The Eternal Glory that is Ham Hocks by Randall Kenan

“Every man has a price.” —Howard R. Hughes, Jr.


My mother did not tell me about Howard Hughes' visit to Tims Creek on her deathbed; she had first mentioned that curious bit of family history several years before, while we shucked and cleaned ears of sweet corn, fresh from the fields, each kernel pearl white and sweet like candy.

“Who?” I had said, absently, thinking I had misheard her, focusing instead on how good it was going to be to boil these ears up, a bit of salt, a knob of butter—you simply couldn't get corn like this in L.A.

The radio had been playing and at the top of the news had been a report about another settlement in the ongoing battle over the will of the late, great reclusive multigazillionaire.

“Who's that?” I repeated.

“Howard Hughes,” Mama said. “Came and asked me to come to work for him.”

I didn't drop the corn, exactly, for I believed I had misheard, misunderstood, miscomprehended my mother, but I did squeeze it a tad overmuch, regrettably causing an unsightly bruise.

“What do you mean 'Howard Hughes wanted you to work for him.'?” She had my attention now.

“Oh, it was a long time ago. We were living back at the other place. In Mama's house. Your daddy was stationed in the Philippines. Your sister was just a little bitty thing.”

“Mama?”

“Yes, baby.”

“What are you talking about?”

She gave me that look that only a woman who had taught elementary school for decades can muster:

“Howard Hughes wanted me to come work for him.”

There is a moment, when someone you've known all your born days, someone you respect beyond reason, with the force of superstition; there is a moment when that person says something so incredulous it forces you to recalibrate, rejigger, rethink the blueprints of the universe we each haul around in our heads.

Before I could say anything she said: “Oh but that was a long, long time ago. Long, long time. Before you were born.”

“Why didn't you...What? When? Mama, you're joking.”

“No.” She picked up another ear of corn. “Mr. Thompson sure grew some pretty corn this year, didn't he?”

“Mama?”

“What?”

“What did Howard Hughes...” I paused, not certain if I wanted to know the answer to the question I was about to ask. “What did Howard Hughes want you to do for him?”

She laughed, that laugh I now miss so much; girlish, eyes closed, involving the shoulders, not quite coquettish but somehow apology and delight at the same time.

“He wanted me to come cook for him. Can you believe that? The richest man in the world. Shoot.”


My abandonment of high finance for food was not gradual. In fact it came to me in a dream, very Old Testament prophet-like. Alone in my bed in my Riverside Drive apartment, I smelled a powerful aroma, so powerful from my childhood (neurologists say that smell hallucinations are a telltale sign of schizophrenia, but I was well past the age of a psychotic break; past the average age, at least). In my dream I arose and walked to the kitchen, and there on the butcher's block (I didn't actually own a butcher's block at the time, but it seemed right that I would, in this olfactory dream of mine), the sumptuous spread glistened and steamed, foods from my North Carolina boyhood undreamt of on the Upper West Side. Chitlins. Pig feet. Sweet breads. Chicken feet. Gizzards and livers and head cheese. There were sweet potatoes and tomatoes and collard greens and okra and squash and, yes, sweet corn.

Before long in walked a woman, naked, save for one of those pirate hats with the great plumes, jutting up and out and over, vividly red it was and full and large, which, altogether, is undeniably sexy, and which, for this narrative would be a digression—needless to say when I awoke it was the aromas, the sights, the warm feelings of the food that lingered with me most.

I waited for a decent hour before I called my mother.

“Can you tell me how you cook your chicken livers?”

“Baby, why are you cooking chicken livers at 6:30 in the morning? I thought you just had a bagel and coffee for breakfast.”

“I know, Ma, I know. I just had a craving. Now, come on, talk me through it.”

Thus began what my bosses called a slow descent, but my future teachers called an upward spiral. I can mark the day, practically the hour. Thereafter I would call home almost daily, often before shopping and while cooking, to pick my mother's brain and to get her advice. I would go home more frequently to watch her in action, to see how she washed the greens, to see what she put in the water with her hog maws, to learn her seasonings, her timing, her heat. I was learning a new definition of love.


Between my dad's love of history and my mom's love of learning in general and her wide reading it's not hard to figure out how I'd chosen law. Investment banking was not quite so obvious, but after five years I knew the world of bonds and stocks and mergers and acquisitions weren't in the stars for me.

