When I was a kid, my dad, a traveling salesman, came home on the weekends. He drove all over the South, mostly small towns far from cities, from North Carolina to Florida and all the way to Mississippi.

Whenever he went through the Florida Panhandle and the Gulf Coast of Alabama he sometimes brought home oysters. Tired with roadburn, he’d pull into the driveway on a Friday evening and open the trunk of his old Mercedes diesel to reveal a bushel of Apalachicola oysters in a big burlap sack. We’d stand in the driveway in the twilight and eat them right out of the trunk.

Then we’d haul them around back in a wheelbarrow and invite all the neighbors over. Steam some on the grill under the same wet burlap, eat more raw. Oyster stew. Fried oysters. Oysters for days.

A great article in

The Bitter Southerner

 

“He beat the guy with a baseball bat, set him up in a rocking chair, and then shot him,” Brent says. “You might not want to get that graphic. You could just say it didn’t end well.”