Michael W. Twitty's Blog, page 4

Dear Grandpa Massa: An Open Letter to my White Ancestor for Confederate Memorial Day

To: Captain Richard Henry Bellamy—

From: Your Descendant, Mr. Michael W. Twitty, a published author

Date: 4/23/2018, Confederate Memorial Day

Subject: Times Have Changed

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You are my third great grandfather. You are white. Because of you and several others I am Viking, I am Celt, I am a melting pot of western, northern, southern and eastern Europe. But I am still Black, your society made those rules, not mine, but its okay because I’m proud to be Black no matter how you intended it to work against my favor. And despite you, I am Asante, Serer, Fula, Mandinka, Yoruba, Igbo, Kongo and Malagasy.

You and your father William held in bondage my great great great grandmother Arrye and her sons—one of her sons married your daughter a girl child born to a teenage girl you took advantage of from the nearby Chadwick plantation.

You were a deadbeat dad; what’s worse is that there were thousands like you that led to millions like me. Thanks to the miracle of DNA research, oral history has been confirmed sans Maury–you are the father.

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You fathered two Black children out of wedlock on the floors of plantation kitchens—one in Alabama and one in Texas. Two Black families can trace themselves back to you.

[image error]My cousin Alan from Texas. His great grandfather and my great great great grandfather is Richard Henry Bellamy.

You are permanently canonized in our memory as a thirty-something in a butternut grey suit, ready to serve as a Captain up from a private in the rebel army of the Confederate States of America. I remember seeing your sword in Alabama as a kid, under a glass case. I know more about you than any other ancestor I have because you were a freeborn white male whose parents and grandparents could say the same. I know you went to school at the University of Georgia and your dorm building still stands; I have seen the eastern counties of North Carolina where you were born and visited my fifth great-grandfather’s plantation (your grandfather) a place where I know so much about what he ate and how he lived, but could never have sat down to a meal with him or talked to him about anything because he himself held in bondage almost fifty human beings. His wealth and your father’s wealth built on the backs of my other ancestors meant you got to go to school, got to become a lawyer, part of the Texas legislature, got to become a prestigious Mason, and got to retire without worry in the countryside of Russell County, Alabama. You are privilege—the original privilege right down to the land your relatives stole from the Muskogee, or the people you called the Creek Indians before helping Andrew Jackson banish them to Oklahoma.

It’s not that I can’t relate to you because you are white. Heaven knows I live in a society that sets all defaults on “white” so good luck with that. I can’t relate to you because I don’t think you would understand why I cannot celebrate Confederate Memorial Day as a descendant of several Confederate veterans. Let’s count the ways:

1. Despite the fact you are part of my life origin story, you violated those girls and you saw nothing wrong with that. I don’t care if it was a “different time,” if a Black man had taken advantage of a teenage white girl, your society said he was worthy of immediate public death. Instead you left us with generations of aesthetic ambivalence, phenotypic exile, and the recurring theme of “Who am I?” We have this movement going on called “Me Too,” and if you and your fellow rapacious slaveholders had been around you’d be the biggest culprits named.

2. You fought to preserve white supremacy. You were not fighting merely for Alabama or the honor of the Confederacy or “states rights” you were fighting to make sure I never had the ability to read a single word, vote, or write this blog post about you. (Don’t be vain.) By the way my romantic partner is a white man so times have changed. I won’t send you into a second death by telling you who the “guy” is in the relationship….I will spare you that, this time. By fighting for white supremacy you were working against all Judeo-Christian values you claimed to ascribe to, or the values of the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. White supremacy you might be happy to know is still causing the descendants of your formerly enslaved workers, including me, much consternation and while the Confederacy lost the war, we have still not defeated white supremacy over 150 years later. I do not want another 150 years of cold civil war. I know we are better than this ongoing open wound. But as long as it’s there it will be used against Southerners in an attempt to keep all of us separated, divided and constantly, chronically sick. The Southern white man and woman are the most culturally African of any of America’s white folks and by blood….by blood, they are bound until the end of time to the Black man and woman and the story of slavery and resistance to slavery.

3. The best thing I can do to honor your memory is to resist everything you stood for including the movement to idolize people like yourself through statues and the flying of an eastern theater battle flag. Honoring history is one thing, having a personal relationship to a specific history and recalling it is another, but using symbols of history as a means of maintaining and perpetuating discrimination, hatred, unproductive separatism, and values that are not in keeping with the best of America’s ideals are not.