When I told Mama I was quitting Drexel and had been admitted into a top-flight culinary school in Vermont, her sigh of apparent relief made me smile and made me feel a quantity of relief myself.

Allene Gano Hughes died during childbirth. She was 39 years old. Her only son, Howard, was away at a high-tone California prep school at the time. The separation had been difficult, initially, between mother and son, for they had a strange, some would say unnaturally close, relationship. They shared a mania for cleaning and a barely-kept-in-check hypochondria. The call to inform his son of his mother's death was probably the most difficult thing Howard Robard Hughes, Senior, had ever had to do in his life.

By all accounts, though not a particularly good man, a man who found it difficult to keep his penis in his pants when it came to other women, a man who preferred to be away from home most of the time, his love for his wife and child were, nonetheless, genuine. He was good at the love part. And he was even better at business.

Originally a wildcat Texas oilman of middling accomplishments, Daddy Hughes one day realized there might be some serious cash money in building a better drill bit. What he dreamed up became a dream for the oil business and his rewards were mighty. At the time of Junior's birth in 1905 the Hughes Tool Company had made of his father the American Dream whose wife was old Texas aristocracy, and who could virtually give his son the whole world.

Howard, Sr., built a sprawling brick mansion on Yoakum Boulevard in Houston's well-heeled Southside in 1910. After Allene's funeral, young Howard returned to the Thacher School in California, but Howard, Sr., wanted his son back in HoustonYoakum Boulevard, where young Howard would meet a young woman, age 30 at the time, a woman hired not long after his mother's death, a woman who would cook and clean for him. with him. The father argued with the school's head master who thought being away, with boys his own age, learning, would be far better for the boy than to be at home with an overly indulgent father. But after a year Howard R. Hughes, Sr. got his way and his 17-year-old son returned to his side at the massive house on

Inez Cross. Later Inez Cross Pickett. My grandmother.


My mother never got to see my restaurant in California. I think she would have appreciated it. I cooked for her, during those last years, showed her what the L.A. papers had dubbed Nouvelle Soul Cuisine without my prompting or blessing but little objection. Her favorite was my candied yams. She did not approve of my collard greens. And though she found my Frenchified calf's livers admirable, my version of her chicken livers she found incomprehensible.

I could tell she was trying not to hurt my feelings.

“Hmmmmm,” she said, “How much do you charge for this one?”

When I told her she asked, “And you sell a lot of them, do you?”

“Yes, ma'am, a good many.”

“Hmmmmmm, now these chitlins are so creamy. So good.”


In 1966 there was only one motel in Crosstown, which was the closest lodging in proximity to the wee village of Tims Creek.

Completed just the year before, the Crosstown Inn and Motor Lodge was modest by almost any standard, all painted cinder block and particle board and veneer and an unfortunate nautical theme that had yet to be consigned to the dustbin of interior decorating; only 14 units, seven equipped with two twin beds, and seven with a double each; the diner, busiest in the morning with its fried egg and ham special, was where the owner, John Bradham, earned his mortgage. The rooms were mostly used by the rare out-of-towner here to see someone in the county jail or by families en route to the beaches, another 50 miles east.

Which is why, when the two tall men in black suits arrived, driving their brand-new and shiny black Lincoln with the California license plates, and snooping around, looking in places your average, run-of-the-mill motel overnighter never looks—it more than puzzled John Bradham. But that puzzlement would be surpassed when, bright and early, the tall blond-headed fellow came to the front desk and informed Mr. Bradham of the desire on the part of a certain unknown “employer” to purchase the place, lock, stock and diner. The monetary figure that the blond-headed man in the black suit with the impressively narrow black tie offered was four times what Bradham had owed to the First Mercantile Savings and Loan, and yet, so dumbfounded, so incredulous, so perplexed was Mr. Bradham that he—after managing to pick his bottom lip up from the floor—simply said: “Well, I'm just going to have to think on that. Can you let me tell you tomorrow?”

The young blond-headed man—himself a poor shopkeeper's son from a small town in northern Utah, who found this verdant, humid East Coast hamlet peculiar to say the least, beheld the small-town businessman with something resembling awe. And even admiration. Who could say no to that kind of money?

That is exactly what Noah Dietrich had asked over the telephone line, when the young man made his report. Dietrich said that along with a set of choice words that offended the young Mormon's pristine sensibilities. Dietrich was the man who ran Howard Hughes' far-flung empire, and who some believe was responsible for making him a billionaire.

