906.
When the airplane was 3 years old.
When Teddy Roosevelt was president.
In 1914, in St. Petersburg, a black man was accused of raping a white woman. Before his trial, he was dragged out of jail and lynched by a white mob only a few hundred feet from today's Tropicana Field.
In Georgia, a little girl grew up in the country. Her grandmother, Eliza Nero, took her under wing. Eliza Nero had been born a slave before the Civil War. Mister Lincoln set her free. In a farmhouse kitchen she taught a little girl the art of country cooking. The little girl, Annie Grace, mastered biscuits, chitterlings, fried chicken, black-eyed peas.
Annie Grace was 19 when she arrived in St. Petersburg in the middle of a 1925 economic boom that would explode in everyone's faces four years later. A growing black population was helping to build and maintain the fresh-faced city. Their work was appreciated but seldom their presence.
In a tourist community known for wonderful beaches, there was no beach open to black-skinned people. A black person brazen enough to sit on one of St. Petersburg's storied green benches risked a night in jail. In 1937, Klansmen marched through the black community warning residents to stay away from the polls.
In 1940, according to USF historian Ray Arsenault's St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream, 1888-1950, only 41 percent of black households enjoyed electricity. One out of five black homes did without running water. Schools and the single hospital were separate but unequal.
A community refuge
People in the black community had each other. They had each other and Mama Wright. Her restaurant especially was a refuge from the harsh, outside world of white America. Nobody would chase you away from her counter. Nobody would pretend you were not standing in front of them. She'd look you in the eye and pat your hand, baby.
"What I remember is the welcoming smile," says Carolyn Delores "Dee Dee" Williams, now 66. "She just gave it to everybody and made you feel like you were a somebody. She was spiritual in the best sense, not like some of these preachers today who talk the talk but don't walk the walk. She walked the walk. She was with God."
Ms. Williams worked as a maid and later in the radiology department at St. Anthony's Hospital. She got up early, but never early enough to catch Mama Wright asleep.
"Nope. Doors were open at 6 a.m. The food was ready to eat. Everything she cooked was scrumptious. I liked the sausage and grits. Of course, you had to have the biscuits."
It didn't matter if your wallet was bare.
"You didn't have to have no money," says Carl Mobley, a Tropicana Field building supervisor who preaches at Tenth Street Church of God on Sundays. "She'd say, "Baby, are you hungry?' She was more likely to feed the person who didn't have money as somebody who had money. She was set apart by God."
Wilbur Wright was also on hand at Harlem. The manager, he was tall and quiet and strict. He had cooked at the Soreno Hotel and owned a gas station and a shoe repair shop. At his restaurant, he paid for everything with cash. "When my dad stood up and hitched up his pants, you paid attention," says 45-year-old Tyrone Wright, the adopted son of Wilbur and Annie. "He was very serious about work. On Saturdays, when I was a kid, I looked forward to sleeping and maybe watching Tarzan on TV. Not a chance."
In the summer, Wilbur Wright would take off for the New Jersey coastal town of Cape May for restaurant work, leaving the St. Petersburg operation in the capable hands of his wife. Mama Wright woke every morning at 4 a.m. By 5 a.m. she and her staff were cooking. At 6 she unlocked the door. At 7 p.m. she locked the door for the night. That was her life for half a century plus change.
Nobody remembers her sitting down to rest. In fact, they remember her almost running from counter to counter in her zeal to get things done. Sometimes she'd slip on grease and fall hard enough to crack her skull. "Praise God!" she'd announce, springing to her feet. "I'm all right."
And everybody would return to work.
"In segregated St. Petersburg, hers was the place to go," says Goliath Davis, who later became the chief of police and is currently the deputy mayor in charge of revitalizing black businesses in St. Petersburg. "She had a knack with people, real warmth. Not to mention very good food. When I was just starting on the police force, I was a regular at breakfast."
Breakfast, dinner, supper. Nobody needed a clock in Mama Wright's universe.
"I started eating Miss Wright's food when I was 10," says James Williams, 45, as he eats collards at Atwater's. "We little fellows in the neighborhood, we'd ride our bikes down there. First we'd try to get into the Manhattan Casino because the nightclub had a pool table. Of course, we kids would get run out of there. So we'd go to Miss Wright's. She'd feed us, love us. "Come on in, sweeties.'
