Where southerners go to fill the tank and feed the family

New York City has its bodegas. The South has its gas stations.

If you stop for motor oil in Mississippi, you can also grab fried chicken on a stick. In North Carolina you can buy a steaming bowl of pozole, along with batteries and a five-pound bag White lily meal.

There might be shawarma next to the shotgun shells, or wedges of mild hoop cheese and packets of salt available for purchase at the counter, along with lottery tickets and pecan pie made by the owner's sister.

Documenting these independent Southern temples of commerce and community has become a particular focus for the photojournalist Kate Medleywho, like most kids raised in Mississippi, grew up eating at rural gas stations.

Ms. Medley, 42, now lives in Durham, NC, and has spent more than a decade collecting images for her photo book. “Thank you, please come again,” that the digital magazine The bitter southerner published in December. The book started with a journalist's curiosity, but ended up as a way for a daughter of the Deep South to gain insight into the beautiful, brutal, complicated place she came from.

“These places hold a great mystery,” she said. “You're rolling down the road and they catch your visual attention. Then you wonder what's behind that glass door when you hear that bell ringing. Is it the MAGA South? The hospitable South? Who is at the cash register? Who's at the grill?”

A dozen years ago, Ms. Medley discovered a Citgo in Durham that had become a Nicaraguan place called the Latin America Food Restaurant. She developed a theory.

“I thought I could map the emerging food routes for immigrants in the South by looking at what was happening behind the gas stations,” she said.

Some independent gas stations fade in the fluorescent light of chains like QuikTrip and RaceTrac, with their cheap gas, hot dog rollers and endless rows of soda machines. Some station owners are letting gas pumps run dry or removing them altogether because the local economy is too depressed. Other gas stations have become churches or nightclubs, or are completely abandoned.

The book opens with an essay by the southern writer Choose Laymon, who grew up in a very different part of Jackson, Miss., than Ms. Medley. She didn't know him when she contacted her, but he immediately understood her project.

“I never thought about the fact that my favorite restaurants, as a child, as a teenager, and as an adult returning to Mississippi, almost all served gasoline,” he writes. “And I never thought of them as gas stations that served food.”

He tells the story of children's trips to Jr. Food market in Forest, Miss., on Friday evening. His grandmother's friend, Ofa D, put a Tina Turner tape in them and drove them in his pickup. They ordered a box of dark meat chicken, a foam container of fried fish, and a brown paper bag filled with the fried potato wedges that everyone in Mississippi knows as potato blocks.

It dawned on Mrs. Medley that you could study a region by its food in 2005, when she landed on the University of Mississippi at Oxford, where she entered a master's program in Southern Studies.

Hurricane Katrina hit the day after it started. She spent the next few months traveling around the state reporting on the devastation for The New York Times, with her travels fueled by rural gas stations.

They often adopt a southern 'get 'er done' attitude. If customers want cakes, someone will bake them. A cashier in North Carolina figured she could make some extra money by buying some Bojangles sausage biscuits on her way to work, marking them up and selling them to the breakfast crowd.

“It's just this ingenuity and ingenuity that you don't find anywhere else,” Ms. Medley said.

This is especially true at some gas stations run by immigrants. Mrs. Medley took pictures of Nina Patel and her samosas Delicious Tikka in Irmo, SC, and Gina Nguyen with a garlic butter shrimp banh mi Banh Mi guyswhich opened at a family-owned Texaco in Metairie, La.

Two weeks ago, Ms. Medley took me to a place in the middle of the Mississippi Delta farmland that also emerged from an immigrant story.

Mark Fratesi's father opened Fratesi grocery and service center in 1941 in Leland. It's a wonderland of homemade pork rinds, staples and bait, with a freezer full of frozen steaks and bags of unshelled pecans. It runs on the honor system. You tell the cashier what you ate for lunch. If you live nearby, you can put your groceries or gas on an account.

The restaurant takes up about half of the building and the family's Italian immigration roots are featured throughout the menu. There are grits and burgers, as well as a rigatoni lunch and a po'boy (their own invention) made with deep-fried balls of chopped black olives, shredded mozzarella and seasoned breadcrumbs, bound together with a bit of mayonnaise and ranch dressing. Canvas-wrapped blocks of seasoned, salted pork loin, called lonza-cure, in the beer cooler.

Mr. Fratesi, 68, doesn't think the place will last long after his retirement. A gas station down the street has already undercut its gas prices by a dime. And no one in the next generation of the family is interested in taking over.

“You must be married to it,” he said.

About 15 miles away, in Indianola, the future looks brighter.

Betty Campbell, 69, and her husband opened up Betty's place in a former gas station, about 20 years ago. The restaurant is located about two blocks away from the BB King Museum. Like her mother, Ms. Campbell was a resident cook for the bluesman and his crew, creating a playlist of reliable Southern standards like sweet potatoes, fried chicken and caramel cake.

The walls of the restaurant are covered with signatures of tourists from all over the world who have come to learn more about the blues. The family recently covered the old garage bays and is expanding the dining room to make room for the growing busloads of tourists.

Her younger brother, Otha, who is essentially the maître d' at Betty's, said she likes to disavow travelers' preconceptions about racism in the South.

“Not only do black travelers see Betty's as a safe place to have lunch,” he told Ms. Medley of her book, “white travelers see it as a safe place, too.”

Small southern towns remain informally segregated, but not at the gas stations that sell food — or the restaurants that sell gasoline.

“There's something about accessibility and it comes together in a space that the whole community shares, almost out of necessity or at least convenience,” Ms Medley said. “Everyone is always welcome, no matter what.”