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" At first I thought  they messed up my order because I was like, &amp;quot;What the fuck is that?&amp;quot; as I stared into a Styrofoam container at Bud&amp;#039;s Snack Bar in Tunica, Mississippi. Inside there was a lump wrapped in some kind of a wax paper, tied together with what looked to me like a tampon string. I was really specific when I told the girl working behind the counter I wanted a tamale. She said okay, then asked how many. I told her one, she said they don&amp;#039;t serve only one, and before I could even ask her why not, she said they sell them by the dozen, half dozen, or I can buy just three for three dollars, since they come in a bundle. I told her I&amp;#039;d take three.  I then asked the girl if in fact that thing inside the white Styrofoam container was a tamale. I&amp;#039;m no connoisseur, but to me it looked absolutely nothing like any tamale I&amp;#039;d ever seen before.  Apparently, it was.  When I think of Mississippi, I think Southern accents and how the hell do you spell that? I don&amp;#039;t think tamales. When I think tamales, I think Mexico and Mexicans. I have yet to meet a Mexican with a Southern accent. So tamales in Mississippi to me sounds about as logical as pierogies at Benihana.  But they&amp;#039;re on the menu at Bud&amp;#039;s Snack Bar in Tunica. And Stewart&amp;#039;s Quick Stop in Cleveland. And Teal&amp;#039;s Onward Store in Onward. Most of the tamales are stuffed with spicy beef or pork and corn dough. Some come wrapped up in corn shucks, some in wax or hot-tamale paper. Some are sold out of small wooden shacks the size of port-a-shitters, some out of carts on the side of the road, some out of trailers, some out of caf\u00E9s, some out of houses. They&amp;#039;re sold all over the Mississippi Delta, on what&amp;#039;s become known as the tamale trail.  But here&amp;#039;s the thing: Nobody here seems to know -- or really care -- how they got here. They just are.  When I left Bud&amp;#039;s, I saw a bunch of black guys trying to stay warm next to a burn barrel. The neighborhood looked like the ideal place to shoot a Tom Waits video: decrepit, beat-to-hell one-stories that in any other city would have been condemned. The yards were decorated with mixed furniture and dead vehicles. I asked the guys around the barrel about the origins of tamales. The one sitting on a cement block enjoying a lunchtime Busch tall can said, &amp;quot;I tell you what, you tell us what they originally from, from what you know. You the journalist.&amp;quot; Okay. So I did. I told them, &amp;quot;From the research I did online, the Mexicans -- &amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yup, the Mexicans,&amp;quot; he said while nodding.  So I continued. &amp;quot;Years back, they introduced them to the -- &amp;quot; I paused because I didn&amp;#039;t know what to say. Do I say &amp;quot;black people&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;African-Americans&amp;quot;? I grew up in the nineties at a time when political correctness was forced down our throats at gunpoint in school, so I wasn&amp;#039;t quite sure what to do. I said, &amp;quot;To, you know, the people here. Cotton was real big back then so they introduced the tamales to the cotton pickers.&amp;quot; After taking a swig, he told me that sounded about right from what he&amp;#039;s heard.  But the guy next to him didn&amp;#039;t agree. He said, &amp;quot;Our people! Black people! They did, and did it with a shook, a corn shuck. That&amp;#039;s the way we did and my mama used to did it.&amp;quot; He went on to tell me that it had to be the black people that brought tamales to the Delta. They are the best cooks. It just doesn&amp;#039;t make sense any other way.   It took me longer than expected to find Mrs. Rosetta Ervin&amp;#039;s place in Sledge because I completely missed my exit, thanks to being so absorbed by some pastor on the radio giving himself a heart attack over gay marriages and &amp;quot;reproductive choice.&amp;quot; But when I finally found the long dirt road leading to her house, Mrs. Ervin escorted me to the back where she makes her hot tamales. With a gentle voice, she told me that they still do it the old-school way, by hand -- not by machine like so many others do now -- because &amp;quot;we just can&amp;#039;t afford to buy one.