2008 Women's Social Constructions Of

WOMEN’S SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF EVERYDAY LIFE:

AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF FOOD PREPARATION

AND PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE

Katherine McKibben Hoover

M. Ed., Texas Wesleyan University, 1998

B.S., University of Arkansas, 1992

A dissertation submitted to the Department of Professional and Community Leadership College of Professional Studies The University of West Florida In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Education

2008

The dissertation of Katherine McKibben Hoover is approved:

______Dallas A. Blanchard Ph.D., Committee Member Date

______Joyce C. Nichols Ed.D., Committee Member Date

______Mary F. Rogers, Ph.D., Committee Chair Date

Accepted for the Department/Division:

______Thomas J. Kramer, Ph.D., Chair Date

Accepted for the University:

______Richard S. Podemski, Ph.D., Dean of Graduate Studies Date

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I grew up watching and listening to the lived experiences of the women who participated in my study. Therefore, first and foremost, my project is dedicated to

Katherine, Cutie, Pat, Jane, Ruby, Betty and my grandmother and the struggles that brought about the joy of their life’s accomplishments, in their eyes, their families. I have always wanted to write about my family. Two people, especially, revealed to me the possibilities of such a project. My mother, my first teacher, taught me the significance of family. I love you. Thank you for the legacy you continue to provide for me from which I build my own. Dr. Mary Rogers taught me how to frame my ideas professionally. Your support, guidance, and friendship are characteristic of a genuine and caring educator like the many you taught me about and to which I aspire. Thank you for sharpening the lens from which I view the world.

There are many others that have helped me along my journey, not to mention all my teachers, members of my doctoral committee, and classmates, but there are just not enough pages to list them here. Thank you to my husband, Eric; my son, Mike, and his family; and all my brothers, sisters, and cousins. With love, I thought of you so often given all we share while this project was under way.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii

LIST OF FIGURES ...... vi

ABSTRACT ...... vii

CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 A. Theoretical Perspectives ...... 6 B. Statement of Purpose ...... 17

CHAPTER II. REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ...... 19 A. Women’s Ways of Knowing and the Social Construction of Knowledge ...... 20 B. We Are What We Eat or How Women Feed Body and Soul ...... 26 C. Food and the Practical Construction of Knowledge ...... 34 D. A Kitchen and Garden Epistemology ...... 42 E. A Phenomenology of the Great Depression...... 46

CHAPTER III. METHODS ...... 51 A. Research Design ...... 52 B. The Sisters...... 56 C. Data Generation and Analysis ...... 58 D. Ethics and Reflexivity ...... 64

CHAPTER IV. THE JOURNEY...... 68 A. The Medium ...... 70 B. Kitchen Warmth ...... 73 C. Mothers and Othermothers ...... 80

CHAPTER V. PRESERVATION THROUGH PERSEVERANCE ...... 86 A. Sowing the Seeds of Life ...... 87 B. 72 Biscuits—More Than Enough ...... 95 C. Beauty and the Biddies ...... 99

CHAPTER VI. MAKING MEMORIES: PEOPLE, PLACES, EVENTS ...... 106 A. Sunday Dinner and Other Occasions ...... 107 B. Spiked Ambrosia and Holiday Specialties ...... 114 C. Recipes and Cookbooks ...... 118

D. Good for What Ails Ya’ ...... 126

CHAPTER VII. DISCUSSION ...... 130 A. A Recipe for Life ...... 130 B. Journey’s End, New Beginnings ...... 132 C. Perpetual Garden...... 137 D. Coming Full Circle ...... 139

EPILOGUE ...... 142

REFERENCES ...... 144

APPENDIXES ...... 154 A. Institutional Review Board Approval ...... 155 B. Informed Consent Form ...... 157

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Katherine’s pound cake recipe with hickory nuts ...... 93

2. Katherine’s cornbread recipe ...... 97

3. Katherine’s tea cake recipe ...... 113

4. My mother’s blackberry cobbler recipe ...... 120

5. Grandmother’s “My Lemon Pie” recipe ...... 122

6. Katherine’s love cake recipe ...... 126

ABSTRACT

WOMEN’S SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF EVERYDAY LIFE: AN EPISTEMOLOGY OF FOOD PREPARATION AND PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE

Katherine McKibben Hoover

Common, day-to-day events and mundane interactions often have no history but leave a practical knowledge legacy. Knowledge construction is about creating meaning through social interactions. Food preparation is a medium through which women provide for the social construction of knowledge. This comparative case study involving the lived experiences of six women from the rural South who grew up during the Great Depression illustrates how knowledge is socially constructed in everyday life leaving a legacy for future generations.

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

My grandmother had ten children. There were seven sisters, including my mother.

They grew up in a small, Southern town during the Great Depression and its aftermath.

Grandmother raised nine of these children with and without the help of a spouse. My oldest aunt, my namesake Aunt Kitty Kat (nickname for Katherine), died a few years ago.

At that time, I began to think about the history of a family and what gets passed along as a legacy of wisdom. Through my relationships with my mother and my own sisters, I realize that many beliefs, values, and attitudes come from the family by way of practical skills and mundane interactions. Being a woman and a sister myself, I want to find out how a legacy builds up from what women know and what they tell us about their lived experiences.

At Aunt Kitty Kat’s funeral, people had much to say about the kind, genteel person she was. My aunt married right out of nursing school. Her husband was a young man much like herself from the same area. They worked and lived in the same house for over 50 years. They raised three sons, but only one remained in the area after growing up.

My aunt’s husband died a short time after he retired. Aunt Kitty Kat lived on until the age of 81. Friends and family at the funeral talked about her cooking, sewing, and gardening as well as her strong faith in God. They talked a lot about how they would miss and

remember my aunt. I felt that such a good life did not appear to have a proportionate impact on the world. I began to think more generally, too, about how women sustain their and others’ lives through the beliefs and values they share in their everyday interactions and projects. My aunt had loved and nurtured a husband and three sons. Thinking about her caring nature, I found myself wondering how a legacy of nurturing, caring, and loving imprints women’s lives and how it intertwines with practical knowledge and homemaking skills such as food preparation and working with cloth. How do women pass on this legacy, especially to female family members? A quiet legacy, women’s knowledge seems most broadly to consist of their insights into life, into living well in the world as women.

My grandmother’s first two children were boys. Following, she had seven girls all in a row, roughly two years apart. One daughter was stillborn, and the last child was a male. These six sisters’ stories reflect their birth order since what they know and how they came to know it derives from the relationships they formed and maintained with each other. Studying the sister’s stories and their interactions with each other will help me understand how shared beliefs and values are maintained in the nooks and crannies of everyday life.

The sisters’ family was relatively affluent until the Great Depression. During the

Depression the family lost everything, and poverty quickly overcame them. Other problems ensued, but my grandmother endured while raising the children and providing day to day sustenance. Based on my own upbringing and relationships with my aunts, I can see that the family’s beliefs and values held them together during the hard times and allowed them to endure. Their type of practical, mundane knowledge was a staple of

fortitude. Working together, the family made it through hard times to persevere in other aspects of life as well. They went on to pass their beliefs and values to their children.

Many of their own children are now raising children of their own.

I remember visits to my aunt’s modest home in rural Mississippi where she made a point to cook for us. Food was a big part of our family life and is also the focal point of my research on the sister’s lived experiences. Most of Aunt Kitty Kat’s cooking involved no recipes. Year after year at family gatherings and reunions, she and her sisters served up their special dishes. Aunt Kitty Kat’s well-kept house was so quiet you could not help but be relaxed and restored there. The sounds of the whippoorwill and hushed adult voices lulled you to sleep at night on crocheted pillow covers and frilly sheets that smelled of time. I knew the sisters were telling stories from the past when I heard their laughter coming from the kitchen.

As children, my sisters and I visited during summers with cousins or at aunts’ houses in Mississippi. When my grandmother was still alive, I remember a grand time of running around her huge old house with wooden floors and large windows covered with pull-down shades. The women gathered in the kitchen to talk while they were preparing meals. In the evening, we all sat on a big front porch while the house cooled since there was no air conditioning. At the time, my grandmother cleaned and cared for the lady she lived with in exchange for rent. Again, I think of how women care for each other during these types of everyday interactions and wonder whether I have absorbed that legacy.

Other memories about the women in my family remain vivid. Shortly after Aunt

Kitty Kat’s funeral, I was given a bathroom rug she had crocheted. I began asking my mother about crocheting, and we talked together about family and legacy. We noted that

if no one in the second generation learned to crochet, it would be a lost art in our family.

My aunt came up in the conversation, and I asked my mother what she thought about her sister’s life. She told me a few stories about her. When I implored her for more details, especially my aunt’s beliefs and values, the conversation faltered. We did not talk much about such things. Maybe details were painful for her because of the hardships the sisters had endured, or feelings were hidden away to preserve pride and dignity. After all, these sisters had grown up with an unwritten rule not to draw attention. Additionally, when women encounter hardships in their lives, they often ignore or suppress their feelings in favor of nurturing others (Gilligan, 1982). Many times they suffer in silence unless, as with the case of these sisters, they have women in close proximity as confidants and mentors.

My own mother left rural Mississippi when she was only 18. She and her older sister, my Aunt Pat, took a train to Washington, DC for jobs left open when men went to war. My aunt would marry and settle in the Northeast, not returning to this area until much later after a divorce. She raised three boys. My mother married a military man and for the next 30 years or so moved from place to place, even living in Japan and Alaska.

She had five children, including three girls.

My aunts all came to have very different lives after they married and had children of their own. Some acquired more things than others, some were more religious than others, and some endured more of life’s adversities than others. Overall, the sisters seemed to be better off than their descriptions of their girlhood lives. I wonder whether their values had included upward social mobility and whether they hoped for this upward

social mobility with their own children. I wonder, too, which parts of their Mississippi upbringing they saw as the most valuable and the most consequential.

I do not remember how or when I came to know these sisters’ beliefs and values in addition to the practical knowledge of keeping a family fed and clothed. I am only aware of knowing them now. When I left home, I noticed how much I relied on this practical knowledge to build my own life’s foundation. For instance, what is the perfect time to pick a ripe tomato, or what happens if you do not pull those innards out of a store bought chicken before you boil it? I, in turn, feel I have passed a lot of practical knowledge on to my own child and see indications of his passing it along to his child. On a recent visit, I noticed my son singing the same patty-cake song to my grandson that is as much about muscle formation in the mouth and manual dexterity as it is a simple shared rhyme between father and son.

As I have gotten older, I see how these shared beliefs and values uphold everyday life. Beliefs and values make us who we are. Through trials and tribulations our practical knowledge sustains us and helps us move forward. Our beliefs and values undergird our practical knowledge through activities such as food preparation and housework. Our beliefs and values shape our daily choices. Together with our practical knowledge, our beliefs and values amount to a legacy for those who come after us.

Like my mother, I have sisters. Slightly further apart in age than my mother and her sisters, the three of us took our relationships for granted when we were young. We remain close friends even though we may only speak once a month or so. We often retell stories of our childhood. These stories seem to reinforce as well as validate our past and the practical knowledge we developed then. I know I can depend on my sisters. The

lengths they have gone to for me are poignant. I enjoy watching them interact with their children and grandchildren. In these interactions, as well as in our own, I see bits and pieces of our lives when we were young.

According to Foucault (McWhorter, 1999), life’s lessons are passed along through our heartaches and joys by relating current moments to moments from the past. Common events have no formal history but do leave a legacy based on everyday interactions. The sisters never questioned why things were done as they were but unconsciously accepted the system of practical knowledge embedded within their family. Their family in turn was embedded in the history, culture, and social structure of the rural South of their girlhood.

Theoretical Perspectives

The focus of this research is how a group of sisters developed and applied their practical knowledge and passed it on as a legacy to their children. Their practical knowledge encompasses the beliefs and values of the sisters’ family as well as their skills. Embedded in the sisters’ social setting and culture, this knowledge has to do with day to day life and with common sense comprising social knowledge and everyday life skills such as food preparation and sharing. Practical knowledge brought them through the hardships of girlhood in the Depression-era Deep South; it enabled them to become thriving, productive, independent women. Eventually, their knowledge became a legacy for their daughters and to some extent their sons as well.

We are not born with such knowledge. We often have no idea how we came to know what we know. Our socialization begins at birth, with family members as our main

source of learning. Berger and Luckmann (1966) theorize about how beliefs, values, and attitudes are passed down to us through primary socialization rooted

in the family. Culture, the beliefs, values, and attitudes that members of a group largely share comes to us through this process.

As we create meaning from interactions with others, we construct knowledge.

These interactions usually involve no formal lessons. Instead, family members act as models, providing consequences, discipline, and nurturing and often using storytelling as a medium of exchange. Beliefs and values are the essence of such everyday knowing

(Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

Sister to sister and mother to daughter, we play out life based on the lessons learned substantially through the women in our lives. Stories hold the key to commonsense knowledge as they convey beliefs and values, albeit implicitly in most instances. In this study, the sisters’ family makes up a cultural unit. Through emotion work and simple life-sustaining activities such as obtaining, preparing, and sharing food, the sisters constructed and maintained relationships through their daily interactions

(Hochschild, 1983). From garden or barn to table, including the use of herbs for medicinal purposes, food-related activities consumed much of their daily lives.

Besides constructing and passing on knowledge together, these sisters also managed impressions, oversaw interpersonal rituals, and developed their very selves together. Goffman (1959) spent most of his life investigating these aspects of human interaction, which he discusses in terms of social dramaturgy. He discusses some of what makes up the complicated notion of human interaction, including teamwork. Team

interactions precipitate a bond of reciprocal dependence such as the one linking the sisters to each other, and helping them to jointly establish their legacy.

Family members as social actors take for granted a given version of normalcy and thereby reinforce the common stock of knowledge (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Goffman,

1959). Doing so requires a lot of emotion work and relationship maintenance, which

Goffman also illuminates. Among the interaction rituals he analyzes are actions such as saving face, embarrassment, deference, and demeanor. Women, in particular, typically place a high value on such subjective feelings and rich communication (Hochschild,

1983; Goffman, 1967).

The experiences these five women share illustrate both the presentation of self and impression management. Each of the women took on different roles and various demeanors in the context of multiple situations. They lived out their lives managing impressions and identities against economic and other forces of the times. Struggling with prejudice and discrimination in deference toward significant others (mostly males), the sisters sometimes may have been denigrated by those significant others (Trevino,

2003). Equally, being poor, and sometimes having to fend for survival besides dealing with narrow-mindedness, added to their hardships from day to day. Although the adversity of their historical era exacerbated the family’s circumstances, the sisters endured and build identities that allowed them to progress in the world and thrive as women. They passed this legacy on to their daughters. In addition to impacting my own life, the sisters’ stories hold implications about women’s social construction of knowledge as it operates throughout society as a whole.

Besides constructing knowledge together, the sisters were probably a support group for one another. Since the family was large, these sisters served in maternal roles for each other, particularly as othermothers nurturing and caring for each other (Collins,

2000). Collins defines othermothers as those who assist bloodmothers by sharing mothering responsibilities. What was learned by the eldest sister created a ripple effect among the other sisters largely promoting shared beliefs and values. Through their sisterly interactions, they constructed and later passed on practical knowledge originating amid the hardships the family endured. Additional examples of othermothering as it relates to the sisters’ family can be found in Chapter Four.

In mainstream society today, cherishing knowledge from elders is often seen as old-fashioned. As a result, elders’ lived experiences can be taken for granted or even dismissed. However, these lived experiences can offer a guiding framework. Their legacy, to us, may seem to be a mere reconstruction of past realities but a closer look shows us something about the social construction of knowledge. For example, women’s lived experiences often involve maintaining a household and caring for family (Aptheker,

1989). These mundane activities are often taken for granted but are necessary to sustain life and determine its quality.

Furthermore, relationship maintenance is required to maintain the mundane activities of everyday life. Women bear the primary responsibility for maintaining personal relationships and doing emotion work (Aptheker, 1989). Hochschild (1983) defines emotion work as the management of feeling and emotion. As the context of our lives change, emotions are displayed to convey feelings about attitudes, beliefs and values. They are set to an ordered pattern. This pattern is modeled primarily by women.

For me, this women’s work (Aptheker, 1989) first became apparent upon my father’s death. His death when I was 12 gave me a heightened awareness of what my mother did every day to care for the five children he left behind. I began to notice women’s work and identified with my mother’s struggles as a single mother raising a family alone. Much later, after becoming a single parent myself, those struggles were even more personal and intense.

Similarly, as the sisters were growing up, they helped my grandmother with women’s work. Like many other women of their era, they established patterns to sustain themselves during a life of poverty within a context of male subordination (Aptheker,

1989). Their stories will likely reveal not only their means of survival, but also the beliefs and values they inherited and those they themselves created (or recreated). These tales hold many lessons on how to live life as a woman, including a great deal about women’s work in connection with food.

Practical knowledge, such as women’s knowledge about food, usually involves sensory experiences. Not only food preparation but also working with cloth, for example, are forms of practical knowledge that produce “artifacts of beauty as it were from nothing” (Aptheker, 1989, p. 45). The sisters express creativity through their work involving an awareness of an embodied consciousness, the lived experiences joining body and mind in everyday life (Rogers, 1983). For women, embodied consciousness has been stereotyped as distinctly different from men’s. These differences produce a dual standard favoring the masculine in Western culture. Consequently, modern and postmodern societies widely devalue bodily aspects of women's experience (Aptheker,

1989).

All the while, women develop a distinctive sort of practical knowing based on their roles in society. Research on how women develop such knowledge is fairly new.

Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule (1986) have studied how women experience knowledge. On that basis they offer a typology about “women’s ways of knowing” (p. 3).

Received knowledge is listening to others’ voices; subjective knowledge has to do with the inner voice and the searching for a self; procedural knowledge revolves around the voice of reason. The knowledge process involves both subjective and procedural knowledge to form meaning and understanding. Belenky et al. also touch upon silence as the absence of knowledge, the most estranged point of learning and knowing. The sisters’ lives put them at various points along Belenky et al.’s continuum as they acted as role models and othermothers for each other.

Belenky et al. (1986) discuss how women’s knowledge evolves. Central to their research and to the sisters is the concept of connected knowing, where linking and associating ideas carries more weight than justifying ideas. The person expands on what is already known. Past experiences act as a scaffold to knowledge, as beliefs and values get adapted to one’s current life. Practical knowledge is one form of connected knowing, probably its most common form (Bruner, 1964; Dewey, 1916). Although connected knowing as a form of constructing knowledge is not exclusive to women, research has shown that Western culture devalues and stereotypes this type of knowledge because of its association with women. Higher value is placed on scientific and objective knowledge

(Harding, 1991).

The sisters’ stories make clear ways of constructing knowledge or knowing through practical activities. Within the family unit, the sisters supported each other as

they passed through Belenky et al.’s (1986) hierarchy of knowledge while constructing their identities. Not only did they build practical knowledge from past experience, but they also shared and constructed knowledge based on one another’s experiences. The sisters build connections with each other throughout their lives, and passing practical knowledge along as a legacy to their children completes that cognitive cycle.

The sisters’ narratives show what it means to have shared beliefs and values and to apply them through practical knowledge to women’s work. During the Great

Depression most men spent time either working in low paying jobs or looking for work.

Most rural women looked after a garden and a few farm animals while also doing odd jobs such as cleaning or sewing for others, while maintaining a household and often caring for children.

Providing food was a major concern. The next meal was not always secured.

Moving food from field or barn to table was a very demanding project for the sisters. As children, each of them had chores. The younger ones did not usually cook because of the potential for waste and accidents, but they all sometimes tended a garden by weeding or picking vegetables. There was a time when the family had to move to the country to maintain chickens, hogs, a cow and a larger garden. Animals had to be fed and watered.

Surplus vegetables, eggs, cream, butter, and buttermilk may have been sold or traded for things they could not produce themselves. The daughters helped with all these enterprises.

After the food was produced, it had to either be eaten right away or preserved in some fashion. Meat was smoked or pickled; fruits and vegetables had to be peeled or shelled and were either dried or canned. This work involved endless hours of effort while

women also cared for children. Cooking the family meal was also a major (as well as more frequent) project since meals were made from scratch. Preparation for a family meal might take several hours. Women often talked together in the kitchen during food preparation. This camaraderie was a forerunner of the kitchen table talk many of today’s women cherish (McGrath, 2005).

Food was a big part of life, not only in that it satisfied daily nutritional needs but also because of the opportunities for sociability that it offered. During the Depression, usually only two meals were served. A tradition of the family was the afternoon dinner when the larger meal was served, and everyone gathered as a family and discussed events of the day. Afterwards, the women pitched in to clean up, and the men and children went back to their work.

The sisters sewed many of their own clothes. In dire times, they used flour or seed sacks for cloth and bleached out the name of the product. They crocheted with leftover thread. They made their own dresses, pants, shirts, even sheets and towels. Clothes may have been washed in a wringer washer and hung out to dry. Sometimes clothes were boiled clean. During their chores, the sisters talked about their hopes and dreams. Stories got told and retold, and knowledge about life grew out of and got reinforced through these stories.

Practical knowledge means little without a rich, specific context. Unlike formal knowledge, which can be lifted out of context in the form of objective facts and figures, practical knowledge is rooted in time and place. Such knowledge often gives rise to a legacy. As an integral part of each sister’s identity, these sisters’ practical knowledge

reflects their time and place in history and will never be duplicated. Yet, it routinely gets passed on in various forms.

