My cousin Edward Mitchell Seabrook Jr. was a shy man with two passions.

The first was science fiction. He would read it in his office on Broad Street in Charleston, South Carolina, where he ostensibly sold real estate and insurance. The pulp-novel overflow crowded the bookshelves in the second-floor bedroom I shared with one of my sisters during a grossly hot summer vacation at Edward's beach house on Folly Island. Edward’s mother was sister to my Nana, his father cousin to my grandfather. (Our family’s bloodlines are tangled; don’t anyone crack Deliverance jokes.) As a teenager, lying next to a box fan with a damp washrag on my forehead, I devoured paperbacks with lurid cover art by Roy G. Krenkel and Frank Frazetta: Tanar of Pellucidar, Pirates of Venus, The Cave Girl.

His other passion was tomatoes.

Because Edward’s front yard on the Folly River was a sandy coastal mess of prickly crabgrass and Spartina, he positioned 50-gallon industrial drums, sawed in half, outside the kitchen door. He basically grew tomatoes in tin cans but was a member of the Agricultural Society of South Carolina. His seedlings raced up poles in a mysterious soil mix about which he was tight-lipped. As the sun burned off dew and the hour for lunch approached, Edward lumbered down the rows checking ripeness until he found a few about to crack with juice, and twisted the warm fruit from its vine. The smell of tomato leaves fell somewhere on the spectrum between scorched tobacco and a mechanic's grease rag. The flavor of the tomatoes themselves, an excruciating alchemy of acidity and sugar, only he knew how to achieve. In the kitchen, one of my great-aunts or Edward's wife, Lucy, made sandwiches. I can’t recall if the mayonnaise was Duke’s, but the bread was squishy and white. I ate mine, bare feet dangling at the end of the dock, or in a rope hammock on the porch, with one of Edward’s fantasies about mutant aliens inches from my nose.

Where would Southern culture be without the tomato?