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A Crawfish Cook Calamity



A Crawfish Cook Calamity That warm, spring Mississippi Delta Saturday was ideal for doing anything outdoors, but the calamitous way it turned out was less than ideal. When it comes to preparing delicious, deep-south cuisine, nobody outperformed my lifelong best friend and mentor, the old black man known affectionately by all as Jaybird. When we asked him to boil several hundred pounds of crawfish, he said, “Sho’ — get the water boilin’; let’s enjoy some country-style cuttin’ up.”
Our favorite place to undertake excursions into crustacean culinary conviviality was at a grass airstrip known locally as Redneck International Airport. We men set up cooking equipment, while the women arranged tables, tents, chairs, and coolers. I kept a Piper Cub airplane at the strip. Providence was peering over Mr. Piper’s shoulder when he designed the tiny tandem-seat trainer. No aircraft is more fun to fly. The Cub was nicknamed “Freddie” in memory of my flight instructor, Fred Frazier, a legendary crop duster who used Cubs to train military pilots. As always, when word got out that Jaybird was cooking crawdads, eaters from all over showed up, and merrymaking was the order of the day. While parents kicked back and enjoyed the warm spring weather, I took kids for plane rides. Every pickup truck had a few shotguns in its rear window rack, and one of my hunting buddies came up with the idea of using empty cans tossed out of the Cub for target practice. After strapping a can-filled bucket in Freddie’s front seat, I would ascend several hundred feet and dump them above the waiting can killers. Since Cubs are piloted from the rear seat and the doors can remain open in flight, dumping the bucket was easy. When the cans floated within range of my armed amigos, they blazed away.

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Mr. Fred wore a huge ring that he rapped on students’ heads if they made dumb mistakes, one of which was failing to apply carburetor heat to avoid fuel starvation when landing. That day, he would have given my noggin a painful rap. Turning toward the strip to refill the can bucket, I forgot to apply carburetor heat. Two hundred feet above the runway, the engine died, and since the craft has no electrical ignition, my only hope was that altitude — a pilot’s best friend — wouldn’t desert me before I reached the end of the strip, precisely where the revelers were reveling. Its engine quiet and propeller motionless, the airplane swooped toward the partiers, causing them to flee in panic, like prairie dogs beset upon by a hungry hawk. After banging the ground and missing by mere inches a host of slightly-less-than-sober celebrants, the aircraft, now deprived of thrust and lift, surrendered to gravity, flopped to the ground, ping-ponged a few hops, and lurched to a stop. A gale of laughter replaced dumbstruck silence when someone quipped, “Well, famed flyboy, at least you didn’t knock over the cooking pot. Then it really would have been what it almost was: a crawfish cook calamity.”


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Jimmy Reed -- Bio and Archives

Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.

This story is a selection from Jimmy Reed’s latest book, entitled The Jaybird Tales.

Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).


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