I Was The Only One Who Liked It

When I was five years old and going to kindergarten, my mother started to work full-time so I had to live with my grandmother a couple of towns over during the week because no one was home to get me off to school.  I adored my grandmother and she did spoil me, but I missed my family.  There were five kids in our family and two working parents so there was always alot going on there.  Music would be playing, my mother was always cooking, the television was often being played too loud, all of us kids were getting yelled at for doing something, laughing, talking, running about, noise, noise, noise all the time.  But at Grandma's house, it was just the two of us and things were pretty quiet there.  She could sit in a chair for two hours and crochet in silence.  I could play outside but I didn't have my brothers and sisters to play with.  Nor did I have any of the neighborhood kids around my age that I usually played with when I was at home.  Grandma's neighborhood wasn't like our neighborhood.  There were alot of elderly people that lived there or people who had older kids that really weren't interested in playing with the little five year old up the street so I spent alot of time alone.  I was able to go home on the weekends to play with lots of kids but there was something else I got to do that had nothing to do with playing with kids.  When my father worked the 8-4 shift at the local steel mill, he would swing by my grandma's house on the way home and pick me up for a little adventure, our little adventure.  But it was only on Wednesdays.  Me and my Daddy were heading to Naperkowski's because on Wednesday, it was Kishka Day.

In our little neighborhood and before Walmart and Supercenters took over, there were little family-owned stores that had in-house butchers. Men who always had on a white shirt, white pants and a white apron. That apron always had blood on the front regardless if it was the end of the day or the first thing in the morning. As a matter of fact, I have never seen a butcher in regular clothes. Never. Naperkowski's sat on top of the hill on California Avenue, and it was one of many of these little stores that were all within walking distance of our house. These stores not only had butchers that could cut your meat, they had tons of penny candy. If you found a dime or a couple of empty pop bottles to turn in (back then you would get deposit money back for glass bottles of Coke, Pepsi or RC Cola), you could go to Naperkowski's and buy candy for you and your friends.  Life was good.


My family lived in a  neighborhood that was full of polish and slovenian descendants and there we were, a racially mixed family.  Alot of people didn't really understand exactly what we were.  My father looked white, my mother looked kinda white, my sisters were both very fair, one sister was covered in freckles, my two brothers and myself were caramel colored so most of us didn't look white and we didn't look all that black either   But, if you were to ask any of us we would say we were black.  To us, that's what we were.   But in the kitchen and with our family dinners, the black culture was alive and well.  My mother could cook up the best fried chicken, biscuits, chittlins, collard greens, grits and corn bread that neighborhood ever saw regardless if we looked black, white or purple. 

That was the food I grew up on (and cook now that I am an adult and have a family of my own) but my father was proud of the fact that I was one of the most adventurous of eaters.  He ventured out one day and came home with some kishka.  I had heard people ordering it at the local butcher shops in town, but I had never tried it. One day he gave me a piece to try and I loved it while my brothers and sisters all said "Ewwwww!  I'm not eating that!!!!" and ran away laughing.  Kishka is delicious but I suppose not many people know what it is.  For those reading and who don't know, kishka also goes by another name:  blood sausage.  It is a sausage made with pig's blood, barley and/or wheat, pig innerds and spices in a casing.  It's dark grey, almost black from the blood being cooked so it's not the most attractive of things to eat, but it is delicious.


Daddy would pick me up and take me to our special store to get kishka.  I can remember feeling so special because it was something that was just me and my dad and no one else.  I'm not even sure if any of my brothers and sisters even knew about these little outings we had.  We would go in and my dad would order a ring.  The butcher would bring it out and wrap it in thick, brilliantly white paper and tape it with a little piece of white tape that came out of a silver machine that sat on the counter.  Smiling and holding my hand, Daddy and I would walk out of the store and get back in the car parked out front.  We weren't going home.  Instead, Daddy would take his pocket knife off of his keychain and cut the tape, unroll the kishka out of the paper and lay it out in between the two of us in the front seat.  He would cut off a little hunk for me and then a bigger hunk for himself.  We would then peel off the casing and sit there eating our kishka, cold just out of the butcher's cooler.  I think it tasted so good to me because it was something that I shared with my Dad and no one else.  Just me and my Daddy eating kishka in front of Naperkowski's.  A small memory but a great one for me.