The place is made to look like an old time dinner shack - using the "House of Blues" style of architecture. Bill's Bar BQ in Wilson, NC has a slogan that comes right to the point,, "From The Squeal To The Meal." it says And they mean it. Because attached to the back of Bill's shack is stainless steel tunnel that descends about 100 yards to a large, windowless, rectangle of a building that can only be a piggie Auschwitz.
Inside Bill's, the tables have little, pink piggie salt and pepper shakers. The clock on the wall is also a piggie, it's tail pointing to the hour. But while the ribs on your plate are falling off the bone (delicious), the piggies in "Auschwitz" are being hooked through a shin and swept into an upside down position and put onto the assembly line, where automated blades quickly gut each piggie alive and send the carcasses down the line.
Wilson is a tobacco town about 60 miles from Raleigh and Diane's entire family, on her mother's side, has lived there, in the same homes, on the perimeter of a 200 acre field for 150 years.
Searching for her history, Diane and I flew to Raleigh and drove down to Wilson, hoping to find the siblings and cousins and stories that had haunted Diane's mother for 77 years.
Martha was the first member of that family to ever make it over the wall, getting out of Wilson by marrying an army band leader from Everett, MA where they both eventually settled after the war. In the home where Diane was born and where her dad still lives.
The night we drove down was especially foggy. Still, after driving around for half an hour, we found the fogbound field and the small shacks surrounding it. We sat with the car running and the headlights on for fifteen minutes.
Out of the night fog, fog so thick you could only see about ten feet ahead, came the eyes. Wide set, pale blue eyes. Eyes just like Martha's. The eyes belonged to Martha's remaining brothers and sisters; Gillium, Billy, Little Billy, Yank and the women, Daisy and Hortense. More, for a total of thirteen, were dead and buried.
We spent hours going from shack to shack and finding out what happened. Gillium showed us his shotgun collection including, I remember, a small "Ladies" shotgun. The talk was mostly about Roselle, the father whose name was new to Diane. Martha had made a point of never, ever speaking her father's name, such was the trauma.
Roselle was an alcoholic and a brutal man. He beat his wife and his children frequently, once beating Gillium nearly to death. It was obvious that the children, all now in their 70's, still feared Roselle, who, within a few years, ran off and started another family not far from Wilson, never bothering to divorce the other Martha Matthews, Diane's grandmother.
More about all this in a later post.
Interesting piece of "Americana." This editor would add a few periods and/or commas, but, as always, both content and POV make for a delightful read.
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