&amp;quot;  I was glad they still did it by hand, because a machine might have put Ritchie Armstrong out of work, and I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;d ever want to see that happen. He was sitting at a newspaper-covered table, head cocked slightly to the left, toothpick placed above his right ear. With probably the softest hands in all of Mississippi, he grabbed a square of wax paper and dipped it into a steel pot of water. Mrs. Ervin, standing proudly to the side, informed me that &amp;quot;you can&amp;#039;t use just any paper, you have to use the hot-tamale paper, because they have to be cooked.&amp;quot; Ritchie placed the paper down on the green plate in front of him, dipped his left hand back in the pot filled with water, then gently over to the pot filled with meal, sprinkling the right amount of meal onto the wax paper. With his right hand, he grabbed a small scoop of the meat mixture, rolled that up like a cigar on the wax paper, then, with both hands, rolled the tamale up, folded one end, and placed it next to the others in perfect single file off to the right.  Every single one of them looked the same, and if I had one of those drug-dealer scales with me, I&amp;#039;d bet money that they all would have weighed exactly the same.  After rolling another perfect tamale and setting it down uniformly, Ritchie told me, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know no secrets on how to do it right, but years of doing it you get better at it. What I was really good at when I first started was tying them, but now I&amp;#039;m good at both tying and rolling, but I guess as the years go, practice makes perfect.&amp;quot;  Mrs. Ervin didn&amp;#039;t know how tamales came to the Delta, but she did know how she came to sell them. Her late husband, Mr. Louis Ervin, knew a good thing when he tasted it. During a trip to Arkansas in 1966, he purchased a recipe off a gentleman there and brought it back with him. Mrs. Ervin has been selling them ever since. I looked around the room and noticed that there was no television or radio, so I asked Ritchie, who was still in the &amp;quot;zone,&amp;quot; what he thinks about when he&amp;#039;s sitting back here rolling up the tamales, since it looked like the chore was therapeutic for him. While still rolling, he shyly told me, &amp;quot;Well, children, hanging out with my bros . . . a whole lotta stuff.&amp;quot;   One thing I noticed about Mississippi is that people have a staring problem. And that&amp;#039;s not paranoia -- that&amp;#039;s the way it is, no matter where you go or what you do. This reminded me of some advice I was given the evening before from a guy I met at a bar in Memphis. I told him I was going to the Delta. He told me, &amp;quot;Whatever you do, don&amp;#039;t tell people you&amp;#039;re from California. They are going to know right away just by looking at you. The police down there are no joke.&amp;quot; About a dozen stares away from Sledge, I stopped at the Ranchero, an old family restaurant in Clarksdale that&amp;#039;s a block or two away from the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. He may also have bought some tamales around here. (He wrote about them in his song from 1936 &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re Red Hot&amp;quot;: Hot tamales and they&amp;#039;re red hot, yes she got &amp;#039;em for sale.) After ordering a few tamales at the bar, I made my way uninvited to a table. I figured if anyone would know the deal with tamales, these older guys would. I was quickly informed that &amp;quot;this is a coffee club.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;We basically Caucasians, and we just share some ideas,&amp;quot; said one of the guys. &amp;quot;Some people ask what all y&amp;#039;all talk about, and I say, Well, we don&amp;#039;t and we can&amp;#039;t tell you what&amp;#039;s really happening today because the media&amp;#039;s all mixed up, but we sure can tell you what we used to be&amp;quot; -- they all laughed out loud at this -- &amp;quot;and that&amp;#039;s what we dwell on.&amp;quot; We talked for a bit -- two of them were farmers, one an M.D., one a politician. Getting straight down to business, I brought up the subject of tamales.  &amp;quot;When I was three years old -- that was seventy-three years ago -- I remember tamales on the street in Lula, Mississippi,&amp;quot; Mr. Youngblood told me. &amp;quot;When I was a kid, Mexicans were selling them on little tamale carts.&amp;quot;  The other farmer at the table, Mr. Garst, remembered the same: &amp;quot;We had a tamale cart, Chili Joe -- he was a Mexican and he rode his cart all over town. He made good tamales, too. He had a bicycle-type cart with wheels on it, and he moved that thing around town, and he had regular customers. You know, the stores and people who worked, and people come out and buy a bucket of &amp;#039;em hot tamales. He done good.