Hot, Hot Chicken by Rachel Louise Martin

Author:Rachel Louise Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Find Your Own Spice

Ms. André Prince Jeffries and the Hot Chicken Heirs, 1974–1998

A young guy on his way to the barber shop next door stuck his head in. “Y’all open?”

“Nope,” Dollye Matthews said. “Soon.”

“Ok,” the kid said. Then, “I’m hungry.” He shut the door.

This storefront, the newest outpost for Bolton’s Hot Chicken and Fish, should have been up and going long before this. “Davidson County,” Matthews said, “you can’t get anything as fast as you like.” She sighed. “Permits and stuff, we were delayed a minute.”

The new Bolton’s was going into a South Nashville strip mall just a few miles down Bell Road from where Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack’s now was. Like André Prince Jeffries, the Matthews have had a hard time expanding their business beyond their original East Nashville location. This spot was their fourth attempt. They first put a branch in a downtown food court known as the Arcade. It didn’t take. Then they’d tried Hickory Hollow Mall, but “I moved in the day McDonald’s moved out,” Matthews said. After three years, they escaped that failing spot and tried to establish a business over on 8th Avenue South, a road that ran into the Edgehill Hill neighborhood. Like much of today’s Edgehill, their area was increasingly gentrified and trendy, so their landlord sold the building out from under them. Now in the winter of 2020, the Matthews were trying again.

Dollye and her husband Bolton Matthews have been running Bolton’s Spicy Chicken and Fish since 1999, but their roots in hot chicken history stretch much further back. Bolton Matthew’s uncle was Bolton Polk, Maude Satterfield Prince’s cousin and a cook/manager at the BBQ Chicken Shack. Polk went on to launch the Prince family’s first competitor, Columbo’s Hot Chicken. He had been part of a new generation of hot chicken folks who helped keep the dish alive.1

Bolton Polk was born on October 8, 1923, in Columbia, Tennessee, just one county south of where Thornton Prince III had grown up. But the Polk family didn’t stay on their farm long. By the time Bolton Polk started school, they were living in Davidson County.

They may have left because Columbia was a deadly place for Black men and boys. One man had been lynched there on October 10, 1905, accused of raping a white woman. In May 1924, Robert Wilson was arrested for the same alleged crime, but the case against him was so weak that the jury of twelve white Southern men sentenced him to only two years in prison. The judge set the sentence aside, an almost unprecedented act of justice in the Jim Crow South. Wilson didn’t walk free, however. While he was still standing in front of the judge, the alleged victim’s brother stood up in the courtroom, pulled out a gun and shot twice, killing Wilson in front of a room full of witnesses. The shooter was found not guilty.2

Three years later, eighteen-year-old Henry Choate was accused of attacking a teenaged white girl one morning, catching her on her way to her school bus.

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