Preserving a family barbecue tradition at Lannie's Bar-B-Q Spot in Selma

The roots of the family tree run deep at Lannie's Bar-B-Q Spot in Selma, where the late Lannie and Will Travis started barbecuing hogs in a cinder-block pit next to their house back in 1944.

Three subsequent generations -- from the children to the grandchildren and great-grandkids -- have stoked the fire since.

Today, the limbs of that family tree remain solid and sturdy.

Candis Hatcher and her cousin Yolanda Hatcher, a couple of Lannie and Will's great-grandchildren, work the front counter of the modest red-brick barbecue joint in Selma's old Tuxedo Park neighborhood.

Back in the kitchen, Floyd Hatcher and his brother Alfonsa Hatcher, two of the grandchildren, prepare pulled-pork sandwiches soaked in a fiery sauce, topped with crispy barks of pork skin and served between slices of white bread.

And across the street, 85-year-old Lula Hatcher -- who carried on the business her mother and stepfather started before turning the day-to-day operations over to her children several years ago -- rocks on the front porch of her tidy, little white house, waving at a steady stream of customers as they come and go.

"That's what it's all about, my family," Floyd Hatcher, one of Lula's eight children, says. "Even my customers, we treat everybody like family here. All of my customers that come in, everybody calls me Uncle Floyd."

Yet another family member, Floyd and Alfonsa's sister Deborah Hatcher, works the evening shift at Lannie's, and Corey Hatcher, Deborah's son, is the pitmaster who smokes all the meat.

"We've always had family to depend on," Alfonsa Hatcher says.

'They were welcome, anybody that came'

Lula Hatcher says she was about 12 years old when she started working at her mother and stepfather's barbecue place in the 1940s.

Back then, her stepfather bought live hogs from the stockyard and slaughtered and butchered them himself. Before building an above-ground pit, Will Travis smoked the meat on wire racks that straddled an open pit he dug out of the dirt.

"He would burn wood and put the coals up underneath there to cook the hogs," Ms. Hatcher recalls. "That's how he cooked the meat."

During the week, her mother and stepfather worked at Selma's Hanna Manufacturing plant, where they made baseball bats, she says, and on weekends, they cooked barbecue.

As word of their smoked pork got around, they eventually added a storefront with a pick-up window. Business boomed, and Lannie's continued to grow.

Tucked away in a historically black neighborhood on Minter Avenue in eastern Selma, Lannie's Bar-B-Q Spot has always been a place where both blacks and whites felt welcome, Ms. Hatcher says. Even during the turbulent 1960s, when Selma was a battleground of the civil rights movement.

She has a simple answer to a complicated question about Selma's -- and Alabama's -- long history of segregation and the roles that places like Lannie's have played in helping to bridge that divide.

"They wanted the barbecue, so they came and got it," Ms. Hatcher says. "They were welcome, anybody that came. They were comfortable."

'It's just something we did'

While her husband, Charlie Hatcher, worked at Selma's Henry Brick Co., Lula Hatcher worked at Lannie's and ran the business after her mother retired. Ms. Hatcher's stepfather and mother have since died, and her husband died in 1987.

The current brick building, which Ms. Hatcher built a few years after she took over Lannie's, goes back about 30 years.

(Earl Travis, Ms. Hatcher's brother, operates a second Lannie's Bar-B-Q on Medical Center Parkway in Selma.)

At one time or another, all eight of Lula and Charlie's children -- Lawrence, Dwayne, Charles, Samuel, Carolyn, Deborah, Floyd and Alfonsa -- worked at Lannie's while they were growing up.

"I started when my head couldn't get over the countertop," Floyd Hatcher, who's 61 now, says. "It's just something we did."

They swept floors, took orders, made sandwiches, and when they were old enough, cooked the meat, which meant long hours tending the pit.

"Back in those days, you had to sit back there with it," Floyd recalls. "You couldn't leave it (for) 10 to 12 hours or more."

Corey Hatcher, Floyd's nephew, has it much better these days, using a stainless-steel, wood-burning rotisserie smoker with an electronic timer that he can set and forget until the meat is ready.

'It's the sauce . . . everybody is crazy about it'

The cooking methodology may have gotten more advanced, but the real secret to Lannie's barbecue is the same as it ever was.

"It's the sauce," Alfonsa Hatcher says. "My grandmother developed it, and everybody is crazy about it."

Alfonsa's brother Floyd is now the guardian of the recipe that his grandmother entrusted him with decades ago.

"It's written down and locked up," Floyd says. "I've been married for 40 years, and my wife doesn't even know it."

Should anything happen to him, though, Floyd has taught Alfonsa how to make the vinegar-based red sauce.

"I had to have surgery a couple of times and I've had two heart attacks, so I had to teach him how to make it," Floyd says. "We are the only two that make it, but I am the one who (usually) makes it all."

Floyd prepares between 40 and 50 gallons of sauce a week, and they sell it over-the-counter in pint- and quart-sized Mason jars and half-gallon and gallon plastic jugs.

"I have shipped it all over the country," he says.

Something else that sets Lannie's barbecue apart are the crunchy pieces of pork skin that are served atop the pulled pork.

It's a tradition that goes back to the days when Lannie's co-founder Will Travis butchered his own hogs, Lula Hatcher says.

"During that time, we had plenty of skins," she says. "Everybody would be wanting the skins."

They still do.

"They ask about it every day," Floyd Hatcher says. "It comes along with the food, but the same (people) come in and ask me about them. That skin makes it for 'em -- the skin and the sauce."

Alfonsa Hatcher says he and his siblings and his nieces and nephews feel a responsibility to continue the legacy that his grandparents began all those years ago.

Lannie's, he says, is important to the people who call Selma home.

"I've had people that have moved away from Selma and usually when they come back home, this will be their first stop," he says."They say, 'I've got to come by Lannie's to get some of this (barbecue) before I go home.'"

'If you need something, I'll ship it to you'

While Lannie's doesn't receive nearly as much press or all the accolades that such venerable Alabama barbecue places as Dreamland, Archibald's and Big Bob Gibson do, after more than 70 years, it has finally started to get some long-overdue recognition.

In 2015, voters chose Lannie's Bar-B-Q Spot as the winner in the "Legends" category -- over Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q, no less -- in the Alabama Tourism Department's online Alabama Barbecue Battle.

That same year, Lannie's also was one of the inaugural inductees into the state tourism agency's Alabama Barbecue Hall of Fame.

And last fall, David Letterman, the former host of "The Late Show," and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who was beaten and bloodied during the 1965 Bloody Sunday march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, stopped by Lannie's for lunch while they were in Selma to tape a segment for Letterman's new Netflix series.

"It was a big surprise," Floyd Hatcher says. "I recognized them right off. I watch the news a lot, so I knew who Congressman Lewis was. And when I saw David Letterman, I knew that was him, too, because I remember him growing all that hair on his face. I used to watch him on TV on that late-night show."

Other, less-famous customers occasionally drop in from around the country and all over the world.

"I had two guys here a couple of weeks ago who were from Finland," Alfonsa Hatcher says. "They had heard about us.

"And I had two customers in here last week from Chicago," he adds. "One of them wanted me to leave here and move my business up there. I told him, 'No, I'm kind of stuck here, but don't worry, if you need something, I'll ship it to you.'"

Lannie's Bar-B-Q Spot is at 2115 Minter Ave. in Selma, Ala. The phone number is 334-874-4478. Hours are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. For more information, go here.