Long before I intended to spend time in Winston Salem and turned my attention in new ways to the "South," I bought a copy of a book entitled The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty.
For various personal reasons, I only read it after I was ensconced in an apartment all too far from home, lonely and finding my way by reading obsessively. It turned out to be a book that I needed to read - and eventually I saw Twitty on television, and started reading his website, Afroculinaria.
But, it all began with a book I picked up on a whim. The book has its limitations - the last third is actually fairly poorly written - but, for me, it is one of the most important books that I have read in a long time in the world of food, history, and related matters. The themes are evident in the book's subtitle: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South. What is hidden there, though, is the ways Twitty uses his own personal explorations of, say, his family history across the South as slave and free as well as his own choice to have his DNA explored to seek family connections. His journey is both a journey of external history and a deeply personal journey. It is a memoir, granted, but in some significant ways, a memoir of more than a single individual. (Perhaps that is always true, but it seems critically important in this book.)
And, the book has won multiple awards - including a 2018 award from the James Beard Foundation and more.
So, what do I have to say about the book? A few points: something I had thought obvious becomes dramatically more important and interesting in the details: that southern food is in many ways entangled with the history of slavery in all its horrors. Both the particular foods and the modes of cooking are attached - to crossing the middle passage, to the ways house and field slaves existed and survived, to the expertise of Africa (e.g., rice) and the demands of what eventually became the Southern United States. The book also points to how Twitty is (and in some ways all of us are) inheritors of both the horrors and the food of an era of slavery. That today, when Twitty re-enacts slave cooking in various settings and is criticized for raising the issues of slavery and race all too often, is itself a reminder that we have not settled the legacy that he writes about. We cannot, I was reminded in reading the book, romanticize nor can we forget the past - we must, as Twitty calls us to do - embrace the discomfort. And, to quote the back of the book, "bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together."
That is, in some ways, this is a deeply political book (especially these days), a deeply hopeful and simultaneously mournful book, and a pragmatic book: if we meet around food, quite literally, perhaps we will find restorative justice. Perhaps.
Perhaps two more details: (1) Twitty is effective in reminding readers that many lineages in the US are interconnected because of the rape of slaves. (2) Twitty is also effective in reminding us not to homogenize Africa and thus the foodways of slavery, African Americans, and the South. Each has varieties. Perhaps because I am spending time in NC, after decades of not having done so, I see some of this in new ways. (When I headed to NC in my youth, I thought the state the heart of the Sooth. Now, I know that there are many Souths and to understand NC one must try to understand that as well as the ways there are many NCs. In an unrelated context, I read a book recently that distinguishes between the peripheral South (including NC) and the deep South. Hmmm.)
I learned a lot about myself and about the worlds in which I live by reading the book.
I grew up above the Mason Dixon line, centrally isolated between Valley Forge and Gettysburg. Indeed, they were each the site of multiple field trips, as was the site of the Liberty Bell, across my childhood and youth. It is no wonder I wanted to grow up and be a history teacher for part of that youth. As an adult, I came to understand that the history we are told is often (to use a term from my field) mythologized and always told from a perspective. So: the version of American history I got was a particular one. It shaped me - so that I believed the Civil War was about slavery (it was), that one side was virtuous and the other not (I now know that the so-called virtuous North was itself deeply problematic though I continue to believe those defending slavery were doing just that), and that version always steered toward believing that we were all about freedom. I forgot too often that we were also, always already about genocide and slavery. I am not sure if I knew that they were slaveholders, those founding fathers - nor that there were founding mothers. And, I forgot all this even though I was raised near Philadelphia. The story seemed so simple then. It was so distorted. And, we know it was a story told to sustain the status quo and that I looked past many stories around me including where, exactly, the African Americans around me came from, to get to such a simple tale.
The food I ate was, in many ways, the voice of my heritage - third generation American Irish of a certain sort. And yet, it was the white 1950s that I ate. I was reminded of the limitations of my stories by Twitty, of the clash of aspiration and reality, of the need for survival and the joy of community. Tobacco was what my parents smoked, not what they - or anyone I knew - grew.
Today, I live in a re-claimed tobacco warehouse. I have a friend who grew up on a tobacco farm. And, I live in a city which is defined by much of that history.
I might, just might, need to re-read Twitty's book.
