If it was summer in Tennessee and you opened my grandmother Miz Lena’s aqua-blue Amana refrigerator, you were almost sure to find an old, dented, aluminum cooking pot with a half-broken black handle filled with fresh-washed blackberries. I picked them.
It seemed like every backyard and pasture fence had blackberries growing on them. They grew thick and wild. Sometimes the weight of the vines would swayback the fences.
I used to eat them right off the vine. Sweet and squishy. When you got up close enough, you could hear a deep-pitched buzzing sound. Bees! Honeybees and black-and-yellow bumblebees. Get too close, and they’d gang up on you. They were proprietary about their blackberries. There’s an art to picking the berries without disturbing the bees. Pick too fast or too hard, and they’d run you off.
It took me about an hour to fill up that 2-quart pot. No problem. The big payoff for me was that Elizabeth, Miz Lena’s housekeeper, would bake me a blackberry pie. I say me. Of course, the pie was for everyone, including my two younger brothers. But in my opinion, it was Elizabeth’s and my pie.
Everything Elizabeth put on a plate was the best that I ever had. Fried chicken. Plenty-of-pepper pork chops. Her thin-cut fried potatoes and okra were superb. You’d never had a pie till you put a fork in one of hers. Especially her blackberry pie.