Michael W. Twitty's Blog, page 2

American Food and Race: Ten Things I Learned from Writing and Living The Cooking Gene

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At the end of the prologue to my book The Cooking Gene (HarperCollins Amistad imprint, 2017/2018) I reflected on whether or not the Southern table could give us some insight into America’s second original sin–the enslavement of Africans and the consequences that resulted:

“The lazy, laughing South / With blood on its mouth /And I, who am black, would love her,” wrote Langston Hughes, a refugee of Joplin, Missouri, the poet laureate of black America. The poems I was bid to remember frequently referenced a place that was caught up in a weird braid of nostalgia, lament, romance, horror, and fear. Forsyth County, Georgia, is no longer the same place it was nearly thirty years ago, and black people have long since moved in. And yet across the region, flashpoints continue, the shootings, the draggings, the overreach of police authority, the obstruction of the vote, inequalities and inequities and silent and sturdy boundaries between white and black. For some, “we” are the South, but “they” are Dixie, and yet we and they all know the old hanging trees and the strange fruit they once bore. I dare to believe all Southerners are a family. We are not merely Native, European, and African. We are Middle Eastern and South Asian and East Asian and Latin American, now. We are a dysfunctional family, but we are still a family. We are unwitting inheritors of a story with many sins that bears the fruit of the possibility of ten times the redemption. One way is through reconnection with the culinary culture of the enslaved, our common ancestors, and restoring their names on the roots of the Southern tree and the table those roots support. The Old South is where I cook. The Old South is a place where food tells me where I am. The Old South is a place where food tells me who I am. The Old South is where food tells me where we have been. The Old South is where the story of our food might just tell America where it’s going. The Old South / With soul food in its mouth / and I, who am African American, must know her.”

Now we are here, another flashpoint, a triple threat in a perfect cauldron of a pandemic, a massive economic downturn and an election year under a controversial and often divisive presidency.  I had hoped originally this would be a cap to the Obama presidency, then I hoped it would be a great way to open the Clinton presidency and then I resigned myself to the fact that his project was going to have to suit itself to the challenges of the Trump era.  Now we are closing in on 4 years and I am just waking up from a weeklong fog.  My immense grief over the continued murder of African Americans and the brutal means by which peaceful protestors and others have been repulsed by rogue law enforcement has been too much.  The ticker tape of word salad flowing through my consciousness is muddied but slowly approaching some clarity.

In 2012 Rabbi Michelle Goldsmith sat me down after a presentation that I gave at her then synagogue in Birmingham, Alabama.  She said, “You realize your life isn’t going to be the same.” She elaborated and she was right.  Then I was still on my Southern Discomfort Tour, a trip though the South to find my family roots and trace food routes from the colonial and antebellum South through to the childhood of my grandparents, themselves one generation removed from enslavement.  Almost four years removed from the publication of The Cooking Gene, and having traveled through 8 countries in West Africa, the journey seems easier but the world seems so much less full of hope than it did when I thought my book would get me into the good graces of Barack and Michelle for a photo opp.  
So what does a detective story in drag about food and genealogy and contemporary food politics have to teach about race and systemic racism? Or a better question, what did I learn after the fact, once the book was closed thinking and linking back to what I wrote?

1. White America and African America are inherently connected, Black folks know this, but many white people are still surprised or in denial and it is this more than blatant appropriation that pisses us off.  

[image error]My great great great grandfather, Richard Henry Bellamy, Captain CSA. Many of his relatives are in denial that we are connected. I have the DNA to prove it.



[image error]My great great grandmother, Hattie Bellamy

Why do many white people seem terrified about addressing their genetic, familial, historical and cultural connections to Black people? What does working through the technical difficulties look like?  

2. Food has meant working in historical and cultural spaces that are really challenging to Black mental health and contemporary identity from the big house kitchen to the contemporary urban dining room.  The inherent vulnerability you have to have to do this work and the fear that it is marketing our traumas is more repulsive and problematic to Black folks now than ever before. This is happening simultaneously as Black folks in America get more interested in genealogy and finding their family’s place in the bigger global narrative.  
What is it about the times we are living in that makes people far more reticent to rehearse and relate stories of past oppression and resistance in the ways those of the past two generations?  How can we achieve a better place where we can critique our experience in a brave new way?  How do we tell our family stories now and in the future?  