The Southern white man and woman are my cousins, but in this era some of them are weaponized against me in an attempt to rally an entire party to the aid of a president who was not elected by numerical majority. The Southern destiny is the American destiny as it has been in the past. The South’s willingness to stand up to prejudice and oppression and progress guides by a new ethic is part of the source code of American liberation strategy. And yet we have reaffirmed tribal lines, resurrected old idols, serve gods which neither hear nor speak.

The Exodus from Egypt was the signature text of my enslaved Ancestors as they fought their way out of enslavement. For those who know the story the Exodus was followed by a return to old, unhelpful ways. A Golden Calf made from gold unwillingly ripped from the ears of the Hebrew women, boiled and molded into something of an Apis bull. “An idol,” as one weary looking actor in The Ten Commandments says, “for idol worshippers.” In the overly dramatic but incredibly important movie, the initial distribution of idols made of gold, the spoils of Egypt, is led by the former overseers of the Hebrews.

In the old, deep North, statues Blue and Gray were forged and cheaply made. During an age of The Lost Cause legend given poetry by white ladies who felt duly protected by white supremacy, only one narrative was to be. The South was right, the rest were wrong. Slavery was necessary, emancipation a mistake. As the challenge against white supremacy in an America hellbent to make the world safe for Democracy mounted, so did the re-centering of Southern identity around statues of the Civil War rebel. One flag of the Confederate South in perpetual battle, it’s x-shape the sign of nullification, resistance and death, likewise gained currency.

I was taught to believe these were markers of generational white PTSD, and I excused them, until, well, fact checks. The New South reverted to the Old South in order to stop The New Negro. American flags were ripped from the hands of Black soldiers and citizens alike as they faced mobs brandishing one of many Confederate battle flags and clung to the oxidizing idols offered them by racializing muses hellbent on keeping their myth alive. In my own ignorance, I honestly believed my cousins needed this for their own self work.

White Southern trauma is far more embedded in its inability to deal with its wounds and embrace their family of color than it is in the demolishing of any markers of myth–statues or flags. The lying, hateful, ignorant League of the South says that “Southern Cultural Genocide” is at large and Identity Europa and other Richard Spencer inspired groups suggest that this is ultimately a cause celebre for white identity as a whole. Confederate narratives have been forced into the shape of American one, and in the mouths of Richard Spencer, “America is once again a country for white men.”

No. If you are in this country and not multicultural, not intersectional, you simply haven’t tried hard enough to be an American. And maybe, with attitudes like that, you don’t want to.

4. I will meet your relatives and mine with peace and a sincere desire to teach and understand. We Southern people are a dysfunctional family, but we are still a family. It is in no small part because of people like you. We can either have another 150 year cold civil war or we can begin to dialogue and work together against the crippling effects of racism+greed as this country’s original sin.

5. I will continue to teach people about our culinary history as a means of showing them that much like today, your world depended on the know-how and skills and abilities of Africans and African Americans. Your popular music, vernacular architecture, language, dance, attitudes about hospitality, ecstatic worship, spiritual expression, ideas about sex, folk beliefs and diet—especially what you chose to eat from day to day—were shaped by the African journey in the American South. Hey just in case you want to, here’s another surprise….you fought for me to never be able to pick up a book, but low and behold, I wrote one.

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Looking at you will never be not haunting.

It is less because your photograph makes you spectral and ore because I have seen your face in our faces. Your eyes were passed down and all the complexity in them.

But what you don’t know is that part of the Ancestors lives on in the bodies of the descendants. Maybe just maybe, now that your eyes are my eyes and my eyes and your eyes you can see why you need to seek redemption and reconciliation and not just memorial and celebration. Now that you know I am your blood, what would you want for me and mine? You have only Black descendants and we number in the hundreds. What, in our troubled world do you see through our eyes? Are you ready to change?

Signed, your great great great grandson

A free man of Color, Author of The Cooking Gene

And the only reason most people will ever know your name.

Happy Confederate Memorial Day?

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Don’t Mess With The Sweet Potato Pie: A Museum Wrestles With ‘Authentic’ Black Menu | KSMU Radio

http://ksmu.org/post/dont-mess-sweet-potato-pie-museum-wrestles-authentic-black-menu#stream/0

Enjoy this piece on sweet potato pie and the search for authenticity! Be sure to get a copy of The Cooking Gene today!

