James Lee “Jackie” Hite is big, a physically and mentally imposing presence, a man who walks and talks with the (expletive)-kicking demeanor — though stereotype it may be — of a small-town southern sheriff. In fact, he has held most every local political position but parish police chief. After two decades of the political life he retired to focus on his barbecue business. Twenty-five years later, supporters were still dogging him, despite his being 72 years old and slowed by open-heart surgery, to run for office again.

“Messing with politics is one of my favorite games,” he told me, winking. “I’m not saying I ain’t gonna run for mayor again either.” Today, Hite continues to serve his people through the politics of pork.

“Most people ain’t even know where my place is,” Jackie Hite told me, waving toward an empty morning-hour dining room. “The local people don’t want a lot of people here because they said it would be too crowded. It’s people in here, but it’s not a whole pile of people.”

I had no desire to try hash again, but I would not pass up an opportunity to watch it being made. We returned to Jackie Hite’s two weeks later for a behind-the-scenes tour. Arriving half an hour early for our scheduled appointment, I let myself in through an unlocked gate. The hash house sat in a corner between the kitchen and the barbecue pits. Inside, Hite’s pitmaster, Tim Hyman, stirred a hot-tub-sized stew pot with a wooden paddle. Traditionally, the hash kettle was fired, like barbecue, with hardwood coals. Though Hite switched to propane to boil his stew following his heart attack, he insistently tosses a few shovelfuls of hickory embers alongside the pot to impart barbecue’s classic smokiness to the stew.

I peered over the cauldron’s edge, where gelatinous chunks of pork and slivers of yellow onion boiled and bubbled in the gurgling hell broth. One hash hound has described the dish as “liquid meat,” and, boy, was he right. I had always thought that I would not mind a visit to a sausage factory, but the old adage about never wanting to see the stuff being made finally rang true. The stench of boiled meat — 78 gallons of boiled meat to be exact — filled my nostrils, my stomach, my head. Woozy and feverish, I felt as if I had swallowed a whole hog whole.

Just at that moment, as I wobbled in my hash-induced haze, Jackie Hite burst through the kitchen door. “I thought I told you to be here at 9,” he hollered in his best bad-cop imitation. Hands raised in surrender, I apologized and slowly backed away from the hash pot while pulling on Denny’s shirtsleeve. Red faced and roaring mad, he pointed to the exit, grumbled something about “keeping a man’s time,” and demanded that we immediately remove ourselves from the premises.

Was Hite a stickler for punctuality? A vigilant guardian of a classified hash recipe? Was he tired of me hanging around his place? Or maybe something else was at work. Too afraid to ask, Denny and I stepped double quick to our vehicle and, like Bo and Luke Duke evading Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane of Hazzard County, sped away in a cloud of gravel dust. Laughing off our escapade, while cautiously glancing in the rear-view mirror, I vowed to never again come between a man and his hash.

Most barbecue proprietors carry few secrets. Their pits are open source. Ain’t nobody gonna put in these hours, work this kinda work, sweat this sorta sweat, many have told me. So look around, take notes, but just don’t ask about the sauce. A sauce’s ingredients, instructions for assembly, thoughts on tasting notes: all inquiries are off-limits. Sauces, like bloodlines, harbor secrets. Sauce recipes are handed down but rarely, if ever, written down. Sauce is the one rule of barbecue: you do not talk about sauce.

I’ve been met with dead-eyed stares and been threatened for asking about sauces. Sauces are grave business. Literally. Pitmasters like to tell stories about men dying with their sauce recipes locked away in their heads.

According to family lore, the Golden Secret emerged from Orangeburg County, an inland area settled by German and Swiss immigrants beginning in the 1730s. In the waning years of the Depression, Joseph Jacob Bessinger, a cotton farmer in the town of Cope, struggled to do exactly that: cope. He was a churchgoing man and a fine home cook, raising 11 children. But he desperately needed hope. And in 1939, hope came in the form of a newspaper article that alerted his saintly wife, Genora, to an area restaurant in need of a new owner.

Bessinger sold off the family’s only viable asset, a milk cow named Betsy, and with that $75 in milk money (other versions of the story add a mule to the equation), Bessinger purchased the Holly Hill Café in a nearby town of the same name.

Though he hadn’t a day of restaurant work behind him, money could be made here. On Saturdays, Holly Hill absorbed thousands of outlanders from the neighboring farm communities, field hands and overseers in need of food, beer and trouble. Unlike in the cotton fields, a better life could be grown here. Seven years later, Bessinger reopened in a new location across town, under a new name: Joe’s Grill. Big Joe, as he was called, served lunch-counter food: hamburgers, blue-plate specials, and, on the weekends, barbecue.