“Who does that little hillbilly think he is?” (Yes, Dietrich called John Bradham a hillbilly, which, for the record, demonstrates a deficiency in geographic knowledge on Dietrich's part—York County is in the coastal plain, and there are no hills there.)

Dietrich was a busy man at the moment, even busier than usual. He had just presided over the forced sale of his employer's stake in TransWorld Airlines, TWA, which had, nonetheless, netted the Texan over half a billion dollars. And now Dietrich's boss had moved to Las Vegas and was buying casino after casino after casino as if casinos were going the way of the saber-toothed tiger. Even more aggravating was the little fact that the mysterious heir had locked himself up in a suite at the Dunes and was only seeing his Mormon bodyguards; not even his wife was allowed to see him.

Dietrich was busy. Dietrich was preoccupied. Dietrich was mystified. Dietrich had his hands full. And now Howard Hughes wanted to go to Bumfuck, North Carolina? Jesus H. Christ on a tricycle!

“Every mutherfucker has a price,” the boss always liked to say.

When Noah Dietrich told the young blond-headed man in the black suit to go back to John Bradham, that very minute, and when he told the upright Mormon how much to offer the thrifty Scots-Irish businessman, it literally made the Latter-Day Saint to commence to sweat. He was sweating when he presented the offer; he was sweating when Bradham said: “If you want it that bad, just show me the moolah and you can have my wife too for that kinda money. Hell, take my daughter too. Hot dog I reckon! And by the way, who do you work for again?”

“I'm sorry, sir, but my employer wishes to remain anonymous.”

This is how Howard Robard Hughes, Jr., kept his visit to Tims Creek, North Carolina, in the fall of 1966, a secret. For, after having set a very well paid private investigator on the trail, looking for one Negress named Inez Pickett (née Cross) and she was located, and after he sent an agent to purchase the pissant motel to be prepared for his brief visit—(this sum, by the way, for Hughes, who was, at the time pulling down roughly $50-60 million dollars per annum, the sum he spent to buy the Motor Lodge was far less than what he off-handedly give for a single, second hand jet)—and after a team of workers drove up from Georgia, directly from the Lockheed plants with whom he had a long-standing and oh-so-lucrative relationship; and after they modified a few rooms to be acceptable to the boss's strict parameters—all of this happened within the course of a week, seven days—then and only then could he himself helm a DC-3 with his retinue in tow (who, to a man, and they were all men, all Mormons, for the record, really hated it when the employer decided to pilot himself, and them; he didn't really inspire a great deal of aviatory confidence during those strange and stranger days), and a week after hatching the notion to find Inez Cross did he, shaven, pressed, fresh-looking and ever-so-charming—show up at the door of my mother.

Her mother, Inez Cross Pickett, had died in 1963.


After his mother's death, young Howard was never quite comfortable in the Yoakum Boulevard mansion. Not only was he haunted by memories of his mother, but of a simpler, freer and less complicated time, and of his mechanical explorations: like the time his dad allowed him to purchase a brand-new car, and to take it completely apart and put it back together again.

The courses he was taking at the Rice Institute were fun enough, but nothing seemed to scratch this itch he had. He didn't even know where to scratch.

The house had only a bare-bones staff. Despite Senior's desire to get his son back home, he still traveled extensively. Leaving his son alone in the many-roomed house with his many-man-sized toys and many-footed staff. Teenaged Howard was not the sort to befriend the help.

The problem arose when Inez did the cooking.

“What the hell is this?”

“I'm sorry?” Inez had said, coming out of the kitchen into the dining room with the imposing table where sat the frowning scion.

“What is this?”

“It's fried chicken, Mr. Hughes.” She was by all accounts a tall woman, thin, yet imposing, sure of herself, with a farmer's daughter's droll humor.

“No. No. No. That! What is that!”

Inez had been left to her own devices when it came to the meals and shopping. When she was first hired, Annette, Allene Hughes' sister, Howard's aunt, set her up and familiarized her with the place. H.R.H., Sr., was a steak and potatoes man. In fact he resented overly fancy food, the sort favored by his late wife and her ilk. Despite his desire to be counted among their number, he still thought of himself, at root, as a wildcatter, a man among men. A Texan. A beef eater.

