Barbecue’s backbone

Five months after closing for the death of its owner, Ella Jane Scott, the legendary Scott’s Bar-B-Q in Hemingway, South Carolina reopened on May 15, 2024.

For 50 years, some of them singed by small fires, there were two things you could count on when you pulled up to Scott’s: good barbecue and Mrs. Scott at the front counter. Usually wearing glasses and a roomy floral shirt, she was always ready to take your order.

Scott might start with a formal salutation, but a funny, sly remark was likely to follow. At Scott’s funeral, Vera Martin remembered catching her friend looking out the window on a slow day at the restaurant.

“Oh, you ain’t working today?” Martin asked.

“Well, they ain’t want to pay me, so I ain’t working,” Scott said, poking fun at the family she loved so much. Even cousins who belonged to the clergy weren’t exempt from teasing. She told pastor Ben McClary, “Rev, I like you ‘cause you don’t stand up there all day.”

While Scott was notorious for shunning attention—the community leader declined a front row seat when her church honored her during Women’s History Month 2023—her son Rodney Scott credits her with always fussing over him and making him the man and award-winning pitmaster he is today.

Now owned by Scott’s brother, Sam Wilson, and her grandson, Dominic Scott, Scott’s Bar-B-Que got its start as a general store and gas station. It represented a return for Scott, who was born Ella Jane Wilson in Nesmith, South Carolina on December 8, 1941, when console radios across the state were tuned to coverage of the previous day’s attack on Pearl Harbor.

As a girl, Scott worked on the family farm, where her parents, Jack and Ella, grew tobacco, corn, soybeans, watermelons, peas, and peanuts. During the school year, she and her four sisters would walk down a long dirt road to Battery Park Elementary, an all-Black institution.

Scott graduated in 1960 and moved north to Philadelphia, joining the last wave of the Great Migration, which saw about 6 million Black Americans set out from the Jim Crow South in search of better lives. Scott had the support of two sisters already living in the city, Margie and Fanny, and she found work as a seamstress at a sewing factory.

Not long afterward, she met and fell in love with Roosevelt Scott from Hemingway, South Carolina, a small town about 10 miles from Nesmith. They married soon thereafter, and in 1971 had their first and only child together, Rodney.

Billowing hickory and oak-scented smoke, wafting smells of vinegar and pepper, and the promise of crunchy skins drew onlookers, but Ella Jane stayed in the store, waiting to pull the pork and make sandwiches. When Rodney was old enough, she showed him how to do the same.  She would sneak him the prized belly meat, as it was the least peppered and vinegared part of the pig, forever finding opportunities to share with her son. 

Every Wednesday night and Sunday morning, Scott cooked for her family. In her small yellow kitchen, Scott showed a 6-year-old Rodney how to make gravy just the right color and consistency so that he would be able to feed himself when he grew older.

“To this day, every time I see that brown gravy with black pepper specks and onion, I think of her and that moment” peering into her cast-iron skillet, he said.

Scott made sure her son knew how to iron his clothes properly and hem his own pants, reminding him to never go out looking unkempt or “dirty himself up.” She taught him that “manners and respect get you further than money could,” to take off his hat while eating, and to always speak to people he met. Although she didn’t know it at the time, she was preparing him for the celebrity life he’d later lead.

Beyond her home and business, Ella Jane was a beloved member of the Nesmith and Hemingway communities. She was a devout member of the Kennedyville United Methodist Church in Nesmith and Old Mount Carmel United Methodist Episcopal in Hemingway. At both churches, she was known for being highly dependable; if Ella Jane said she was going to do it, she did.

“If she said ‘yes’, that was it,” Rev. Norma D. Bartelle said.

Around Easter every year, when local families held reunions, Scott hosted a free community event that Rodney Scott characterized as her “biggest accomplishment.” The restaurant was known as the center of the surrounding towns’ cultural, political, and civic conversations, so highly placed political candidates sat alongside local workers at her tables.

Prior to the picnic, she would drum up support from other local businesses, making sure she had enough hot dogs, buns, Pepsi, and paper plates for any size crowd. Once the event was underway, she kept a careful eye on it, ensuring everyone was eating and having a good time. If someone was too old or infirm to participate, she hand-packed takeout plates for them.  

Scott’s husband, Roosevelt, died on December 10, 2020, passing on oversight of the restaurant to his wife and brother-in-law. After her husband passed, when asked if she would date again, she would respond, “I know what I had; I don’t know what I’ll get, so I ain’t looking.” 

According to Scott’s sister Jackie Gordon, Scott visited Roosevelt Scott’s grave every day.

“I want people to remember that behind every good man is an even better woman, and that’s who my sister was,” she said.

On her own, Scott was most content when strolling through the neighborhood or playing gospel music; her favorite song, Otis Clay’s “When the Gates Swing Open” would float out her kitchen screen door. Sometimes she’d go to the casino or try a new restaurant with Rodney; she claimed she wasn’t picky, but she made sure to let the server know if the food was under-seasoned. Mostly, though, she liked to sit on her front porch. But there wasn’t anything she loved more than God, her family, and her work, in that order.

Scott passed on Christmas Eve 2023. Her successors pledge nothing is going to change at Scott’s Bar-B-Q. “The only thing that has changed is that she’s not here anymore, and we feel that,” Sam Wilson said. “Every morning, she would come in she would say, ‘I’m in the house!’ We miss that.” 

But on a recent visit, it was apparent that her spirit hadn’t gone anywhere. The new owners know they have a legacy of community work and damn good barbecue to honor.

Amethyst Ganaway is a chef and food writer from North Charleston, South Carolina. She focuses primarily on the foodways of the African Diaspora, with an emphasis on the foodways of Black communities in the South.