&amp;quot;  Then they just started talking among themselves. &amp;quot;Hicks sells tamales down there, down the road. That&amp;#039;s what the president eat, wasn&amp;#039;t it? Clinton, them hot tamales?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He eat tamales from Hicks?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I think Hicks sends him tamales on a regular basis.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah, you have to ask them about that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;He stripped the corn and ate the whole thing.&amp;quot; At this I told them that where I&amp;#039;m from -- California -- they use corn husks as well. My tape recorder, its gears humming quietly, recorded nothing but dead air for about five whole seconds.   I pulled into theparking lot of Hicks and sat in my car for a minute or two and watched two guys walk up to the drive-through window. I don&amp;#039;t know how many times I&amp;#039;ve tried to order food at McDonald&amp;#039;s or Burger King on foot or bicycle and been rejected for not being in an automobile, but here at Hicks they seem pretty cool serving everybody. Behind the counter was a montage of various Bill Clinton photographs titled, &amp;quot;President Clinton&amp;#039;s Historic Visit to Hicks Superette and Clarksdale MS.&amp;quot; To the left of the counter was something resembling a shrine to Dale Earnhardt, who&amp;#039;d apparently been a fan.  Considering all the hype surrounding their tamales, I was a bit leery, but after that first bite, I could see why Hicks has gotten the reputation over the years. Like I&amp;#039;d been told earlier, &amp;quot;They good!&amp;quot; -- meaty ashell and just as spicy, served with a splash of chili and a couple packets of crackers.  &amp;quot;I found them to be good with salad, green salad, vegetable salad,&amp;quot; Mrs. Hicks told me while I ate. &amp;quot;Kind of like a taco -- mix &amp;#039;em around with that salad. They&amp;#039;re very good to me, but some people want them with cheese, spread a little cheese on them, you know, and then some want them with chili, so it&amp;#039;s just however you like it, you know.&amp;quot; Do you know how the tamales got here?  &amp;quot;Everybody asks us that. They were here from before we got born. They must have been here, because all my life I&amp;#039;ve heard about hot tamales, even as a child, but I&amp;#039;ve heard different weird stories as to how they were made, or made of.&amp;quot; I asked Mr. Hicks, who&amp;#039;s been making tamales since 1958, if the recipe has changed over the years, and he said, &amp;quot;We upgraded it quite a bit. We still have the basics of what we was taught, probably forty-nine, fifty years ago.&amp;quot; He then told me that only two people know the exact recipe: he and his son. He smiled.  He doesn&amp;#039;t want his wife having his fortune.   I thought I got lost on the way to Solly&amp;#039;s Hot Tamales in Vicksburg, so I parked my car on the side of the road in a neighborhood that reminded me of an old De Niro movie. I walked over to another parked car on the side of the road, and as I asked the individual inside if I was going the right way, I looked straight down by my shoes and noticed a couple expired 9mm brass shell casings. He told me to keep going the same way.  If not for the big yellow sign, Solly&amp;#039;s could easily be mistaken for a dirty, aluminum-sided VFW dive bar. Inside, owner Jewel McCain works behind a piece of Plexiglas separating the counter from the store. After I ordered, I asked her how she started.  &amp;quot;Well, I didn&amp;#039;t -- this man here did,&amp;quot; Jewel said, pointing to a photo. &amp;quot;Henry Solly is the one that started selling them here in Vicksburg in 1939. He was like my grandfather but no blood relation whatsoever.&amp;quot;  Then she went on to explain, &amp;quot;My mother worked with him, and she took care of him, and she knew how to do it because we kind of grew up in a way, and this is the story he told me, so I can tell you:  &amp;quot;They had a falling out, he and his daughter who worked here, and my mom was here and she stayed with him. She worked with him before that and kept on working. So we would come up on the weekends and help him make tamales, and I thought that maybe I&amp;#039;d like to continue doing this, thought why not give it a shot, so you know, that was twenty-five years ago. He taught me, he said, Use this -- don&amp;#039;t use that.