The lawyer in Raleigh was named Harlan Boone, and at eighty four he still wore a bow tie and kept a fountain pen in his breast pocket. He laughed for a full ten seconds on the phone, and then he cleared his throat and said, “Mrs. Huff, I apologize. I have been waiting fifty one years for somebody to call me about this envelope. Your mother made that company sign something in 1974, and they have no idea. Please do not talk to them. Do not sign anything. I will drive out to Hickory tomorrow morning, and I will bring my copy.” I wrote his name on the back of my hand with a grocery store pen.
He arrived at nine on a bright Thursday in a green Buick, carrying a leather satchel that must have been older than I was. He sat at my kitchen table, ate a slice of pound cake with obvious pleasure, and spread three documents in front of him. The first was a letter in the handwriting of my mother. The second was a notarized agreement, six pages long. The third was a faded newspaper photograph of two women at a church supper, my mother and a stout lady in a hat. “Let me tell you how it came about,” he said, “because you will not believe it.”
In the summer of 1974, he explained, a young vice president of Hartwell Foods, a company out of Charlotte, tasted the pickles of my mother at the Catawba County fair, and wanted them on the shelves of grocery stores across the Carolinas. Clara refused to sell. But after a long negotiation, with the help of Mr. Boone, then a young lawyer in his thirties, she agreed to a license. Hartwell could make and sell her pickles under her name, and she would receive five percent of every jar. But there were three conditions, and she insisted that each one be written in plain words.
A woman with a fourth grade education and a good lawyer can outlast a company with an advertising budget.
“The first,” said Mr. Boone, putting on his glasses, “is that the recipe itself shall never leave the family. The company received only the brine and the spice mixture, in sealed packets, which your mother prepared herself. The second is that her likeness, name, or portrait shall never be used on any label without the written consent of Clara Huff or her heirs. And the third is the one I am proudest of. In the event of a breach of any condition, the license terminates immediately, all rights revert to the family, and the company owes damages equal to all profits on the product from the date of the breach.”
I read the paragraph twice. The old man smiled at me, and his eyes were damp. “Your mother was the shrewdest woman I ever met,” he said. “She had a fourth grade education. She said to me, Mr. Boone, a man with a pen can promise you the moon, but a man with a lawyer will remember it. She made me put every word in writing. The company signed it in the back room of a diner in Gastonia. And then the product failed, and the license lapsed quietly in 1981, and the paper went into a drawer and everyone forgot it. Everyone but Clara. And me.”
The new label on the grocery store jar, with the little drawing of a woman in an apron, had been designed by an advertising firm in Atlanta, which had found an old photograph of my mother in a trade magazine in 1974 and traced it. No one at the company knew that her likeness had been forbidden. No one had checked the file. They had built a brand on her face and her flavor, and they had paid her estate nothing. Mr. Boone lifted his bow tie slightly and said, “I believe, Mrs. Huff, that we have a small matter to discuss with the legal department of Hartwell Foods.”
He wrote them a letter, in his own hand, on a typewriter that he still keeps in his office. Ten days later a delegation arrived at my kitchen in two black cars, three men and a woman in suits, led by the general counsel of the company, a polite young woman named Ms. Reyes who sat on the edge of her chair as though she expected it to bite. I made a pot of coffee. Mr. Boone laid the agreement of 1974 on my table, and she read it. Slowly her face went from professional to pale. She put the page down and looked at me with real respect.
The settlement took four months. In the end, Hartwell Foods agreed to pay one million two hundred thousand dollars in damages, to acknowledge in writing that the recipe was the property of the Huff family, to withdraw the label with the face of my mother, and to pay a royalty of five percent on all sales of the pickles for ten more years, retroactive. It also agreed to something I had not even thought to ask for. A new label, designed by my own daughter, who draws, with a photograph of Clara at the fair in 1974, in her own apron, smiling at the camera. CLARA HUFF, it will say. HICKORY, NORTH CAROLINA.
I do not want anyone to think the money changed me. I still sell at the Saturday market at the farmers market lot behind the courthouse, from the same folding table and the same striped awning. The line is longer, though. People drive in from Charlotte and Asheville, with the new jar in a paper bag, to tell me that it is good but that mine is better. I tell them I only make it in small batches, and they nod. I use the money in other ways. I paid off my house. I bought my granddaughter a laptop. And I started a scholarship in the name of my mother at the community college, for students in the culinary program.
In August I stood at my own kitchen counter at four in the morning, with the radio low and the first jars lined up on the table, and I made the pickles of my mother the way she had made them every summer for forty years. Garlic, fresh herbs from the garden, and the one thing she never wrote on any card. I will not tell you what it is. I stirred, I tasted, I added a pinch. And I swear that for one second, with the steam rising and the smell filling the house, I heard her humming behind me, off key, exactly the way she always did.