"Now I eat at Atwater's, although, to tell the truth, sometimes I call Atwater's "Miss Wright's' by mistake. Same kind of food you know, soul food. Everything they say about her biscuits is true. They were something else. You know, she'd shape them by hand. You could tell by the fingerprint. I mean it. Right in the middle of the biscuit you could see the thumb prints!"
Atwater's Cafeteria is still an old-fashioned place. The tables in the dining room rock back and forth if you're careless with your elbows. The kitchen is only a few degrees cooler than the surface of Venus. The kitchen is always staffed by somebody named Atwater. Seven brothers and a sister, they carry on not only the tradition of their parents but the tradition of Mama Wright. Only thing is, they are more likely to write recipes down. She never did.
"I can make her biscuits exactly like she did, but I usually make them a little different," Elzo Jr. says. "Bacon drippings! Man, it tastes good, but it'll kill you if you eat too much. Right? So I use vegetable oil, the modern way.
"Mama Wright's recipe? Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Take four dry cups of flour, add six ounces of baking powder, then add one cup - YES! ONE CUP - of bacon drippings to ABOUT a quart of buttermilk. Watch the liquid! You don't want it soupy like pancake batter. Roll your dough into balls with your hands. Shape the biscuits with your fingers and put them on a pan. Bake about 15 minutes or until golden brown. You'll end up with about two dozen of Mama Wright's biscuits." Of course, Mama Wright never wrote anything down. Elzo Atwater is going by memory.
A legacy that lasts
A little house takes up the corner of Third Avenue S just off U.S. 19 in St. Petersburg. Tyrone Wright and his wife, Vernadian, live there. Tyrone kicks himself because he never learned to cook from his mother. But Vernadian makes up for it. She's a Southern cook of the old school.
Sometimes, when she is cooking in their small, hot kitchen, she hears the creak of a walker. Her mother-in-law is standing there, leaning on the walker and watching.
Not criticizing - Mama Wright doesn't criticize - but offering gentle suggestions like "another pinch of lemon pepper would be good." A breeze through the open window could blow her down, she's so fragile. But she likes to think that God is with her. She doesn't fall.
Some people are convinced that Mama Wright's age exceeds a century. But she should know. She says she will turn 98 in October, God willing. Her husband passed in 1995. He ate her fried chicken and her bacon-flavored biscuits and never weighed more than 139 pounds. He was 94.
In her red housecoat and blue kerchief she looks wonderfully ancient. Her vision is blurred from cataracts though she says she can still read the Bible when she has a mind to. Nothing wrong with her hearing. She can follow dialogue from her favorite soap opera, The Young and the Restless.
"I still like to cook," she says in a high voice, "but sometimes I'm not strong enough."
When she cooks she uses her old cast-iron pan. She believes it has been with her since 1925, though maybe she had it in Georgia. The pan is wearing thin on the bottom, but she greases it with Crisco and keeps it new. "I like to cook chicken wings. I like to fry them a little bit in Crisco, and then stew them. I love black-eyed peas with bacon. I know people say bacon isn't good for you, but I like it fine."
Once a month ladies from her church, Bethel Community Baptist, bring her communion. Elzo Atwater Jr. and his siblings visit once a month, too. An emotional man, Atwater usually weeps when he embraces her. "You're my angel," he says. Then the Atwaters sing gospel songs a cappella. Her favorite is Family Prayer.
Don't forget the family prayer
God will surely meet you there
When you gather in the evening
Don't forget the family prayer.
She doesn't go out anymore, but if she did, she says she would go to Tropicana Field. She says she always liked baseball. Years ago, black baseball players who trained in St. Petersburg during the Jim Crow era ate at her restaurant. At Tropicana, she says she would like to visit the little booth under the stands in right center field, American Sunday Plate.
It is Elzo Atwater Jr.'s concession. On the menu is meat loaf, ribs, fried chicken sometimes, and collards, green beans and cornbread always. Mama Wright likes Elzo's cooking, but she will tell him if he needs to add a pinch of something.
Last year, 1,058,695 fans attended games at Tropicana Field. Elzo Atwater Jr. fed about 3,000. When they ate his food they were eating Mama Wright's food, too. If he has his way, Mama Wright will never die.
-- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 and at klink@sptimes.com
Further reading:St. Peterburg and the Florida Dream, 1888-1950 by Raymond Arsenault, University Press of Florida.
On the web: The Deuces, by Jon Wilson and Jamie Francis, the St. Petersburg Times. www.sptimes.com/2002/webspecials02/deuces/