“If y’all are going to Craig’s, I’m coming with you.”
My friend Sam looked up from his conversation a bit startled. “You like Craig’s BBQ?”
The four of us—my husband and I and our friends Sam and Natalie—were in the beer garden of Dickey-Stephens Park watching a Travelers game. It was the kind of humid summer night where you endure the steam coming off your funnel cake despite your shorts-clad legs sticking to the aluminum bleachers and the unflattering field lights emphasizing the hair stuck to your sweaty forehead.
Erik and I had been discussing Craig’s that very morning. I had had Craig’s only once at that point and was craving a return trip. That one time happened a few weeks before, on our way back from The Oxford American fundraising event in Clarksdale, Mississippi. My husband pulled off the highway toward DeVall’s Bluff and the BBQ shack that has been in business since the 1940s, saying, “I’m not sure you’re going to like this, but it’s worth a shot.”
Now, this is not a story about BBQ, nor am I a food writer, so I won’t get sidetracked trying to describe the amazing diced-apple coleslaw or the tangy sauce wrapped up along with sliced meat and a bun in wax paper Sharpied with mild, medium or hot sauce, whichever you choose.
Natalie had never experienced Craig’s and isn’t a frequent consumer of meat. We spent rest of that hot night absentmindedly watching the game, drinking beer and discussing nuances of BBQ, Southern food and meat while planning a road trip to DeVall’s Bluff the next day.
On Saturday, around 10 am, we met in the North Little Rock parking lot in front of a strip of buildings housing a Barnes & Noble and Chili’s Restaurant, among other things. Natalie, Sam and I went in to Barnes & Noble. Sam disappeared among the stacks of books, and we headed for coffee.
Once we’d squeezed ourselves into Erik’s fuel-efficient car, Sam pulled out a book he had just purchased, and we headed south while he read to us in a voice that wouldn’t be out of place for a reporter on the NPR show “This American Life.”
The hour-and-a-half trip passed quickly enough. We distracted Natalie from her trepidations about BBQ with the promise of pie from Mary’s Pie, a one-woman pie shop in a dilapidated building right across the two-lane highway from Craig’s, with “Pie Shop” spray-painted in black on a white-washed cinderblock building.
The BBQ was everything I remembered. Driving back, I realized that our weekend was spent at a few of the places that now represent Arkansas and the rest of the Mid-South: a baseball game with humidity and bugs, big-box retailers and chain restaurants and, finally, a historic restaurant in rural Arkansas with a road trip to match. I recommend this series of events to anyone. It turns out that my day in Little Rock provided me with a weekend of Arkansas.