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Michael Twitty Dishes About Cooking, History and Judaism | JewishBoston

https://www.jewishboston.com/michael-twitty-dishes-about-cooking-history-and-judaism/

Read this awesome piece in Jewish Boston. We talk about food, history identity and using food as means of resistance and renewal. We talk about The Cooking Gene and its follow up volume, Kosher/Soul. Come see me next Monday, April 9 in Cambridge!

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After Africa.

I haven’t exactly been a good blogger for a while. I’m sorry for being inconsistent. This past year and a half has been extraordinary. I haven’t had writer’s block so much as my soul has pressed pause. I’m desperately trying to take it all in.

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When you shift from blog to book, all of a sudden filing material gets very very tricky. Articles, books or blog? To be honest the blog, which is free until monetized, gets the short end of the stick. Confessional as I am, I also have been processing a lot in my journey. And this past year I went to Senegal, Nigeria and Ghana. I can hardly believe it myself.

I can hardly believe all the things that have come to pass that were once just prayers and thoughts. I think I’ve waited my entire life to feel as though I’ve transitioned from what state to another, to feel initiated into a new period of life; this is it.

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Something happens to you when you finally see Africa. My guide and friend Ada Anagho Brown says that the feeling you get is that of “your Ancestors thrilled that they finally get to return home, through you. It’s not just you walking, dancing, breathing, seeing things through your eyes, they are, simultaneously, returning.”

Kosher/Soul comes to University of Maryland 4/4!

Kosher / Soul: Black-Jewish Identity Cooking



Events



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Wednesday, April 4, 2018 – 12:00pm to 2:00pm

1207 Van Munching Hall (VMH)

Being African American and Jewish is a combination that many can’t wrap their heads around. However, for thousands of Jews of color; having heritage, faith and family in both Diasporas—African and Jewish—and their many intersections means creating material, social and

ideational lives that interweave identities and histories. For Michael Twitty—food blogger, Judaics teacher and writer on Jewish cultural issues—this includes food and the ways Blacks and Jews have mediated otherness and oppression using what they eat as well as the global stories Diasporic foodways have to offer.

Michael Twitty is a culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria.com.

He will be signing copies of his book, “The Cooking Gene” immediately following the event.

Event is free and open to the public. Kindly RSVP to Debra Kirsch at dakirsch@umd.edu or 301-405-4975. More information can be found at jewishstudies.umd.edu/events/kosher-s...

1207 Van Munching Hall (VMH)

Being African American and Jewish is a combination that many can’t wrap their heads around. However, for thousands of Jews of color; having heritage, faith and family in both Diasporas—African and Jewish—and their many intersections means creating material, social and

ideational lives that interweave identities and histories. For Michael Twitty—food blogger, Judaics teacher and writer on Jewish cultural issues—this includes food and the ways Blacks and Jews have mediated otherness and oppression using what they eat as well as the global stories Diasporic foodways have to offer.

Michael Twitty is a culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria.com.

He will be signing copies of his book, “The Cooking Gene” immediately following the event.

Event is free and open to the public. Kindly RSVP to Debra Kirsch at dakirsch@umd.edu or 301-405-4975. More information can be found at jewishstudies.umd.edu/events/kosher-s...

1207 Van Munching Hall (VMH)

Being African American and Jewish is a combination that many can’t wrap their heads around. However, for thousands of Jews of color; having heritage, faith and family in both Diasporas—African and Jewish—and their many intersections means creating material, social and

ideational lives that interweave identities and histories. For Michael Twitty—food blogger, Judaics teacher and writer on Jewish cultural issues—this includes food and the ways Blacks and Jews have mediated otherness and oppression using what they eat as well as the global stories Diasporic foodways have to offer.

Michael Twitty is a culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria.com.

He will be signing copies of his book, “The Cooking Gene” immediately following the event.

Event is free and open to the public. Kindly RSVP to Debra Kirsch at dakirsch@umd.edu or 301-405-4975. More information can be found at jewishstudies.umd.edu/events/kosher-s...

