Last week, Salvation South editor Chuck Reece delivered a lecture at Mercer University’s Center for Southern Studies in Macon. The next morning, he had breakfast at the H&H, a restaurant that’s been feeding Maconites for nearly seventy years. A restaurant that has stories of its own to tell about the South. 

H and H restaurant in Macon

Credit: Google Maps

 

Mama Louise and Mama Hill have gone home, but their restaurant, the H&H, lives on.

Louise Hudson and her cousin Inez Hill opened the H&H Restaurant on Forsyth Street in downtown Macon, Georgia, in 1959. Sixty-seven years later, it still opens every morning at 7 a.m. (8 on weekends) to serve breakfast, then lunch. 

In my teenage years, a visit to the H&H was part of a rock ’n’ roll pilgrimage. A stop in Rose Hill Cemetery to smoke a joint over the graves of Duane Allman and Berry Oakley. Lunch at the H&H, where Mama Louise and Mama Hill fed the Allman Brothers Band in their early, lean years on credit or out of the goodness of their hearts.

Now, it’s part of a Southern history pilgrimage. I was in Macon last week to deliver the annual Byington Lecture at Mercer University’s Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies. The next morning, needing breakfast, we headed to the H&H. Stacy and I both had a “Butch Biscuit,” the sausage (or bacon), egg, and cheese handful that’s  named after the late Butch Trucks, one of the band’s two drummers.

It was early, but inside, the room was already awake—coffee cups clinking, most of the tables full, the smell of breakfast abiding like true love in the air. 

I kept thinking about how a place like this has watched the South misbehave and try to grow up. In 1959, when H&H opened its doors, Macon was still dug in on the wrong side of history. Yet here sat this Black-owned café, feeding whoever would walk through the door and mind their manners. Over the years, civil rights workers, lawyers, working-class Maconites, and hungry musicians have fed their souls and bellies here. During the civil rights movement, arguments about what the South should be raged at the courthouse and in churches, but the daily practice of a better South was quieter inside the H&H: a plate set down in front of you, a refill of your coffee cup , a server who would probably address you as “hon.” 

The night before, I stood in a university hall talking about the stories we tell to repair this region. This morning, t hat story arrived on a biscuit. Institutions like Mercer’s King Center honor and repair the South in myriad ways, through stories, research, and digging (sometimes literally) in the dirt of our region. But  H&H does it by opening bright and early every day to prove that another South has been sitting here all along, waiting for us to sit down together and eat.

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