The diverse forms of practical knowledge reflect the interactions between the sisters and their context. Even as practical knowledge was produced and reinforced through interaction and story-telling, it underwent transformation. The stories we tell are not static. They change a bit with each retelling. In turn, what is received takes shape from the interpretations of the listener. Practical knowledge also changes the knower through its telling (Vygotsky, 1962). Stories form who we are. We do not make stories to live by; we live by telling and retelling stories, many of which have been passed on to us

(Heilbrun, 1988).

Yet the social construction of knowledge, including practical knowledge, was far from apparent to me even as I grew older. I held on to the belief that knowledge consists of static information involving facts and figures, unable to see that it is a process. My life continued with marriage at a young age, a divorce, and single-motherhood. Raising a child alone meant I often faced dire circumstances such as poverty and social isolation. I was forced to move where I could get a job, and I usually rented apartments. I got acquainted with other mothers in similar circumstances and heard their stories of hardship. We had much in common, but not everyone had an extended family to help them out the way mine did sometimes.

Over time I managed to finish my education and become a teacher. Required coursework placed a great deal of emphasis on formal education but not on practical knowledge. My first teaching experience took place in a first grade classroom in an urban elementary school with a 98% free lunch rate and mostly minority children. I learned

extensively about the children and parents through their stories. I began thinking about how “coming to know” ties in with family life.

There, for numerous reasons, little emphasis was given to practical knowledge. I saw siblings who cared for each other when parents would not or could not. I witnessed the debilitating effects of poverty. In some cases, there was suspected child abuse or substance abuse. Many of the children were already exhibiting the physical and mental effects of their circumstances in their academic work or in their behavioral patterns.

Some told stories freely, others held theirs tightly inside. Either way, constructing social knowledge for them was gravely different from what I had ever observed.

After five years of teaching at the urban school, I took a position with a suburban elementary school. There were fewer behavior problems, and the students typically did what the teacher told them. They seemed well fed and well clothed. There was little suspicion of illicit activities in their homes. The children would gladly relate experiences from home through their work at school. I began to think anew about the beliefs, values, and attitudes children bring to school and how this legacy gets passed to them.

What makes some students excel where no differences of ability appear to exist?

Addressing such a question entails looking at that basic practical knowledge passed on from birth. Practical knowledge is embedded within cultural capital and includes everything we know and all those skills that enable us to show what we know (Bourdieu

& Passeron, 1970/1977). Students with more cultural capital are likelier to succeed in school, suggesting that the lower income children lack the practical knowledge and skills that middle income children bring to school, an occurrence which often parallels their urban or suburban locations and impacts parental attitudes toward school.

Certainly for the sisters, poverty was a challenge. It is only one hardship they overcame. Feminist theorist Collins’ (2000) work on power and the matrix of domination revolves around the institutionalized subordination of women through most of history.

Many of the experiences from which the sisters’ stories stem occurred in a time and place presupposing that being born female meant major marginalization. For example, when my grandmother’s husband succumbed to alcoholism during hard times, she may have suffered the stigmatization of being a woman left alone with children as if somehow she was to blame for my grandfather’s addiction.

In addition, Collins’ (2000) approach to domination may also illuminate the governmental relief systems set up to aid the disadvantaged, providing for further dishonor and disgrace. Instead of monthly monetary allotments, my grandmother often met a truck or train as it came through the area with surplus food. Never knowing what would be available, the family ate those foods every day until they ran out, whether it was cantaloupe or cheese. The stories the sisters tell reveal these and other things about the roles food played in the construction and application of their practical knowledge.

More generally, the sisters’ lived experiences will show how connected knowing, nurturing, and embodied consciousness come together in a legacy of practical knowledge that women pass on to other women. This legacy finds expression in the sisters’ daily lives through modest activities, especially food preparation of various sorts. The sisters’ food preparation and sharing helped to constitute a micro level cultural unit (their family) within Depression-era Mississippi, thus giving this study an ethnographic dimension.

The five remaining sisters recently buried their youngest brother, my Uncle

Donald. Death is certain for everyone, but it is especially sad to experience the death of

someone you felt would surely outlive you. All of the sisters expressed their long held expectation that Uncle Donald would have a hand in caring for them during their final hours. The oldest sister, my Aunt Cutie, currently lives in an assisted care facility. She is

85. She always wanted Uncle Donald to place flowers on her grave after she was gone.

After the funeral, these types of stories flowed freely, as this event moves the sisters still closer together.

Statement of Purpose

Women’s legacy of practical knowledge commonly revolves around or at least centrally includes food. Food preparation provides a medium of passing on practical knowledge. I want to understand how that happens. In a typical household, many families delegate responsibilities that center on food preparation. Food preparation takes into account not only the acquisition of food and storage, but also sharing food at meals as well as special occasions and food used for medicinal purposes. Overall, it requires planning which is usually done by the matriarch or delegated by the matriarch.

Also, I want to understand how food preparation illustrates how women socially construct their knowledge. Interaction takes place while food preparation chores are being delegated and performed. Women are being taught these duties not only explicitly, but implicitly through actions such as modeling and predominantly through storytelling.

Women’s narratives seem to contribute to the social construction of knowledge.

Finally, I want to understand how food preparation appears to contribute to a family legacy. From generation to generation, women seem to learn the intricacies involved in feeding there families regardless of their circumstances and pass this

knowledge on to their children. Intertwined with social interaction and, in this study, an epistemology of food preparation and practical knowledge, these concerns center my work here.

CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Knowledge has long been a subject of research and debate. I grew up understanding that knowledge comes from learning and that learning comes from formal schooling. Knowledge involves facts, figures, and details. Teachers give it out, and children take it in much as Freire describes in his critique of the banking model of education (Freire & Macedo, 2001). The more you could take in, the more successful you would be, at least in school. Knowledge had little to do with the realities of everyday life.

At school, the teacher lectured about things unfamiliar to us and forbade any talk.

History class was about the times and places of events significant in our great country.

Math class was about addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. You seldom saw or wrote words at math time, save for the dreaded story problems depicting situations we had never experienced. At reading time, the teacher assigned us to groups like the

Redbirds or Blue Jays, and we read from books appropriate for our reading level. The place for “real” literature was the library, and you never touched a book on display.

Language arts emphasized handwriting, spelling, and grammar. We learned the parts of speech and how to diagram sentences. Epistemological issues were unthinkable.

Now, though, such issues preoccupy me. I want to know why so much knowledge goes unrecognized when its possessors are uncredentialed, unlicensed, or insufficiently schooled. The practical knowledge that women create daily, for example, includes

cooking, cleaning, gardening, working with cloth, and maintaining relationships. Their labor includes a lot of emotion work. Hochschild (1983) defines emotion work as labor having to do with the suppression of feelings in order to sustain an outwardly suitable public expression. It involves the management of feelings. Emotion work largely falls to women and with the development of subjective knowledge, may contribute to perceptions of lower status (Aptheker, 1989; Douglas, 1970; Hochschild, 1983; Smith, 1987).

Women’s Ways of Knowing and the Social Construction of Knowledge

Three themes emerge from thinking about women’s development of knowledge and their commonsense or practical knowledge. First, this type of knowledge undergirds day-to-day activities that sustain life, including cooking, cleaning, and nurturing relationships. Such labors are widely seen as women’s work. Second, these types of activities are highly subjective and laden with feeling as well as a sense of duty. They also lend themselves to creativity even though they are mundane. Last, practical knowledge is primed for the making of a legacy. Family members create ways of doing things that incorporate women’s knowledge, and they commonly pass these practices on to future generations (Lerner, 1977; Smith, 1987). A major vehicle for transmitting practical knowledge is storytelling. The narrative is not a measurement of the self but is part and parcel of the self (McLean & Pratt, 2006).

Women’s knowledge is coming to the forefront as a major topic of study.

According to Belenky et al. (1986), women go through distinct stages of knowledge. The first stage is silence, a form of not knowing or an inner voice denigrating the self. It entails little introspection or thinking. Surrendering without question to those with power

over them, silenced women sense that they have no substantial control over their own knowledge. Concerned mostly about surviving day to day realities, these women do use practical knowledge in their daily activities but place no great value on it.

In the second stage women overcome “not knowing” through received knowledge. Women at this stage take in knowledge from authorities and experts, but do not trust themselves to construct knowledge. Received knowledge illustrates the age old man-woman dualism of speaker-listener. All the while, these women commonly experience a safety zone in being received knowers. They do not recognize their practical knowledge as authentic knowledge (Belenky et al., 1986).

The next stage of Belenky et al.’s (1986) hierarchy is subjective knowledge that involves intuition and an inner voice, which bring self-esteem as well as knowledge from within the self. Women at this point feel confident making decisions and relying on past experiences to do what is best for them. Nurturing stems from subjective knowing.

Beginning to realize similarities in the lived experiences of their sisters, mothers, and friends, women with this knowledge still do not see knowledge as something they can construct and inspire. Women as subjective knowers value stories and legacy but still do not believe these have the worth of objective knowledge.

Procedural knowledge, the next stage, revolves around the “voice of reason”

(Belenky et al., 1986, p. 87). At this stage women reject dualisms. Either-or thinking gives way to multiple ways of thinking. Procedural knowers use reasoning to engage in a dialectic of “conscious, deliberate, systematic analysis” (Belenky et al., p. 93). Creating and speaking their own opinions, women come to appreciate other people’s views and

opinions. Unfortunately, only significantly privileged women usually realize this type of knowledge.

Two distinct facets emerge from Belenky et al.’s (1986) study of procedural knowledge. At this stage, connected knowing is contrasted with separate knowing.

Separate knowing, which comes from “objective” thinking, includes “impersonal reasoning, doubt, argument, judgment, and control” (Wright, 2000, p. 4). It implies separation from the object and mastery over it. Connected knowing comprises personal experience, empathy, and trust with an appreciation of the relationship between the self and the object. Connected knowing gives rise to and sustains practical knowledge

(Belenky et al., 1986). It takes in experiential knowing, deriving from women’s greater understanding of their own experiences and of their relationships with others (Smith,

1990).

Finally, Belenky et al. (1986) report that the fifth stage, constructed knowledge, brings together separate and connected knowing into knowledge that validates intuitive insights and practical knowledge. Constructed knowledge is supported by relationships, as well as lived experiences, but often denigrated as emotion work. These findings suggest that power and gender shape the shared beliefs, values, and attitudes at work in the construction of practical knowledge (Belenky et al., 1986; Chodorow, 1999; Dewey,

1916; Nesbit, 2000; Wright, 2000).

An example of Belenky et al.’s findings may be found in a qualitative analysis on the meaning-making and coping experiences of African-American women. Mattis (2002) defines spirituality as an individual’s belief in the transcendent nature of life, spirituality which suggests an emphasis on Belenky et al.’s (1986) connected knowing. Promoting a

sense of connectedness with others, especially other women, transcendence fosters empowerment, a sense of purpose, and personal growth. Forty-three percent of the participants in Mattis’s study (n=10) suggested that not only prayers, dreams, visions, and proverbs but also intuition, were modes whereby meaning takes shape. Such findings illustrate the importance of connected knowing and practical knowledge.

Accordingly, knowledge includes how to live in the world with others. Activities such as cooking, gardening, working with cloth, and maintaining relationships entail complex practical knowledge. Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) theorizing about the social construction of such knowledge centers on relationships and social institutions such as the family. The world of everyday life or the life-world compares actual, embodied experiences that provide a context for mundane interactions such as women’s work, including relationship maintenance. During primary socialization, children externalize their being in the world and internalize cultural and social realties. Therefore, their habits tend to be so ingrained by institutionalization that they are taken for granted. Some of this familiar stuff of everyday life consists of roles, attitudes, beliefs, and values within the family. These realities make up the life-world.

Later, according to Berger and Luckmann (1966), socialized persons extrapolate their life-world to society at large. Such practical knowledge is not explicitly and systematically taught to us, but learned through modeling roles and sharing attitudes, beliefs, and values during interactions, especially with significant others. Through their interactions, family members form concepts and images of each other and each other's actions. In turn, these concepts and images become habituated into roles played out in

relation to each other, creating the family institution whereby knowledge gets shared as beliefs, values and attitudes largely held in common.

Such theories about the institutionalization of family life provide for the emergence, maintenance and transmission of a social order, in this case, the family unit above all. This type of knowledge guides the conduct of day to day existence and consists of subjective meanings taken for granted as practical knowledge and experience. Lived experiences provide a framework for the sisters’ construction, use, and legacy of practical knowledge (Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

Knowledge constructed to maintain day to day reality does not address issues of objectivity. It derives largely on habits formed to deal with everyday life, including that schema of typifications called language. For the sisters, the Southern vernacular holds a unique set of meanings. Cliché and idiom used to communicate in the South require little thought for Southerners in day to day reality because it holds to a taken-for-granted pattern. Yet, idioms such as ya’ll or fixin’ to may hold little meaning for people from another area of the country (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Killian, 1985).

Accordingly, the vernacular allows for passing along practical knowledge and reveals a historically specific culture. In a study of her family, McGrath (2005) talks about the emotion work and the complications that ensue as McGrath’s mother and aunts care for their ailing mother. Unique familial language and interactions help them through their lived experiences of difficult times. McGrath discloses how language falls short at times. Facial expressions, body gestures and even silence can be as revealing as language in emotion work (Belenky et al., 1986; McGrath, 2005).

The everyday knowledge the sisters constructed got maintained and fine tuned in their face-to-face interactions within the family unit. Berger and Luckmann (1966) purport that during such interactions the other person becomes more vividly real than the self, and the interchange typically reinforces shared meanings and understandings such as the sisters’ beliefs and values about food preparation (Berger & Luckmann, 1966;

Comito, 2001).

Such mundane beliefs and values about the necessities of life ultimately concern generativity, which Erikson defines as caring and nurturing beyond oneself for the perpetuation of life. This caring and nurturing involve practical knowledge about comforting, listening, and giving advice according to Keyes and Ryff (as cited in

McAdams & St. Aubin, 1998).

Generativity is a medium for the transformation of social knowledge and is a central stage of human development. One of the major tenets of Erikson’s theory concerns moving from the receiver of care to the giver of care, which is what might have occurred with the six sisters as they became women. Wakefield believes passing on caring and nurturing knowledge create a legacy of practical knowledge (as cited in

McAdams & St. Aubin, 1998). For the sisters, practical knowledge is facilitated by their lived experiences.

Dollahite, Slife, and Hawkins (as cited in McAdams & St. Aubin, 1998) define family generativity as the moral responsibility to bond with and care for the next generation within the family and extended family systems. It involves six core concepts.

Holism has to do with sustaining generative connections; morality concerns keeping generative commitments; temporality has to do with initiating generative changes;

making generative choices is related to agency; maintaining generative convictions involves spirituality. Last, the development of generative abilities promotes capability.

Women’s emotion work and primary caregiving illustrate their constructive generativity. Women’s practical knowledge sustains life through caregiving and also serves as a model of generativity. In addition, what may be characterized as gossip and old wives’ tales such as “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,” actually reunites mothers and daughters, reconnecting daughters to the motherline through the practicalities of advice and life lessons (O’Reilly, 1998).

Not only sharing advice and life lessons through generativity, the sisters also shared a distinct family culture, a culture of place, under the umbrella of the Deep South.

The South’s rich socioeconomic and ethnic history, in addition to the beliefs, values, and norms that form Southern culture are unique. Some of its cultural components can be construed as problematic for certain groups, especially women and even more so, women of color. Illuminating women’s ways of knowing through lived experiences will aid in understanding how women deal with cultural marginalization and even poverty. Giving voice to the sisters’ stories will address the renewed interest in practical knowledge, relevant in today’s society.

We Are What We Eat or How Women Feed Body and Soul

When I was growing up, we always had food on the table. As a family, we usually enjoyed at least two meals together at more or less the same times each day. Before my father died and my mother went to work full time, I remember her being in the kitchen fixing our breakfast each week day before we went out to catch the school bus. I

remember her being there as well when I returned, with restrictions on what I could eat as an after-school snack so as not to “spoil my supper.” Later, at suppertime, it seems my two brothers and two sisters were always present. My mother was a good cook, but she typically cooked to suit my father’s tastes and later, his low salt diet. She did not talk much about the food of her childhood.

I never helped my mother much in the preparation of food. My kitchen job was to clean up afterwards. I do not even recall what duties my siblings were assigned, but it does not seem that it was cooking since I can remember my mother preparing most meals alone. I often call my mother for advice on food or for recipes I do not remember. At times, we share new recipes as well from magazines such as Southern Living. Based on the unsolicited stories I have already heard about her youth and my own family reunion experiences, the cooking she experienced as a child became a significant part of her life.

I also remember family camaraderie at meal time, holidays, birthdays and other celebrations where food was central to the joyous occasion. It would be unthinkable to have Thanksgiving without turkey, dressing, and green bean casserole or ham and deviled eggs at Easter. Soothing an earache with warm oil or gargling with salt water for a sore throat were part and parcel of our folk medicine. Fresh tomatoes from the garden always topped store-bought, even if we had to buy them from a roadside vendor. I mirror these traditions in my own family. Little did I realize all along the way, this practical knowledge was not only a legacy to me but also an array of lessons about how the knowledge of the social world gets constructed.

Other such lessons are more formalized and public as well as less personal. These appear in the sociological, anthropological, and other scholarly literature (as well as in

memoirs and autobiographies). Beoku-Betts (1995), for example, researched the Gullah culture of the Georgia Sea Islands. Culture can be preserved through food as well as language. Gullah women are primarily responsible for the construction and maintenance of culinary traditions. Food preparation and sharing strengthens Gullah identity. Through individual narratives of daily experiences, Beoku-Betts found a form of custodianship and transference of oral tradition through food practices among Gullah women.

One example Beoku-Betts (1995) provides is the Gullah women’s preparation of rice. After establishing a connection between the slave descendents sharing the Gullah culture of Georgia and South Carolina, she found rice had been a profitable crop for slave-holders and Africans of the West African coast where it was cultivated. Rice became a staple of the Gullah diet as a food that not only filled you up but also could foster self-sufficiency and autonomy. By perpetuating a certain way of preparing rice and passing this down orally to subsequent generations, Gullah women became a medium of cultural legacy. Their legacy still serves as a deterrent to the encroaching Western culture

(Beoku-Betts, 1995; Hussmann, 2006; Smith, 1987).

In general, foodstuffs are unique to cultural systems. According to Rahn (2006) remembering and recreating food through gardening, cooking, and eating are tied to place as well as to culture. Food teaches lessons that shape as well as express worldview and identity. For example, the South during the Great Depression was predominantly rural.

Families raised a few domestic livestock. Among these was the hog that prompted the old adage “high on the hog.” Similarly, corn is a Southern staple. It is easy to cultivate and can withstand the hot and sometimes dry growing periods of the South. The many uses of corn speak to its resilience as a fundamental source of practical knowledge. It not only

provides feed for animals, its cob and silk for tools, but also is the central ingredient of corn pone, a type of bread made with cornmeal, water, and salt. Then, too, corn is the basis for cornbread and hoecakes, cornbread cooked on a hoe over an open fire, when no pan is available (Locher & Cox, 2004). Like the Gullah women whose culture perpetuated self-efficacy and autonomy with their practical knowledge about cooking and foodstuffs, other Southern women provide similar cultural evidence.

Jewish culture also involves distinctive forms of food preparation and sharing and the transmission of practical knowledge. Frishman (2007) tells about his grandmother’s use of jellied calf’s feet in a dish called fus. Using many parts of an animal besides the meat is a common practice passed down through generations when there is little to eat and little or no preservation for food. “Waste not, want not,” stems from the efficiency born of cultures where self-sustenance is the order of the day (Frishman). Jewish identity, tradition, and law are seen in terms of feeding others, and the everyday work of Jewish women is considered holy (Nakhimovsky, 2006).

Even so, certain Jewish women are just now being considered heroes of World

War II. They are credited with not only sacrifice, but also innovation for putting food on the table or helping other women find a means to feed their family during dismal times.

The Nazis sealed off the Jewish ghettos to impose starvation. Consequently, the Jews broke Kashrut, the kosher rule, as a means of survival. Not only did they consume pork but also horse meat. Common in the Yiddish slang was that if someone saw another running, he or she could be described as “e rest vishtshinove ferd” or “he who eats racehorses” (Sinnreich, 2005, p. 24).

There was no end to the ingenuity of Jewish women in feeding their families during World War II. These women found that not only animal fodder, but rotten produce as well could provide sustenance when cooked. Dumps were scoured for discarded vegetable parts that could be revived by soaking them in water and with heavy spices, turned into a salad. Among other things, potato peels or coffee grounds were used as flour and motor oil substituted for cooking oil in the fight to stay alive. Women often shared these secrets in trust and camaraderie with other women (Sinnreich, 2005).

Furthermore, in Comito’s (2001) study, she researches her family and the meaning of food related activities in a Calabrian Italian family from Iowa. Italian

American participants subscribed to the ethic of waste not. Whenever a morsel of food was left over, it became an obsession for her family to make sure it was consumed at that moment. According to one of Comito’s participants, meals were decided by what the family could afford, suggesting an intricate balance between what was available and what could be obtained. Because of this delicate balance, they were made to eat what was put in front of them and raised their children to do the same. The women knew what it was to acquire and prepare food and shared these lessons through their actions.

