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Black Belt manure tea makers say brew cures what ails you
06/20/02
TOM GORDON
News staff writers
MOSSES The moment of truth had come for Mary Surles.
Before her was a steaming saucepan containing a knotted white cloth and an amber brown liquid that had been boiling for a few minutes.
Surles lowered a silver serving spoon through the steam and brought some of the liquid to her mouth. The next moment, her eyes brightened. Her left index finger pointed triumphantly toward the ceiling.
The liquid that had just passed Surles' personal taste test was a homemade tea. It also was a home remedy, ready to be used, as Surles has used it countless times in her 78 years, to combat the common cold or a bout of flu.
The beverage is commonly called Many Weed Tea.
But its main ingredient is dried cow manure.
The mere thought of a tea made from cow chips collected in a pasture might repel those accustomed to reaching for the Robitussin on a drugstore shelf. But in Surles' home county of Lowndes, elsewhere in the Black Belt, and even in Birmingham, people her age and some much younger have consumed the tea by the cupful and claim that it put their colds and fever to flight.
Here are some testimonials:
Mosses Mayor Walter Hill, whose grandmother made it for him: "It was just like a miracle cold drug."
Veteran state Sen. Hank Sanders of Selma, whose mother served it to him when he was a boy in Baldwin County: "It often tasted different, depending on what the cow had been eating. I can't recall a time it not working."
Roderick Jackson of Birmingham, whose Bullock County-born mother made it for him: "At first, I didn't know (what it was). When I found out, it was like, `Oh my goodness,' but it did the job."
Perry County resident Beatrice Harris: "Yeah, I do it if I get a bad cold. I took some last year. My sister has cows ..."
Those testimonials may become fewer in years ahead. That's because most of those who can make them are well into adulthood Harris is in her 70s and are talking about circumstances that, by and large, no longer exist for them, their children and grandchildren.
When they talk of mothers, grandmothers or aunts making the tea for them, they also talk of living in a rutted-dirt-road rural setting, often without a car or ready access to a doctor or drugstore. In those rural settings, people put a frog in boiling water and put the liquid on arthritic joints; made a corn shuck tea for chicken pox; took red clay, vinegar and Epsom salt and fashioned casts; and used spider webs and soot to bind bad cuts.
"We didn't know what a doctor was," said Surles, who gave birth to 17 children.
Now, most people do, and they usually have a way of getting to one. And they're more likely to take what Dr. Jones recommends for a cold than what grandmother used to get from the cow pasture.
"My daughter ... wouldn't think about giving it to her kids," said Lowndes County Sheriff Willie Vaughner, another manure tea veteran. "She takes them to the doctor for everything."
Information on manure tea as a cold cure seems as scarce as cow chips are plentiful. When gardening professionals talk of manure tea, they are talking about combining chips with cold water, salt and soap to make fertilizer. Health professionals have heard much about herbal medicines in recent years, but manure tea has never made their herbal-highlight list.
"This is real tea?" said state Epidemiologist J.P. Lofgren. "In which country do they make it?"
"I can't see that it would be better than a commercially available medicine for colds," said state Public Health Veterinarian Dr. Bill Johnston. "I mean, you've basically got a lot of fiber and undigested protein and carbohydrate particles ... I wouldn't personally recommend it. I don't think I'll be doing it anytime soon."
The manure-based tea is called Many Weed because the chips contain grasses and weedy growths on which the cows commonly graze. But it has other ingredients that improve its taste.
When Mary Surles prepared her recent batch of the brew, she spread a white cloth on a plastic table covering. On that cloth she placed and moistened two large, dried manure chunks, two lemons with their tops and bottoms removed, several dried stalks of a common silver-green plant known as rabbit tobacco, and added a cup of honey.
After knotting the cloth about seven times to form a sack, she lowered the sack into the boiling water of the saucepan and the clear water immediately turned brown. As the boiling continued for several minutes, she added nine Halls honey lemon cough drops. Vicks drops, she said, would have been better. And a little corn liquor would have been a plus as well.
When the time came for Surles and the reporter to sample the finished product, its taste did not make one think of the main ingredient, but of honey, herbs and lemon.
"It tastes like medicine is supposed to taste," Surles said.
Sweet taste aside, an obvious question plagues a first-time taster: Is it safe?
Surles, a robust, active woman who seems far younger than her age, says she has made and drunk the tea too many times to count. Most of her children drank it countless times.
"I have never known anybody to get sick off that tea," she said.
The key, apparently, is in the preparation.
"When you cook the tea, you sterilize all kinds of germs," Surles said.
J.P. Lofgren agrees.
"The thing that makes this probably fairly safe is the boiling water," he said. "If they deviate from boiling the heck out of this thing, there might be some danger."
The tea has been only a part of the arsenal to traditionally treat a cold or flu. In the past, the patient usually drank it at night, rubbed a beef tallow poultice on the chest, got in bed under a pile of quilts and got ready to sweat.
"It worked," said Lowndes County Commission chairman Charlie King. "You sweated it out that night."
When Surles made her most recent batch of tea, her oldest son, Albert, was on hand to watch. So was one of her daughters, Aza Bell; a 10-year-old great-granddaughter, Ashley Bell, and a 1-year-old great-grandson, Ronald Brown.
Albert Surles, 59, readily sipped a cup. Ronald, who had the sniffles, did not hesitate, either. Ashley took some persuasion before she took a sip, then said it tasted like peppermint. Daughter Aza let the cup come to her lips for what would have been her first-ever taste. But, at the last moment, she turned her head.
"I love my mom, but I love Aza also," she said.
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