3. Acknowledging multiple languages and multiple ideologies is not “both sideism,” its just breaking down why we have an ongoing disagreement about the past, the present and the future.
Is it possible to engage in these conversations acknowledging the words and thoughts of “alternative visions,” of the same exact history without amplifying myths or lending them validity?  Can you understand and discuss their language and ideas without becoming toxic or losing your own sense of revolution and evolution?  

4. Food was a window for me into the fact Southern white people and their descendants are the most African-rooted white people in mainland North America.
How do we make sense of the engrained African, Afri-Creole and African American impact on Southern whites and at the same time acknowledge Black erasure and the decentering of Black narratives in the service of white supremacy?  

5. Africa was an absolutely necessary part of my journey, but I feel valid and full as an extension of Africa in America.
In a space where the Diaspora wars wage on social media and a racist president describes modern Africa and Africans in demeaning terms, what did Africa mean to my food and identity journey and how did it change my perceptions about being African American for the better?  What does it feel like to recover my original family names?  

6. The politics of race and food and culture in the American South is far from just Black and white and we must repeat that racial inequality and systemic racism are not only baggage born by the South.
How do we have a more inclusive conversation that includes all Southerners, addresses parallel issues in the Black or African Atlantic world and moves the discussion from being Southern to all-American?

7. People of all backgrounds really don’t know the full story of African American food in the South, and that’s because a simplistic, one note narrative that can be quickly digested and spat out has become the prevailing narrative of African American food—and most African American culture in the marketplace of ideas.  Soundbite size, one note, simple narratives are often how we communicate our feelings about “race.”
What will it take to guarantee that this story of Black resistance, travail, hope, memory and creativity becomes an ongoing movement for cultural literacy and cultural awareness for all?

For the next 7 posts, I’m going to try to tackle each one of these in 1500 words or less.  This is a very, very serious time for thinking about “race,” and what it means and how systemic racism and the legacy of 1526/1619 lives on with us 4 and almost 5 centuries later.  Each post will come with discussion questions that you can go over with a group.  If you have a copy of The Cooking Gene, great.  If you don’t please consider purchasing a RSADR (Retail Purchases Support Authors During Rona) copy and have an even richer conversation inside yourself and with your friends, family and neighbors about the themes of the work and politics of race and culinary history and culture in American life.  

Homework:
1. Use this time apart to collect family recipes over the phone or by computer.
2. Design a menu that reflects the life of one Ancestor in your family tree.
3. If there is a person in your family or community who is a culture or culinary tradition bearer surprise her with a meal to honor her knowledge and skill.
4. Eat well.

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A Scolding in Seven Pieces

Warning. This isnt my usual style of writing, it is full of cuss words and frustration and darkness and struggle in the attempt to recover and heal. Read at your own discretion. This is my reaction to the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery may they rest in peace and power.

A Scolding in Seven Pieces

1. Gazelle

Why do none of us really want to know?  Why do we tell ourselves stories that will hide the pain?

Is it true that a gazelle will die willingly in the jaws of the predator? I mean allow itself to succumb to suffocation to its predator…is that true?  Is it to save the others?  Is it a sacrifice?  Do gazelles think that way? Are these the myths we speak about creatures which should be free but we wish them and will them into our hierarchy of good and natural deaths? Is that why it hurts some less to shoot them and dismember them into trophies? 

As it dies, does it will itself into a dark and endless sleep?  Does the gazelle know it has no heaven? Does it wish for more light as its own eclipses?  How does that suffocating gazelle feel? 

2. 1775

A year before the Declaration of Independence, each one of my grandparents had an Ancestor who arrived in America. Some had been here for generations, others were just arriving.

My maternal grandmother’s direct paternal line arrived from Ghana in the 1770’s. He passed down the story of being Asante.

My maternal grandmother’s direct maternal line arrived from Sierra Leone in the 1760s-1770s.

My paternal grandmother’s people were in Virginia since the late 1600s at least.  Many of them came from eastern Nigeria, home of the Igbo.

My paternal grandfather’s direct  paternal Ancestor arrived in the 1760’s from Ghana. He was Ewe and Akan.