Taking her cue from the father, Inez kept the meals simple, and in the process reverted to her down east North Carolina ways.

“What is it?” He was pointing toward a mound of lime green on his plate with chunks of reddish flesh afloat amongst its shapely lumps.

“Butterbeans. They were on sale and–

“On sale?.Butter. Beans. Well....okay. I see....” He poked the beans with his fork, as if they were somehow alien. He sampled them as if they were rumored to do some magical thing like cure heartbreak. After a few quizzical chews and a swallow he proclaimed:

“Not bad. Not bad at all.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And is this ham? You put ham in the beans? And butter too? I don't quite understand...”

“That's ham hock, sir. You put ham hocks in the vegetables to season 'em up good. No butter. Just ham hocks.”

“Fascinating,” Howard said, and went back to studying an engine diagram while eating absentmindedly as always, completely forgetting about my grandmother.


How my grandmother—whom I never met—a young African American woman born in a teeny North Carolina town in 1892, found herself in Houston, Texas, in the 1920s, I've yet to discover. There are suggestions that she was following a man—a man who did not become my grandfather. Rumors of following a family to Texas to work for them; rumors of a job offer. Ultimately I have no clue as to how much experience she had cooking for the well-to-do, or how good she was at it.


On January 14, 1924, Howard Hughes, Sr., dropped dead. At 19 young Howard was thirsting to be his own man; he had no intentions of waiting two years for his majority to kick in. Therefore, he had his lawyers quickly buy out his relatives' inherited interest in Hughes Tool Company, to a one, thus making it completely and totally his, and, more important, he convinced a judge to declare him an adult. By June he had married a Houston aristocrat—like his mother—to silence any naysayers about his prematurely acquired mantle of manhood. He moved to Hollywood, and later that same year he hired Noah Dietrich. The house on Yoackum Boulevard was closed up, the staff let go. Junior never said good-bye to Inez Cross. A lawyer handed her her final check.

According to my mother, my sister found a particular fascination with Howard Hughes' shoes. Odd, when you figure she would one day become a buyer for Nordstrom's. Hughes was 61 and unaccustomed to dealing with anyone who didn't work for him and who largely feared him. Three-year-old black girls simply didn't figure into his cosmology.

“I'm really sorry to hear about your loss, ma'am. She was a fine lady. Nineteen-sixty-three, did you say?”

“Yes, sir. She died just after Christmas.”

Hughes remained silent and the silence grew long and uneasy.

“Can I get you something, Mr....I'm sorry. What was your name again?”

“Hughes, ma'am, Howard Hughes. I'm a Junior. Your mother, she worked for my father. And me.”

“I see, Mr. Hughes. Let me get you some iced tea. —Veronica! Leave that man's shoelaces alone! Come here—I'm so sorry, Mr. Hughes.”

That done, sweaty glass of iced tea in his hand, the awkward silence returned.

“So, Mr. Hughes, is there anything I can do for you?”

Hughes put down his glass. “Mrs. Cross...I mean Pickett—”

“Actually, I'm a Phelps now. My husband, he's stationed in the Philippines at the moment. He's a mechanic in the Army.”

Hughes' eye lit up at the word “mechanic,” but a harsh, single-minded, pragmatic look took over his brow: “Do you cook, ma'am?”

“Of course I do, but—”

“Now, see here. I'll get right to the point, Mrs. Phelps. I'm not a man to dilly and dally around if you get my meaning.

“See, your mama she use to cook for me, see. Right after my dear mama passed. And, well, I'll tell you, Mrs. Phelps, that was about the most—how do I put it? —the most memorable food I've had in all my born days. Unusual. Satisfying. Like nothing I'd had before, or, to be honest, since. Now, I'm not the sort of man who spends a lot of time thinking about food, myself. Take after my paw like that. But your mama's cooking...well...” Howard Hughes stood up, as if the need to pace had over come him, but when his head came so close to the ceiling, he seemed to think better of it and sat back down. But now, perching on the edge of the seat, his large frame cast a shadow upon the room.

“To be completely honest I didn't really appreciate it so good while she was there, but after she left it kinda lingered, if you get my meaning. Never had a biscuit quite like hers, you see. In fact, I think I can honestly say hers was the first biscuit to cross these here lips. You see. Recently here I've been hankering, if that's exactly the word I want, hankering for her cuisine something fierce.”

