“When I was a little kid, I wrote an essay that I wanted to be a social worker like my Uncle Steve. I cared about why people act the way they do and got my degree in social work at Delta State.

My husband was in med school, and for five years, I supported us with my job as a health and hospice social worker. Carrying around other people’s stories of pain and death and helping families resolve decades of heartbreak made me old by the age of 25. I loved my work, but I couldn’t draw boundaries around it. I became the executive director of an art program for people with disabilities, and that was like stepping into the sunshine.

I wrote grants first, then figured out how to administer them. Agreeing to do something before you know how to do it runs in my family. My granddad Ubon agreed to move from Missouri to Yazoo City, Mississippi to run the Twist farm. After he got the job, he called a farmer friend in Arkansas asking how to grow soybeans and run a farm.

After my husband finished med school, I went to culinary school to chase a dream I didn’t know I had. Food Network had just started and taught me about kosher salt, flavors, and foods not sold in grocery stores in Yazoo City.

I loved culinary school, but I dropped out because my daddy needed me for his life change. At age 54, his job had shifted, and he was figuring out what was next.

My great-grandmother in Missouri made a barbecue sauce every Sunday for the meatballs she served at family dinner. Granddad Ubon passed the recipe to my dad who made the barbeque sauce for everyone. In 1986, he started bottling the sauce and had my younger sister, Jennifer, and I help him sell it. I had just gotten my driver’s license and we took the bottles to every grocery store and gift shop in the Delta. We also gave out samples of hot dogs simmering in the barbecue sauce at the Sunflower grocery store. Most shoppers walked out with a bottle of sauce.

Daddy thought we would sell more sauce through barbeque competitions. Our first contest was in Cleveland in 1989. Dad rolled into Memphis in May of 1990 with five cases of Ubon’s sauce and handed it out to some of the best barbequers in the world. He realized they had their own sauce and didn’t care about ours. The next year, we competed in our first Memphis in May World Championship Barbeque Cooking Contest.

I saw something different in Dad when he started theo competitions. He finally found his sport and what he was good at. It was also a way for the two of us to connect and keep us tied to each other.

In 2005, we started going to the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York City. A restaurateur opened a barbecue restaurant and realized that he needed to do something bigger for his barbeque to be taken seriously. He created the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party to bring in pitmasters, like my father, from across the country to show what is possible. American barbeque culture can be traced to that event

There were 125,000 people at our first Big Apple Barbeque. Daddy and I cooked at least two tons of pork, constantly pulling it off and putting it on. At one point I looked at Daddy – I was so tired that I was pulling pork with tears running down my face. Daddy told me to take a break, but 75 or 100 hungry people were standing in line. There was no time for a break, so we kept pulling pork.

From that event, barbeque became more inclusive because people from different cultures learned about it. Food channels and food bloggers started up, and we became a part of the Food Network culture. We were recently a tiny part of Michael Symon’s six-part documentary on competition barbeque. It’s still weird to sit in Yazoo City and realize that I’m on Discovery plus.

We have taken Ubon’s barbecue around the world, including Australia. It is a big jump from our first competition in Cleveland to being a part of growing the culture of barbeque. It’s exciting to show people that there is good news coming out of Mississippi with good food and good hospitality.

My daddy passed away four years ago. He was my best pal, and I had to keep this going without him. This year, we cooked 9,000 servings of shrimp and grits in three days at a festival in Denver. It was a recipe I had made many times for 15 people. I thought I would just do it over and over and over again until all 9,000 were fed. We cooked our sauce in a 25-gallon pot and shrimp on the griddle all day. I loved serving that many people. We made a lot of people happy and it was the first time some of them had Mississippi flavors.

I embrace that I have been here so long that I am one of the matriarchs of barbecue. I cast a wide net for staff, and my barbeque team is very diverse. I think we’ve helped barbeque grow and show what it stands for: taking time to sit down with friends and family.

We opened Ubon’s Barbecue restaurant in Yazoo City in 2004, and it still brings visitors here. Last week we had people from Germany and South Africa. They fly into Memphis or Atlanta and do a barbecue trail in the south. Barbeque has given me a platform that I use for sharing the good sides of Mississippi, I will always scream it from the rooftops.

Watching people eat my food is a way of touching a person without physically touching them and there is an immediate response. Feeding people recharges me. I love being around big groups of people.

My oldest son is in culinary school. He has been working with us and trimming shoulders and ribs since he was nine years old. He has a lot of options and already knows the people he needs to know to succeed on his own. Maybe we will get to work together one day.

I’m not going to make a million dollars with Ubon’s, but I have a million-dollar lifestyle. I have access to so many good things that it balances out. Sometimes experiences have more value than money. I feed off of social adventure and plopping down with barbeque in the middle of nowhere and people know me well enough to introduce themselves or say hi.

I turn 50 next year. I don’t know what will happen next, but I will continue to say yes to adventures and keep taking Ubon’s to new places. I want to up my game and feed more than 9,000 people.

I am just Leslie with my big red smile. I want to bring a little brightness in hard times. I have lived in Yazoo my whole life, and I hope I’m reminding people that there is a lot of good in a small town like this.”

Leslie

(Some photos courtesy of Leslie)