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K: How do they prepare it, do you know?
R: Fried. Well, at least that's the way I ate it.
He said there was never anything like famine or thought
of famine. The only thing that might worry you in the
Everglades then--he was born in the 1920s--was the idea of
what white men might do. "My father's work was hunting,"
Buffalo said. "Most of the men folks in the village would
go away for two weeks to a month at a time on hunting trips.
Before they would ever go away, they would collect all the
firewood they could find for their wives and children.
They would get plenty of meat in--usually turtles or birds
or fish. They would salt the meat, dry it in the sun, then
it would keep in vats. Sometimes they smoked the meat, and
it would keep longer. Also, they usually smoked sweet pota-
toes, and then they would keep a long time.
While the men got the meat, their wives and mothers
would prepare groceries for their husbands. They would
roast corn they grew in corn garden plots, and then grind
it to make sofkee, which is something like grits but tastes
a little different and better than grits. When I was little
we used very little stuff that we bought from white men.
What we bought was cloth material, salt, and a little bit
of flour and lard."
I had a feeling after we got that panic in the fifties
on the atom bomb that of all places I would run to if my
world and railroads and communications blew up, I would run
to the 'Glades. What I would lay in would be enough of those
small gigs and long spears, because you can gig so many gar-
fish, and they are tasty, no matter how they look to us.
Anybody could live on garfish. It is a well-rounded diet.
K: The account that you read, which goes back to the twenties,
mentioned turtles a lot. Are they still abundant in the
Everglades as a food source?
R: Yes, yes. Buffalo said they always liked turtle meat very
much. You know, these are freshwater turtles. The kind that
sit on the logs, and they're still sitting' out there. And
they always liked alligator tails, but oddly enough....
K: Alligator tails??
R: Oddly enough, they never ate turkeys.. They always thought
turkeys were a white man's bird. When you come to think of
it, it needs an oven, and these people are great...in Buffalo's