Luciani (2006) studied her own Italian heritage, her mother, the kitchen and cooking. She discusses the integral part food plays in our lives. Using recipes as bases of interactions in the kitchen illustrates women’s ways of knowing. The simple occurrence of a bowl breaking, in Luciani’s work, prompts a story of a broken heart and how women come to the aid of other women. Luciani speaks of the responsibility and expectations through women’s chores and tasks as a way of teaching and learning from each other, creating a legacy.

Subsequently, Luciani (2006) tells the stories of how her family grew many of their fruits and vegetables. When the harvest was ready, much of it had to be prepared for keeping long term. Luciani describes how she was directly involved in freezing or canning items to keep in the cantina or cold cellar. Lamenting the loss of play dates,

Luciani recalls long, hours of chopping, squeezing, mixing, stirring, boiling, sealing, and storing to preserve the fruits of labor that kept them connected to the land. She remembers watching her mother choose measurements by the weight of her hand and blending ingredients together with her bare hands, knowing how much or how little, and when to substitute. Lessons learned in the kitchen, according to Luciani, are lessons about life.

Moreover, for Luciani (2006), these life lessons are about slowing down and taking time and care in preparation. They are about the value of waiting and not instant gratification; learning that all things come together in time means learning that patience is a virtue. Trial and error, miracle and mishap guide decision-making, as in being unable to make dough when the humidity is high. Each movement of the arms, legs, and mind in the preparation and sharing of food is both familiar and new. These actions are familiar because they have been acted out before. They are new in the unstated predictability of each encounter. Anything can go wrong (Luciani). Consequently Bost, a participant in

Byerly’s (1986) study, describes being given a little bit of flour when she was little to,

“make up something” (p. 60). Bost’s grandmother always made her eat her own cooking.

Bost learned to cook by eating what she cooked.

Luciani (2006) reports that when the task of preparing food for longer storage was too big for one family, families gathered together to share this Italian custom. Often with

the men outside drinking and smoking, women from many families gathered in the kitchen to prepare foods for canning or freezing. Reconnecting to the past as they worked in talking, confiding, giving advice, telling tales, women modeled for Luciani how to be a woman and live well in the world.

For Luciani (2006), good wives are trained by their mothers as obedient homemakers. Her research suggests that women did these things to gain and keep a man, implying a means of self-preservation or even advancement for women. Molding daughters into spitting images of themselves, mothers set the groundwork for the daughter’s role as a wife. Thus, Luciani was always told to serve her father first and obey his every command. All the while, Comito (2001) reports that the role of mother is central in terms of cultural values, finances, and decision-making. Girls are socialized to become strong, active women and mothers.

Comito’s (2001) research suggests that sometimes activities such as food preparation and sharing are so laden with meanings that the activity itself achieves central importance in a group such as the family. In line with Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) theorizing, food centered activities allow women to construct, maintain and negotiate their identity and interactions. For Comito food preparation and sharing, more than anything, made her feel at home and gave her a sense of what was right. Most of her research centers on the kitchen or garden. A great deal of Comito’s interviewing and observing takes place in either the kitchen or the garden.

Over and over, Comito’s (2001) research reveals particular cooking scenes where a female family member is attempting to make a traditional family dish using her own technique while another is reminding her of the way “mother” used to do it. Comito goes

into great detail explaining the women’s narratives through descriptions of tone of voice, body gestures, and facial expressions. In addition, these interactions reveal an individual’s status, authority, and experience. Food is a means of communication.

Moreover, food is a physical experience with routines and patterns recognized and recorded over time carrying more weight than its nutritional value. For Comito (2001), recipes are much easier to perform by recalling watching her mother. Even the children are eager to watch but not allowed to participate. Reflecting what Comito calls a general family socialization, the children are encouraged to engage through the senses. The older children have much more responsibility than the younger ones.

Comito (2001) uses the Italian word synetheia to explain how the five senses contribute to the process of constructing social knowledge. One of the participants explains that she only knows how much garlic to add by the way it smells. Further, she does not know how she knows. Comito explains that the participant finds it difficult to put into words, implying that practical knowledge often comes from doing something repeatedly for many years.

The ability to reproduce recipes is intricately linked to knowing how food is supposed to taste. Knowing how the items come together entails using all your senses based on past experiences and associations. Since cooking and baking produce perishable goods, all that remains of them after they are consumed is the memory of the taste, the acts of preparation, and the recipe, when there is one.

Grover (2004) describes trying to understand her childhood and heritage through her mother’s German cooking. Grover contrasts the dreary German food her mother made and her mother’s depression with that of a more culinary exciting family friend and

mentor, Nanty. Grover began to understand that food was a grid through which she viewed the world as Nanty offered her warmth and interest through food when her mother could not. Grover describes the fare as the same food her mother sought to cook daily. However, Nanty ended up with more of an experience that included sugar, spices, and especially butter, than mere sustenance. Contrasting the quality of fresh fruits and vegetables with her mothers’ bulk produce and Nanty’s butcher bought meats instead of the supermarket variety, Grover recalls being able to shut out the world with food.

As we have seen, there is a great deal of literature on women’s practical knowledge of food preparation and sharing. The significance of this medium for passing on practical, everyday knowledge also provides for the social construction of legacy.

Food and the Practical Construction of Knowledge

There are many ways that women use food as a symbol. Food is often an expression of hospitality. During times of celebration or sadness women, predominantly, come bearing gifts of food. Hurston’s (1995) work powerfully illustrates this cross-cultural pattern. She often makes use of culinary metaphors that represent food as a gift, which invites a sharing of confidences. Further, preparing and sharing food are evident in “declarations of attraction, affection; a sign of seduction, satisfaction; a gesture of friendship, companionship” (Hood, 2007, p. 78). Food preparation and sharing afford many women, especially in traditional societies, an identity as well as a sense of self-worth. Gullah women always cook more than enough just in case someone visits or is needy (Beoku-Betts, 1995; Hood, 2007), inculcating a sense of community where one may have abundance while another does not because of failing crops, unemployment, and

other hard times. The sisters likely will share such experiences with me as they recount tales of their girlhood.

Much is evident about women’s food preparation in Eudora Welty’s distinctly

Southern writing (Romines, 1997). Welty describes cake as a delicate product of women’s labor that lightens life’s load. For Welty, cake symbolizes change, growth and decay. More generally, Romines suggests that the things women produce, such as food and clothing, are not meant to endure, but to be used. Culture necessitates that these achievements be passed on as legacies since there is little or no physical evidence of them left. As Welty sees it, cake is a language, spoken not only through what events merit cake, but the kinds of cake to serve, even what type of serving ware to use. Mirroring hopes and dreams for the future, cake preparation, entails an uncertainty about how it will turn out each time (Romines, 1997).

The Sunday meal and holiday celebrations are ways women pass on traditions and practical knowledge and therefore their legacies (Luciani, 2006). Implementing recipes can thus be an act of nostalgia involving the expression of self as well as the camaraderie of family. Comito (2001) suggests that a meal is a lived experience bounded by memories of past meals. Meals and their creation bring together family members and perpetuate that unit while at the same time subordinating younger members in their acceptance of the older members’ food preferences. All of these things are mostly managed by women.

As we have seen in passing, sometimes advice and tips are how practical knowledge gets passed to the next generation, and legacies can get made in the process.

Meese (1998) did a study of her mother and wrote about several such tips. Salt the water if you want to peel the shells from hardboiled eggs. Let the roast set for fifteen minutes

before carving. Pour a little carbonated water on the blood stain on the carpet. Rinse egg plates in cold water. Keep potatoes in a cool, dry, dark space. Each of these tidbits of advice offer a method, a meaning or a way of doing something useful that sustains others.

Together, these tips amount to a legacy of practical knowledge.

Today, we also find evidence of this type of practical knowledge in movies. Most recently, the film No Reservations (Heysen & Hicks, 2007) suggests the importance of women and food when a single, high-profile chef loses her only sister and gains custody of her sister’s child. Unable to get the child to eat her haughty French cuisine, she learns that modest food and its preparation can be a medium to bond with her sister’s child.

Significant in the film, too, is that the chef comes to realize that she must leave her position to spend more time with the child.

Babette’s Feast (Betzer, Christianson, & Axel, 1988) is another such film.

Babette is a French Revolution refugee brought to Denmark by her brother as a favor to a friend. She toils long and hard for many years for two very religious, spinster sisters.

Later, Babette’s long held French lottery numbers come up, and she comes into quite a bit of money. Her wish is to cook a true French meal for the sisters and their religious clan. Her wish is granted, but the sisters and their abstemious clan plan to eat the meal without comment in penance. It happens that a long lost love of one of the sisters is also invited who cannot squelch his enthusiasm for the meal. Babette, having been a top Paris chef, has spent her entire fortune on the meal, but her desire to share this core part of her being is well worth the price.

Soul Food (Writer’s Guild of America & Tillman, 1997) is another film that depicts an African American family’s life that centers on Sunday dinner consisting of

“soul food” or African American cuisine. The mother of the family upheld this family tradition until an accident and subsequent death pits the family against each other in various ways. According to one of the main characters, food was a way that African

American ancestors shared joy and sorrow with each other. However, when some of the other family members begin to vent their problems at the dinner table, the unity of the family is jeopardized. Sunday dinner brings them all back together again as a lesson of family values is learned and the tradition of sharing food is strengthened.

Closer to home for the sisters is Fried Green Tomatoes (Avnet, 1991), a film set in the South where the smell of bacon and fried green tomatoes holds memories and life lessons. One of the main characters, who now lives in a nursing home, narrates much of the story. She and another woman had owned a café for a time. When the café has to close, the town begins to deteriorate. This coming of age story, told in retrospect from the old woman’s point of view, sheds light not only on food preparation and sharing but also on how women care for and support one another.

Language is itself full of idioms and cliché involving food and our gustatory hopes, dreams, and desires. Who has not, to cite a few such usages, hungered for something, spiced something up, sugar coated, hashed things out, sunk your teeth into, found something difficult to swallow or hard to digest, had a bone to pick, coughed it up, or received their just desserts? Who has not referred to someone as sugar, honey, pumpkin, dumpling, cupcake, sweetie pie, ham or nut (Jones, 2007)? What memories about relationships and interactions can these words and phrases evoke?

As I learned growing up (see page 9), food sometimes shows up as medicine that women typically prepare and dispense. Luciani (2006) describes various instances of

food as a home remedy. These remedies from the kitchen have sustained humankind for centuries and across cultures, both before the formal practice of medicine and when doctors were unavailable. The Luciani family, for example, uses rice water to treat diarrhea. An earache calls for a cotton ball and olive oil. Cuts get soaked in sea salt; potato slices relieve burns; a necklace of garlic alleviates teeth-grinding and worms; boiled dandelion is good for constipation. The latter also makes a great paste for bruschetta when mixed with garlic.

In Byerly’s (1986) study of women, poverty, and the rural South during the Great

Depression, Bost’s grandmother either had a kitchen remedy or would call on a nearby neighbor for help. Bost describes a childhood memory of her foot getting caught in a chain

so all the skin on my legs and back was gone. So this lady told my mama that she

had some powder and she told her son to go and get it. She said to beat it up,

kinda parch it and put it all on that place. She said it gonna be burning and when

they did, Lord have mercy, I hollered and cried. (p. 57)

In addition, Bost recalls how to cure the common cold:

See people didn’t use doctors back then like they do now. Now, when I got

a cold, my grandmother always used those old time remedies. She made up her

brews and stuff. She’d make horehound tea and all that stuff. Then she’d make

up some homemade grease from the tallow that comes from goat. It’s white

looking and kindly hard and she would cut with a knife just like soap or

something. It comes from goat’s fat. So she would make up grease. Back then

we had fireplaces and we’d have on long flannel gowns. We’d get that grease at

night before we’d go to bed, and we’d grease our feets and grease our chests in

front of the fire. She’d get us so greasy as she could get and she’d take a brown

paper bag and grease that paper bag and we’d sit there and get it hot and then

we’d go to bed and she’d pin that paper bag to us. The next morning that cold be

done broke. (Byerly, 1986, p. 58)

Cookbooks are also a tangible source of evidence about food as a vehicle for transmitting practical knowledge. As a child, I remember trying to make my mother’s fudge. Usually found on the back of the Hershey Cocoa can, the recipe was on an index card tucked in her Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. As I misread the 1/4 teaspoon of salt for

1/4 cup, I learned that recipes must be followed exactly. I ate that fudge anyway, with memories of how it tasted and of Christmas, the only time Mom makes it.

Cookbooks not only offer printed advice or wisdom but also what we pencil in the margins of its creased and dog-eared pages. Recipes are practical knowledge that often serves as a legacy (Luciani, 2006). Accordingly, how recipes get used is more important than how they are written. Even so, food preparation from garden to table holds more value than eating the meal, which is like a performance followed by audience scrutiny

(Goffman, 1959). Just as memories are revisited and revised over and over, so are recipes

(Bruner, 1964).

Comito (2001) talks about how recipes serve as narratives of memory. She delineates three levels of “recipe performance,” inherited, renovated, and recent recipes.

Inherited recipes have been in the family for generations. There is little deviation in following inherited recipes, and some may be referred to as “truly Italian,” even though each version of it may be unique to a family, such as marinara sauce. Change can occur

with these recipes but only under the auspices of more authoritative members (usually women). Certain technology can constitute an acceptable change, such as using a food processor or a pasta maker. The participants in Comito’s study suggest they show respect by trying to do things exactly as their mothers did. Without the experience of making it with someone who has culinary authority, though, a recipe is of little value.

Renovated recipes are considered tried and true and are often reproduced but not necessarily written down. They can evoke the past but are not dependent on the past for meaning. These recipes can come from newspapers, magazines, friends, or acquaintances. Comito (2001) gives the example of Spanish rice, clearly not an Italian recipe. Renovated recipes are open to modification and experimentation.

According to Comito (2001), recent recipes involve either a written recipe or an improvisation. Cheesecake is an example here. Critique is expected by the participants, and a modicum of status comes to one who can introduce a new recipe or a feasible innovation to a recipe, moving it up to a renovated recipe.

A recipe, according to Comito (2001), is not simply a list of ingredients and the directions for assembling them. Even the Latin root for recipe, recipere, implies a giver and a receiver requiring a social context. It also serves as a measurement of a woman’s communicative competency. What recipes do not offer is the unwritten part, the part communicated by bodily practices. These unwritten parts often involve teaching values and passing on who your mother wanted you to be while also “adding a touch of who she is and a pinch of what she values” (Comito, p. 100).

In her study of Russian and Russian-Jewish cookbooks, Nakhimovsky (2006) notes that recipes are often followed by dietary commentary. For example, one cookbook’s entry was followed by a combination of admiration and advice, “A delicious, beautiful dish with a tantalizing aroma. But only for a healthy and physically active person” (p. 71). Another leads to the observation, “good for children and sick people” (p.

73).

According to Bower (2004), cookbooks offer women the opportunity to maintain a self-image that fits some variation of the role of nourisher, giver, or homemaker. Bower goes on to suggest that women who read cookbooks may sometimes use them as an escape, fantasizing about cooking and serving exotic dishes different from those of her daily life and sometimes unattainable due to limited skills or income.

In a study of African-American cookbooks, Eves (2005) describes how recipes and associated text validate African-American women’s self-images. Eves shows how these books memorialize individuals and community. Her research reveals that many traditional African-American dishes (pigs’ feet, intestines, jowls, ribs) center on enslaved peoples using skill and creativity to feed their families. Such cookbooks make known not only a history, but also the values of a community.

Eves (2005) argues that the transmission of recipes helps reclaim identity by reinforcing connections with the past. Some of the cookbooks Eves studied elicited contributions from prominent African-Americans who in turn shared a memory of the recipe they supplied. For example, Magie Laini Raine’s recipe for collard greens reminds her of her grandmother picking, washing, and preparing them. Eves’ (2005) research implies food is a cultural site for storing and retrieving memories, particularly through

recipes. As we read and carry out recipes, memories are evoked. These memories are enhanced by physical and spatial factors similar to what Comito (2001) found.

A Kitchen and Garden Epistemology

The kitchen has long been a place filled predominantly with women. Zora Neale

Hurston claims she was “born with a skillet in [her] hand” (Hood, 2007, p. 74). She sees the kitchen as a place of power for women, where they connect food and knowledge.

Hurston emphasizes the complex significance of food and all that it entails, including the preparation, presentation, pleasure, and necessity of it.

McGrath’s (2005) ethnography includes attention to the Dunne girls’ interactions in the form of kitchen table talk. Since women have been the primary preparers of meals, the kitchen has long been a refuge as well as a workplace commonly all their own.

McGrath began her study in the kitchen where her participants spent most of their time.

The kitchen is where many interviews ended up taking place. Talk between mother and daughter, and sister and sister often occurred there. This setting is, for many, a place of trust.

From childhood memories, Alexander (1997) describes the kitchen as a place central to all the other rooms of the house. She remembers watching and listening to the hubbub in the kitchen and her excitement at being asked to help. Giard (1998) says good cooks can be found in the kitchen, at work crafting the world, “women’s gestures and women’s voices that make the world livable” (p. 222). A room where women often find physical sustenance and emotional support, the kitchen is where women share food and

time with each other. Its warmth, both literal and figurative, lets women rework and express themselves (Bachelard, 1969; Byerly, 1986; Rahn, 2006; Zubiaurre, 2006).

In Comito’s (2001) study of her Italian family, her participants include her mother and various aunts. She questioned her Aunt Lu about the importance of the kitchen in her life. Aunt Lu replied that she loved the whole house, but it was in her kitchen where she was most herself. Comito’s mother’s response referred to smells that evoke memories.

Throughout Comito’s study, when asked to mention a particular scene, setting, or situation, her participants often commented on a recipe or a memory involving women in the kitchen.

Nothing short of magic takes place in the kitchen. The transformation of animals and plants into food can be a metaphor for what happens to the soul through nurturing. It can also be likened to order arising from chaos with the senses coming alive to the feel of ice cream or soup, the smell of simmering garlic and onions, and the plethora of smells and sensations that come from a pie or a cake baking in the oven.

Moreover, women follow countless rituals over and over to address basic human needs, some with a creative flair. Food preparation and sharing are one fundamental way to make sense of the world, often shared through stories as well as recipes. These narratives are not based on objective facts. Fluid, dynamic, and sensual, they typically hold a moral as well as other practical knowledge (Hosek & Freeman, 2001; Reichl,

2000).

Inextricably, the kitchen and the garden are intertwined as contexts of performance and interaction. What is harvested from the garden typically lands in the kitchen and gets transformed there into nurturance and sustenance. In Xochimilco,

Mexico, houses are designed to revolve around this idea. Christie (2004) reports that there, a house-lot garden adjoins the kitchen and is termed the kitchenspace. Here, not only are flowers, fruits and herbs grown in pots, but small animals are also raised. The kitchenspace is where the tastes, traditions, and beliefs of the region are passed on by older generations through food preparation and sharing. In these surroundings, girls learn their role of nurturing and serving others. Typically, grandmothers choose only one female to whom they pass on the cooking knowledge and recipes, leaving sister siblings to depend on each other.

Women maintaining even larger gardens are the focus of Jones’ (2002) oral history of Lurline Stokes Murray. Murray describes small, subsistence type farming as

“live at home farming” and adheres to a “waste not, want not” (p. 107) ethic that meets as many needs as possible, making the most of women’s practical knowledge. Murray took care of the farm while her husband worked. She tells of a “profit of friendship” that paid off when neighbors rendered services for little or no money and offered free advice (p.

107): “There ain’t no fuss about money. If I got, he’s got. And if he’s got, I got” (p. 110).

Larger gardens, women’s hard work, and a sense of duty made possible a good, sustainable life. According to Murray, “We didn’t know what it was to stop” (p. 112).

She goes on, “Honey, in our way of life, there ain’t no banker’s hours, and I don’t find in the Bible there’s no such thing as an eight hour day” (p. 118).

Likewise, in Comito’s (2001) study, gardening seems to have played a significant role for women as purveyors of a legacy. Each year, the seeds from the harvest were saved. These seeds were important enough to be considered a family inheritance. Some seeds had been brought to the United States from Italy, not only to make available a

particular type of tomato or pepper but also to ensure the tradition of gardening.

According to Comito, seeds are like memory heirlooms reproducing former connections to the past with a “flavor, hardiness and uniqueness that cannot be found in history books” (p. 192), not only holding keys to the past but acting as guides to the future.

Scott (1996) also uses oral historical accounts to shed light on farm work in

Appalachian Kentucky during the Great Depression. In her research, women and girls milked cows, tended chickens, and worked in the garden. From these endeavors, they generated barter and cash income, in addition to cooking, sewing, and caring for children.

The women persevered out of a sense of duty through their use and sharing of practical knowledge. Amazingly, some of the men referred to the women only as “helpers” (p.

215) rather than as full and equal partners.

Closer to the sisters’ home, rural Southerners historically survived on food grown in their own gardens, typically eating what the garden was yielding at any given time.

