MAKING SORGHUM SYRUP
Sunday, Todd, Susie and I visited our friend Randall Lanier‘s family mountain place where his extended family and friends were crushing and boiling sorghum and turning it into syrup. A week ago I wrote about visiting Tony and Kystal‘s place and making sorghum with a large group of their friends. We went then on Saturday and only observed the first part of the process. People were cutting the stalks of sorghum and pushing it through a crusher which was rotated by fastening a long pole to the crusher and pulling it in a circle with a riding mower.
This time the sorghum had already being crushed, leaving a large pile of flattened sorghum stalks and the boiling process was nearing the end. It was mostly considered men‘s work. A large group of men gathered around the long metal vat of syrup being boiled over a wood fired oven. They were debating when the bubbles were the right size for the hot syrup to be ladled into large buckets and stored to cool, after which it would be ladled into small glass jars with lids and distributed to the participants and kept for use during the year.
Randall had attended this ritual process since he was a boy in eastern North Carolina and was an expert, though his son, Laird, was now directing things. When Randall was a boy a mule pulled in circles the long branch attached to the crusher. The last time that they had used a mule to do that here, the mule had turned ornery and decided to leave pulling the crusher over. So now they used a riding lawn mower. But everything else was done the way it had always been done for the last hundred years including straining the thick syrup through a mesh cone and pulling it through with two sticks squeezed together.
Nothing else had changed. The real purpose of making sorghum syrup was to bring family and friends together, to sit around a wood fire, to tell stories and become reaquainted and to create a sense of community. The sweet syrup was simply a byproduct.
And people like me who know nothing about making sorghum syrup were pulled into this community of friends. I was being pulled into Appalachian culture even though every one here was drifting away from Appalachian culture or were being drawn into it as an escape from city life. But it was a place where oldtimers, whose families have lived her for generations, could feel comfortable with newcomers who are seeking a form of rural life.
After the syrup was stored, we ate food from a long table and then sat by the fire as dogs and children raced around.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 