My paternal grandfather’s direct maternal Ancestor arrived from Sierra Leone between 1750-1775.

One of his Ancestors arrived from the Sundi Kingdom of Kongo in the early to mid 1800’s, we think he was probably “illegal.” 

My maternal Grandfather’s paternal line was founded by British American r/a/p/i/s/t who held my female Ancestor in bondage. There are many like him in my blood, Confederates all.

So many I am related to Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney. Gd made up for it by making me a distant cousin of Samuel L. Jackson.

My maternal Grandfather’s direct maternal line was from Ghana. I am more kente cloth than Old Glory.

His mother’s direct paternal bloodline went back to John son of Sarah, who made the middle Passage into Virginia around 1765-1774. 

The rest were from Senegal, Gambia, Madagascar, Angola, Dahomey and Liberia, even east Africa.  Some were English, Scottish, Irish and Scots-Irish.  Some were Native Americans, some were Jews.  Through theirs veins rode the Vikings, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, the Middle East, Central Asia and East Asia. By accident of birth, I am the beginning of humankind, every Diaspora, I am the Middle Passage and the American dream deferred. I was here before St. Augustine, before the Mayflower, before Ellis Island, before the airplane. This is why our sages taught–“When you save a life you save the entire world..”

3. Exorcism

Chauvin….Chauvin….I’m talking to your demons…I’m talking to your dark side. I want to understand that demon in you….you know…the one that keeps shouting in you…the side that must kill the ni**er.  Kill that ni**er. Kill the ni**ers. KILL THEM. With a knee. Take a knee right? Dare you to disrespect MY flag.  This is not your county. That anthem talks about scaring the slaves into submission.  Don’t you know this is a WHITE MANs country?

Apply the pressure of white nationalism.  Lean in, apply the pressure of comorbidities caused by the Middle Passage. Go on Aryan prince, hit him with that white male alpha authority and that stink of Hitler.  Come on —don’t let Soros win–it’s the Jews right?  Is that what the anti-Semites told you?  Apply that anti-Blackness, hold the fuc*er down until he dies like a gazelle. You are the lion, he is the prey. Let him cry out and just take all the ni**ers with him—to sleep. He is limp. Bannon said Satan is his master and the nation must be destroyed.  Nobody listened.

Hey Demon!  Listen to me!  None of your colonial power can fu*k with me…I know who I am…I know who you are I will call you by your real name and watch you burn…

White Supremacy Patriarchal Animosity Fragility Rage Monstrosity

If you kill me you kill the entire world.  You kill your entire history. You kill your Adam and your Eve and your Cain and your Abel and everyone who roamed Eden..  You kill generations. You kill the world’s oldest DNA.  You kill the makers of American food. You kill the creators of your soundtrack. You kill veterans from every fuc*ing war.  You kill your greatest comedians and inventors and innovators and writers, and inspiration for writers and your poets and the women who bore your children when you were the most infamous of all the baby-daddies using African and Native women.  WE ARE YOUR COUSINS and you want to kill us because you can’t stand to look in our eyes and see yourselves and see the sins of your fathers and their rampant gleeful illegitimacy.  If you kill us you kill the greatest money maker in American history–not American cleverness or wit or inspiration but the womb of the Black woman. You didn’t deserve King! You kill the same kind of  blood that was the first blood to die for this country.  None of your magic beats karma, the Orisha, none of your magic can hold this gotdamn wolf by the ears when you taunt it.  Your upside down Bible cannot stay the power of our mojo—-

The flag is red white and blue.

The money is green.

But you cannot avoid the shout of our dead—

When they scream

Ogun’s knife cries out for blood,

It is not clean. 

4. Sunset

For a week now he has watched my face with green eyes.  He is my best friend, my lover, my fiance, a white man with two tablespoons of Black from a woman that passed into whiteness, a little more Roma from wagons that went from India to England, and lots of “white.” Alabama and Tennessee Slaveholders and Indian hunters he is ashamed of, veterans he is proud of. He is mostly Scottish indentured servant and Mennonite war dissenter, peacemaker Germans.  A pioneer woman who saved her life by climbing the sole tree on an Oklahoma plain when the last of the bison thundered on earth rather than heaven and night after night he watches me and holds me as I scream at another part of his people.  I rage, and I cry and he doesn’t hold me back or tell me not to cry or scream or mourn because I couldn’t love him if he did not respect me or give me my space. 

