30 / 60
28
MY
ROUSES
EVERYDAY
SEPTEMBER | OCTOBER 2015
the
Savings
issue
L
ast spring, I sat down for nearly two
hours with one of my heroes: Marvin
Matherne, the po-boy-maker and
proprietor of Guy’s Po-Boys in Uptown
New Orleans. I had known Marvin since
my first Guy’s Po-Boys experience fifteen
years prior, and I had interviewed him
several times for articles about the city’s
iconic sandwich. But Marvin is one of the
busiest people I know — he makes every
po-boy that leaves Guy’s kitchen.
Every
po-
boy. I had never dared ask for a two-hour
audience with him. Which is why I had
never learned that Marvin had a previous
life as a hairdresser. Or that Guy’s was
formerly a Sicilian-owned corner grocery
store. Or that once when Marvin went
to Commander’s Palace for his birthday,
Emeril Lagasse invited him into the kitchen
and personally cooked Marvin’s rabbit. Or
that Marvin eats a lot of quinoa at home.
Or that he considers every po-boy he makes
to be sacred.
We sat down for this deeper-than-usual
conversation as part of a Southern Foodways
Alliance (SFA) oral history project titled
The Lives and Loaves of New Orleans. I
made a digital recording of the interview,
and I returned a few weeks later with a
professional photographer. The interview
transcript and photos live in an archive at
the University of Mississippi at Oxford
where the SFA is part of the Center for the
Study of Southern Culture, and they also
exist for public consumption on the SFA’s
web site.
I have slowly been gathering oral history
interviews for the SFA for ten years on
topics like gumbo, boudin, sno-balls, ya-
ka-mein and most recently, po-boys. I am
also a writer, and interviewing is a large
part of that work as well. But as in the case
with Marvin, it’s always the oral history
interviews that dig the deepest and yield the
most intimate, gratifying information. I love
that these interviews will exist in perpetuity,
so that decades — even centuries — from
now, southerners can learn the history and
spirit behind their foodways through the
very voices of the people who cook, produce
and otherwise spend their days thinking
about southern food today.
As outlined in its mission statement, “The
Southern Foodways Alliance documents,
studies, and celebrates the diverse food
cultures of the changing American South.
We set a common table where black and
white, rich and poor — all who gather —
may consider our history and our future in a
spirit of reconciliation.”
It’s an organization of ideals and earnestness
and goodwill. Inclusiveness has always
been a guiding principle (see Founders
Letter sidebar), which is partly how this
Wisconsin native became an oral historian
in Louisiana.
Oral history is just one of the SFA’s
The Southern
Foodways Alliance
by
Sara Roahen