Wednesday, April 4, 2018 – 12:00pm to 2:00pm

1207 Van Munching Hall (VMH)

Being African American and Jewish is a combination that many can’t wrap their heads around. However, for thousands of Jews of color; having heritage, faith and family in both Diasporas—African and Jewish—and their many intersections means creating material, social and

ideational lives that interweave identities and histories. For Michael Twitty—food blogger, Judaics teacher and writer on Jewish cultural issues—this includes food and the ways Blacks and Jews have mediated otherness and oppression using what they eat as well as the global stories Diasporic foodways have to offer.

Michael Twitty is a culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria.com.

He will be signing copies of his book, “The Cooking Gene” immediately following the event.

Event is free and open to the public. Kindly RSVP to Debra Kirsch at dakirsch@umd.edu or 301-405-4975. More information can be found at jewishstudies.umd.edu/events/kosher-s...

1207 Van Munching Hall (VMH)

Being African American and Jewish is a combination that many can’t wrap their heads around. However, for thousands of Jews of color; having heritage, faith and family in both Diasporas—African and Jewish—and their many intersections means creating material, social and

ideational lives that interweave identities and histories. For Michael Twitty—food blogger, Judaics teacher and writer on Jewish cultural issues—this includes food and the ways Blacks and Jews have mediated otherness and oppression using what they eat as well as the global stories Diasporic foodways have to offer.

Michael Twitty is a culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria.com.

He will be signing copies of his book, “The Cooking Gene” immediately following the event.

Event is free and open to the public. Kindly RSVP to Debra Kirsch at dakirsch@umd.edu or 301-405-4975. More information can be found at jewishstudies.umd.edu/events/kosher-s...

1207 Van Munching Hall (VMH)

Being African American and Jewish is a combination that many can’t wrap their heads around. However, for thousands of Jews of color; having heritage, faith and family in both Diasporas—African and Jewish—and their many intersections means creating material, social and

ideational lives that interweave identities and histories. For Michael Twitty—food blogger, Judaics teacher and writer on Jewish cultural issues—this includes food and the ways Blacks and Jews have mediated otherness and oppression using what they eat as well as the global stories Diasporic foodways have to offer.

Michael Twitty is a culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria.com.

He will be signing copies of his book, “The Cooking Gene” immediately following the event.

Event is free and open to the public. Kindly RSVP to Debra Kirsch at dakirsch@umd.edu or 301-405-4975. More information can be found at jewishstudies.umd.edu/events/kosher-s...

The Culinary Search For Self

Please enjoy this really cool profile from Ashley Jacobs of Jewish Boston. I will be in Boston on April 9th! Read more about the event here! They made The Cooking Gene a common read

Groundnut Stew My Way

Ghana inspired me! Groundnuts=#peanuts and peanut butter stew or soup, nkantenkwan is really important stuff. Ghanaians love this in their chop bars or neighborhood cantinas. The delicious one below was made in a fantastic chop bar in Kumasi named Cece’s in the capital of the Asante kingdom and heartland. Peanut soup in the South started out as nkantekwan in Ghana and maafe in Senegal and Gambia.

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2 pounds of boneless chicken breasts, or 2 pounds of chicken thighs or legs, bone in.

1 large red onion, washed, peeled and quartered

4 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed

2 inch knob of ginger, skinned

1 very small fresh hot pepper

1 ground up Maggi cube or two teaspoons of powdered broth.

1 tsp of coarse ground black pepper

2 tablespoons of tomato paste

2 tablespoons of vegetable oil

Take all those seasonings and blend them together until liquefied. Place in a dish, spread over chicken and marinade several hours to overnight.

In a large Dutch oven take two tablespoons of palm oil and heat it to melting. Add chicken and sauté and sear for about 20 minutes over medium heat. Add a little liquid if it starts to carmelize too much.

Add 2 cups of vegetable or beef broth, 1 cup of unsweetened peanut butter, and 2 large chopped tomatoes or 1 28 ounce can of tomatoes and stir well. Add a sprig of thyme and 2-3 bay leaves. Cook on a low and slow slimmer for 45 minutes. Stir for about 3 minutes every 15 minutes. It should be reduced by over one third.

Ok..heres where I will get my butt kicked. I don’t like smoked fish. But I get that you need another flavor element that is earthy and marine. 2 tsps of bonito flakes, seaweed flakes, ground crayfish or shrimp, or 1 tablespoon of oyster or mushroom sauce gives you that background umami most often savored through the use of smoked fish in stew. If you choose to add it to your pot, give it another 10 minutes. Serve with fufu or over cooked rice. Serves 4-6 or 2 Ghanaians.

