Michael W. Twitty - The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

I dedicate this book to my board of directors, My Ancestors, without

whom none of this would be possible, but more specifically

With respect to my Mama

With respect to my Daddy

For Meredith, for Fallan, for Gideon, for Kennedi, for Grace and

Jack, for Malcolm, for Bensouls in and out of the Newest South

FUNTUMFUNEFU

There are two crocodiles who share the same stomach and yet they fight over food.

Symbolizes unity in diversity and unity of purposes and reconciling different approaches.

THE ADINKRA WISDOM OF THE AKAN ELDERS

Negroes in the North are right when they refer to the South as the Old Country. A Negro born in the North who finds himself in the South is in a position similar to that of the son of the Italian emigrant who finds himself in Italy, near the village where his father first saw the light of day. Both are in countries they have never seen, but which they cannot fail to recognize. The landscape has always been familiar.... Everywhere he turns, the revenant finds himself reflected. He sees himself as he was before he was born.... He sees his ancestors, who, in everything they do and are, proclaim his inescapable identity. And the Northern Negro in the South sees, whatever he or anyone else may wish to believe, that his ancestors are both white and black.

JAMES BALDWIN, NOBODY KNOWS MY
NAME: A LETTER FROM THE SOUTH

T he Old South is a place where people use food to tell themselves who they are, to tell others who they are, and to tell stories about where theyve been. The Old South is a place of groaning tables across the tracks from want. Its a place where arguments over how barbecue is prepared or chicken is served or whether sugar is used to sweeten cornbread can function as culinary shibboleths. It is a place in the mind where we dare not talk about which came first, the African cook or the European mistress, the Native American woman or the white woodsman. We just know that somehow the table aches from the weight of so much... that we prop it up with our knees and excuses to keep it from falling.

The Old South is where people are far more likely to be related to one another than not. It is where everybody has a Cherokee, a Creek, a Chickasaw, a Seminole, or a Choctaw lurking in their maternal bloodlines but nobody knows where the broad noses or big asses come from. It is a place where dark gums and curly hair get chalked up to lost Turks and meandering mystics but Nigeria and Gambia are long forgotten, unlike everything else that is perpetually and unremittingly remembered. Proud bloodlines of Normandy and Westphalia and County Armagh and Kent endure here and, like it or not, it is often in the bodies that bear no resemblance to those in whom those genes first arrived, bodies like mine.

The Old South is a forgotten Little Africa but nobody speaks of it that way. Everything black folks gave to the aristocracy and plain folks became spun gold in the hands of othersfrom banjos to barbecue to Elvis to rice and cotton know-how. Everything we black Southerners kept for ourselves, often the unwanted dregs and markers of resistance, felt like markers of backwardness, scratches of the uncivilized, idolatry, and the state of being lost. And yet I loved that Old South, and loved it fiercely in all her funkiness and dread. To be honest, I never hated white people for their strange relationship to us, their colored kith and kin, but I grew up with the suspicion that they had no clue just how much of us there was in their family trees and stories and bloodlines and on their groaning tables. Maybe if they did, we would know less enmity toward one another.

The Old South is where I had to return.

T he Old South is my name for the former slaveholding states and the history and culture they collectively birthed from the days of contact through civil rights. My Old South doesnt end when white people start recovering from the Civil War and move to Southern cities and start working in mills and factories. My Old South ends when black people are formally and forcefully brought out of the nineteenth centuryin the middle of the twentieth. Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma: pretty much the census South. Heads may shake over this list, but my geography is determined by the fact that the South is multi-regional. Landscapes, politics, subcultures, climates, ecosystems, and crops separate Blue Ridge from bayou country, Chesapeake from the Ozarks, the Black Belt from the Low Country, the delta from bluegrass country, and middle Tennessee.

Old South culture is also not bound by growing up in the former Confederacy. Where are you from in the South? privileges settlements and cities, not to mention the white-folks version of what Southern means. The former Confederacy is not the totality of the South or Southern culture, and the Deep South is younger than the seaboard and Upper South. The prominent cities of the New South, while markers of the Sunbelt, are not really where the vernacular culture of the South came to be. It was in the wide swaths of densely populated rural country, often not far from rivers, where the elements came together.

In 2011, I remembered that I had started to forget where I came from. I became aware of my own apathy and amnesia. I had a responsibility to study the generations before me and use that to move forward. So I worked with my then partner to craft a crowdfunding campaign called the Southern Discomfort Tour. My goal was for us to travel the South looking for sites of cultural and culinary memory while researching my family history and seeing the food culture of the region as it stood in the early twenty-first century.

There are giant peaches on top of towers, and statues of boll weevils and giant mammies, and country stores that sell pig parts aplenty and have coolers that can keep a deer carcass or a mess of largemouth bass cold for three days. Nothing can prepare you for the sea of green cane or rice or tobacco or the way cotton looks when its young and bushy and putting out mallowlike blossoms. The road signs are clearthree crosses on a hill, Get Right with God, signs for cans of field peas and succotash, buffet-style halls and meat and threes off the highway, and nondescript adult entertainment centers. Old plantations lend their name to actual historical sites on the brown landmark signs as well as to apartment complexes and resorts, and battlefields are everywhere. In some town centers, the auction blocks are remembered. From the town I live in in Maryland, to Oxford, Mississippi, the Confederate soldier stands guard near the old courthouse, and people will point out to you where the hanging tree stoodor stands.

There is a lot of beautiful and a lot of ugly mashed together. Pecan trees are my favorite thing and they stand guard over my grandfathers home in South Carolina. Nothing matches light filtering through Spanish moss in the latest part of the day. The elders talked about how beautiful this place was, and if you are lucky, you will learn why they left it and what that first taste of Northern cold was like and the realization some things were no better no matter where you lived. In the words of my maternal grandmother, The day I learned up North wasnt streets paved with gold and that white people there could be just as bad was the way I learned that sometimes the grass is greener because theres more shit to deal with. But she missed the crepe myrtles, and my grandfather missed the taste of ripe cane nabbed from a neighbors yard; I had come to see it all for myself.