This recipe uses three
large chicken leg quarters. They fill a large baking pan. It is an
easy recipe, little work, little clean-up yet the finished dish is as
elegant as any 5 star offering.
Our
meal tonight is in honor of a little know and unlikely Angel from
Arkansas: Ruth Coker Burks. Please take the time to read our little
write-up on this wonderful person.
Ingredients
3
chicken leg quarters
½
cup brown sugar
- 28
oz can sliced peaches
Preheat
oven to 425 For
easy clean-up, line a 9 x 13 dish with foil.
Pour
over the chicken pieces.
- Bake
for 30
minutes.
Remove foil and turn chicken.
- Reduce
heat to
400 degrees. Spoon
baking juices & peaches over chicken and bake 35-45
minutes longer
or until chicken is done.
- Pour
off the sauce, reduced it and thickened it using 1tsp of cornstarch
and a little water.
What
an unexpected blend of peaches and garlic!
For
our music tonight:
Faithfully
serving my Master Indy
socialslave
To
satisfy and restore.
To
nourish, support and maintain.
To
gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to
nurture, assist, and sustain
…..I
cook!
Please
buy slave's cookbook:
The
Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes
by
Dan White
http://www.amazon.com
/dp/B00F315Y4I
/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM
via
@amazon
===========================
The
Unlikely Angel from Arkansas
Ruth
Coker Burks.
To
tell a story of Ruth Coker Burks and her fantastic works of love, we
must start with a story of anger.
Ruth's
mother had a terrible family argument with an uncle, she decided she
would make sure he and his branch of the family tree would never lie
in the same dirt as the rest of them. The mother quietly bought
every available grave space in local cemetery: 262
plots.
Imagine the drive this took. It gives us an interesting snapshot of
the “truths” this family grew up with.
Fast
forward to 1984.
Ruth is now 25 and a young mother herself. She went to University
Hospital in Little Rock to help care for a friend with cancer. One
day she noticed a door, with "a big, red bag" over it. It
was a patient's room. "I would watch the nurses draw straws to
see who would go in and check on him. It'd be: 'Best two out of
three,' and then they'd say, 'Can we draw again?' "
She
could guess it was the new epidemic called GRID — gay-related
immune deficiency. Now maybe because of some higher power moving her,
Ruth ignored the warnings on that red door and snuck into the room.
In
the bed was a skeletal young man. He had wasted to less than 100
pounds. He asked to see his mother.
"I
walked out and [the nurses] said, 'You didn't go in that room, did
you?' " Burks said: 'Well, yeah. He wants his mother.'
They
laughed, 'Honey, his mother's not coming. He's been here six weeks.
Nobody's been here, and nobody's coming.' "
This
was just not right she thought. Ruth got a phone number and called.
The conversation was very short before the woman hung up on her. Well
that really ticked her off!
"I
called her back," Burks said. "I said, 'If you hang up on
me again, I will put your son's obituary in your hometown newspaper
and I will list his cause of death.' Then I had her attention."
Her
son was a sinner, the woman said. She didn't know what was wrong with
him and didn't care. She wouldn't come, as he was already dead to
her. She said she wouldn't even claim his body when he died. This was
a mother talking about her dying son! A boy begging to talk to his
mother just one more time. (unfortunately, this story was to be
replayed too often.)
Ruth
hung up the phone, trying to decide what she should tell the dying
man. But when she walked into the room he said, 'Oh, momma. I knew
you'd come,' and then he lifted his hand.
“What
was I going to do? She asked. “So I took his hand. I said, 'I'm
here, honey. I'm here.' " Ruth said it was probably the first
time he'd been touched by a person not wearing two pairs of gloves
since he arrived at the hospital. She pulled a chair up, talked to
him, and held his hand. She bathed his face with a cloth, and told
him she was there. "I stayed with him for 13 hours while he took
his last breath on earth," she said.
After
a second call to his mother confirmed she wanted nothing to do with
him, even in death. "No one wanted him," she said, "and
I told him in those long 13 hours that I would take him to my
beautiful little cemetery, where my daddy and grandparents were
buried, and they would watch out over him."