Every night at sunset we watch the sifting of anarchist from protester to white supremacist plant as if it matters.  We coddle dinner together.  He looks at my face when I’m not looking at him but when he looks me in the eyes he does not let the helplessness show.  He wants to go stand up to power but  I tell him he must stay. The reporters and journalists keep saying “peace,”  what is that?  Violence they speak of but every night I hear fu*k–a thousand times from the cops and watch people lose eyes, get gassed, get trampled by horses, run into with cars, spat on, and windows broken into–did they really have to try to muddle screams and shash tires and taze him?

The red dots grow across the map like measles. RedSummer2.0 I don’t feel like being respectable.  My nightmares—I wake up unable to breathe. Fear of being next.  He knows when I wake up screaming.

We are dying of an invisible serial killer

Just when we caught a human one…

The money trees are bare.

It’s summer. We just got started. 

The kids are not alright.

The revolution is televised.

Nobody has anything to do but die or vote..or watch the Tiger Queen

We are watching lions and leopards and hyenas hunt gazelles…

Ahmaud then Breonna then George then….

All 45 can do is juggle a Bible and shake at the youth as if they are vampires

He wants to be something before he closes his eyes

…like the gazelle.

5. Bull Connor 2.0

Barr and his jowls.  Mean lying cuss.  Sheltering in place behind a G-d we are sure will not want him. He is playing Bull Connor for the camera.  Tom Cotton is the new John C. Calhoun.  45 is Nixon in 68.  How much reading do you have to do on your way to the protest to understand this hellish moment?

I am watching them hurt Washingtonians–I am screaming at the TV. 45 comes out.  Gold Glory and G-dless.  A TV ad shoots up the next day–crisp and clean, a totalitarian fantasy.

The sisters text me and write me–they know I am prey. They are too–but I can’t say that–I vow to die a martyr before they are disrespected.  The brothers call.  We want to go to war but we are past our warrior days but not quiet aged.

The white and non-Black friends call and text–they worry that I may be in my own bunker, the walls closing in.  

I don’t know what to say really–so I wrote this. 

6. America, America, this is the anthem throw your damn hands up and don’t shoot Love note to the red kaps

They are still talking about Kap’s knee…

And if only the Negroes were law abiding and they were 1950s Negroes on Beulah and Amos and Andy and that one Black lady in Mayberry and on the Waltons but we could still extract value from their bodies–labor, entertainment, abuse, sex, and someone to(sm) other

Why can’t they just be gazelles and maybe after we live in peace with ourselves we will yawn and let them pee next to us again or whatever they want this time, the water fountains weren’t as bad as we thought they were…what about the looters…what about the violence…King would have been—I can’t even repeat that bull*hit;

Don’t they know pieces of cloth are more important especially when they are made in China making America slump again like our little red hats to go along with our little red books (they will be out next term)?

Don’t they know songs are worth more than  a million of their fingernails….

Jingoism and (white) nationalism and Jesus as Thor oh-my

A holy war designed to restore the natural order of rocket launchers at Starbucks…

Of lion and leopard and hyena on gazelle

The circle of strife.

7. Hope.

Some will read this and say I hate them because I hate what is done to us.  Some will say I ignore their casualties and therefore I am not preaching true equality.  Some say I should forget the past. Some say I am brainwashed. No not really. I love me more than I could ever hate you. 

And I love you enough to tell you that you are wrong about me and us and this and the dream and the ideals and everything.  I am not the traumas some inflict on me and you’se guys are not the traumas others like you inflict on us–unless you parrot and project your dystopia–then you are quite the same. 

No, I don’t hate you.  I had a grandmother–the descendant of 1775.  I had grandparents who taught me my history and wanted me to be in better days. 

I’m not a gazelle.  I’m not prey. I am not a predator in reverse because I love myself more than your vision. You are gazelle tonyoir own lion

And I understand I will always be queer by color and sexuality and faith and philosophy in your eyes and I celebrate that because I am every color in the rainbow.