Fries, another participant in Byerly’s (1986) study describes, “…waitin’ on the crops to grow in the garden so they could have stuff” (p. 19). When they could harvest the food, they would can and “do” (p. 19) so they could enjoy it in the winter. From the same study, Bertha Miller claims, “We raised corn, wheat, barley, tobacco, and enough cotton to make quilts and stuff like that” (p. 46). These women depended on the garden not only for their own nourishment but also for money making endeavors, another expression of practical knowledge.

The kitchen and the garden are important social contexts that reveal not only places where life is sustained using practical knowledge but also how this type of knowledge is undergirded by interaction around the basic necessities of life. A sense of

place can put into perspective how women socially construct their knowledge and pass this legacy on not only to each other but also to future generations.

A Phenomenology of the Great Depression

“Many, many years I didn’t know what a piece of money was. We were raised on, if you don’t have money, you can share what you got” (p. 111), according to Lurline

Stokes Murray in a discussion on making do during a time of scarcity (Jones, 2002).

Much of the research that revolves around food, gardening, and women centers on poverty, the context for the sisters in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression. It seems that in the direst of times women are relied upon to make do and they do just that using well honed skills and detailed practical knowledge. They rise to such occasions out of a sense of duty, love, and nurturing.

Kephart (1922), who studied poor people of the Southern Appalachians and the plight of poverty in that region, found little discontent about their lack of food. Self respect is not lost. Even some wit is obvious as is evidenced in some of the town names,

Needmore, Poor Fork, Long Hungry, No Pone, and No Fat. In another study, Soto (2001) collected essays on childhood memories from a group of his students. A female participant depicts her memories of three generations of women who were white

Southern sharecroppers. Vivid in her memories are not the conditions they endured, but how she was inspired as a child in her family’s preservation of a sense of identity and integrity.

A Saskatchewan farm woman discusses work and womanhood in the Great

Depression in a study conducted by Bye (2005). With over 150 letters from her

great-grandmother, Kate, to Bye’s grandmother, Bye conceptualizes what life was like for women on farms. These letters depict Kate’s role in shaping the lives of the significant females in her life in addition to the 17 hour days that included “churning butter, raising chickens, tending children, cooking, cleaning, canning, sewing, and gardening” (p. 135). During the Great Depression, Kate’s family relied on the proceeds she took in from butter, poultry, and cream and her ability to swap eggs and butter for groceries. In several letters, Kate comments on the women who lived up to her work ethic as well as those who did not. The women were described in Kate’s letters in terms of “a good cook who [could] sew nicely” or “did not know the meaning of being economical”

(p. 145).

Bye (2005) goes on to reveal to us through her great-grandmother Kate’s letters that “the task of nurturing family members fell mainly to women” (p. 144). Women were expected to support their families with “physical labor in the house and yard through cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning house, tending children and sick adults, and economizing by patching old clothing, sewing rag rugs, and generally making do” (p.

144-145). In addition to their physical labor in and around the household, women also served as “tension managers” or consolers of the family (p. 145). Their main job was to keep the household on an emotional even keel through relationship maintenance. Kate also describes these women as “so cheery and does one good” or “always amiable and willing to help out” (p. 143) or else “she was unkind to her mother-in-law” and “was never taught respect for the elders” (p. 145).

Moreover, the legacy Kate transmits in her letters is that of a farm woman as a hard worker, cheerful and efficient, a good manager who keeps the household and the

garden running smoothly and has no complaints. Unfortunately, Kate reinforces the subordination of these women by frequently saying they must “give in at all times” (Bye,

2005, p. 155). Even so, Kate was very proud of her domestic skills including nurturing, as well as the fact that she was hard-working. Kate’s female descendants came to measure their own lives against her expectations.

In a study of Dust Bowl women in Kansas, Weller (1995) talks about how cream money was sometimes all a family had to subsist on in the way of money. Chicken feed sacks were used as cloth for clothing and curtains. Extra handmade items were often sold as well. In addition, they used cow chips or corn cobs as sources of fuel. Participants in this study felt that the harsh conditions their families endured shaped values and built character. Practical knowledge as evidenced by women’s work is a means of family preservation and left a legacy to future generations.

In the Deep South, the caste system still thrived after the Civil War when food was hard to come by. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers both black and white formed a new class (Killian, 1985). Bourdieu (1979/1984) reminds us that social class is a main factor influencing food practices. One way the upper classes differentiate themselves from the lower classes is through food. Upper classes change food preferences as the lower classes catch on to maintain that distinction.

In Byerly’s (1986) study of poverty, women, and the rural South during the Great

Depression, one participant tells a story about not having anything to eat for three days.

Her mother decided, “Now if I don’t get something to eat today, I’ll die” (p. 18). The participant describes her mother going over to a nearby farmhouse and borrowing a

“quart” of cornmeal, “till they could get food and have something” (p. 18). Upon her

mother’s return, the participant explains, “they couldn’t wait for her to cook it so they just dipped in and got them a mouthful, they was so hungry” (p. 18).

Another of Byerly’s (1986) participants discusses taking peanut butter and crackers to school for lunch most days. When they did not have that, they took biscuits.

She describes the embarrassment she felt upon pulling out a biscuit when all the other kids had white bread. Other memories included being taken back to the school’s kitchen after lunch with the other “underprivileged kids” (p. 22) to drink the leftover milk. The school was only aware of what the children brought for lunch. This participant had a cow at home and got plenty of milk, “back then we would just drink it right from the cow” (p.

22).

Women, in particular, played a vital role in the success or failure of farming work, especially just after the Civil War. Osthaus (2004) discusses how Southern yeoman often toiled right alongside their slaves, if they had them. Osthaus reveals examples of detailed records of men’s outside work but not women’s work inside or outside the household.

Women “labored full time as cooks, cleaning women, washerwomen, gardeners, and essential hands for raising poultry and running a small diary and perhaps a household manufacturing concern” (p. 761). They performed this labor willingly, with a sense of duty, taking pride in “tidy kitchens, bountiful gardens, fancy preserves, and warm and attractive quilts” (p. 761). When the men died, women often took over as full-time field workers in addition to other duties to maintain their livelihood.

As we have seen, a vast literature shows how women’s food preparation and sharing contribute to their construction of practical knowledge and creates a legacy as well. It would be impossible to cover all the studies about women and food. Its themes

tend to be ahistorical, though. I have captured them here, mostly in connection with practical intelligence, community, and family.

CHAPTER III

METHODS

The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the practical knowledge of six sisters raised in rural Mississippi and Alabama during the Great Depression. Practical knowledge is day-to-day, common-sense knowledge that is often taken for granted

(Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Rogers, 1983). It finds expression in day to day activities, including interactions with others as well as the labor characterized as “women’s work”

(Aptheker, 1989). Each of the sisters, as young girls, had chores assigned to her that focused on practical, gendered activities such as cooking and gardening.

I adopt a phenomenological approach to the sisters’ practical knowledge and culture of origin. For example, the sisters’ practical knowledge includes intentional acts such as weeding the garden, which are lived experiences capable of sustaining what phenomenologists call the lebenswelt or life-world (Rogers, 1983). These activities not only provided for the basic necessities in their lives but also served as venues for camaraderie and creativity. Emotion work and relationship maintenance were part and parcel of the storytelling the sisters did during their work. As they applied their practical knowledge, narratives from the past likely unfolded over and over again as life lessons

(Rogers, 1983).

Each of the sisters’ stories serves some purpose in their lives. Like other storytellers, they emphasize those aspects of each story that serve a given purpose

generically to create or reinforce meanings in their lives and the lives of others. Together, the oral histories I construct from their stories reveal the day-to-day, taken-for-granted elements of their practical knowledge while also addressing the matters of selfhood, identity, and culture. I generate grounds for inferring that their rich, vast knowledge serves as a legacy for future generations (Aptheker, 1989; Rogers, 1983).

Research Design

For this research I follow a comparative case study design. A case involves a specific instance of a phenomenon bounded in time and place. Each of the sisters represents a case. For the purposes of this study, each case exhibits practical knowledge revolving around food preparation and sharing. I focus on the part of their lives bounded in time as their childhood and adolescence. The place is the rural South. In general, cases reflect circumstantial specificity (Ragin & Becker, 1992). Here the sisters’ childhood and the rural South intertwined to form the specifics of their practical knowledge about food preparation and sharing, as we will see in colorful details.

Since six sisters participated in this study, I consider them in a comparative or cross-case design. Each provides distinctive information and stories that can readily compare with those of the other sisters (Yin, 1989). They were not chosen because they represent something I aim to generalize about, but because they shed light on practical knowledge about food preparation and sharing (Stake, 1995).

Qualitative research such as this commonly ties together social constructionism and dramaturgy. Social constructionism, which is often used in case study research, presupposes that knowing is neither passive nor static (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). In the

knowledge process individuals continually test and challenge their thinking with new experiences, albeit prereflectively in the absence of an immediate problem (Rogers, 1983;

Schwandt, 2001). A constructionist approach presupposes that commonalities in the sisters’ stories substantially reflect their shared experiences and relationships. Their practical knowledge, thus, builds up out of relationships with one another that in turn build up out of their daily interactions.

In addition to social constructionism, this study includes a dramaturgical framework because data will focus on the sisters’ social interactions or what they do in response to the presence of others. Social dramaturgy, based on Goffman’s (1959) work, revolves around theatrical metaphors with the assumption that society is very much like a theatre. From this point of view, the sisters’ food preparation and sharing entails practical knowledge not only about food but also about interpersonal rituals, teamwork, “face,” and the various “stages” and scripts of everyday life. In addition, dramaturgy focuses on impression management whereby people present themselves to others with their best foot forward. Some of the fronts they adopt are prereflective and habitual while others are intentional and self-conscious (Hunt & Benford, 1997).

The sisters’ social interactions and storytelling reveal a taken for granted life-world. In that world the sisters play out their lives through the behaviors Goffman

(1967) describes in terms of deference and demeanor, such as ignoring or suppressing their feelings in favor of nurturing others (Gilligan, 1982) or not drawing attention to themselves. The sisters did not think consciously about their emotion work but acted and reacted in the context of their needs, driven by time and place (Aptheker, 1989;

Hochschild, 1983). These interactions follow a pattern. The findings reveal that the

sisters bore the primary responsibility for maintaining personal relationships and doing emotion work as modeled by my grandmother.

Stories or narratives are superb sites for applying social constructionism and dramaturgy. The sisters’ stories, especially those about women’s work, recapitulate practical knowledge in a unique temporal and spatial context. Until recently, the practical knowledge of the everyday world took a back seat to more formal, objective knowledge

(Smith, 1987). Yet, practical knowledge is the mainstay of social life. Consider this observation:

We hear old stories retold. We heard again the story of the clean house; we heard

the story of the kitchen, the story of mending, the story of the soiled clothes...of

the cries of birthing, the story of waking at night, the story of the shut door, the

story of the voice raging. From all these stories we learn about the reality of

women’s lives; about the suffering, the failure, the struggle to nurture well.

(Griffin, 1978, p. 201)

Investigating practical knowledge from the perspective of social actors, a type of naturalistic inquiry, is essential to understanding people’s life-world. Here, it entails a portrayal of the sisters as social agents with distinctive points of view about food and family.

Particularly in the South, women’s stories have emerged as a critical means for challenging stereotypical images (Higginbotham, 1986). Women are the focus of much research today because they have been left out of or misconstrued throughout history

(Reinharz, 1992). The sisters and their many counterparts have been little considered and merit voice. Stories of their lived experiences serve as life lessons and give insights into

how women live in the world as mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts, creating virtual partnerships across generations of strong, independent women.

The sisters’ narratives provide firsthand accounts of their practical knowledge, which they eventually passed on to their own children. Using the framework of naturalistic inquiry, I enter the sisters’ world, gain their trust as a researcher, and interpret their life-world and lived experiences, primarily by focusing on their practical knowledge

(Denzin, 2001). The substance of their stories is interpreted and reinterpreted by these women over many years of storytelling (Rogers, 1983; Silverman, 2001). Even though I am related to them, I nevertheless discover their world, bringing it into sharp focus through their own cultural lenses.

Naturalistic inquiry treats social action as a multifaceted undertaking. It presupposes a respect for the world of lived experience (Denzin, 2001). Narratives illuminate lived experiences, though not through a rigid, linear process. Naturalistic inquiry involves emergent design. Emergent design means that as researcher, I remain flexible and open to adapting the design of this inquiry as my understanding of the sisters’ stories deepens or shifts. Becoming locked into a particular design curtails responsiveness to participants. Qualitative investigation thus routinely includes the emergence of new paths to see whether they merit a closer look (Patton, 2002).

My research revolves largely around stories from the six sisters. “Recalcitrant experience,” a term coined by Quine (1966), suggests that stories and narratives are not meant to change ideas about life. Rather, they fine-tune shared beliefs, values, attitudes, or other elements of culture. The sisters did not espouse theories through their stories.

Instead, their stories are personal narratives about life and their own day to day

experiences. Typically, they hold a message or a lesson. Originally, the sisters often shared these stories during their labor because there was little free time.

For the most part, the stories that most interest me here are about producing or acquiring food, food preparation, and sitting down and sharing food as a family more than once a day. The sisters’ personal narratives reveal an individual identity for each of them as well as a group dynamic that provides for the sustenance of family life, especially during difficult times (McWhorter, 1999; Morales, 1998; Rogers, 1983;

Silverman, 2001; Vahabzadeh, 2003).

The Sisters

My study focuses on sisters who lived in rural Mississippi and Alabama during the Great Depression. All the girls were born approximately two years apart. Here, I briefly introduce each sister and for the most part refer to them by the names they use for each other to preserve their Southern charm.

As I mentioned in the introduction, my namesake Katherine was the oldest sister.

We all called her Aunt Kitty Kat. My Aunt Kitty Kat tried to teach me how to crochet on more than one occasion, unsuccessfully. I would crochet away a single long thread, but eventually something else would catch my attention. I would set the work aside and forget about it, yet she never stopped trying. Social knowledge was constructed through our interactions as Aunt Kitty Kat modeled for me not only how women crochet but also how they can turn a piece of thread into something useful and beautiful.

Carolyn is the second sister. Her nickname is Cutie as a testament to her beauty.

She is most personable and outspoken with an assertive Southern drawl and often a huge

smile. She has probably faced the most adversity in life. She taught me how a woman can be candid and outspoken. Always greeting me with a tight embrace, she is still living independently today at 85, living life to the fullest with few inhibitions.

Pat and my mother Jane, who was born two years after Pat, left home after high school to take clerical jobs in Washington, DC, during World War II. I always remember that as a fantastic thing during such a challenging era. Their independence still inspires me today. Living together, each worked at the Pentagon until they married. As my mother has often conveyed with a patriotic spirit, everyone was willing to do their part during such dire times, and evidently my grandmother felt the same way to let them go so far at such a young age. The practical knowledge learned early in their lives sustained them on that journey from a small Mississippi town to the nation’s capitol.

A stillborn child, Doris May came about two years later. Some painful things like this just were not discussed. From this I sense humility and modesty as well as grief, and

I learned how a family can move on after tragedy. Some things, I learned, cannot be expressed in words but rather through practical knowledge about how to go on after death. Through love and support we learn to deal with grief through relationships, common-sense experiences, and the practical knowledge of how to survive hard times of all sorts.

Ruby comes next. She too went north, then settled down and had two girls with her husband, Vern, a man from Alabama. I see them from time to time at family reunions, weddings, and funerals. Aunt Ruby’s older daughter Debbie, still lives with them today.

Her other daughter, Phyllis, is married with children and lives a short distance away.

Betty is the youngest sister, the aunt we visited most with during some summers.

She has three girls close in age to my two sisters and me. They lived on a farm of sorts and grew lots of vegetables. Just after the youngest daughter married and was on her honeymoon, Aunt Betty’s husband, my Uncle J.P. had a massive heart attack and died.

Today, only Cutie and Pat remain in Mississippi. My mother, Jane, lives in

Florida. Betty lives in Texas, and Ruby in Alabama. They get together once or twice a year barring obligations to their own families. Each had two or more children of their own. Every other year or so, someone plans a family reunion, and most attend. The sisters’ lives span many years. The oldest living sister was born in 1922 and the youngest in 1932. This span of time may contribute to differences in the sisters’ perspectives on historical events such as the Great Depression and the trials and tribulations that ensued.

Data Generation and Analysis

The researcher takes on more than the role of interviewer or ethnographer.

Qualitative inquiry lends itself to the researcher as bricoleur, one who takes on a variety of identities in order to investigate the social world (Schwandt, 2001). Exactly what ensues in qualitative research cannot be specified in advance, as we have seen. For example, letters, recipes, newspaper accounts, and church bulletins offer insights leading to other sources as well as other methods of garnering further insights. Patton (2002) characterizes the bricoleur as “situationally responsive” to the unexpected treasures that often turn up. The researcher also brings a unique presence to the research, a bricolage.

My way of interacting and reacting during various stages of the study differs from anyone else’s.

Interacting and reacting with data in the course of examining conclusions from more than one vantage point is a means of further enhancing the research. I achieved this enhancement by utilizing multiple methods, theories, and data or triangulation ensuring a criterion of validity (Schwandt, 2001). As qualitative inquiry has no rigid plan, I discuss various theoretical perspectives in the research design, in addition to using the sisters as multiple data sources that bring to light women’s practical knowledge.

Since the predominant mode of data generation is interviewing, I spend a substantial amount of time with each sister to gain her thoughts and memories about food preparation and closely related activities. Interviews occur in each sister’s home to enhance trust and rapport and to maximize convenience. Spending time in each of the sisters’ homes enabled me to observe shared patterns or themes in their lives. I prepared initial questions to launch each interview but largely followed up on each sister’s distinctive stories in a manner likely to elicit rich data.

I use what qualitative researchers call semi-structured interviews where the researcher and the research participant tend to be conversational partners (Rubin &

Rubin, 2005). I anticipated using member checks which are a means of confirming interview data by sharing it with participants (Schwandt, 2001). However, the sisters implicitly confirm each others’ narratives, sometimes even getting way off track in reliving those rich childhood memories.

To begin each interview, I offered basic information about the research study and addressed questions about the project including methods, data collection, and analysis. To retain as much as possible of the sisters’ Southern culture, I sought permission to use their original first names. I keep their last names confidential in order to protect their

privacy as stipulated by the Institutional Review Board (See Appendix A). Each sister signed the informed consent form after we discussed confidentiality and privacy (See

Appendix B). In the first interview I secured demographic information about each sister’s life. These data provide a context for understanding the basis of each sister’s identity and life experiences. (McWhorter, 1999; Yow, 2005).

During interviews, I drew out from each sister her respective place in the family unit and how she participated in various chores involving food. The overall outcome is a rich array of stories about practical knowledge, including how each sister passed some of it to her children creating a legacy. Some questions for various stages of the first interview included

1. When were you born?

2. Where were you born?

3. What were your chores as a girl?

4. What do you remember about the kitchen of your childhood?

5. Who did most of the cooking?

6. What kinds of food did you eat for breakfast; for dinner?

7. Do you ever remember not having enough to eat?

8. Did you keep domestic animals at one time?

9. Did you ever work in the garden?

10. Also, what kinds of things grew in the garden?

Listening to the tone and timbre of each sister’s voice gives me permission to proceed through my battery of questions. It also makes the memory more real for me.

Many times, more than one question is answered during a response. The sisters often

repeat responses as a means of confirmation makeing transcription less difficult. As researcher, I listen with more than a researcher’s ear. I adopt the outsider within stance

(Collins, 2000). I listen as daughter and niece as well as researcher. I believe that much of what the sisters say goes beyond the purposes of my study. Their narratives are a legacy for me, directly and formally, in addition to already having left its mark on me throughout the past.

In addition to individual interviews, I conducted a focus group. A focus group is a group interview that aids the researcher in obtaining the range of subjective reactions within a group (Bloor, Frankland, Thomas, & Robson, 2001). They are important because they generate data not only from individuals but also out of group processes. Moreover, focus groups shed light on the “normative understandings” that the sisters draw upon (p.

4). According to Myers and Macnaghten (1999), participants make spontaneous connections through lively, complex and unpredictable talk. I videotaped the focus group to capture facial expressions, gestures and other forms of non-verbal communication

(Berg, 2007; Bloor et al., 2001).

Focus groups provide an opportunity for the researcher to act as participant observer (Morgan, 1998). Though I have already been a part of social settings involving these women in the past, never before has it been for the purpose of observation alongside participation. Here, again, I detect the sisters’ genuine interest in teaching me in subtle ways beyond the research context.

Focus group questions evolved from initial interview data. The focus group elicits so many narratives and stories that it took more than two hours. Centering on activities such as planning for food, gardening, recipes, and relief services that provided food, the

focus group generated data about family rituals and interactions. These rituals and interactions involve specific meals, holiday celebrations, food as a source of comfort, and food as medicine.

Some sample questions in the focus group included

1. Describe a typical family dinner.

2. What did you do to keep food for long periods of time?

3. How did you go about getting a chicken from the yard to the table?

4. Describe what planting time was like.

5. Describe what harvest time was like.

6. Describe food for special events.

The sisters’ focus group was very lively, eliciting fits of laughter and sometimes solemn notes. I wondered during my observation of the focus group if my mom (Jane) did not feel the pressure of leader as I am daughter and researcher. I also feel eager to join the discussions as I have in the past during family visits. These group interviews confirm the sisters’ stories told during individual interviews.