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Ghana (You) Must Go! Part 1

On March 10, 2018, five African American culinarians took a journey with Ada Anagho Brown of Roots to Glory on a culinary tour of Ghana. For the first time, a DNA and heritage driven tour specifically for African Americans to reconnect with their Ghanaian and West African cultural and culinary roots commenced lasting nine days. We based this on journey on my book The Cooking Gene (HarperCollins 2017) This brief photo essay will give you a hint of what we experienced.

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You know me but the rest of these beautiful people are (from the left), Kenyatta Ashford, Kezia Curtis, Josmine Evans, Harold Caldwell and Ada Anagho Brown. This was our first breakfast in Ghana, just an hour or so after landing.

Ghana has a pronounced culinary tradition based on the courtly cuisine of the Akan kingdoms, the Ewe diaspora and the Sudanic cultures of the north. Very similar to other West African foodways, Ghana’s foodways are much more cross-ethnic, and people enjoy the signature dishes of other peoples or ethnic groups while maintaining special pride in their regional delicacies.

Ghana is onion, tomato, ginger, garlic and hot hot hot peppers. It is snails and grass cutter rodents. It is 47 different types of leafy greens at the market. Ghana is kenkey, fufu, Banku, tuo zafi, omo tuo and Ghanaian style jollof or fried rice. Ghana is lots of smoked and fresh fish. Ghana is also hospitality, kindness, proverbial knowledge, cultural pride and spiritual power.

Ghana is 32% of my DNA and present in all four of my grandparents. I am a descendant of the Asante, Fante, Akyem, Ewe and ethnic groups from the North. I’m very proud to be part of the legacy of all if these peoples.

[image error]At Cape Coast Castle one of the core spaces of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Ghana has more of these than any other country.

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By our first afternoon we were cooking with the Ga people in Accra. We made fried fish and Ga style kenkey. Kenkey is a ball of fermented cornmeal dough that is eaten with stews, sauces and soups. Along with fufu (pounded and smoothed) yam, cassava or plantain and gari, Banku and tuo zafi and rice….every starch is pretty much eaten with soups, sauces, stews and proteins. The Ghanaian seasoning par excellence is shitor, a brown long simmered hot pepper sauce with tomato and onion.

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Shitor starts with various annum and chinense peppers.

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Smoked fish are like the side meat of West Africa.

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Basil is called “dancing chicken” because it is deemed indispensable with chicken soup.

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In this picture alone you can see hot ground pepper, dawadawa or locust bean paste, kuku…a baobab based leaf thickener similar to filé and Chichinga—(Ghanaian kabob) spice and ground indigenous African spices like hwentia and alligator pepper.

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Hot peppers are called ma-ko. They are ground in a clay bowl called an asanka:

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[image error]All the basic condiments.

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Eating small fried fish with kenkey and fresh shitor paste.

[image error]Turmeric, ginger, habanero, shallots.

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[image error]Tilapia soup vibrant with palm oil and spices.

Without palm oil….the rest is for naught….

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Yes that’s palm oil. Key to much of West African foodways. From the oil palm which gives thatch, wine, vinegar, palm cabbage, wood and medicines. To tropical Africa it is the tree of life.

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We look forward to sharing more of our journey with you in future posts. We will be making a yearly trip to West Africa on a culinary tour. Next year we are going to Benin! Be sure to get your copy of The Cooking Gene today!

Sometimes life is too cool…

This is how I woke up today….reading this….TOP CHEF JUDGE PADMA LAKSHMI READING MY BOOK! Thank you Padma! Want to find out what she’s so excited about? Click here to find out more. Click here to order a copy. Glad to share this with all of my readers.

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It Keeps the Evil Out of Your House: Basil by the Front Door in the American South and West Africa

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05wrz17

Please enjoy this short BBC Food Chain interview from their Food Pilgrim series about seeking the source of some food and folklore on both sides of my family. The subject is basil a culinary and medicinal herb known and widely used in West Africa but also with some history in the American South, a history that I documented in The Cooking Gene. Be sure to get a copy…it was a finalist for The Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and is an Art of Eating semifinalist as well as a Barnes and NobleNew Discoveries Nonfiction finalist! THANK YOU FOR ALL OF YOUR LOVE AND SUPPORT.

Here is a great recipe for peppe soup using basil.

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