Otherwise I really have zero f*cks to give whether or not you love me back.  I have my work to do—grace, compassion, peace, love and all that good old time religion stuff…and I don’t have time to waste it.

This place–is not a thing to be squandered. You say we should unify around the symbols of obfuscation born in slavery and Native removal and manifest destiny and I say no—we can choose new ways to be one—understanding how much our blood has crossed. We are deliciously impure—looking at you Steve King—enjoy retirement—its on us.  If you are not multicultural and kissed by otherness and soaked in the world of your neighbor you have wasted your opportunity to be an American to be a part of an accidental planned experiment.  The glory here is not in melting but melding by learning from each other and having no boundaries on opportunities…and to have those opportunities black people cannot be the canaries in the American coal mine any longer.  Black Lives Matter and if they do not there is no reason to dream in American. 

Indigenous people are not to be annihilated by governors on the Dakota plains offering 21st century smallpox blankets…or in the deserts of the Navajo Nation…

Poor people aren’t dumb.  Black and Brown tired of this covid—bio warfare nonsense…

Trans people being able to fight would guarantee America is better.

Trans lives not being snuffed out would mean that too.

Asian Americans are tired of reliving the Exclusion Act and Manzanar and being blamed for your sneezes

Women should have equal pay for equal work and the protections on the sky and waters and earth should be restored.  The Earth Mama is at war with us, and pier one is closing so you cannot appease her with dead reeds wrapped in plastic and bead portiere this is not a lewk.  She wants her planet back–MAKE EARTH GREAT AGAIN.  She has blown dust on us and it became Babalu and as he dances the plague spreads. 

Brown people are tired. From the Rez to the Barrio to the Masjid and Gurdwara and Temple. 

The Jews are tired.  We showed you how to survive during Pesach–you didn’t listen. 

The gays–well we are horny and tired.

The kids are bored.

The cats want us gone. 

The dogs are all going to have separation anxiety.

The elders are lonely.

The introverts are just fine.

The extroverts are stir crazy and the ambiverts are ambivalent.

I just want you to understand :

Black Lives Matter means I should be able to do normal things without dying.  I should not die a flashpoint. So many Black women. So many Black men.  So many Black people. They were not gazelles.  They did not die as a sacrifice for the herd. They did not succumb for you.  So many brown people and allies and friends and framily just all of us have finally said–across the earth this has got to stop, enough is enough, this is gazelle on gazelle on gazelle.  Black Lives Matter means NOT only saving Black Lives but making sure Black people can live lives of quality, dignity and freedom. You should be thinking, thank G-d that Black woman can have a child in optimum safety or have her doctors interact with her in a respectful way. You should be thinking isnt it great his name or her hair isn’t a barrier to a job or they can live wherever they want and get a loan for it. You should be thinking oh those two friends are of different backgrounds and people won’t ascribe a drug deal or sexual fetish or a robbery to their interaction. You should be thinking isnt it great Black he or she is feeling themself and that’s important given the historic erasure of Black joy and beauty. Or that a Black person can be academically or artistically gifted without help or assistance from anyone else. 

She can drive a car, put the kids to bed, he can jog or eat ice cream or live to raise their little ones of go birdwatching or have a barbecue.

Black Lives Matter means not being scared to go to a doctor as a Black man because you’ll be ignored or worse experimented on like an laboratory animal. It means being a Black woman¬ being considered aggressive because you won’t suffer other people’s passive¬ so passive microaggressions. It means being Black of any color or shade or faith or sexuality etc.¬ having people vivisect your identity because u don’t fit a bubble. It means people don’t assume you’re poor or culturally disadvantaged&if you are financially challenged that you aren’t less of a human being. It means living a life of mental& physical health un-impacted by the stress of racial slights and systemic racism& living off 5 black dollars to a white 100. Black Lives Matter should begin at birth&be an inheritance for generations to come.&don’t forget it means law enforcement and vigilantes don’t get to profile you&destroy your life. And maybe I can sleep again.

The Cooking Gene made it to the Best Food Books of All Time

The Cooking Gene made it to the Best Food Books of All Time!!