Rubin and Rubin (2005) talk about the “responsive interview” (p. vii), which describes my interview experiences with the sisters. The researcher asks further questions about what is heard from the interviewees rather than relying heavily on predetermined questions. More in-depth views are garnered when the researcher responds to and asks further questions about what the interviewees actually say. The researcher works with interviewees as partners.

Finally, I used archival research, not only as corroboration and context, but also to add to triangulation. Photographs from the sisters’ childhood offered vivid images, and

letters, legal agreements, school work, recipes, and cookbooks set a context for what the sisters say in interviews. Newspaper clippings documented events from the sisters’ lives, plus census data about rural Mississippi helped complete the picture (Berg, 2007). Betty has many of these items since she is in the process of creating a family genealogy.

Among her things are cookbooks and recipe collections, newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, and photo albums. Her daughter even has a Bible she let me borrow that belonged to my grandmother. The public library in the area also has several collections of other family histories that are advantageous in getting a sense of what the area was like during the sisters’ young lives.

For my Aunt Katherine, who has passed away, documents are the main form of data. Her youngest son and his wife were so gracious in allowing me to go through her things and even borrow some for closer inspection. They kept school records, newspaper clippings, photo albums and scrapbooks, cookbooks, recipe collections, and another family Bible. The visit to their home included a wonderful lunch in addition to their

Southern hospitality.

I analyzed the data from an ethnographic standpoint with the focus on the sisters’ culture and their social construction of knowledge and social interactions within that culture. I transcribed and coded the data generated from the sisters’ interviews as soon as possible.

Coding is a way of disaggregating data. It is hermeneutic in nature since it renders narrative data more amenable to interpretation. The researcher breaks data down into manageable parts through coding by constantly comparing and contrasting data while at the same time categorizing data into themes. To begin the coding process, I delineated the

sisters’ demographic information through descriptive coding (Richards & Morse, 2007). I used descriptive data to formulate possible questions for the next coding phase. Each new coding phase entailed a rereading of data or moving among data involving analysis as a process of creating and developing abstractions from data. Next, I categorized similar topics to provide possible themes or common threads. For instance, linking dinnertime with specific types of food evolved into a theme about family celebrations. Other themes included family rituals, gardening procedures, cooking chores, and care of farm animals

(Richards & Morse; Schwandt, 2001). Finally, I determined patterns from these themes developing concepts from which to organize the latter chapters, keeping in mind that the process is not linear, but holds the researcher to the nature of emergent design to find out

“what is going on” (Richards & Morse, p. 150).

Ethics and Reflexivity

Major concerns in any social research include the trustworthiness and authenticity of data. The most difficult aspect of family research may include the researcher’s deference toward the participants. In the past, my relationships with my mother and aunts mostly entailed being subordinate and reactive. My position as researcher, however, involved being authoritative and proactive. This shift affected the sisters’ responses to me. I structured the interview process so as to escort the sisters gently out of their familial roles and into the role of research participant, while preserving the spontaneity of their responses (Atkinson, Coffey, & Delamont, 2003).

Another challenge in family research is the insider stance. As a member of this family and a woman who uses similar practical knowledge in my own world, I labeled

myself as an insider. Bishop (2005) suggests that the insider may be more sensitive and responsive to a research project. Insider researchers gain easy access, can ask more meaningful questions, and read non-verbal clues. Family members revealed more to me since I am a member of the family. On the other hand, Bishop claims that insiders are inherently biased and too close to the culture to ask critical questions.

Caring is how the researcher as family member moves between superordinate and subordinate roles to meet the challenges of family research. According to Noddings

(1984), caring is the framework for ethical decision making. She treats caring and being cared for as basic human traits. Even more relevant to family research, Noddings’ work includes a discussion of “natural caring” where the motivation to care is unnecessary because, in a family, caring naturally occurs under typical circumstances. While setting the pace for researcher and participant in a study involving family members, natural caring does not mean the research occurs without effort. Rather, the effort responds to participants’ needs. In qualitative research, especially family studies, the needs of the participants are a top priority both affectively and ethically.

Attunement to the needs of participants is what the insider perspective typically provides. In contrast, the outsider perspective usually focuses on the participants’ needs in affectively narrower ways. The insider as family researcher must meet the needs of participants in order to delve effectively and sensitively into the life-world of family members, exploring their worldviews (weltanschauungen) by gradually peeling back their layers. Accordingly, caring is an integral part of insider research, especially when it involves family members.

Additionally, staying true to the qualitative process and the significance of the research itself alleviates many concerns about ethics and about authenticity. Keeping attuned to both researcher and participant further authenticates the research. Such attunement involves reflexivity. Schwandt (2001) describes reflexivity as a "process of critical self-reflection on the researcher’s bias, theoretical predispositions, preferences, and so forth" (p. 224). He emphasizes that the researcher is part of the setting. Such reflexivity served as a continual reminder that we cannot perceive of the world in just one way, even if we have helped to create it (Trevino, 2003).

Keeping notes similar to those Duneier (1992) used in his study of the lived experiences of a group of African-American men in Chicago is another method for maintaining reflexivity. My notes are in the form of a journal describing each step of the research process along with my feelings and beliefs as researcher. During the coding process, these notes are coded for themes as well.

In McGrath’s (2005) study involving her family, she too stays continually aware of her bias yet also remains reflexive:

For as long as I can remember, I have been watching and listening

to these women affirm and argue with each other, grow apart and move

together, and limit and liberate each other in a patterned language of

their own, one weighted with implication, proceeding according to certain

rules, in a preservation of meaning and companionship valued equally

by each sister. (p. 59)

McGrath discusses concerns about how her research would affect her family. She fears it might cause conflict within the family. In the end, McGrath describes the joy in

her project as a slice of time and characterizes it as “not closed, possessing an obvious beginning and an end, but one that has multiple starts and stops, just like the interexchange of conversation, memory, storytelling, and family history” (p. 58). In any family, conflict is possible. Noddings’ (1984) ethic of care and my own attunement to the sisters’ needs helped me remain aware of the possibility of conflict not only between the sisters but also toward me as researcher.

My study of the sisters does not hold to grounded theory methodology. It is not a study bent on creating theory so much as a study about the lived experiences of a group of sisters. The sisters tell stories about what occurred years ago. These stories are embedded within each sister’s unique perspective, which adds to the richness of the data.

CHAPTER IV

THE JOURNEY

A journey can take physical or cerebral forms. This study takes on both, for me as researcher and for its participants. Offering me insights into the social construction of knowledge through food preparation and into sharing as a medium of learning, my participants take me through time and space during their interviews. I take them from place to place as I travel to conduct the interviews. Who, after all, could visit their sisters in their respective towns without inviting all along?

This study involves three sisters and one niece/daughter, the latter 50 and the others in their 80’s, in a car together headed for Texas. Incidentally, the older three women may be beyond making journeys of more than a few miles on their own. So they see loved ones in far away places only occasionally. Yet, this particular journey really begins many, many years ago during a time when these loved ones lived happily together with their mother who was busy raising nine children. This term “raising” is what this study is all about for these sisters.

“Raising” is what Berger and Luckmann (1966) would call primary socialization, encompassing roughly the first five years of our lives. Later, it is carried on in tandem with secondary socialization, when the outside world leaves its marks. Filled with the most concentrated learning we will ever experience during a given period, the socialization of young “uns” typically entails love, care, and nurturing. One way love,

care and nurturing are conveyed is by meeting a most basic of human needs, the need to sustain our bodies with food.

The sisters grew up when food production was often part of the family’s day to day charge. Unlike today when we go to the grocery store or stock up at the mega market, the sisters were intricately involved with producing their own food. At the same time, they may have been unaware of these daily actions to generate food, but their lives would have been in jeopardy without them. In other words, food preparation and sharing were woven into their primary socialization. Since planning the next meal was always on my grandmother’s mind, an hour did not pass without some activity related to feeding her family. Her daughters were routinely involved in these activities.

Since the sisters were around their mother most of the day, food preparation and sharing were thus central to their learning and their construction of shared knowledge.

These activities not only prepared them for the outside world but also equipped them to pass on a legacy much later in their lives. They accepted the system of practical knowledge embedded within their family. As social actors, they took for granted the common stock of knowledge (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Primary socialization is seldom valued and is often downplayed (Aptheker, 1989). Yet, family members are our main source of learning (Berger & Luckmann). For the sisters, time and time again, nurturing, caring, and loving rest on women’s insights into life.

The idea for my study of these sisters begins with a now defunct community. I began to see its importance to the sisters’ stories when its members reunited in another small Mississippi town. That community is but one place the sisters lived and thrived for part of their formative years. Time and place contribute to the construction of knowledge

in many ways, including food preparation and sharing. We are an amalgam of our lived experiences played out in time and space, revolving around what sustains us: love, care, nurturing, and food.

My journey continues with visits to each of the sisters’ homes for the interviews.

These homes include two in their Mississippi home town, one in Alabama, one in Texas, and one in Florida. Small and demure, the sisters’ homes are filled with keepsakes along with countless family photos. A set of crystal figurines here and a vase of silk flowers there stand among the smiling faces in photographs that tell of happy times and family sharing with siblings, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The Medium

For this young family as well as many other families back then, obtaining food was a major struggle (Bye, 2005; Byerly, 1986; Jones, 2002; Weller, 1995). Yet, their struggle yielded much practical knowledge that eludes many people today. Each of the sisters talks about her respective role in learning and applying that practical knowledge as well as about my grandmother’s role. From keeping a garden to maintaining domestic animals, the sisters each played a part in an annual and a daily cycle. They ate what they could grow, according to the season, and also either ate what the animals produced or ate the animals themselves. In my grandmother’s Bible, she marks this passage from 2 Kings

18:31-32 (King James Standard Version): “…then every one of you will eat from your own vine and your own fig tree, and drink water from your own cistern.”

In addition, all the sisters agree that nothing went to waste. Pat describes the efficiency of using everything: “One of Mother’s favorite things was head cheese. It was

made out of the parts of the head cleaned off of the meat, including the brains and the eyes.” Cutie talks about using flour sacks for curtains, dish towels, crochet thread, and even undergarments. Pat says, “Most of our underclothes were handmade. Mother would put a little piece of elastic around them and hem them up.” Cutie recalls a story about her grandmother: “Grandbob was making doughnuts out at Katherine’s, and instead of sugar she put salt. She thought she had sugar. She took ‘em out to the old cow and made the old cow eat ‘em.” Lots of laughter breaks out from everyone at the example of the no-waste standard.

The sisters’ family is a typical family of the times except for the absence of a father. When my grandfather was alive my grandmother referred to him as “Mr.” along with the family name when the children were around. He died quite young of what was called consumption back then. Consumption is a catch-all category for various illnesses that had not yet been named. Cutie describes it: “Something in you dies; you more or less give up.” She remembers him as a very private person who “never told us nothin,’” and if we asked him something he’d say, go ask yo’ Momma.” At his funeral, the family all wore white, not a typical tradition, but “just the way Momma wanted to dress,” according to Cutie. The church and the neighbors pitched in and paid for the funeral.

Shortly after his death, the family moved to a Mississippi hamlet where they could maintain a larger garden and keep more farm animals. According to Betty, the move was hard because of the much smaller population of the area. The family’s relocation coincides with the Great Depression. Before he died, my grandfather lost his part in a sawmill business. Cutie describes his business partner as “crooked as a

rattlesnake.” However, these are but a few of the events that set the family up for trying times.

The sisters remember a time when they catch their mother crying over the grocery list. While poring over newspaper advertisements of food that would get them through the week, she had been trying to piece together the bare minimum. My grandmother would walk to the store and buy what she could for ten dollars and then come home with her groceries in a ten-cent cab ride. That amount would have to feed her and her nine children for a week.

From time to time, the family would go down to get commodities. These were a form of government assistance by way of a train or a truck that hauled in surplus goods, including a variety of foods. Each time commodities were available, their meals were supplemented with staples like corn meal and sometimes canned ham or corned beef, nuts, cantaloupe, or cheese. They filled up on these things until they ran out. Jane recalls,

“Daddy would go down there and get those commodities, and sometimes it was bananas.

You’d never believe we ate such an exotic thing back then.”

In addition, Joe, an older brother, often brought food home from a job as well.

Cutie remembers, “I’ve seen him bring a whole bunch of bananas home when he worked for Leeco’s Banana Company. He’d bring a whole bunch home and hang ‘em up.” Jane adds, “They’d probably pay him in banana. Bananas were so cheap back in those days.”

Betty notes, “Compared to other fruits.” Cutie continues, “You remember he used to bring the nuts home, Brazil nuts, by the croaker sack full. I reckon he got ‘em at the same place.”

The family’s garden and their domestic animals had to fill the nutritional gaps.

Cutie remembers a time when they might have gotten hungry:

I don’t know how Mrs. Harris knew we was hungry, unless Momma told. She

usually got around and got us something to eat. We usually had something, some

way. But Mrs. Harris come over to the house and said she brought something for

the pigs. And when we opened it up, it was full of sandwiches for us. And that’s

the only time I ever remember we might’a gone hungry.

Ruby also recalls,

We always had [food]. I can remember having cornbread and blackberries,

canned, but we loved it. We didn’t mind. It was food, and Momma put it up and

that made it all worthwhile, but we never went to bed hungry. I don’t ever

remember going to bed hungry.

Food took on a poignant cast during the sisters’ childhood. They seldom went to a cabinet or a refrigerator and found bought items. Each day, food was carefully planned out not only for that day, but for the weeks and months ahead. The tools for most of this practical knowledge are often found in the kitchen, which they considered the main room in their home.

Kitchen Warmth

As the literature makes us aware, the kitchen is more than simply a room in a house (Alexander, 1997; Christie, 2004; Comito, 2001; Luciani, 2006; McGrath, 2005).

Betty told me, “In the winter that was our warm room, the kitchen.” The kitchen had a wood floor. Pat remembers, “Momma used to scrub that old wood floor.” Cutie adds,

“Didn’t even have no rugs on it nowhere.” The sisters told many stories about the kitchens in the various places they lived as children. Most of them contain the same basic pieces of furniture that served, not only as tools needed in food preparation and sharing but also as a medium for practical knowledge. Their memories include the kitchen table, the wood stove, the ice box, and other minor furniture required for cooking and mealtime.

The kitchen table, Betty remembers, was “a huge, massive round table that had the beautiful legs that came out like that [sweeping her arms out wide].” Most of the sisters remember setting and clearing the table at various times during the day. Jane remembers

Pat and me, we always had to fix the table and after everybody ate, we had to

wash the dishes and we’d get so mad because we had to wash so many dishes. But

back in those days you had to wash all the plates and then glasses and all the pots

and pans too, and a lot of times you didn’t have anything to scrub them with but

your fingernails.

Meals were held around this table roughly twice a day. During the school year, these were typically breakfast and supper. Leftovers from breakfast were taken for school lunches. Then, during the summer, usually breakfast and dinner were served, and there might be a snack later. Pat recalls, “We sat down together to eat. We sat at the dining room table. Mother wouldn’t have had it any other way. She wouldn’t have let us eat, unless it was at the table with the family.” This outlook rings true for all of the sisters, but memories of individual meals differ slightly.

Since the children sometimes had to be at different places at different times, breakfasts may have been staggered. Recollections differ. Their usual morning fare is

eggs, grits or fried potatoes, biscuits, and when available, Cream of Wheat. There is always homemade jam or jelly. Occasionally, the sisters are allowed to cook their own eggs. Eggs are in abundance from the chickens the family keeps. Along with milk, eggs are their main source of protein. Often my grandmother would make tomato gravy, a mixture of flour and stewed tomatoes.

The next time they gathered at the table during the school week is for supper. In fact, the most vivid childhood memory of the sisters returning home from school includes their mother always home, usually cooking supper. Typically, my grandmother prepares turnip greens and potatoes and a vegetable they had preserved in some fashion.

Sometimes, they have soup that they prepare and can during the summer months. When there is meat, it is usually chicken. Chicken is fried or boiled and served with dumplings or with cornbread dressing. Ruby recalls her mother telling them, “Now ya’ll go in the yard, until I get the meal ready, and then I’ll call you.” Ruby says, “When you got that many children, you know you can’t have ‘em underfoot.” Of course, there are special meals as well (see Chapter Six).

Meal conversations around the table are usually about church or school. Jane vividly recalls a story about her fourth grade teacher:

One thing Momma made that I loved was candied sweet potatoes. I remember one

time when I was in the fourth grade, and we moved up to that house. It was 36th

Ave. I went home for lunch. I was so happy I could go home for lunch. Momma

made candied sweet potatoes, and I just begged her to take some [to my teacher],

and she did and I took her some, but I don’t know if she liked them or not. She

never said anything about it. She was a mean teacher, but those sweet potatoes

were so good. She might like me, and it would help me.

When pressed about the significance of the kitchen table, the sisters’ accounts take on a more intimate tone:

Betty: The table just became like part of the family, an important part because it

was the only place we could all gather around.

Jane: The center of everything that went on.

Cutie: A gathering place.

Betty: You have to remember, too, we didn’t have a lot of furniture in other parts

of the house. We had beds, but we didn’t have chairs and recliners or anything

like that. But we had the table.

Pat: And the chairs around it.

Betty: We sat and did whatever we would do, sit there to talk or play games.

Jane: Even when we got a radio, we sat at the dining table and listened to that.

Another piece of furniture endearing to each of the sisters was the wood stove.

Sometimes, it was the only heat source throughout the year. Jane remembers, “We sat around that many a winter.” On the side of the stove was a huge detachable “reservoir.”

Pat describes it:

These old wood stoves had reservoirs on the side full of water. It was like a great

big tank that sat on the side of the stove attached to the stove. You could heat your

water like that, and then when [Mother] canned, that big tank was put up on top of

the stove. She would fill it up with jars and boil them.

Jane recalls another use: “We had to dip it if we wanted to take it out of there and take it and pour it in the tub.” There was no hot water heater. The sisters recall their mother chopping most of the wood for the stove. A more endearing memory of the wood stove belongs to Pat: “One July when it got really cold, and we had made ice cream that day, homemade ice cream, and we had to sit around that old stove and eat that ice cream.” She adds, “We used to sit with our feet on the oven door.”

In sharp contrast to the warmth in the kitchen is the ice box, seemingly quite a new technology for the times. At first, I mostly tried to ascertain from the sisters just what is kept in the ice box. I quickly got the sense that barely anything is kept there since food is either shortly eaten or canned. So, mostly milk, butter, and tea filled the ice box at any given time. There was no freezer. Each of the sisters talks about the ice box.

Cutie, the oldest living sister, says that “it kept everything good and cold, your milk and stuff like that because lots of people kept their milk in the springs.” Pat describes it as

a little piece of furniture that had doors on it and had a metal bottom with a hole

in it and that hole for the ice. I think it dripped right straight down. There was a

pan always underneath the ice box that caught that water.

Ice came from the ice man in the city who delivered it to each household. The oldest brother, Ed, may have brought it home with him from the store where he worked when the family lived in the country. They chipped the ice off the block when they wanted iced tea. Cutie adds, “Momma loved ice tea.”

Pat also remembers a little metal table and a safe, similar to the old time pie safes.

According to Pat, the metal table was “a tiny table where [mother] made dumplings

between the safe and the stove.” The sisters talk about the look and feel of things that involve quite a big difference with what one might find in a modern kitchen. For example, they remember the feel of dough on metal when they went to kneading, cutting, and shaping it for biscuits, not unlike Comito’s (2001) and Luciani’s (2006) descriptions of making pasta. Pat also describes the smell of turnip greens cooking: “I’d come home, and Mother would have a great big pot of turnip greens with those cornbread dumplings.

Ugh, I couldn’t stand it.” Jane remembers “the good aromas that came out of there.”

Cutie adds, “Everything smelled good to us.”

The sisters had a great deal to say about sneaking around in the kitchen, when they thought my grandmother was unaware:

Jane: We’d sneak in and get something to eat once in a while.

Pat: We might mix some sugar with cocoa.

Betty: You might steal a biscuit and poke a hole in it and fill it with molasses

syrup.

However, little went unnoticed:

Jane: But every time we did something [Momma] knew exactly what we did.

Cutie: I think she had eyes in the back of her head.

Jane: I think she did. You never could keep anything from her.

Betty: Don’t you imagine whenever anything was left over she knew she was

going to have that for the next meal or something? So if it was missing, she knew

one of us had to get it.

Jane: And if we’d sneak in and get cocoa and sugar, we’d spill some of it and

she’d say, “Where did that come from, ah huh?”

Finally, Betty shares at length:

I think the lore or what you might want to call what’s passed down from

generation to generation, especially the girls, that’s gonna come from the mother,

definitely from the mother. And since the mother is usually in charge of the

kitchen and the cooking, and in a lot of families that’s the hub of the family to be

in the kitchen. My girls did use to hang out in the kitchen a lot when I was

cooking, and they would do their homework and things when I was cooking, but

yet they didn’t take a big part in the cooking. I think it’s very valuable to pass

those things down and not only valuable to the girls themselves then. They are

going to have that instilled in them. That’s a family value that they will become

more likely to pass it on to their children.

Jane shares similar feelings about passing on the goings on in the kitchen. She says, “We always ate together, you know that.” She is talking not only about what her family did in the past, but what she feels has passed on to my brothers and sisters and me.