It took my mother a while to receive and digest what the industrialist—whom to her, at the moment, was just some tall, white fellow, a little strange, who, clearly, in his better days had enjoyed charm and good luck, but who now was riding on the steam of his money, and who obviously had more of that commodity than he had any clue what to do with.

“Well,” Mama said, “I'm sure she would have been proud and happy to know you liked her cooking so, Mister. Proud and happy.”

“Mrs. Phelps, I would like for you to come back with me. Back to Nevada, where I've recently taken up residence, and cook for me. The food your mama use to cook.”

My mom laughed. She always laughed when she got nervous. Cook? Nevada? Me? This was simply too too much.

“Don't worry, I'll make it worth your while. Yes sirree, Bob.” Hughes then called out a sum that made my mother stop laughing.

“Excuse me,” she said, “you can't be serious.”

Hughes doubled the figure, with a casual, imperious air, meant to indicate how little money meant to him, but, oddly enough it had exactly the opposite effect.

My mother rose to her feet. “I'm sorry, sir. But I'm going to have to decline your offer. But I thank you.”

Hughes, undeterred, pronounced a figure that even now, in the 21st century, just seems ridiculous, an insult even. Which is exactly how my mother took it. Her eyes narrowed at him:

“Mister. My husband is overseas. I'm a school teacher with a three-year-old and another one on the way”—and she put both her hands on her big belly, on me—“Now, I don't know how you folk do things out there in Texas and California and NE-vada, but here in North Carolina, I put my family and my responsibilities first. Above all else. Above money. And frankly I don't know what kind of game you think you're running, but I don't want any part of it, and in fact I suggest it's time you were on your way.”

Hughes stood and picked up his hat. “Ma'am,” he said, “in my experience everybody has their price.”

“You don't have that much money, mister.”

At that Howard Robard Hughes, Jr., laughed. A big, loud, long, mocking guffaw. He was still chortling as he walked out the door, snickering as he got into the back seat of the Lincoln, chuckling as it drove away down the dirt road and vanished into the ether.

Apparently Hughes didn't intend on giving up that easily. He sent lawyers several times over the next couple of months with contracts and sometimes with checks, once with a bag of money. Literally. One wonders: Why didn't he just hire another chef? One of the 15,000 or so truly excellent cooks working on any given day all over the planet Earth? But this mania—one among the many he collected and harbored and cultivated like virulent viruses in the petri dish of his soul—wasn't really about food, in the end, it was about time, time lost, time gone, about remembrance, about a feeling. Money can't buy you love, a famous song says—but that's just one of the many things beyond its grasp.

In truth I can empathize about biscuits and my kinswomen.


One of my earliest childhood memories: Early June, blueberry season. My mother would macerate the plump new berries, briefly, for only a few minutes, with the slightest touch of sugar. Next, over a fire they'd go, gently heated, a slight simmer, creating the simplest of simple sugars, but somehow beatified, blessed and blessedly blue.

When sopped up with one of those steam-white and steam-light biscuits created with cold butter just before the first rooster awoke, the resultant reaction in-mouth arrested the tongue and captured the brain.

For a boy with no knowledge of sex, this basic sensual experience, firing off every nerve ending with sunshine and delight, taught me everything I would need to know about orgasms long before I ever had need for the word.


All Howard Hughes' real estate holdings were owned by the Summa Corporation, which, years after his will was settled, was finally sold to the Rouse Company. When I last checked, they still owned the Crosstown Inn and Motor Lodge, and the place hasn't changed much. The eggs are still greasy, the ham tough as shoe leather, the coffee fit for removing toilet clogs.


Daddy did well as a plumber, very well indeed, over the years. And Mama got her Master's degree—it took many years of driving back and forth to East Carolina University twice a week. She became a principal of the local elementary school, and for a few years before she retired, she was a county school supervisor.

When I asked her why she turned Hughes down, she said, merely, “I didn't like the smug way he asked. Like he could buy and sell folk on a whim. Besides, if he was going to pay somebody that kind of money—which I simply, simply couldn't begin to believe—for somebody to stir him up some shrimp and grits—I know he had to be stone crazy.”

And when I asked why she had never talked about this rare encounter before, she said: “I didn't want your daddy to know, to be frank about it. Do you have any idea what that man would have done if he knew I'd turned down that kind of money?”