I’m happy to announce that my book, “The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South”, made it to BookAuthority’s Best Food Books of All Time:

https://bookauthority.org/books/best-food-books?t=u8kzpl&s=award&book=0062379291

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BookAuthority collects and ranks the best books in the world, and it is a great honor to get this kind of recognition. Thank you for all your support! Please keep buying this book retail (not second hand) so I can keep seending chefs to West Africa from my sales!

The book is available for purchase on Amazon. Buy the paperback brand new!

The Cooking Gene on THE NOD

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/the-nod/49h54e/michael-twittys-cooking-gene?utm_source=gimletWebsite&utm_medium=systemShare&utm_campaign=gimletWebsite

So glad to be able to share this interview with the team from The Nod podcast, Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings!

The Nod tells the stories of Black life that don’t get told anywhere else. Our show ranges from an explanation of purple drink’s association with Black culture to the story of an interracial drag troupe that traveled the nation in the 1940s. We celebrate the genius, the innovation, and the resilience that is so particular to being Black — in America, and around the world.

Please follow them and subscribe!

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Please enjoy the quick listen and give me feedback here on Afroculinaria. And if you haven’t yet please get your shiny new retail copy of The Cooking Gene so I can get more chefs to the Motherland for our trip to Senegal and Gambia. New visitors, welcome!! You family now!

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Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors, Sit Down.

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Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors,

Hi! My name is Michael W. Twitty and I’m one of those interpreters who has watched you squirm or run away. I’m not a reenactor, because G-d forbid I reenact anything for the likes of you; but I am an interpreter, a modern person who is charged with educating you about the past. I take my job seriously because frankly you’re not the one I’m centering. I’m performing an act of devotion to my Ancestors. This is not about your comfort, it’s about honoring their story on it’s own terms in context.

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For over a decade I have been working towards my personal goal of being the first Black chef in 150 years to master the cooking traditions of my colonial and Antebellum ancestors. Five trips to six West African nations and more on the way, and having cooked in almost every former slaveholding state beneath the Mason-Dixon line, my work is constant, unrelenting mostly because I have to carve my way through a forest of stereotypes and misunderstandings to bring our heritage to life.

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Because minds like yours created the “happy darky,” some people of color are ashamed of my work. Although I am none of the things they imagine me to be, I can understand why they are confused about what I (and many people like me) do. Once upon a time folks like yourselves wanted to have a national Mammy monument on the Mall, to remind us about the “proper” role we were meant to occupy and to praise our assumed loyalty. No, our forebears are the real greatest generation. With malice towards none they constantly took their strike at freedom and yet their heroism was obscured because you guessed it, white supremacy, had to have the final say.

Southern food is my vehicle for interpretation because it is not apolitical. It is also drenched in all the dreadful funkiness of the history it was created in. It’s not my job to comfort you. It’s not my job to assuage any guilt you may feel. That’s really none of my business. My job is to show you that my Ancestors, (and some of yours quiet as its kept…go get your DNA done…like right now…talking to you Louisiana and South Carolina…) resisted enslavement by maintaining links to what scholar Charles D. Joyner famously called a “culinary grammar” that contained whole narratives that reached into spirituality, health practices, linguistics, agricultural wisdom and environmental practices that constituted in the words of late historian William D. Piersen, “a resistance “too civilized to notice.” Want to read about it? Since you already know I’m a literate runaway from the American educational system, I wrote an award winning book called The Cooking Gene. Like Eddie Murphy said, “but buy my record first…”

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What’s most telling about the above quote and others is how blithely unaware you are about the real American struggle for freedom. When you’re in one of those hot ass kitchens watching me melt you are secretly telling yourself you’re glad you’re not me–or them. And yes, I’m about to go Designing Women/Julia Sugarbaker (in that pink hoop skirt) on you…so you might want to run now.

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Thanks to a viral tweet the whole country sees what me and my colleagues have seen for quite some time. We get it. You want romance, Moonlight and Magnolias, big Greek Revival columns, prancing belles in crinoline, perhaps a distinguished hoary headed white dude with a Van Dyke beard in a white suit with a black bow tie that looks like he’s about to bring you some hot and fresh chicken some faithful Mammy sculpture magically brought to life has prepared for you out back.