Moreover, of raising her own young children, Jane adds, “You know you had three meals a day. You set the table, and you called the kids and they came and ate.”

Betty tells, “Even if I gave my children milk and cookies or something, they stayed at the table to eat it. They didn’t roam around the house.” Also, she states, “We sat at the table to do their homework.” Pat interjects, “We played a lot of games.” Betty chimes in, “Put puzzles together.” Jane’s sentiments sum up this section about the sisters’ childhood and the kitchen, “Everything went on in the kitchen.”

Mothers and Othermothers

The sisters talk about my grandmother’s early life. She tells them about working for her own family and meeting their father in a boarding house. Jane asserts her mother told her about that meeting: “When daddy came there to that boarding house and he saw her, he said that’s the girl I’m gonna marry.” My grandmother didn’t finish school, but my grandfather did attend college. He was quite a bit older than she.

My grandmother was a religious woman. She had several Bibles throughout her life. Some of the sisters still have these Bibles. Like many people, she often wrote in them or stuck articles and announcements between the pages. Betty has one of her Bibles.

It appears to be a much worn, leather bound family Bible. At the front is a family tree where my grandmother had filled in the birth and marriage dates of the members of her family. My grandmother had written the words, “The same yesterday, today, and forever” and “The Lord is my Shepard” on the title page.

My great-grandfather and great-grandmother’s wedding announcement is taped within this Bible, and my great-great grandfather’s death announcement is pasted in the front of the Bible. The author of the death announcement describes in detail the activities of my great-great-grandfather’s life, which included rearing a family of 16 children with an arm crippled from serving in the Civil War. It reads,

Just before his death in 1908, he was heard to say, ‘What I have to live for, I have

done. All that He gave me to do, I have finished my work. My children are all

married and doing well. I’m just waiting for the summons and do not care how

soon it comes.’ This house was not made with hands.

He was 80 years old. The author continues,

We think we can hear the Master say, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.

Enter then thou the joys of thy lord. May God who guides us even on sparrow’s

wing care and comfort the ages of a heartbroken wife, sorrowing children, and

friends.’

In another of my grandmother’s Bibles, she has written on the title page,

“Usefulness is the rent we pay for room on Earth.” This woman maintained her own household. She directed all the chores that had to be done, leaving the bulk of the work for herself. Especially in the kitchen, she did nearly all the work in order to reduce the potential for waste. The sisters looked eagerly on and mirrored their mothers’ actions outdoors with mud pies and paper dolls cut from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, which,

Jane says, they also used as toilet paper.

The family as a unit of practical knowledge would not have functioned as it did without all the individuals playing their roles (Goffman, 1959). Since the family was large, some took on the role of othermother, as we have seen (Collins, 2000). Staples such as flour, sugar, corn meal, lard, and molasses had to be purchased, and the money for these items is gained through hard work. Othermothers in the family endured these hardships.

For a short time, after my grandfather became incapacitated, my grandmother worked outside the home. Later, three of the oldest children, Ed, Joe, and Katherine dropped out of school and took jobs to provide the household’s main source of income.

Katherine was only 15 when she went to work at a shirt factory. Luckily Joe, the eldest brother, worked in a grocery store and later as a butcher, allowing him to sometimes obtain items they usually might have gone without, especially meat. Betty describes his

employer as a man with a “good tender heart” because of what he gave the family instead of throwing out. She says, “Mother could salvage anything out of that that she could.”

Cutie gained the most direct cooking experience from her mother by being the main helper in the kitchen, especially while my grandmother held a job. She talks about

“cook[ing] soup and stuff like that, something easy. She’d tell me what to do when she left.” She fondly remembers making one of her favorites, fried green tomatoes, something I would not describe as “easy” (I order them today in a fancy restaurant). Jane and Pat took care of the garden and cleaned the animals’ stalls in addition to washing the dishes every day. Betty, Ruby and the youngest brother, Donald, were mostly told to stay outside and out of the way when they were younger, even though the others always kept them within sight.

My grandmother had only one brother and two sisters living, and only one sister had any children (and then just two). There were woefully few relatives to help her. After my grandfather died, my grandmother is encouraged to put her own children in the

Masonic Home. Although she refused to put them in an institutional setting, the sisters’ mother did heed the advice of those who urged her to split the family up in order to survive. Jane was to go to an aunt in Baton Rouge, while Ruby went to Vicksburg to another aunt. Ruby is the only one to actually go at a time that coincided with their brother Ed’s work at a Civilian Conservation Camp (CCC) location. As part of the Works

Progress Administration (WPA), the CCC was a New Deal program set up to provide jobs building and restoring national parks (National Park Service, 2001). Ruby did not stay long at all and was brought home after suffering a great deal of homesickness.

After Katherine, the eldest daughter, married, my grandmother was again encouraged to split up the family. My grandmother took a job as a housekeeper in town and took the two smallest children with her. Two of the girls lived with Katherine as they wanted to finish in their current school in the country. Katherine thus took on the role of othermother to help maintain the family (Collins, 2000). Her husband served as a father figure, according to Betty. However, the entire family still managed to get together at least once a week.

Cutie describes their mother as “a proud person, but if we were hungry she would go get us something to eat.” I asked her whether her mother might have been embarrassed about their situation and she exclaims, “I imagine she was, but I don’t think she ever let on that she was.” In response to her own embarrassment she confides, “The girls I run with had more than I did. Course, they all had daddies, too. That made a difference there.”

Betty describes her mother as “a real strong willed person, determined.” Further, she tells how, “She corrected us. She wanted us to speak well and to have manners and morals. She was real witty and always busy.” In addition,

She was either in the kitchen, out in the yard, or sewing. That was about the

extent of her life, preparing meals, in the garden getting the food to grow,

preparing the food, sewing, cooking and the time she went to church. To me, that

was about what took up all Mother’s time.

Betty also portrays her mother this way: “Even though we were a family in need, she could always see a family more needy than we were.” Jane recalls, “She would always give things out of the garden.” Pat also talks about how my grandmother

was a very good person. She was a religious person, and she was a good

homemaker. And because we were poor she did the best she could, you know, and

she was a good cook. We chattered among ourselves. We were very lively, and

what I can remember mostly is just having a good time.

As far as disagreements went, Pat says, “Mother didn’t really settle a lot of our arguments. She let us do it ourselves.”

Jane remembers her mother this way: “She was a very good person, hardworking, and she loved her family and was determined to put food on the table. She made sure us kids had something to eat before she’d eat herself.” About trying times, she adds, “You just pick up and start doing; you have to. Some things you don’t want to do, but you have to.” She goes on,

Momma never used to let us do any cooking, but she let us stand around in the

kitchen and watch her so we knew how she did things, and I picked up a lot of

that just from watching her.

Ruby talks about what a good mother my grandmother was: “She was just the best. She really was. There’s [sic] not many people as good as she was.” However, “She let you know what she expected of you. We all seemed to know we had things we had to do and she expected you to do it now; you didn’t put off things like we do now.” Ruby also says, “Momma took care of everything at home. I enjoyed being a little child. We had a very peaceful home. We have always loved each other to death.”

So we see that my grandmother’s microcosm of love, care, and nurturing centered on her children. They, in turn, model her actions in caring for each other in othermother roles forming a legacy for their future children. The end product in the knowledge

construction processes they shared is the transformation of that knowledge into further practical intelligence.

Each of the sisters played an integral part in the knowledge process. Obtaining, preparing and sharing food includes all the people, places and objects that help to foster these actions providing a medium of expression that eventuates the practical knowledge that helps sustain a family. In the following chapters, I describe in more detail how gardening, maintaining farm animals, and food preparation presuppose social interaction as teamwork and give rise to a legacy built on hard times.

CHAPTER V

PRESERVATION THROUGH PERSEVERANCE

Betty begins this chapter: “Before the frost would fall, everything had to be taken care of. That’s the thing about gardening. You can’t just say, ‘We’ll wait until next week and do that.’ If it’s ready you have to do it today.” Here lies the gist of what it means to maintain a garden as a viable source of food. When you garden, you live by the seasons.

You have to prepare and carefully calculate throughout the year. Searching for wild things, weeding, harvesting, preserving, and cooking are the experiences sustaining your life. Luckily, in rural Mississippi, the sisters’ family enjoyed a climate with a long growing period.

Jane recalls that before my grandfather died, she and Pat would help him start the garden each year:

I remember my dad had a little ol’ hand plow he’d push along, and we’d follow

him, stepping in his footprints when he was plowing. It had a blade in the front.

The dirt would scoop up, as you went along with it.

Like most of their neighbors, the family kept a garden every year. In the city, it was a much smaller plot than what Betty calls the “small scale farm” they maintained in the country after their father died. At that time, the man from whom they rented plowed their garden for them using mules.

Seed could be gotten in many ways. My grandmother would often save seed from year to year, similar to what Comito’s (2001) research illustrates. Betty remembers,

“[Mother] would save the seed from year to year from her peas, corn and certain things.

They would get dried out. That’s the only way she could save them. Then, the next year she could reseed those.” Jane adds, “In the winter [Momma] used to sit and look at seed catalogs, you know, and sometimes she’d send off for seed and get them by mail.”

Sometimes there were seedlings. Betty recalls, “She would start out the seedlings first. She may have done the tomato plants that way. She just dug little trenches or little holes in the ground and dropped them in. That’s what I can remember.” Jane adds, “Well, you always had a little store that they’d sell plants, you know, or you could go downtown and get them from the co-op.” At any rate, according to Cutie, “[Momma] grew everything—squash, snap beans, butter beans, collards.” The family also grew corn every year, but they did not mill it themselves. There was a grist mill a short distance away that made corn meal when they lived in the country.

Sowing the Seeds of Life

The sisters contributed in a variety of ways to the planting, hoeing, weeding, and harvesting of the garden, regardless of size. Ruby recalls following her mother: “When

[Momma] put out a tomato plant, you watered it after [she] put it out, and you covered it up.” Pat describes her outside chores with Jane: “We had to keep the yards clean. Course, we always worked in the garden, Jane and I. When the vegetables started to come up, we had to hoe and weed them.” Jane remembers,

When you have a garden and you plant it, everything almost comes on at the same

time—butter beans, snap beans and beets and squash and corn. So it’s a really

busy time, and then things don’t really last. And some things do last a long time

like butter beans and snap beans and peas. They keep bearing for a couple o’ three

months. But then after they get old, they don’t bear anymore. But sometimes you

could have two crops in one summer.

Typically, things were harvested during the entire season. Cutie says they all picked: “for a meal, when the vines got a lot of ‘em on there, you had to pull ‘em off, or they’d get big, see. So then [Momma]’d have to can ‘em.” Ruby also remembers how they helped:

We picked potato bugs, for one thing, off of the potato plants. Momma didn’t

have time to do everything. We had to do that. That was the main thing I

remember. We would help her plant seed in the garden—whatever she needed us

to do. We carried water. We didn’t have hoses like you do now. We’d carry water

to water the garden.

Pat: We picked a lot of potato bugs.

Jane: Worms.

Betty: Tomato worms, potato bugs.

At that focus group meeting Pat, Jane, Betty, and Cutie all then burst into fits of laughter. Then Pat recalled an old saying: “Come in out of that tater patch, Bessie

Llewellyn, and put you on some drawers [underwear], don’t you know them taters got eyes,” referring to little offshoots from the potato skin. Their laughter goes on. Jane adds,

“We’re a crazy bunch.” Betty concludes, “I think that’s one of the reasons why we survived.”

When things came out of the garden or field, there was preparation for canning, unless they were going to be eaten right away. Ruby remembers helping with tomatoes when she was older: “We didn’t peel ‘em. She would scald ‘em with hot water, and the peel would slip right off.” Jane recalls distinctly, for all of her 81 years, the intricate ways of the butter bean:

Well, you know, I mean a butter bean comes in a pod, and you open it up with

your fingernail. And there’s the butter bean so you have to take ‘em out and put

‘em in a bowl or something. If they’re not big enough, you don’t pick ‘em. You

can test ‘em that way. You can almost feel ‘em and tell if they’ve got plump

beans in ‘em.

Ruby says, “At the end of the growing cycle, everybody had to drop whatever they were doing so they could get that stuff put up.” Betty adds, “I guess canning some provided you with some for the colder months.” Canning involved the old wood stove.

Betty recalls,

We’d take that [reservoir] off and put it on top of the stove, and [Momma] would

put those things in the jars and put them in the reservoir. We reused the jars over

and over. She would have to buy little caps sometimes. She could use the caps

over, too. I remember this one type of old jar cap that had the seal made in it.

[Momma] would sterilize the jar. She would sterilize those lids, too, and that

would make the rubberized seal thing soften up in there. And then when she

pressured it, it would adhere to the jar. That’s how they sealed.

Cutie sums up, “[Momma] canned all kind of stuff, jar after jar.”

Pat says that my grandmother “made soup mix with all the vegetables that were ready at the time. That was really my favorite.” Jane continues,

She could make some of the best soup mix you have ever tasted with corn and

tomatoes and butter beans. It was so good. She put that in jars. When [Momma]

made that, it’s like a condensed version of soup, and you added water. She always

did ‘cause we had such a large family. It’d take six jars to feed all of us.

Sometimes, we’d have soup and cornbread. Sometimes that’d be all we had.

In addition, Betty remembers what is called chow-chow:

They didn’t call it relish. It was something kinda like a salsa. It would have

tomatoes and peppers and onions and different things in there. She made that. But

all this had to be canned because there was no freezing back then, not to my

knowledge, in our situation anyway.

Much of what the family picked was wild. From blackberries, huckleberries, and muscadines to a variety of nuts, the sisters spent many a day gathering nature’s bounty.

Jane recalls:

We didn’t have gloves at that time of the year so we’d come home with our hands

all torn up from briars. We left with buckets, every one of us carrying a bucket.

You know, buckets back then had bales or handles, and you could take them

along. You could hang ‘em on your arm and pick blackberries and put the

blackberries in. A lot of times we just set them on the ground and pick the

blackberries and put them in. We’d pick huckleberries, too, and those things are

little. They are nothing but a small blueberry, and that’s what they tasted like. It

takes a lot of picking. But, honey, you couldn’t imagine six or seven kids

marching off picking maybe two gallons a piece. Just think of all the blackberries

we’d have. We’d go to a field where they used to grow wild. They don’t have

them like they used to. In the fields where they kept the cows, we’d be scared to

death of an old bull that might come charging at us.

One of the stories shared was about how Betty broke her arm climbing a persimmon tree to get to a muscadine vine. Jane recalls, “I remember, I picked Betty up and carried her all the way home.” A close neighbor took my grandmother and Betty to the doctor in town and did not arrive home until late that evening. Jane tells what happens in their absence: “I was gonna go out and milk that cow, and I tried. I took the bucket out there and everything, but I could not get any milk to come down into the bucket. We didn’t know how to milk.”

My grandmother preserved fruit in a variety of ways. Betty recalls, “She canned a lot of ‘em as fruit to make pies and cobblers, and things. And a lot of ‘em she’d make into jams and jellies and things.” Jane and Pat recall peaches and wild plums. Both Cutie and Betty recall a surfeit of wild plums. Jane recalls, “We’d go by the road to get these old wild plums. Sometimes we’d pick a whole bucketful, and she’d make jelly or jam out of ‘em.” In addition, the sisters sometimes got to pick the fruit from the trees of nearby neighbors. They talk animatedly about canning fruit:

Cutie: Momma really liked stuff sweet.

Pat: I don’t think they used anything back then to make it harden besides cooking

it down.

Betty: I know, Pat, no Certo or Sure-Jell back then.

Jane: [Momma]’d buy from maybe a truck that went through the neighborhood

loaded with peaches or something, and you could get them real cheap. And she’d

buy them by the bushel. She’d even make pickled peaches. They were so good. I

remember sitting on the front porch or in the shade somewhere to peel peaches.

Betty: Ya’ll’d sit out there under those big ol’ trees.

Jane: And peel peaches until our hands turn brown from the stain.

Betty: After they were peeled, she’d stick cloves, and make that syrup to put in

there. I guess she had to cook ‘em and put ‘em in the jars.

Jane: She would just can with a little syrup, and then she could open ‘em up and

make cobbler or whatever she wanted.

Betty: Nothing went to waste. Anything that anybody got or picked, grew or was

given to us, it was all used. [Momma]’d think of some way.

Pats: Even just to feed the hogs.

Cutie recollects how her mother made muscadine jelly by putting the grapes “in sacks, and she had a nail on the end of the table and those sacks drained.” Later says

Cutie, she “cooked em and mashed ‘em all up. She put ‘em in a flour sack bag.” Betty continues, “She didn’t use the pulp and the skins. She just used the juice to make jelly.”

Nuts were in abundance around this small rural area as well. Before the sisters’ father died, he used to take the children for long Sunday walks up a small mountain, where, according to Pat, “He pointed out a lot of different things to us you know, the nuts mostly. I remember hickory nut, chinquapin, and sassafras trees. We used the roots to make sassafras tea.”

Cutie: He put the nuts down underneath the house, and that’s where we went to

eat ‘em, down underneath the house.

Jane: I got many a sore finger from hitting them [nuts] with a hammer.

Cutie: Walnuts. We used to get them down on Dunn’s Fall Road.”

Cutie (after a pause): Them was the hardest thing it ever was to pick out.

Pat: Momma made the best hickory nut cake.

One of Katherine’s pound cake recipes was made with hickory nuts (Figure 1).

Katherine had penciled in at the top of this recipe: “Mrs. Barber gave us this with a cake pan when we married.” Mrs. Barber was her mother-in-law. Another legacy lives on.

Hickory Nut Pound Cake

2 cups sugar (just level) 1 cup butter (just level) 3 cups flour 1 cup buttermilk 1/2 teaspoon soda 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla 4 eggs 1/2 cup chopped hickory nuts

Sift flour, soda and salt several times. Cream butter and sugar thoroughly then add eggs one at a time and cream until perfectly smooth, then add the prepared flour and buttermilk

Figure 1. Katherine’s pound cake recipe with hickory nuts.

. Canning is a practicality passed on to the sisters as a means of survival, especially for Katherine. When World War II broke out and people were encouraged by the federal government to join the “Can for Victory” and “Food for Freedom” campaign to offset a public food shortage (Victory Seed Company, 2008), she and her husband did just that.

Katherine’s old papers show her tabulations of hundreds of pint, quart, and gallon jars of fruits, vegetables, jams and jellies during the years 1942-1944. She kept careful records that indicated the amount, cost, number, and size of each jar.

Katherine and her husband gardened and canned the produce as part of this nationwide effort, taking their small roles very seriously in helping a country at war.

They maintained a garden for the rest of their lives, even though buying food from the grocery store was becoming more and more prevalent. For them, the garden food tasted better, and they felt it was more nutritious. Betty and her husband also kept a large garden and canned much of what it yielded:

Together we just kinda’ knew what to do. I guess from watching my mother, and

he’d watched his mother. And I’d watched Katherine a lot and lived with

Katherine a lot. She was a mother figure for a long time and so I learned a lot

from her.

The formation and sustainability of the sisters’ practical knowledge is illustrated through the family’s gardening endeavors. Undertaking tasks of that era that begin with a seed and end with a plethora of products to hold them through the winter beautifully illustrates the knowledge process. The family relied on the sweat of their brow in gardening year after year. In so doing the sisters were fed physically and mentally as well, in addition to building up a legacy for their children. These actions were just

enough, for the most part, to feed the family. However, as we have seen, it was all really more than enough.

72 Biscuits—More Than Enough

Metaphors abound in terms of bread and life especially in the Christian tradition.

In my grandmother’s Bible, she marked the passage “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17, Revised

Standard Version). Bread sustains life. She understood the importance of the “grains” part of the food pyramid long before such a vocabulary existed. My grandmother made fresh biscuits daily, typically in the morning. Later in the day, there was cornbread.

Each of the sisters reminisced about their mother’s biscuits. Ruby says, “She would cook them at breakfast. Oh, she had a pan that long and about that wide [gesturing with her hands outstretched], and she’d make it full of biscuit [sic].” Cutie adds, “Every day [Momma] made 72 biscuit in one big ol’ brown, black pan.” My grandmother made more than enough biscuits for the morning meal because biscuits fulfilled another purpose (Byerly, 1986). The sisters often took biscuits for lunch. Pat recalls, “I don’t know what would be in the biscuit, let me think, jelly, probably jelly.” Jane remembers,

A lot of times we took biscuit with a piece of ham, or piece of bacon in the

biscuit. Sometimes we just had jam. We had peanut butter. Back then, it wasn’t

processed like it is today. When you buy a jar of peanut butter, the oil would be

on the top and you’d have to stir it real good to get it mixed up real good into the

rest of the salve. But that wasn’t hard to do. And we had syrup, and we had

honey—you know, things like that.

Asked about what the other children brought for lunch, Jane continues,

Now a lot of ‘em, they were rich enough to have ‘light’ bread, sandwich bread. I

don’t know where that ever came from, but a lot of the kids would kinda be

ashamed to pull out a biscuit and eat it. But if you were hungry enough, you

would, you know.

