I love Chinese food, the egg rolls, the sweet and sour pork, the sesame chicken, and the rice. White rice, brown rice, wild rice, but I just can’t bring myself to try the yellow rice. There is a reason for that.
I lost my appetite for yellow rice back during my days at dear Ole Beulah Hubbard. As much as I cherish the memories of Beulah Hubbard, there were a couple of things that could have been improved. The lunchroom food was one of them. I can’t blame the bad food on the ladies who worked in the lunchroom. They did the best they could with what they had to do with. There were only two things I could eat in the lunchroom, and those were the cheese and the rice. They used to call it Commodity Cheese. The stuff that the government gave away. Make it three, the canned applesauce was another. There is only so much, even the best of cooks can create from cheese and rice. But they tried. Bless their hearts.
How do you mess up cheese, applesauce or rice? Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And I certainly can’t blame this one on the cooks.
The rice and canned goods were stored in a small room in the gym, which joined the old lunchroom. It seemed that somebody or somebodies found that to be a convenient place to relieve themselves. It must have been some of the visiting fans. I have my suspicions, but I best keep them to myself. Contrary to popular believe, we did have indoor plumbing at BH. But maybe whoever polluted the rice became so hysterical about the whooping Beulah Hubbard was putting on them, they just didn’t have time to make to the restroom.
The principal assumed that it was us boys who were staining the little white morsels and called us into the auditorium for a long fatherly lecture. That wasn’t the first time he had called in all the boys. We figured it was going to be one of the usual subjects. Here we go again. Somebody had stolen the two metal policemen again and threw them in the creek at Little Rock or had let the air out of a school bus tire. Happened all the time. But from the look on the principal’s face, it appeared to be more serious that the usual pranks. Whatever the case, it got me out of study hall for a few minutes.
Eyes began to roll, and the snickers and giggles resonated in the room as the principal announced to the unsuspecting crowd of good ole boys why the yellow looking rice tasted funny. Needless to say, he was not happy about the rice. Snickers and giggles soon gave way to silence and angst. This was not the usual fatherly lecture. Things were getting serious. Everybody became a suspect. Whoever the culprit or culprits were had reduced the edible menu from three choices to two, applesauce and cheese.
That fatherly talk was not the last time the principal called all the boys into the auditorium but it was the most entertaining.
There is an even bigger mystery to me. Why the girls were never called into the auditorium and quizzed about the yellow rice. Of course, back in those days girls would have never been suspects in such an atrocity. However, there was one girl who was more that capable of letting air out of a school bus tire. I am still wearing a scar over my right eye from her book sack.
In all honesty, the boys were probably the culprits. If there is anyone out there who knows of somebody from Beulah Hubbard who never liked rice, please let me know who it is. That information might solve a long-standing mystery from the little school on the red clay ridge between Dennis Harrison’s corn field and J.R. Chaney’s Grocery.
Ralph Gordon of Union, Past President of the Mississippi Writers Guild and Recipient of the William Faulkner Literary Award