The Old South may be your American Downton Abbey but it is our American Horror Story, even under the best circumstances it represents the extraction of labor, talent and life we can never get back. When I do this work, it drains me, but I do it because I want my Ancestors to know not only are they not forgotten but I am here to testify that I am their wildest dreams manifest.

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While your gall and nerve anonymously preserved for eternity online is cute, I thought you might want to be further disturbed not by the actions of the dead, but by those of the living:

Like remember when you took the form of the docent in Virginia who told me, “Look, you don’t have to go on about the history, just tell them you’re the cook and be done with it…”

Or remember when you waltzed in with a MAGA hat and told me “I know what it’s like to be persecuted like a slave. I’m an evangelical Christian in America. Its scary!” (More power to you for your faith, but that analogy? Or skewed perception? Or saying that nonsense to my face with the assumed confidence that I wouldn’t respond?)

My personal favorite was when I spilled some of the contents of a heavy pot of water as the light was dying and you all laughed and one of you said…and I could hear you…”This boy doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“Boy.”

I was exhausted. I had been cooking over an open hearth for 7 hours. One enslaved cook in Martinique was thrown alive into an oven for burning a cake. How do we know? His mistress calmly showed his charred remains to her guest after the meal. Spilling or burning food could have meant my ass.

How about that time you asked me if I lived in that kitchen with the dirt floor. Or when you said I was “well fed” and had “nothing to complain about.” “This isnt sooo bad. White poor people had it just as bad if not worse.” I do so love it when folks like you ask me “What are you making me for dinner?”

In South Carolina there was that time four of you walked in grinning and salivating as you often do, and were all ready to be regaled of the good old days until a German tourist scratched your record. He said, “How do you feel as a Black American, dressing like your Ancestors and cooking and working this way?”

You started to frown.

I said, “Slavery was colloquial and discretionary, one story doesn’t tell all. But its important to remember that our Ancestors survived this. Survived slavery.”

He pushed me further. You gestured towards the door.

“How do people feel about slavery?”

My retort was fast. “How do you feel about the Shoah? How do you feel about the Holocaust?”

The German said, “The Holocaust was a terrible thing and never should have happened. We were children when Germany was coming out of the ashes. But it is a shame upon our nation.”

As the four of you turned to leave, I got in a good one: “That’s a phrase you will almost never hear some white Southerners say. “Slavery was a terrible thing and never should have happened.”

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But…the South is not to be indicted on it’s own. Without Northern slave trade captains, merchants, mill owners, and even universities that had stock in the enslaved, the Southern economy could not have flourished. (And please miss me with “you sold your own people..” the corporate identity of Blackness was not a feature when African, Arab and European elites and merchants conspired during the time of the slave trades…you cant learn everything from the crossword section of StormFront…)

Furthermore your immigrant ancestors would never have had a land of opportunity to come to. Or a people to walk on as your folks climbed towards whiteness. The most valuable “commodity” in Antebellum America during the years of exponential growth was not wheat, corn, tobacco, rice or even cotton. The most important commodity of the mid 19th century in America, was the Black child, and behind the children, the body of the Black woman.

Dont get me wrong. This isnt about being anti-white. But if you do think I don’t like you because you identify as white that’s not it. I suspect what you might be doing—identifying with heathy slices of weaponized racial power, privilege, attainment and achievement obtained in a hierarchical exploitative American dream between two pieces of unexamined whiteness, I guess the plantation isn’t the ideal place for you to escape.

[image error]The moment genealogist Lon Outen helped me discover the plantation where my great great great grandfather was enslaved near Lancaster, South Carolina.

Facing my past has been my life’s journey. It’s also been at times devastating and painful. But reflection in no way equals one second in the lives of the enslaved women and men whose blood flows in my veins. I had the privilege of rediscovering my roots on a North Carolina plantation at a dinner we prepared for North Carolinisns of all backgrounds. Knowing that the enslaved people who once occupied those cabins could never have dreamed of that rainbow of people sitting together as equals in prayer, food and fellowship while my Asante and Mende roots were being uncovered after centuries of obfuscation was for me a holy moment.