&amp;quot;  What&amp;#039;s this and that? &amp;quot;Just certain ingredients.&amp;quot; Like what? &amp;quot;Well, mine, it&amp;#039;s pretty much close to everybody else&amp;#039;s, except I don&amp;#039;t use paprika. A lot of them use paprika.&amp;quot;  What the heck is paprika? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s red, it&amp;#039;s like chili powder but redder, and it helps some of them give it that red juice. We use kidney fat and get the grease off it, and that&amp;#039;s what we use. Because that&amp;#039;s the way he was taught, that&amp;#039;s what he told me -- you use this -- and I&amp;#039;ve never changed anything, and I do it exactly like how he told me. He was like eighty-something years old when I started doing this, or older, and he&amp;#039;s one of those old people that when they said do it, you didn&amp;#039;t argue, you didn&amp;#039;t ask questions, you just do what they told you to do.&amp;quot; Then she told me that he was a hobo for a while. I got a bit excited at that because I think hobos are cool for some reason.  &amp;quot;Yes, he was,&amp;quot; she told me very matter-of-factly. &amp;quot;And he said that in his travels he came across this man in one of these places he was in that had a broken arm, and he was selling hot tamales. And he needed a job, so he asked the man if he would let him work for him.&amp;quot; So he worked for him, said Jewel. Then one day when the man was gone, he decided to make the tamales himself. &amp;quot;When the man came back, he said that he was just kind of mad. He was like, Who did this? And he said, I did. And he said the man tasted it, and he said, From now on, you do it.&amp;quot; So Solly stayed for a while, making tamales with the old man. Then he got married and began moving around a lot. But soon enough he got tired of moving. He wanted to settle down with his wife.  So he asked his wife, Jewel continued, &amp;quot;he said, Mama, what do you think about going to Vicksburg and making tamales? She said, Okay, if that&amp;#039;s what you want to do, that&amp;#039;s what you want to do. So they came to Vicksburg, and he went to the local grocery and told them who he was and what he wanted to do. He said, I don&amp;#039;t have any money -- would you let me have a little credit? He said, I&amp;#039;m going to make them tamales and if they sell, I&amp;#039;ll come back and pay my bill. And the man agreed. So he went home, and he made the tamales, and that&amp;#039;s it.&amp;quot; After that, Jewel gave me a brief tour of her tamale shop. She showed me the pot where they cook them and showed me how they like to stack their tamales in the pot vertically on top of each other, rather than horizontally like all the others cook their tamales. It gives it more flavor when you cook them this way, she told me, and then she showed me the machine she uses to roll her tamales, which made me think of Ritchie Armstrong&amp;#039;s fingers.    I spent the night in Vicksburg at the Battlefield Inn, a cool Civil War-themed hotel decorated with two framed portraits of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh next to the lobby bar. Outside they have several Civil War-era cannons, which I assume at one time were used to kill Yankees but now spend their retirement as lawn decorations strategically placed pointing outward toward the other hotels in the surrounding area. In the hotel bar, I had the pleasure of witnessing a local wearing a hunting-cammo ball cap, a T-shirt, a flannel lumberjack shirt, a belt buckle, jeans, and construction boots up there on the karaoke stage emotionally singing from memory Simon &amp;amp;amp; Garfunkel&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;The Sound of Silence.&amp;quot;  The girl working behind the bar at the Battlefield Inn had a Southern drawl, and I immediately fell in love with how she said and ended every sentence with the word sweetheart, which, for some reason, got me to drink and stay at the bar for a lot longer than I intended. Just to double-check, I asked her if Vicksburg was at the bottom of the Mississippi Delta, and she thought about it for a second and then said, &amp;quot;Why, yes it is. I think so, sweetheart.&amp;quot;   There was one last place I wanted to check out before calling it quits -- some place called Meals on Wheels. So with a massive hangover and &amp;quot;Hello, Darkness, my old friend&amp;quot; stuck in my head, I struck out the following morning to Yazoo City. It was about 11:00 A.M. when I pulled up next to a tamale trailer. There was a sign on the road advertising their specialty and signs all over the trailer saying that it was open.  