At some point, Big Joe began saucing his smoked pork with a mixture of mustard and vinegar and spice. It made sense: mustard and Germans, Germans and pork, mustard and pork. Maybe the idea belonged to Big Joe. Maybe he inherited the recipe from his father, or his father’s father or some other sauce-souled prophet with deep Germanic roots. Maybe that first pot of mustard sauce was carried over by the inaugural ship full of Germans in 1735. Maybe it was not German at all. The exact moment of inspiration has been lost to time, but that brief flashpoint of genius, to whomever the credit is due, lives on.

Like all great barbecue sauce cultures, there is a distinct uniformity to the range of mustard sauces found throughout South Carolina restaurants and groceries today: mustard bold and vinegar tanged, a little salty, and stippled with black pepper. The best-tasting, and most aesthetically pleasing, varieties are always, always, the color of goldenrod, a deep, muted glow that warms the senses as it gilds the pork. South Carolinians defend this dash of culinary esoterica against skeptics, barbecue know-it-alls, and the whole damn state of North Carolina. They prize their golden-hued sauces like gold. And as Shakespeare wrote regarding humanity’s abiding and often blind devotion to that soft, sometimes priceless metal, there is no “worse poison to men’s souls.” If gold corrupts and barbecue sauces brim with secrets, we might expect a golden sauce to be the most soul poisoning of all.

Throughout the 1940s, Maurice Bessinger, the eighth-born among Big Joe’s brood, acted as his father’s right-hand man. During the early breakfast rush, each morning from 5 to 8 a.m., Maurice ran the Holly Hill Café as a one-man operation. Just 11 years old, he’d have to stand on a stool to reach the stovetop. After a midday break to attend school, Maurice returned to work the afternoon and evening shifts alongside his dad.

Maurice knew that he would inherit the family business one day; in his autobiography, self-published in 2001, he writes that his father told him as much. But there were other Bessinger boys, including Melvin, a World War II veteran, D-Day survivor, prison-camp escapee, and GI Bill college student, who was seven years Maurice’s elder. When a sudden heart attack left Joe’s Grill without a Joe in 1949, the war-hero son stepped in to replace his father. Mirroring the best of Shakespeare’s tragic characters, the spurned heir, Maurice, rather than fight the battle at home, chose self-exile, joined the army, and, one year later, found himself at the front in Korea.

His white-mustachioed face beamed proudly from the packaging of Maurice’s Gourmet BBQ dinners, frozen and microwavable barbecue and hash for those devotees who could not make the drive to any one of his eleven locations scattered throughout South Carolina. He smoked hams to feed the masses — estimated at 20,000-plus customers each week, an impossible number to supply with whole-hog barbecue — but steadfastly refused to alter his cooking process (24 hours over hickory coals), though every other large-scale barbecue entrepreneur in the nation had switched to gas-fired cookers. Maurice Bessinger was on top of the world.

But then he hit his moment of hubris. On July 1, 2000, after years of debate, protests, and boycotts, the state legislature finally removed the Confederate flag from atop South Carolina’s capitol dome. Bessinger was incensed.

As two students from the Citadel — one black, the other white — lowered the Confederate flag from the State House (and placed it, not so inconspicuously, at a monument honoring the Confederate dead on the capitol’s front lawn), Bessinger removed the Stars and Stripes. In its place he hoisted the Confederate flag, the battle flag of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the rebel flag, the Dixie flag, the old Southern Cross, high above each of his nine restaurants. He opened a religious mission in the parking lot of his flagship Piggie Park and distributed literature covering, among other far-right-wing topics, a biblical defense of slavery.

The reaction was swift: several major grocery and wholesale chains pulled Maurice’s Carolina Gold and mug-stamped TV dinners from their shelves, the NAACP called for a boycott of his restaurants and the national news media pounced on the unreformed barbecue baron. His wholesale sauce and frozen dinner business nose-dived by a staggering 98 percent. Yet Bessinger’s restaurant business gradually ticked upward.

Unrepentant and bolstered by the support of his customers, Bessinger took aim at those retail chains that dared to purge his sauce and sued those bastards.

Bessinger sued nine retail grocers, including the Bi-Lo chain and Walmart, and even several individual store managers, “alleging that discontinuation of his products constituted violations of the South Carolina Unfair Trade Practices Act.” Two courts disagreed that Bessinger’s lawyers had sufficiently proved that the grocery chains had violated the Trade Act by acting in an “immoral, unethical, or oppressive” fashion in removing Maurice’s barbecue sauce from their shelves.