New York has its bodegas. The South has its gas stations.
When you stop for motor oil in Mississippi, you might as well grab fried chicken on a stick. In North Carolina, you can buy a steaming bowl of pozole along with batteries and a five-pound bag of White Lily flour.
There might be shawarma by the shotgun shells, or wedges of mild cheese with a hoop and packets of salt for sale at the counter along with lottery tickets and pecan pie made by the owner’s sister.
Documenting these independent Southern temples of commerce and community has become a singular focus for photojournalist Kate Medley, who, like most kids raised in Mississippi, grew up eating at rural gas stations.
Now living in Durham, NC, Ms. Medley, 42, has spent more than a decade collecting images for her photo book, “Thank You Please Come Again,” which was published by digital magazine The Bitter Southerner in December. The book began as a reporter’s curiosity, but ended up as a way for a daughter of the Deep South to understand the beautiful, brutal, complicated place she came from.
“These places hold a great mystery,” he said. “You roll down the street and they grab your visual attention. Then you wonder what’s behind that glass door when you hear that little bell ring. Is it MAGA South? The welcoming South? Who’s at the checkout? Who’s at the roast?’
A dozen years ago, Ms. Medley discovered a Citgo in Durham that had become a place in Nicaragua called Latin America Food Restaurant. He developed a theory.
“I thought I could map the emerging foodways of Southern immigrants through what was going on in the backs of these gas stations,” he said.
Some independent gas stations are fading in the fluorescent light of chains like QuikTrip and RaceTrac, with their cheap gas, hot dog rolls and endless banks of soda machines. Some gas stations are letting gas pumps run dry or removing them altogether because the local economy is so stressed. Other gas stations have become churches or nightclubs, or have been abandoned altogether.
The book opens with an essay by Southern writer Kiese Laymon, who grew up in a very different part of Jackson, Miss., than Ms. Medley. She didn’t know him when she reached out, but he immediately understood her work.
“I had never considered the fact that my favorite restaurants, as a child, as a teenager, as an adult back in Mississippi, almost all served gas,” he writes. “And I never, ever, thought of them as gas stations that served food.”
It tells the story of childhood journeys in Jr. Food Mart in Forest, Miss., on Friday nights. His grandmother’s friend, Ofa D, slipped on a Tina Turner tape and drove them in his pickup. They would order a box of dark meat chicken, a foam container of fried fish, and a brown paper bag filled with the fried potato wedges that everyone in Mississippi knows as potato wedges.
Ms. Medley realized you could study a region through its food in 2005, when she landed at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where she started a graduate program in Southern studies.
Hurricane Katrina hit the day after it started. She spent the next several months traveling the state to cover the disaster for The New York Times, her trips fueled by rural gas stations.
They often run with a Southern “let’s get it done” mentality. If customers want cakes, someone will start baking. A cashier in North Carolina figured she could make a little extra money by buying some Bojangles sausage biscuits on her way to work, marking them up and selling them to the breakfast crowd.
“It’s just that ingenuity and resourcefulness that you don’t find in other places,” Ms Medley said.
This is especially true for some gas stations run by immigrants. Ms. Medley took pictures of Nina Patel and her samosas at Tasty Tikka, inside a Shell station in Irmo, SC, and Gina Nguyen holds a garlic butter shrimp banh mi at Banh Mi Boys, which opened in a family-owned Texaco in Metairie, La.
Two weeks ago, Ms. Medley took me to a place in the middle of farmland in the Mississippi Delta that also came from an immigrant history.
Mark Fratesi’s father opened Fratesi Grocery and Service Center in 1941 in Leland. It’s a wonderland of homemade pork rinds, cabinet staples and bait, with a freezer full of frozen steaks and bags of shelled pecans. It works on the honor system. You tell the cashier what you had for lunch. If you’re local, you can put your groceries or gas on a tab.
The restaurant takes up about half the building, and the family’s Italian immigrant roots are found throughout the menu. There are grits and burgers, but also a rigatoni lunch plate and a po’ boy (their own invention) made with fried balls of chopped black olives, shredded mozzarella and seasoned breadcrumbs laced with a bit of mayo and ranch dressing. Canvas-wrapped logs of seasoned, salted pork tenderloin called lonza cure in the beer cooler.
Mr. Fratesi, 68, doesn’t think the place will last long after he retires. Already, one chain gas station down the road has cut gas prices by a penny. And no one in the next generation of the family is interested in taking over.
“You have to be married to it,” he said.
About 15 miles away in Indianola, the future is brighter.
Betty Campbell, 69, and her husband opened Betty’s Place in a former gas station about 20 years ago. The restaurant is about two blocks from the BB King Museum. Like her mother, Ms. Campbell was a regular cook for the bluesman and his crew, creating a playlist of reliable Southern standards like sweet potatoes, baked chicken and caramel cake.
The walls of the restaurant are covered with the signatures of tourists from all over the world who have come to learn about the blues. The family recently covered the old garage bays and are expanding the dining room to make room for the growing busloads of tourists.
Her younger brother Otha, who is essentially the maître d’s at Betty’s, said they like to disavow travelers’ preconceptions of racism in the South.
“Not only do black travelers see Betty’s as a safe place to stop for lunch,” she told Ms. Medley of her book, “white travelers see it as a safe place, too.”
Small Southern towns remain unofficially segregated, but not at the gas stations that sell food — or the restaurants that sell gas.
“There’s something about accessibility and that coming together in a space that’s shared by the whole community almost out of necessity or at least out of convenience,” Ms Medley said. “Everyone is welcome every time, no matter what.”