After banging on the back of the tamale trailer for a couple seconds, I finally heard a voice (which sounded a bit like the comedian Katt Williams) say, &amp;quot;Hold on a second,&amp;quot; followed by what sounded to me like somebody just now waking up. A couple seconds later, I heard a voice say hello from the thick black screen in the window, but I couldn&amp;#039;t see a face.  I had no idea who the hell I was talking to, so I asked for an order of tamales. He apologized and said that he was completely sold out. So I asked if it was cool to talk tamales with him.  &amp;quot;Yeah, uh, you see the thing about it is, I&amp;#039;m not open for business. If you come through another day, I&amp;#039;ll give you an interview, but I can&amp;#039;t do it this morning because it&amp;#039;s an inopportune time, really.&amp;quot; When I told him I was from Esquire, he said, &amp;quot;Hold on a second, I&amp;#039;m gonna step outside.&amp;quot; Now that I was able to see the face with the voice, I asked him how he got into the business.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve been in and out of tamales for thirty years, yes sir. My mother was into it, she learned how to do it, she trained me and showed me how to do it. It was just one of those kinds of things -- she had been in it for some time.&amp;quot; Do you know how tamales got to Yazoo City? &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know it,&amp;quot; he told me while lighting up a morning smoke. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s deep-er than me, it&amp;#039;s deeper than what I know about it. Tamales been around for years, probably two or three hundred years. It&amp;#039;s all over the Delta, it&amp;#039;s all over the city.&amp;quot; When I asked him about the spices, he told me, &amp;quot;Ain&amp;#039;t nobody gonna tell you nothing about their seasoning and all that. People who know how to make them tamales ain&amp;#039;t going to tell you nothing about that.&amp;quot; Why not? &amp;quot;They aren&amp;#039;t gonna learn you how to make no money. Ain&amp;#039;t nobody gonna learn you how to do that. You gotta go to school for that, to learn how to make you money.&amp;quot; He paused and said, &amp;quot;What school did you go to?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;California High School.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, where you go to college?&amp;quot; There was some confusion after I told him that I hadn&amp;#039;t. Then he asked, &amp;quot;You wanna try some of my hot tamales?&amp;quot; As he went back inside his trailer, I thought, Hey, wait a minute, don&amp;#039;t I have this guy on record telling me he didn&amp;#039;t have any? I stood there waiting as pickup trucks drove by staring at the out of towner.  When he came back out with a plastic bag of tamales, I gave him a five. After that, I got back into the car and drove around the neighborhood for a bit. It was Sunday, and I got the impression that everything around these parts closes down except for the churches. Not dressed appropriately for church, I decided to call it quits and head north.  The day after I returned home to Los Angeles, I was awakened by a knock on my front door. When I answered it, I saw that it was my neighbor. His wife is on some new reality show on Bravo, and they were having a party the following night in conjunction with the show&amp;#039;s premiere.  Not knowing anybody at the party, I pretty much spent the whole time hanging out at the punch bowl, wife at my side sternly whispering in my ear, &amp;quot;That better be the last one!&amp;quot; every time I refilled my cup.  In between cups, a lady that we had met earlier walked over with a paper plate in her hands. Eyes wide open, I asked her if that thing on it was a tamale. She said it was. I wondered if tamales were now en vogue in L. A. I asked her where she got it, and she pointed with her finger to the kitchen, where there were a couple catering people serving them. She told me that it was excellent and that I should try one. I told her I was tamale-ed out, and that I just got back from Mississippi eating nothing but tamales for a couple days straight.  &amp;quot;Tamales in Mississippi? Really? I never knew.&amp;quot; She seemed really confused. I told her I hadn&amp;#039;t known either. They just are. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a2891/restlessman0507/>