Asked about other children teasing her about her lunch, Jane recalls, “I don’t think they ever did. We always thought they were, but I don’t think they ever did ‘cause a lot of kids did that. It wasn’t just us.” Cutie has a different experience. A friend of hers would tease her and her friend Evelyn by singing, “Yonder comes Caro’line’ and

Eva’line’ [rhyming]. They both got a bag o’ biscuit.”

Pat remembers a midmorning snack with a biscuit similar to Betty’s recollection:

“We’d get a biscuit, stick our finger down in it, and pour molasses.” Later in the day, as

Pat remembers it, “Sometimes for dessert we would have a biscuit with blackberries over

‘em. Sometimes we even had it with cornbread.” Cornbread was for dinner or supper.

Jane reminisces,

We called it supper when we went to school. Now, during the summer we’d eat

early in the day our big meal. But then at nighttime we just have a peanut butter

biscuit or jam and biscuit with a glass of buttermilk. Sometimes just buttermilk

and cornbread, but we liked that. Crumble cornbread and pour your buttermilk on

top of it and eat it with a spoon. We liked it.

Pat says, “Mother usually had cornbread ready when we got home, and she had supper started.” Cutie recalls, “You didn’t eat without cornbread, and we have eaten corn cakes, fried corn cakes. You fry ‘em like you do a pancake, and it is good.” Cornbread is

a Southern staple, and Cutie says her mother “could make the best cornbread there ever was.” She reminisces about her mother’s reputation for cornbread:

My friend, one time, knocked on the back door, and we was eating dinner, and

[Momma] says, “Erlene what do you want? Carolyn’s eatin’ dinner.” [She]

says…I just want a piece o’ your cornbread.” Momma carried a big ol’ piece of

cornbread out there, and she left. I guess they never made no cornbread at their

house.

Cornbread was also used to make cornbread dressing for special events (see

Chapter Six). Not having the original recipes my grandmother used is disappointing.

However, here is a recipe given to Katherine when she married (Figure 2).

Cornbread

1 cup cornmeal ½ cup flour ½ cup sour milk 1-2 teaspoons sugar ¼ teaspoon soda ½ teas baking powder ½ teaspoon salt ½ cup water 1 egg

Mix well and bake in hot oven.

Figure 2. Katherine’s cornbread recipe.

Jane recalls a variation on cornbread:

I remember I never ate chitlins, but I did eat chitlin bread. They fry ‘em up real

crisp in lard. They’d fry ‘em real crisp, and when they made cornbread, they

would break ‘em up in the batter, and you would cook your batter. It was good. I

remember they’d taste like bacon.

Pat adds, “I remember crackling bread.” Betty also liked it. There were also cornbread dumplings.

Cutie: I loved them dumplings.

Betty: Not like rolled out dumplings. Like balls.

Betty (after a pause): Like hush puppies, just cooked and browned.

Pat: I just could not stand those things.

Betty: We usually ate what we had. It wasn’t a matter of whether we liked it or

not.

Southern tradition meant making more than enough, if you were able, like the

Gullah (Beoku-Betts, 1995). Not only did her children eat all day on the food my grandmother cooked, but she also gave it away if need be, as with Erlene. Cutie remembers when they lived near the railroad tracks with the hobos coming by, “and

Momma would always feed them.” Pat confirms that, “She always fed them hobos.”

Cutie continues,

Momma fed all of ‘em that ever come to the door. They said our house was

marked. They knew by the mark on the house. They marked houses that they

knew would feed ‘em. I don’t know how they’d mark ‘em, but they did.

Betty asks, “How did she manage to feed so many people?” Jane adds, “She would always come up with something she could feed ‘em.” Pat says, “It didn’t really matter to them what they got, if it was cornbread with gravy on it, it was good to them, I imagine, if you’re hungry.”

People often help others, especially in difficult times. Bread was cheap to make, went a long way and could be made in various ways. In order to make bread you have to have milk, eggs and, of course, it’s always good with butter. The family kept a cow and raised chickens to provide these things. There were also pies and cobblers as we will see in the next chapter.

Beauty and the Biddies

In addition to working in a garden, the literature also reveals how women and girls of that era often tended to cows and chickens (Byerly, 1986; Scott, 1996). The sisters did the same type of work. It was imperative that these creatures be maintained in order to provide food for the family. According to the sisters, the cow was used mostly for milk. Seldom did they slaughter and eat a cow because it was much more valuable for the products it yielded. Betty remembers, “We always had chickens and a cow. We even had a pig or a hog.” Cutie adds, “You didn’t butcher the cow. We never butchered no cows.”

One of the reasons the family moved out to the country was to keep domestic farm animals. Cutie remembers, “I reckon when they quit having so many cows [in town] was when they got an ordinance in town that said you couldn’t have any cows. In town a lot of places wouldn’t even let you have chickens.” This type of ordinance may have

precipitated the move beyond the city limits. Pat adds, “We first got a cow before we moved [to the country]. We had a cow in the city and chickens.”

All of the sisters remember that the cow’s name was Beauty. Pat recalls, “We had to take care of that cow, had to keep her stall cleaned out. I couldn’t milk. I never did learn to milk. So I didn’t milk.” My grandmother typically milked the cow. Jane recalls,

Cows are there in the morning and at night. They are ready to be milked. Milk

cows are. You don’t have to do anything to them but clean off the teats, and you

start milking them. But I could never do it. I could never get anything out of her

when I went out to milk the cow. [Momma] never tried [to teach us]. I guess she

was afraid we’d spill the milk or something.

Milk was used in many ways to sustain the family nutritionally. Ruby reminisces with much nostalgia: “We mostly drank sweet milk, straight from the cow, cold milk, sweet, cold milk.” The family made butter, buttermilk, cream, and clabber. Each of these represents different stages of souring milk. Betty recollects, “We all loved clabber milk.

You let the milk just sit out, and it makes big ol’ hunks. I don’t know what you call it, and you put sugar on it.”

Then there was buttermilk. It gets made as the milk is churned into butter. Betty remembers that her mother

had a big churn that she would put the milk in. The milk had to sit for a certain

time to go to a kind of period of fermentation or something, I suppose, before they

would churn it. I guess it had to be in that state before it would make butter. I

don’t think that fresh milk would do that. Then they would put it in that urn like

thing that had a churn. It had a lid on it and had a hole in there with a dasher, a

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stick that went down in the bottom with four little prongs. Somebody would have

to sit there and churn. Then the butter would form on top and they take the butter

off.

Cutie recalls,

We all churned. It takes a pretty good while. We like buttermilk better than

anything else. When you make the butter, your butter comes to the top. The butter

comes out of the milk, and you drink the buttermilk after you take the butter out

of the top.

Betty’s favorite thing about buttermilk was “When mother would leave some of the butter. Sometimes she would skim off the butter so thoroughly there wouldn’t be any in the milk, but sometimes she would leave some in there.”

Jane adds that the churn

had a hole in it. Then you had this paddle stuck down and you just go up and

down and up and down until it turns to butter. I don’t know how many days it

took for [milk] to sour but being in Mississippi, it probably soured pretty quick in

warm weather. We might have churned everyday, being a kid and having to sit

there and churn butter.

Jane also remembers all the socializing:

Oh, we’d all talk ‘cause we would be in the kitchen, and that was our main room

in the house. And so everybody’d sit around and talk, and we’d take turns

[churning]. Now, Momma always did the cooking and cleaning, but things like

churning and if something had to be whipped. We never had a mixer and if she

was gonna use whipped cream, she’d skim the cream off the milk, and one of us

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had to beat it. We would beat it by hand with a kind of whisk until it turned thick

enough. It could be whipped cream or divinity. Momma would make divinity, and

we’d have to whip that and you can imagine how long it would take but she’d

make us do it.

When asked how they knew whose turn it was to do any whipping, Jane responds,

Ever who was at home usually did it. Pat and me did a lot of that. When the milk

sit up and clabbered we put it in a churn. And we churned away until the butter

came to the top and it did.

The milk that we buy in stores today is stripped of much of its natural resistance to bacteria through pasteurization. I asked Jane if she was not worried about sour milk and getting sick from the bacteria it might contain. She says, “No, not if you keep your things clean. I never knew anybody getting sick from anything we ate or drank.”

Just as Beauty supplied them with fresh milk, chickens provided necessities as well. A biddy is a chicken, but can also be defined as a cantankerous old woman. Upon hearing the word biddy these days, most people opt for the latter definition because of their lack of farm experience. The first definition applies here, though, as Betty recalls:

I can remember the way mother used to get those chickens we called little

biddy’s. She ordered them some way and they would come in the mail. She had a

little incubator and a boxed pen that she would put them in and kept a light on

them. Fresh little babies a mother hen would have ordinarily kept warm during

that first little growth period.

Pat remembers feeding the chickens: “We had to gather the eggs and help keep the nests all clean.” Both Pat and Jane both took a liking to the chickens. Pat recalls, “We

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loved loving on those chickens, and we got them summer and winter. We usually each had one as a pet, and it was sad when it was our chicken’s time [to be used for a meal].”

Betty adds, “I know Momma killed their pet chickens. Pat and Jane always took them as their pets, and they named ‘em you know, Joshua, Ezekiel, named from the books of the

Bible, Jeremiah.”

Betty and Cutie share another chicken story about their younger brother Donald.

Betty begins, “One time we had this old rooster that was so mean he used to get after

[Donald]. He was a little old bitty guy, and [the rooster] got after him all the time.” Cutie finishes, “That ol’ rooster’d peck the heck out of you if he got a chance. He turned on

Momma one time and she said, ‘You going in the pot.’ And he did too.”

Unlike the cows, the chickens had a dual purpose in what they could offer as far as eggs and meat. Taking a chicken’s life was an intricate endeavor. Jane remembers her mother began with wringing its neck,

We didn’t chop its head off; she’d ring its neck, just a quick motion. To break its

neck she would kind of spin it like that [one hand pointing downward in a twirling

motion]. She would kinda spin it, shake it round and round and I don’t remember

any of us having to do that except Mother.

Cutie remembers her part in preparing a chicken for a meal: “I had to dress ‘em, take the feathers off. Soak ‘em in hot water first and take the feathers off.” Jane says to get a chicken ready for frying, her mother would

put ‘em down in boiling hot water, and when you pour boiling hot water over

them, the feathers are easy to get off and then she’d bring it in and wash it real

good and cut it up and put salt and pepper on it and dip it in flour and fry it.

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Betty recalls,

Whenever you were going to have chicken, they just went out there and killed a

chicken. I never did that personally or remember ever seeing them do it, but I

know that that’s what was just accepted. That is what chickens were for.

Knowing when a chicken was ready to be killed depended on what you planned to do with it. Cutie remembers, “If Momma’s gonna make chicken and dressing, she used the old chickens. It makes the best juice to make dressing. We always had chicken and dressing on Thanksgiving and Christmas.” Pat adds that her mother sometimes “would fry it and sometimes she would boil it and make chicken and dumplings and that’s mostly what we used it for was fried chicken and chicken and dumplings. The older ones were for stewing or baking.” Jane recollects,

Fresh young chicken is the most delicious thing in the world. I guess that’s why

Southerners like fried chicken so much. It is not like what we get today. You

didn’t eat ‘em until they got big enough to make a meal. Out of old hens,

sometimes Momma would make chicken and dumplings. She didn’t use the frying

chickens for that.

Betty shares: “I think sometimes they kept the roosters longer and he was older because they needed him to fertilize the eggs.” Cutie adds, “Sometimes rooster’s meat will be a little tough.”

Unfortunately, chicken was not something the family could eat on a daily basis.

Cutie remembers, “We didn’t have meat all the time. We did have a good bit because we always had chickens.” That begged my questioning the need for protein in a balanced

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diet. In addition to the milk they drank, Pat responds, “We always had eggs. We could have eggs every day because we had enough chickens.”

The biddies provided a lot of eggs. My grandmother used eggs in recipes, as well.

Pat recalls white icing, “the kind that cracks, made out of sugar, whites of eggs, beaten.

She made a syrup, dribbled it into the egg whites and then she put it on a cake.” Even though there was often a struggle for food, there were times when food was a treat.

Special events called for special food and the sisters recalled many stories about special times in the next chapter.

My grandmother was the catalyst for what needed to be done to sustain her family. She relied upon what she had been taught and when needed, she improvised. As times changed, the children grew and the family moved from place to place, her improvisations set an example indicative of knowledge that is tweaked to create new knowledge in unfamiliar situations. Practical intelligence is the result of this learning cycle. Through the day to day interactions during mundane events, the sisters learned what was needed to survive. Even the extraordinary events added to the knowledge progression in offering contrast to the norm. The next chapter delves more deeply into what the sisters learned through these special occasions.

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CHAPTER VI

MAKING MEMORIES: PEOPLE, PLACES, EVENTS

Food played a large part in special family events. They often gathered together and celebrated with food. Some of these events were anticipated, such as Sunday dinner, holidays, and birthdays. Others took shape around unexpected happenings such as a fishing trip or an impromptu picnic. Many of their special occasions would not be considered so today, but they were very special then, in part because family members could eat special foods together. Such events brought the sisters even closer together and created a bond that still involves interacting and sharing knowledge.

The sisters enjoyed these happy events. My grandmother seemed to know just how to take advantage of times when food was unexpectedly obtained. Sometimes it meant stopping all other goings on and devoting full attention to making the most out of a

“mess” of freshly caught fish or the bounty from a hunting trip. She also applied this type of knowledge to the federal commodities the family got when they were available. She had to know how to make the most of these opportunities to feed the family for one more day.

The holidays were special times that revolved around food preparation and sharing. The family never traveled during the holidays. Pat recollects, “We stayed home.

Relatives lived too far away. We had an Uncle Don in [town].” He and his wife would

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frequently visit during the holidays. My grandmother’s holiday cooking brought them to their home. She enjoyed sharing whatever special treats they had.

Sunday Dinner and Other Occasions

Bringing people together to share food was how my grandmother showed her love. Little did she know she was an exemplar of practical knowledge. My grandmother’s daily life revolved around caring for and nurturing her family, which largely stemmed from her religious beliefs. She kept Sunday, the Christian Sabbath holy. Events of the day revolved around church. Typically my grandmother would get up very early to prepare a meal to eat after church. Betty remembers feeding their pastor at many a Sunday dinner:

“We had big Sunday meals. I don’t know how [Momma] did it, but we always had a big dinner, especially when the preacher was coming.” After my grandfather died, the family began attending the Four Square Gospel Church. Jane recalls how this church impacted their lives:

One summer, [the Four Square Gospel Church] had this big tent they set up. We

started going there. They took, rented a church, and that was where we went. It

was a Holiness Church [with] speaking in tongues and stuff. They believed in a

lot of yelling and amen and halleluiah. They had a big altar down front. You come

down and pray, you know, get saved.

Ruby recalls, “We all went to [that] same church, and Momma had taught different Sunday school classes.”

After they moved away from town, Betty remembers even driving back for church services in the little car that Ed had: “We went every Sunday to church [and to]

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Sunday school.” In my grandmother’s Bible, I found several of Billy Graham’s Christian advice articles. Most were about how to be a good Sunday school teacher. Especially since they were dated well after her own children were grown, they serve as a testament to her nurturing nature. She continued to teach Sunday school at that same church for many years.

Understandably then, when the preacher came for Sunday dinner, it was a major occasion. When my grandmother fed the preacher, she usually prepared what she felt was the very best. Jane remembers fried chicken and vegetables out of the garden, like green beans or butter beans: “I remember he always got the best pieces of chicken and the best of everything. The company got the best. Momma was a good cook, and everybody enjoyed coming to our house to eat.” Pat recalls blackberry pie or cobbler. Jane and Cutie remember the potatoes and gravy. Jane tells about my grandmother’s fried chicken gravy:

You keep some of your drippings out of the pan [after frying chicken] and put

some flour in there and get it dissolved real good, and then you can either use

milk or just water. A lot of time, she just used water. Put that in there, and it

thickened up. And stir it real good until it thickened. Put salt and pepper on it.

Cutie also shared her Sunday meal memories: “One thing we always had was some kind of meat. We didn’t have it during the week. I can’t tell you whether it was always chicken. We never was a real, what you call, meat eatin’ bunch of people.”

Although the sisters do not remember church suppers, Jane does recall “a lot of

Sunday school activities. I remember, we’d go out to Highland Park and have races, and we’d have picnics.” Picnics were a popular activity during those times. Betty remembers somebody would just say, “Let’s all have a picnic down at the river.”

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Betty talks about how everyone was anxious to be involved in these picnics. She describes the food:

I’ll just say it was fried chicken. I imagine it was even vegetables. I don’t think it

would have been a lot of sandwiches because I don’t think sandwich bread, sliced

bread, was in such abundance because I know most of the bread was baked. We

had biscuit [sic] or cornbread.

Betty recalls one picnic journey to a lake owned by one of Katherine’s in-laws:

Ed would take us there [in an] old kind of car that he had, what they used to call a

turtle shell on the back. The trunk lifted up. They called that the turtle shell. We’d

have to sit inside there. Those roads out there were all dirt at that time. By the

time we would get where we would be going, we would be covered in dust, you

know. We didn’t care. We were just so happy.

Many of the sisters’ good times revolved around water, because they lived close to a river during their country days. One special event occurred while Joe was fishing, one of the more serendipitous events. They all loved fish and considered it a delicacy.

Jane recalls, “Joe caught a catfish…that was a 40 pound catfish and hung it up in a tree, and they skinned that catfish. We had…fried catfish for a long time, but it was good.”

Cutie remembers being with Joe when he caught the fish: “The catfish got hung, and he jumped out of the boat and went down in the water and unhung ‘em and put ‘em in the boat.” I wondered whether they might have had so much that they shared it with friends and neighbors. Betty adds, “Knowing mother, she might have shared it with someone, the

Tatums most likely.”

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It is not uncommon for loved ones’ celebrations, big or small, to revolve around food. How things smelled, tasted, and felt are prevalent in the sisters’ memories. Already we have heard about the warm oven and the cold milk. Ice cream is among these memories. For this family, it was one of the most special treats. Betty reminisces about how, as poor as they were, they could afford to make ice cream. Betty describes just what making ice cream entailed for them:

We had the old fashioned ice cream freezer. It was actually wooden, little wooden

slats like put together, with the big metal container that you could put custard in.

That was what you mixed up with the milk and the eggs. Mother used to cook

hers…wait for that to cool…pour it in that container…put it down in that wooden

part, and then you pour ice all in. We had block ice so they would have to chip

that ice with the ice pick and then, chip it and put a layer of ice and then the rock

salt. They would put some salt and then some more ice and more salt like that.

Donald or Ruby, or I one…usually had to sit on that because it was not in the best

of shape. The dasher down in there had the crank on it. It wouldn’t stay in there

tight enough, and it had to stay in there tight enough or it wouldn’t have worked.

Cutie remembers, “Momma’s biggest thing was ice cream. Peach, mostly peach. We all loved peach ice cream. Boy, was it good! They just don’t make it no more like that.” I envision them sitting on the porch making and enjoying this icy treat.

Most of the houses the family lived in had big front porches. Activities like making ice cream occurred on the front porch. It gets fairly hot and humid at the height of summer in Mississippi, and the front porch offered some respite from the heat. This part of the house holds many memories for the sisters:

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Jane: Well, the porch I remember was that one where we used to sit out where the

Rivers lived.

Betty: Oh yeah, I remember that house very well.

Jane: We always sat out there to shell beans and peas or snap beans.

Betty: Remember it had those big ol’ bushes, and we could almost sit there and

people passing wouldn’t even know we were there.

Jane: We could see them, but they couldn’t see us [laughing], but we’d sit there.

We’d peel tomatoes.

Betty: That was a really good porch. I remember when the boys used to come

there to play cards and things with ya’ll, and ya’ll would sit there and play cards

and things.

Jane: What boys?

Betty: Boys from the church. Sometimes it would be your boyfriend, sometimes it

would be soldiers.

Jane recalls sitting on the front porch in the afternoons:

Our house kind of faced the east so the sun would be behind us, and it would be

the coolest place to sit. And we’d all sit around there and shell beans or peel

peaches or do things like that or snap the beans…

In addition, Jane says

We were brought up that children should be seen and not heard. Your neighbor

would come over and help you and do things like that, and we’d all sit around on

the porch and they’d talk. We didn’t get a word in edgewise.

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Yet some occasions centered on each of the sisters individually. Birthday celebrations were special events for them but not in the ways we think of today. Cutie remembers, “There wasn’t no celebration to it. Momma always made a cake, but as far as a party we never did do that. I think she could make anything, mostly coconut. We loved plain cake.” Pat recalls, “We always had a cake, a layer cake.” Jane recollects,

“Momma’d make cakes and we’d always have a cake, and that was for dessert and that was it. She’d always decorate them, too.”

Cakes bring us to another special treat that each of the sisters tells about: tea cakes. Tea Cakes are actually a cookie popular in the South. Betty remembers,

To me, they were just so delicious. I know that you’re mind plays tricks on you as

you get older, and a lot of things you think were so wonderful when you were

young, to anybody else they would not have been. [Momma] made them a lot. I

don’t know how…there was very little stuff to it. Of course, she used lard. She

didn’t have shortening and oil like that today. I guess she had gotten that when

she killed the hogs. It was probably just that, the flour…well, you know I have

tried some of those recipes, but I never could get one, to me, that would come out

as the same.

