Canthook

An arrabber?

I love learning new words, and the word "arabber" was new to me today. Apparently, it's a term used only in Baltimore. An arabber - pronounced A-rabber, with a long A - is a huckster, and apparently the term comes from "street arabs", a term also used for homeless children.

Some find the term "arabber" to be insensitive, as if the fact of homeless children was less offensive than the term used to describe them. The Romany are called "gypsies", although they aren't from Egypt, and Chevy used to produce the "Nomad" station wagon. As Frankie Laine's haunting song "Call of the Wild Goose" taught us all, wandering isn't necessarily a bad thing.

"Holler, holler, holler,
till my throat get sore.
If it wasn't for the pretty girls,
I wouldn't have to holler no more.
I say, Watermelon! Watermelon!
Got em red to the rind, lady
-- Arabber's cry

In 1995, the Baltimore Sun talked to Eugene 'Fatback' Allen. He'd been an arabber for 55 years at that point, and used the profits to not only support his family, but put a slew of them through college. (He had 16 kids.) Writing of arabber Charles Cohen, the City Paper wrote "They tell Depression stories, of days when they could make it through the week with a dollar, when Cabbage would go through the streets selling fish, yelling, Five cents fish, man; bring your dishpan."

Hucksters buy wholesale produce daily, then take it through neighborhoods, offering fresh produce as if they were driving ice-cream trucks, their sing-song chant replacing that wretched distorted music that the ice cream vendor uses. In Baltimore, it was an equal-opportunity business in the 19th century. After World War II, when high-paying jobs were available for all white men who were capable of doing the work, the ranks of the arabbers became almost exclusively black.

In Baltimore, there were central stables where arabbers parked their wagons overnight, and many of the arabbers rented horses by the day. That made it considerably easier for arabbers to get started in the business.

My late first wife's maternal grandfather was in that same business, in Marion, Indiana, in the early 20th century. They didn't call 'em arabbers, though. They were hucksters. My mother remembered huckster wagons in rural NW Ohio in the 1920s, 1930s, and even into the 1940s. By the 1950s, they were pretty much all gone.

Or were they? Em and I used to buy from the Schwann driver, and they're still around, although I can't get them to add me to their route. The Schwann driver doesn't sell fresh fruit, he sold frozen foods. Schwann ice cream is first-rate, and the Schwann people own a couple of frozen pizza companies - Red Baron, I think, and maybe Tony's Pizza as well. They have frozen OJ, and portion-control meats, and Em loved their 3-pound boxes of peeled, deveined IQF (individually-quick-frozen) shrimp, although they were quite pricey. We'd get a steel can of chocolate almond ice cream, maybe 8 quarts, and a smaller plastic tub of butter pecan, maybe 5 quarts, and by the time the driver returned in 2 weeks, it'd all be gone. I think there are still Jewel Tea drivers, although I'm not really clear on what their offerings are.

Em's mother, Beelzebub, talked about her dad selling pies from the huckster wagon. Her mother would be up at 2 or 3 AM, making pies and baking them. Come morning, she's go to bed, and Beelzebub and her sister would have to wash pie tins, 100 or 150 of them. Pie tins don't have any difficult corners to deal with, the lard used for the crust would melt in hot water, and if the pies bubbled over, the high sugar content of the fillings would make it dissolve easily in hot water as well. She professed to really hating that chore, though.

She thought her father was a brilliant businessman, though. She said that he could break a tomato open at the membrane. At one point, he was faced with a lot of tomatoes that were turning bad, and with the weekend ahead, he knew they'd be unsalable come Monday. He headed towards the poor section of town - Jigtown, she called it - and sold the tomatoes there, claiming that they were seedless tomatoes, a rare delicacy, and he got extra-high prices as he dumped this nearly-spoiled product onto these customers.

"He didn't go back there again", she said, and she would just cackle. I didn't see much humor in cheating people, but she thought it really funny. A year or two later, she joined a fundamentalist church and told me I was going to hell for being a Methodist, and I asked her what kind of church it was, that taught her that cursing like a sailor was godly behavior. She'd respond by demonstrating that her cursing, in fact, was not like a sailor, but was instead something to make a sailor blush.

We were out of bread, so I went to the bakery down the street for hoagie rolls and a french loaf. Blondie doesn't care for their french bread, and wanted a loaf of store-brand wonder bread, so I went from there to Darrenkamp's this afternoon.

Sweet corn was 10 ears for 4 bucks, freshly arrived from Florida, and we had that for supper. We'd had sweet corn a couple or three weeks ago, but this was especially good, as the kernels were extremely large and juicy. Blondie didn't think she'd ever seen such fat kernels.

When I was growing up, we always raised sweet corn - but when it was time to steam the corn, we picked both sweet corn and field corn. Field corn is pretty much like sweet corn - each is soft and juicy in July, and each has hardened into seeds by the first of October. An ear of field corn is an inch or two longer than sweet corn, and it's about a half-inch larger in diameter. There are more kernels, but not that many more; mostly, it's larger kernels. Sweet corn is, as you might guess, has a higher sugar content. but field corn has a "cornier" flavor.

Mom always chose to eat sweet corn, but Dad preferred field corn. As soon as I was old enough to select my ears from the center of the table, I chose field corn, not because it was larger, but because that's what Dad ate, and every little boy wants to be like his Dad, right? And as I said, there's not a big difference, but when the "supersweet" sweet corns were developed about 1980 or so, they were even sweeter, and were even less corny in taste. Once I was self-assured enough to eat quiches, I could have decided to eat sweet corn, and now that I live in town, I don't have enough room to raise my own corn, so I have to buy sweet corn instead, but I really prefer field corn. I guess that's my "hick" side shining through.

Every year for decades, the Presbyterians held a sweet corn supper every June at Ange's farm. Ange would be over a century old now; the must be doing things differently now. But they had picnic tables set up in the barn, and there was cole slaw, fresh patties of sausage, and the first sweet corn of the year, picked an hour or two earlier, just dozens of feet from the barn. You didn't have to be Presbyterians to go; it seems like everybody went, and it was a really nice social event, as well as some really good eating.

The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,--
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.

That's the God I find easiest to worship. Not the God that brings Hurricane Katrina. Not the God that allows drunk drivers to run into school busses, leaving kids quadriplegics. The God of tomatoes, the God of sweet corn, the God of butternut squash and fresh pork sausage with maple syrup. There may be no atheists in foxholes, but there aren't even any agnostics around the supper table. As Lyle Lovett sang in his song, "Church":

To the Lord let praises be
It's time for dinner now let's go eat
We've got some beans and some good cornbread
Now listen to what the preacher said
He said to the Lord let praised be
It's time for dinner now let's go eat

Other Bloggers On These Subjects:
arabber - field corn - Frankie Laine - fraud - huckster - Lyle Lovett - pie tins - presbyterians - schwann - sweet corn