You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning by Celia Rivenbark

mama had given her husband an “old tomato”: Either let Reverend Brenda lay healing hands on his fevered alcoholic brain or she’d be leaving him and taking Darinda and her little brother with her.
    Reverend Brenda didn’t seem to mind that we had intruded on her healing and demon-casting-out service. As we got ready to leave, she even broke away from her tongue-speaking long enough to cheerily tell us that we both looked “cuter’n a sack full of puppies,” adding, “y’all girls have funat the ball game and don’t fornicate under the bleachers ’cause you know a man won’t marry a woman with the dirty leg.”
    “Didn’t plan on it,” I said under my breath while being vaguely creeped out at the notion of the “dirty leg.” I was almost positive that phrase was nowhere to be found in the King James version of the Bible.
    “We might smoke some weed, though,” said Darinda, mostly under her breath.
    We giggled at this and ran out the door, hoping that Reverend Brenda hadn’t heard that last part. She meant well and there was no denying that she was good at her day job, having once created an astonishingly lifelike spun-sugar rendering of the faces of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and John F. Kennedy Jr. on a vanilla sheet cake for the ribbon-cutting ceremonies at the new town hall.
    She also made a red velvet cake that you’d crawl over twenty miles of broken glass to have the chance to eat. And she was the most cheerful somebody I’d ever met. If you asked Reverend Brenda how she was doing, she’d always smile real big and say, “Honey, if my life gets any better, I’m gonna have to hire somebody to help me enjoy it.”
    Reverend Brenda’s red velvet cake was created as a godly alternative to devil’s food cake, which she refused to make or decorate for obvious reasons. Ditto her feelings about partaking of that famous Southern Christmas delicacy: divinity fudge.
    “There’s nothing Christlike about fudge,” she’d say, refusing to eat it even under the more politically correct name that even the holinesses who didn’t shave their legs and lived on the dirt roads would use: seafoam candy.
    In the rural South, even food had the capacity to offend the Almighty. Some folks I knew wouldn’t eat deviled eggs because of the name, which made them almost but not quite as crazy as Sister Admira in my mind.
    I’ve never met a deviled egg I didn’t love. They’re a pure pleasure and you can dress them up as much or as little as you like. Here’s one of my favorite variations.
HEAVENLY DEVILED EGGS
1 dozen hard-cooked eggs
6 tablespoons mayonnaise (yes, Duke’s again)
2 teaspoons prepared horseradish
2 tablespoons sweet pickle juice
1 teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon salt
     
    Split the eggs lengthwise; remove yolks and mash ’em up with the mayo, horseradish, pickle juice, pepper, and salt. If you want to get fancy, you can blend this together in a food processor ’til creamy, pour it into a cake-decorator bag (or a Ziploc bag with one corner cut) and pipe the filling into the egg-white halves. Garnish with paprika ’cause it just looks more festive.
CLASSIC RED VELVET CAKE
    In the South, we love our artificial red food coloring and we’re not ashamed to admit it. You won’t care about the health and safety of it once you taste this Southern classic, which is always welcome at wakes and weddings alike.
2½ cups flour
½ cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 sticks butter, softened
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
8 ounces sour cream
½ cup milk
1 (1-ounce) bottle red food coloring
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Cream cheese frosting (recipe follows)
     
    Sift flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt; set aside. Beat butter and sugar in large bowl with electric mixer for 6 minutes or until fluffy-looking. Add eggs in, one at a time. Add sour cream, milk, red food coloring, and vanilla. Gradually beat in the flour mixture until blended. If you overdo it, your cake won’t be as