Food for the Soul
It’s 9:30 on a Sunday morning and Carl Byrd is sitting on a barstool greeting everyone who walks through the door of Shirley’s Soul Food. He watches two large men lumber in.
“I think we got enough food to feed ya,” Carl calls out as the men look warily around. “We can feed both y’all this morning.”
It’s regulars like Carl who create the family reunion-like atmosphere of Shirley’s, a cluttered, welcoming metal-sided diner on the corner of 34th Street South and 18th Avenue, where everyone is on a first-name basis. It’s a place to get a free meal if you need one and unload problems if you have them; the kind of place to see old friends and meet new ones.
“A lot of ’em I know,” Carl says of the patrons in the restaurant this Sunday morning, “and a lot of ’em I don’t. But I know ’em when they leave.”
Shirley Tiggs, the Shirley of Shirley’s, first opened shop because her brother owned some extra land and she didn’t like her job as a service representative for GTE. But it has become more than a job to her and more than a restaurant to her customers.
“I feel like a mother,” Shirley says of her relationship with her patrons. “They give me a lot of respect.”
Shirley is, in fact, mother to three sons. Her son Anthony helps her with all the cooking and original recipes. He is the only one of her children who works in the restaurant. Shirley is as much a mother to Mo, Anthony’s girlfriend of 20 years and Shirley’s waitress since Mo was 19. When Shirley opened her first restaurant on 16th Street in 1986, Mo needed a job and found one there. Mo Reilly (no one calls her by her full name, Maureen) ran the restaurant with Shirley’s mother until Shirley quit her job at GTE in 1990. Mo says she never imagined she would still be at it all these years later.
“I guess I never thought that far into the future,” Mo says. “When you’re first opening up, you don’t know if you’ll stay in business or not.”
Stay in business they did, and after 14 years on 16th Street the regular crowd had outgrown the original space. In 1999 Shirley moved to her current location, a larger space with a longer bar and more tables in the back. And the regulars kept coming.
“When she was on 16th Street I stopped and ate and I liked the food,” Carl says. “I been following her ever since.”
The neighborhood where Shirley has planted herself anew has its share of problems. The intersection is busy, littered with pawn shops and liquor stores that cash checks. In 2002 there were 127 burglaries in her neighborhood, the second highest number in the city, according to the St. Petersburg Police Uniform Crime Report.
In all their time on 16th Street, Mo says Shirley’s was never broken into, though most of the businesses around were. Just last week, after four years on 34th Street, Shirley’s suffered its first break-in. Shirley found the windows smashed, a lamp and a set of knives missing, and the cash register, emptied at closing, lying on the floor. But trouble is nothing new to Shirley. She says her recent burglar could have been someone she feeds, maybe looking for drug money. She says she used to read the newspaper every day and see one of her customers in the crime reports or the obituaries.
“I’ve lost a lot of young guys,” Shirley says, citing drugs and violence. “My really…good customers, they’re in prison.”
Mo says losing young men over “silly stuff” is depressing.
“They’re good people,” she says. “They just got mixed up maybe in the wrong thing, or they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Shirley takes any chance she can to impart motherly advice to her younger clients, most of whom stop in to pick up take-out orders and head quickly back out into a neighborhood Shirley says will never be rid of drugs and violence.
“I tell them, ‘You’re going to need your education some day,’” she says. “‘You need to go to college and get your skill.’ I talk to them. And they listen. They say, ‘I know, Miss Shirley. I know.’”
A bright yellow sign hanging above the microwave (“Kyle’s Kwik Bail Bonds -- It’s better to know me and not need me, than to need me and not know me”) makes clear what will happen if young people disregard Shirley’s advice. Other pictures support her message of perseverance. In the back of the restaurant hang pictures of Nelson Mandela and Louis Farrakhan, a beaming Louis Armstrong and a serious Martin Luther King Jr., all icons of the kind of community Shirley strives to maintain, a community in stark contrast to the world outside.
“There’s no going to a place and staring around at people,” says regular Stanley Gammage, who drives a wheelchair-accessible taxi and eats at Shirley’s three to four times a week. “You can eat in good peace of mind. You can enjoy your meal.”
The range of meals at Shirley’s is as wide as the range of people who eat them. There are turkey wings, which Shirley says are the most popular, meatloaf and fried chicken with macaroni and cheese, cabbage or black-eyed peas on the side. There’s toast, eggs and salmon croquettes for breakfast and warm peach cobbler or a piece of cornbread to round it all out. And every meal comes with generous helping of free advice, Mo’s favorite thing to dish up.
“There’s a lot of times people may need someone to talk to, company, something to get off their shoulders,” Mo says, “and they feel more comfortable talking to someone like them.”
Mo is, in fact, not like most of her customers. Hers is often the only white face in the restaurant, which serves a predominantly African-American clientele. While it took some time for everyone to get used to, Mo’s race doesn’t seem to be an issue anymore. Not at Shirley’s. Mo learned the ways of soul food from Shirley and Shirley’s mother. Shirley says before the restaurant opened Mo couldn’t cook at all, but now, “you should see her table on holidays.” On holidays Mo cooks for Shirley, Shirley’s children, Shirley’s grandchildren.
And that atmosphere of family keeps Shirley going, showing up at 5:30 a.m., six days a week, to put food in people’s stomachs and warmth in people’s souls. She wears a stained apron and a tired expression. She says she’s in her 60s, confesses to feeling “burned out,” and says she’ll probably own the restaurant until she dies. At first she says it’s because she’ll never manage to pay off her debt. But later she admits there’s more to it than that. It’s about a community where people are fed with good company and good food.
“A home-cooked meal. A meal that fills you up,” Shirley says. “Soul food. A good meal that takes time and you know the person worked on. I wouldn’t give nobody something to eat I wouldn’t eat myself. That’s food for the soul.”