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You miss out on magic like that when you shut down your soul. Going to what few plantations remain, your job is to go with respect and homage and light. You know, like I felt at the Tenement Museum and learned about the first American experience of those who passed through Ellis Island. Your job is to be thankful and grateful. Your job is to not just hear but listen. Your job is to know that Black lives mattered then just as they do now. Your job is to face the reality that hardships and hurt have been passed down from the American Downton Abbey, the American plantation.

[image error]Scholar and museum director Kathe Hambrick showing me lists of enslaved Ancestors on a Louisiana sugar plantation. Not far away a Black family was living without running water…in 2012.

Rape happened there..to the point where almost every African American with long roots here bears that evidence in their DNA. Theft of our culture. Forced assimilation. The breaking up of families…like all of us. Of course there was economic and legal exploitation and oppression, the effects of which have never been extricated from the American story.

[image error]Imagine what it would be like to meet your long lost family and to discover that in merely 2 generations or even less, millenia of knowledge had been beaten out of you…Abomey, Benin, West Africa, 2019

But because enslavement was so damn fuzzy…we forget that those maudlin moments of blurred lines passed down by sentimental whites were purchased with pain. I tell my audiences that enslavement wasn’t always whips and chains; but it was the existential terror that at any moment 3/5ths could give way to its remainder, and unfortunately often did.

Guilt is not where to start. If you go back start with humility. Have some shame that NONE of us are truly taught this. Be like the working class white lady whose family I met in Louisiana who brought her young kids because she “wanted them to know the whole story, the story of American history is Black history.” Too bad she ain’t going viral. Wherever you are my cousin, I salute you.

[image error]Go to Whitney Plantation in Louisiana. Seriously. You won’t regret it. (For the non disgruntled.)

Right now we need people to exercise their compassion muscle over their dissatisfaction or disappointment. Right now we need people to see the parallels. Right now we need people to remember the insidious ways history repeats itself. Right now we need people to remember the righteous who sacrificed so we could tweet and leave awful online reviews.

Y’all come back now y’here?

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New Stuff/Schomburg Center Debut/Podcast w Korsha Wilson/WorldPrideNYC

So!! Here we are again! I am in New York City for three things! A podcast with my friend Korsha Wilson on Heritage Radio Network! The plural of “zaddy” is used more than once, tune in to find out why lol!

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I am here for World Pride NYC and will likely be marching in the parade on Sunday and…….I will be presenting at the inaugural Schomburg Literary Festival in Harlem!

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See you on Saturday June 29th at 12:30-1:30, booksigning to follow! Langston Hughes Auditorium, first floor, Schomburg Center, New York, New York;

Let’s have some fun New York City!

Happy Pride!

Brooklyn Historical Society June 4th!

Event!

Event!

Event!

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Event: DC AUTHOR FEST

https://www.dclibrary.org/DCAuthorFest

If you’re in THE DMV, come see me April 27th at the Library of Congress! Let’s talk about genealogy, culinary history, African American foodways and Southern tradition…

Saturday, April 27, 2019

Library of Congress

James Madison Memorial Building

101 Independence Ave. SE, Washington, D.C. 20540

10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The DC Author Festival, in partnership with the Library of Congress, is a gathering for local writers to participate in workshops, discussions, social activities and professional development.

Please register here for the event so that we know you will attend and which sessions interest you!

Signature Speaker: Michael Twitty

Mumford Room

1:30 p.m.

The 2019 featured author will be Michael Twitty, James Beard Award winning author of The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African-American Culinary Traditions in the Old South. Join us for an exploration of Twitty’s writing about food history and African American culinary culture.

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African American Seder Plate

Lots to do, more to come, enjoy!

Thanks to Ben Jankewicz and Queen Quet!

Please keep buying FIRSTHAND copies of THE COOKING GENE from HarperCollins, Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Sales of firsthand retail copies fund culinary trips to West Africa for people who can’t afford to go on their own dime. So far sales of the Cooking Gene have sent five people to West Africa in two years!! When you buy firsthand it helps authors build the kind of self sufficiency where we can help others. I appreciate you!

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Cornmeal is baked into the history of the Americas, and it’s time to dust off those roots – The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2019/03/07/cornmeal-is-baked-into-the-history-of-the-americas-and-its-time-to-dust-off-those-roots/

Quoted.