She
had to contract a funeral home in Pine Bluff for the cremation. It
was the closest she could find that would even touch
the body. She paid for the cremation out of her savings.
Ruth
went to a friend at Dryden Pottery in Hot Springs, who gave her a
chipped cookie jar for an urn. Then she went to the cemetery and used
a pair of posthole diggers to excavate a hole in the middle of her
father's grave. “I knew that I would be able to find him if I ever
needed to find him." She put the urn in the hole and covered it
over. She prayed over the grave, and was done.
Yet
this simple act of bravery and love was just a start. People started
calling, asking for her help. She said. "Word got out that there
was this kind of wacko woman in Hot Springs who wasn't afraid.” She
soon became one of the go-to people in the state when it came to
caring for those dying with AIDS. Ruth would bury over 40 people in
chipped cookie jars in that old cemetery. Before long, she was
getting referrals from rural hospitals all over the state.
She
estimates she worked with more than a thousand people dying of AIDS
over the course of the years. Of those, only a handful of families
didn't
turn their backs on their loved ones. People ask her why she wasn't
afraid. "I have no idea," she said.
Somewhere
in her attic, there is a list of names. Ruth
said she always made a last effort to reach out to families before
she put the urns in the ground. "I tried every time," she
said. "They hung up on me. They cussed me out. They prayed like
I was a demon."
She
learned to say the funerals herself, after being rejected too many
times by preachers and priests. "I knew that what I was doing
was right, and I knew that I was doing what God asked me. It wasn't a
voice from the sky. I knew deep in my soul."
The
financial help for the patients couldn't have happened without the
support of the gay clubs around the state, particularly Little Rock's
Discovery."
They
would twirl up a drag show on Saturday night and here'd come the
money," she said. "That's how we'd buy medicine, that's how
we'd pay rent. If it hadn't been for the drag queens, I don't know
what we would have done."
She
recalled sitting with dying people while they filled out their own
death certificate, because she knew she wouldn't be able to call on
their families for the required information. "Can you imagine
filling out your death certificate before you die? So I'd get a pizza
and we'd have pizza and fill out the death certificate."
Memories
and stories from those early days of the epidemic are horrifying and
nightmare like. However, slowly more people began to step up, slowly
attitudes began to change, perhaps encouraged by this unlikely angel.
Ruth
had a stroke five years ago. After the stroke, she had to relearn
everything: to talk, to feed herself, to read and write. It's
probably a miracle she's not buried in that old cemetery herself.
The work she and others did in the 1980s and 1990s has mostly been
forgotten, partly because so many have died. She's not the only one
who did that work, but she's one of the few who survived. She has
become the keeper of memory.
If
we are to hold on to any lessons from her story, lets not keep anger
for the way patients were treated. Let us instead focus on the acts
of love done by this wonderful woman.
Who
knows what will happen next? There will be new unexpected tragedies
and hills to climb. We will face and overcome them as long as we
remember what love can accomplish. Love will beat fear and anger. One
sure way this will happen is to remember an unlikely angel of
Arkansas named Ruth Coker Burks.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ruth needs our help! She
has had significant health setbacks. Her employer that did not want
to have his business associated with AIDS activism, and she was
blackballed. She lost her health insurance, then, without health
insurance, she suffered a stroke and clots in her lungs. She
needs assistance to build the memorial as well as a modest amount to
take care of her health bills and expenses. She helped so many when
no one else would, please help her now!
A “gofundme” account
has been set up.
She said:
"It was
always my hope that a monument would someday be placed there with the
names of those brave men whose families didn't want them to bury
them. I have also buried a few whose families didn't have the money
to bury them..It is a peaceful place and my guys knew that if nothing
else they were loved by me. It gave them such peace to know that they
had a final resting place."
Let's make this
happen! Please share it on your social media and directly with
friends and family. Thanks for your support!
Over $41,000 has been raised toward a $50,000 goal.
I'm not used to asking for this kind of thing, I'm not good at it. I
only ask you to consider, to remember how much has been done, and how
close the goal.
