Food That Good

The best kitchen on this mountain was built to keep people apart. I'd start there, and then I'd get to the pie. Summer of nineteen thirty-seven, Washington prodded this park about its Black visitors. "Two bus loads are going up tomorrow," the note said, "and they have to be fitted into camping places for white people. This is not a good condition." The answer was Lewis Mountain, with its own campground, its own cabins, its own lodge. The Interior Department's solicitor told the Secretary that segregation here was an "infringement of constitutional principles," because it was separate and it wasn't equal. It got built anyway, and better than nine thousand people came the first year. When word came down to leave segregation off the maps, the rangers kept handing out maps marking Lewis Mountain for colored visitors. Superintendent Lassiter, who'd written that the best policy was definite segregation, got called to Washington to explain. Within a year the park's own history has him exiled to Santa Fe, with a cut in grade and ten percent off his pay. That's the men upstairs. Come on in the kitchen. Lloyd Tutt ran that lodge and cooked for twelve years. His wife Mittie was the pastry chef. Fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, potato salad, pies and cakes of every sort. Church groups came from Washington and Baltimore, the Green Book listed it, and big bands played on weekends. One woman who went there said, "It may sound just silly, but you never thought about segregation. There was so much going on. And Mister Tutt really had that lodge swinging." The park's own marker at the campground says Harry Truman came twice, to eat at that lodge with Chester Franklin, who published the Black paper in Kansas City, and General Benjamin Davis. Now my favorite line in the whole record. Tutt was told to turn white guests away, and they came anyhow. "Our food was that good," he said. He tried to keep the races apart, by his own account, seating them at different tables. A government had been arguing over that line for years, clear up to the Secretary of the Interior, and a plate of pie walked straight across it. The woman who heads the Black Heritage Project over in the Valley puts it this way. "You mention the name Lewis Mountain and people smile." A young woman working with her said, "Black history should be more than slavery and sadness and despair." I know why they smile. It's Saturday night, the band's tuning up, and here comes Mittie Tutt through the kitchen door with a pie in each hand.