My grandmother’s recipes included none for tea cakes, although I have come across them in contemporary cookbooks. They probably came from a recipe passed from neighbor to neighbor that used very few ingredients. Betty says, “I think it was something she kind of just made up.” Cutie also reminisces about these cookies:

Tea cakes was in that big pan. She made that whole pan full. And then she had

some of them she’d take and put a white icing on, and boy you talk about

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something good. It’s kind of like a cake, but it is about that thin [using two fingers

to describe]. Kinda like a cookie with a cake texture to it. I think she just made it

up.

Here is a recipe I found in Katherine’s papers (Figure 3).

Tea Cakes

3 cups flour 1 cup sugar 1/3 cup shortening 1 egg Error! 1/3 cup buttermilk 1/3 teaspoon soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon vanilla

Roll out dough and cut with a cookie cutter.

Figure 3. Katherine’s tea cake recipe.

My grandmother did the best she could to feed her family and keep them healthy.

However, she went beyond the ordinary, day to day activities to sustain the family. She took the food she was familiar making and made it as special as could be. She did not have to do these things, and many people did not. She did it as an expression of loving, caring, and nurturing. She also applied this type of practical knowledge to planned special events.

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Spiked Ambrosia and Holiday Specialties

Holidays were special in the sisters’ home, even though somewhat modest compared to some of today’s celebrations. Certain kinds of food got prepared during these times of the year. Pat reminisces about her mother’s Christmas specialties: “She made fruit cakes, big old fruit cakes.” Fruitcakes have to be kept moist to fully develop their flavor. When Pat asks how their mother kept them moist Cutie reminds her about the whiskey. Betty adds, “If she didn’t have any, Uncle Don used to give her whiskey.

But if she didn’t have it, she put juice that she had.” Jane says, “Blackberry juice.” Betty adds, “Wrap it in cloth so it would absorb that and keep the cake moist.”

Jane recalls another of my grandmother’s specialties: ambrosia. Ambrosia is a fruit salad made of orange segments that have to be individually deveined without tearing and is a very tedious process. Jane recalls a visit from Uncle Don and his wife one

Christmas:

I remember ambrosia. Usually we’d have one of my aunts [who lived in the city]

and her husband. He drank all the time. They would always come out to our house

for Christmas. He always would bring something to drink in his pocket in a flask,

and he’d pour it in the ambrosia. Momma’d get so mad at him.

Of course, I wondered what happened to the ambrosia after that. Jane told me,

“Oh yeah, we’d eat it. Well, she wouldn’t throw it out.” My grandmother never wasted food even if it meant going against her own beliefs somewhat. My grandmother did not drink, and I always thought it was due to her religious nature. One of her Bibles included an unsigned temperance pledge.

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Pies were another popular sweet treat during the Christmas holidays. Cutie remembers mincemeat pie as one the main pies my grandmother made. It was one of her favorites. Pat remembers sweet potato pie as her personal favorite. Other sweet treats included fudge and divinity. Jane recalls that my grandmother made treats mainly for the holidays or during the winter when it was cold: “In the summer she had to do so much canning. It was hot to be in a kitchen in the summertime, and so I guess she didn’t want to stay in the kitchen anymore than she had to.”

The foods for the main meal at Christmas and Thanksgiving were typically the same. Betty remembers “candied potatoes, yams and chicken or ham along about the same thing.” Cutie recalls holidays during difficult times speaking from a perspective in which everyone else is eating turkey: “Chicken and dressing on Thanksgiving and

Christmas and canned vegetables to go with it so we always had something to eat.”

Cutie contributes a recipe for chicken and dressing she modified from my grandmother’s. However, true to the nature of my grandmother’s method of cooking from memory, Cutie gives it to me from memory. It includes cornbread, three eggs, and three slices of white bread, onions, celery, melted margarine, parsley flakes, and sage. Mix with the broth from the boiled chicken. She remarks that the canned chicken broth “don’t taste like nothing.” Add the cooked chicken. Cutie cuts her chicken up into the dressing.

Today, she uses Pepperidge Farm Cornbread Stuffing in place of cornbread. She suggests using a hen to get the fat with the most flavor.

Food treats were often given as gifts in their Christmas stockings, according to the sisters. Pat remembers, “We always got a stocking with hard candies and fruit. We had

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oranges and apples, but I don’t know how they got there.” Betty recalls candy and fruit, especially raisins:

The raisins she always bought were not individual raisins. They were on stems…

and to me they always tasted so gritty. I could not stand those raisins, but it was

funny. It was good times and happy times, you know.

Jane compares the raisins to those of today, “You didn’t buy grapes or raisins in a box in those days. They were shipped in a big wooden box, and I remember seeing ‘em sitting in a grocery store packed in wooden boxes, little wooden boxes.”

There were not a lot of other Christmas gifts. Mainly the sisters made their toys, and in many instances they were modeling real world women’s work. Betty remembers the paper dolls she and Ruby played with:

We would take a catalog and cut the ladies out of the catalog, and that was our

paper dolls. And we would make them little cars out of match boxes. Then we

would pretend that we would have cars. We didn’t even have any little things,

cars or toys to play with, but maybe just blocks of wood. But we would make our

little roads and our little tunnels and all and play just in the dirt.

Jane remembers these imaginary playscapes: “We’d make our own furniture out of cardboard.”

Cutie shows me a special gift that involves food preparation and sharing through traditional women’s work:

That’s where that little tea set come from, right yonder [pointing to a child’s tea

set on display in her home]. Girls don’t play with them anymore. I was four years

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old when I got that little tea set, and that is before we moved, before Jane was

born. I had it ever since, and just one piece is missing.

Pat recalls other Christmas gifts that model traditional women’s practices and a make-believe outdoor playhouse:

Cleaning off a place, make a clearing, we usually divided it off with a stick. We’d

say this was our kitchen and this was our bedroom, you know and we, lots of

times, take our dolls out there and played with our dolls and the little houses that

we had drawn off. They were store bought dolls that we got at Christmas time. I

don’t know who paid for them. I have no idea where the money came from.

The sisters played, as sisters have perhaps since the beginning of time, by modeling their mother. Play provides a medium for practical knowledge while also fostering imaginative social interactions.

Another special time of the year was Easter. The family followed typical Easter traditions, many of which revolved around food, especially eggs. They dyed eggs for

Easter, reemphasizing the importance of their chickens. Jane recalls these traditions:

We had a basket we already had, a new dress, homemade, and I think we had new

white shoes. We’d get these big old candy eggs. Must have been that big… [using

dramatic hand gestures]. They were hard on the outside, but they had a softer

center. But they were good. And they’d hide those in the bushes. They’d do that

before we’d get up on Easter morning, and we always got up with our basket and

we’d go out and hunt eggs.

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The Easter meal was significant as well. Betty remembers, “I know we had a big meal.” Cutie recalls, “I reckon we always had ham. I’m sure.” It was probably served along with other staples from the garden.

Food was at the center of the special events the sisters enjoyed as girls. One time my grandfather brought home a river turtle, and my grandmother made turtle soup.

Another time he ordered a huge crate of tapioca because it looked interesting. Jane recalls, “He liked to send off and get things he heard about. We ate a lot of tapioca pudding for a long time.”

The sisters often worked together to prepare for such events, and they shared in them, too. Unwittingly but surely, they were creating a legacy of practical knowledge for their future families distinct from knowledge formally taught from books. Yet some things did get written down and referred to time and time again. Recipes and cookbooks exemplify these texts.

Recipes and Cookbooks

Women have used recipes and cookbooks for centuries (Nakhimovsky, 2006). All the sisters keep cookbooks, just as many women and I do today (Luciani, 2006). Drews

(as cited in LeBesco & Naccarato, 2008) illustrates how recipes become legacy. She discusses the symbolic weight and deep meaning of handed down recipes, especially from suffering ancestors. She shares her own thoughts when she anticipates baking a

Jewish cake from a treasured Holocaust recipe collection, “Knowing when and why, understanding the implication, struggling with the complications, preparing oneself for how to digest the history, the memory, the suffering that surrounds what seems a simple

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piece of cake” (p. 72). At the core of her feelings about baking this cake, I found feelings similar to my own about the recipes I found in my grandmother’s and Katherine’s recipe collections.

My first thoughts at finding these special recipes included wanting to try some of them. Then, I realized that some of the ingredients might be hard to come by, such as lard. I hesitated, though, because even if I could match all the ingredients, would it really taste the same as it did back then? Finally, I became aware, similar to Betty’s feelings about the tea cakes, that I simply could not do it because it just would not be the same.

Ambivalent feelings prevailed even though making the recipes would be appreciating the legacy and fulfilling the Latin meaning centered on the giver and receiver (Comito,

2001).

When the sisters were growing up, they were aware of my grandmother’s cookbook and recipe collection. However, most of what they remember about it was that she did not consult it. Her recipes had few ingredients, and she understood how to make bread or vegetables without it. She did not have to know how things happened. She only had to know that this was the way to sustain a family.

When I asked Jane (my mom) to contribute a recipe for blackberry cobbler to this study, she remarked that she had consulted several recipe books for one that resembled her memory of my grandmother’s cobbler. She noted that those recipes had twice the ingredients than she recalled, so she recreated my grandmother’s cobbler recipe from memory. As you will see, her directions for mixing the ingredients are very corporeal.

Jane remembered my grandmother kept a flour bin where she stored a sifter. Any time my grandmother used flour, she likely sifted it into whatever she was making. Also

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notable is that the dumplings for chicken and dumplings are made from the same pastry recipe used for the cobbler without the sugar (Figure 4).

Blackberry Cobbler

4 cups fresh blackberries

1/3-1/2 cups granulated sugar for berries 4 tbsps butter

1 cup sifted all-purpose flour 1 teasp baking power

1/3 cup sugar for pastry 3 tbsp shortening

1/3 cup of milk

Combine flour, baking power and sugar in sifter, sift into bowl. Make a small well in

center of mixture, drop in shortening. Slowly, with hand, combine shortening with mixture

until it looks like coarse cornmeal. Then pour in milk and continue to mix until all is

combined. Turn dough out on floured surface and knead softly at least seven times. Roll

dough lightly with floured rolling pin until 1/8 inch thickness. With knife cut dough into

strips. Layer 2 cups berries in greased baking dish, 12”x 8” x 2”. Sprinkle with 1/2 sugar

and dot with 1/2 of butter. Layer with strips of dough. Repeat for one more layer. Bake 375

F. for 35 minutes.

Figure 4. My mother’s blackberry cobbler recipe.

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My grandmother inherited her knowledge from her own mother, as many women have through time (Comito, 2001; Eves, 2005). Cookbooks, along with the notes in the margins and substitutions, tell a lot about a woman’s life. Unfortunately, I can only imagine my grandmother’s memories and thoughts as she prepared food for her family.

The cookbooks she kept do, though, sketch the memories and experiences she might have had.

My grandmother’s cookbooks were not always bought. Some were handmade or collections of recipes given to her by other women. One of the cookbooks I found in her papers was such a handmade collection. A loose-leaf notebook covered in blue cloth, worn and faded, it has the word “Recipes” handwritten on the spine. The first section is a collection from Good Housekeeping on pies and is possibly an installment from some type of recipe club. It also includes pictures and suggestions for serving the dishes. The pictures illustrate 1950’s style white women in tight wasted flared skirts and short hair.

Men are shown in suits with black ties and hats. Other recipes look to have been cut from magazines and pasted on notebook paper. Also included in this handmade cookbook is a handwritten recipe for lemon pie with the words “My Recipe” at the top of the page

(Figure 5).

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“My Recipe” Lemon Pie

1 1/2 cups of Carnation 6 eggs

1 1/2 cups of water 2 1/2 cups of sugar

6 tablespoons of flour Juice of four lemons and rind,

grated.

Figure 5. Grandmother’s “My Lemon Pie” recipe.

Sometimes the recipes only include the ingredients, not the directions similar to

Cutie’s recipe for chicken and dressing. During that era, I assume, one was expected to know what to do. Another recipe for “real” lemon meringue pie is included, and my grandmother has written in the margin, “This is the one I used for Don’s birthday.”

Another magazine recipe for lemon meringue pie has penciled in changes she made to the ingredients. There is also a handwritten recipe for peach pie and one for “Katherine’s” pie crust. She includes a newspaper article with hints for making good pie dough, as well.

Another cookbook looked bought and had pages that had originally been blank. It was a green and white clothbound book with pictures of food decorating the pages. She had not placed any recipes on its pages. “Health and Happiness through Food” is a section of this book. Some of the helpful subsections of this part include “To Guard

Against Fatigue;” “To Ensure Energy;” “Strong Muscles;” “Strong Bones and Teeth;”

“Good Red Blood;” “Stunted Growth;” “No Appetite;” “Nerves;” “Poor Skin;” and

“About Vitamins.” Following these subsections are examples of foods to address or

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promote these conditions. The book recommends 3000 calories a day with 70 grams of protein for optimum health and a caution about weight gain. Fresh vegetables and how to prepare them are touted here.

Each of the pages in this cookbook is actually an envelope in which my grandmother placed recipes. These envelopes held aged, browned recipes. In addition, she taped in some recipes she had cut from the newspaper. She has written on one of the newspaper cuttings, “I fixed this chicken for the church barbeque.” Next to a baked bean recipe she has penciled in, “Substitute Karo for brown sugar.” On the outside of each envelope she made a list of what was inside. I also found additional evidence of recipe exchanges between mother and daughter.

Cookbooks are not always used simply to fulfill directions for cooking. Betty remembers her mother’s collection of recipes:

We got the newspaper sometime. We would have magazines sometimes. In

[Mother’s] cookbooks, you saw little articles she cut out of magazines and things.

That would be places she would get them. She liked to try new things. She was

bold, much bolder about trying new things.

Testaments to Betty’s thoughts appear in another Good Housekeeping supplement of the handmade cookbook, including a birthday cake cookbook. Some of the recipes are quite elaborate. Pink petal cake, demitasse spoon designs, corsage cake, Peter Rabbit and sons cake. Next to the Brazil nut sensation cake she has handwritten, “Make this sometime.” Some of the pages were stuck together with what appears to be an old, dried pink substance. I wonder whether that could be frosting.

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Another section of the handmade cookbook is a Good Housekeeping section on holiday cakes and cookies. She has handwritten the word “this” over a recipe for Dream

Bars. More recipes taped on notebook paper include Twin Angel Cakes and Sue’s Honey

Date Bars. Another section from Good Housekeeping entitled the “Weekend Cookbook” includes things that I would not have guessed she would have had the time or ingredients to fuss with. Who can say whether she was thinking of the picnic described in the

“Weekend Cookbook” when the family was meeting for a picnic at the river? Or, how a

Good Housekeeping recipe supplement entitled “You’re Caught in a Heat Wave” could have offered ideas she modified for the hot, humid Mississippi summer with no air conditioning? Bower (2004) suggests the idea of the cookbook as a means of escape for women and may be exemplified by what my grandmother kept.

In a Good Housekeeping section entitled “Tips for Cooking Chicken,” she has taped in tips for better stuffing, basic bread stuffing, and cornbread-sausage stuffing. My grandmother’s cookbooks indicate her attention to detail and her creativity, too. Did she really dream about a time when she could break tradition and make a different kind of dressing during the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays?

In a cookbook that my grandmother kept much later in life I found evidence of what may be dreaming through her recipes. I found where she had created recipes to send off to contests. The sisters discuss these contests in the group interview. Pat recalls,

We got those two magazines, Saturday Evening Post and the Progressive Farmer

[modern day Southern Living]. They always had contests going on, and she

entered every contest that she could possibly enter. A lot of ‘em would be like

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‘give a little statement and finish it in ten words,’ or send in a recipe. She sent it

in, but she didn’t win anything. She never won anything.

Katherine kept similar recipe collections. Her papers include many homemade cookbooks. But Katherine’s papers showed greater evidence of her sending off for recipes and belonging to recipe clubs. One cookbook is entitled, Cooking from Provincial

France. There, she had a handwritten recipe for Army Cookies and one called Sorry

Cookies. She had pre-printed recipe cards and cut-out recipes stuck in her recipe collection. She pencils in stars and checks by things including dates things were made as if to mark them for their value. She does not hesitate to record changes on the recipes.

The recipes found among her things span a time frame from the 1950’s to the 1990’s. She died in 1998.

Katherine shared recipes, too. I found several copies of “How to Make the Perfect

Fruitcake.” She had handwritten on one of the copies, “made three 1977.” In addition, she had marked substitutions. She seems to have always tried to improve upon what she found. In other words, she had enough confidence and self-esteem to take what she already knew to make improvements on things that were “of the world,” even though she was from a small, rural town in Mississippi. That likely comes from being brought up in caring, nurturing, and loving environment. Not only did she share recipes, but also

Katherine often gave food as gifts. Tucked in one of the cookbooks was an article entitled, “Food as Gifts—Size and Color Never Wrong.”

In addition, Katherine’s papers reveal recipes passed on as instruction. Here is a recipe that was found in a cookbook given to her by a group of church ladies upon her marriage (Figure 6).

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Love Cake Recipe

One long narrow bench Four arms in twine Two lips well pressed Mix and seal well and serve in the dark.

Figure 6. Katherine’s love cake recipe.

Good for What Ails Ya’

Using food for medicinal purposes has existed for centuries (Luciani, 2006). This type of practical knowledge finds expression throughout the sisters’ lives as well. Doctors did come to the home when they were available, but that was not the norm. Many times no doctor could come. In addition to the more common Castor oil, Vick’s Salve, or tonics of the day, my grandmother dispensed home remedies and concoctions to cure or treat common human ailments and those less common as well.

The sisters recall an instance during the group interview when my grandmother cured herself:

Pat: Ya’ll remember the sore Momma had on the front of her leg? She took care

of that herself and that thing was that big [gesturing with her hands].

Betty: It did not heal overnight. It might have been there for years.

Pat: It was from dew poison.

Cutie: Dew off some plant.

Betty remembers another of her mother’s cures:

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I had earaches a lot when I was small. I remember many, many times she had

what she called sweet oil. What exactly that was, I do not know, but she would

heat that in a spoon and drop it in my ear. And she would have these pieces of

cloth that she would warm on that old stove, and she would lay them over that to

keep that warm.

Cutie recalls her grandmother’s remedy for cuts. One instance involved an older brother: “I remember Ed and Joe were doing something. I don’t know what it was, sawing something. But Joe got a bad cut, and blood was everywhere. But she put black pepper in there, and that stopped it.” Then she remembers her own experience: “I split my arm wide open on a barb wire fence, and she used it on me. It would coagulate the blood.”

Jane reminisced about a time when a doctor might have been the best remedy, but was not called, leaving my grandmother to treat her with a special remedy:

We were walking along going up the mountain, that hill, that big hill on the south

part of [town]. And all of a sudden this snake, everybody else had already passed

him and maybe it scared him, and he jumped on me when I went by. I guess I saw

him and jumped about that time and he only struck me with one fang…on my

heel, on my right heel on the back here [pointing]. This, they called a ground

rattler....Well, I yelled and told daddy and he came back and took me down into

the little creek. And he washed it off and then he put me up on his shoulder and

we went back home. Momma put some kind of a poultice on it that she made out

of I don’t know what. And put that on there and made me sit with my foot

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propped up. And my foot swelled and all that for I don’t how many days but it got

alright.

After settling down from my own shock and disbelief, I had to ask how she knew it was a ground rattler. She replies, “Well, I don’t know. I tried to describe the snake to my daddy.

Then he knew what it was. He’d had a lot of experience in the woods because he was a woodsman.”

The group interview also invited discussions about what the sisters called

“cleansing the system” with home remedies. Cutie called it “spring tonic.”

Pat: Every spring we were suppose to drink sassafras tea…as a tonic.

Jane: It’s made from the sassafras tree.

Betty: It was the roots you used.

Pat: To get through the winter.

Cutie: Purifies your blood.

Betty: Cleans your system…a preventative.

Food used as medicine, to treat minor ailments, clearly shows how it can be a medium for practical knowledge. Sharing this type of knowledge occurs through social interaction creating a legacy for those around us.

All these special memories convey how the sisters developed practical intelligence. When “what to do” is not immediately evident, the knowledge process comes into play and we construct solutions. Solutions are heavily based in what we remember from our past as modeled by strong parental figures who are confident in the ways and means of sustaining a family. Whether it is how to dress a wound, entertain the

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major religious figures in your life, or how to make the best use of serendipitous food finds, the cycle continues.

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CHAPTER VII

DISCUSSION

The hills unfolded before us as my mom and I made one last research trip together so I could have my last interview with the sixth sister in this study. The little town in

Alabama where Aunt Ruby lives was a fitting destination. The road became quite steep, contrasting sharply with the flat terrain of the Florida panhandle. The bright fall foliage against the green pine trees had me gaping at the surrounding environment as the log trucks barreled past us. I felt as if I were going back in time as we passed through small towns and villages filled with historic homes and landmarks.

Upon our arrival, Aunt Ruby came out on the front porch to meet us. Her daughter was, to complete the scene, fixing lunch to welcome us. We sat down to fried chicken, freshly made pimento cheese sandwiches, homemade potato salad, and sweet tea. Food preparation and sharing played a major part in our interactions. The trouble they had gone to was a fitting conclusion to my study of how food preparation and sharing shape the process of constructing practical knowledge among these sisters.

A Recipe for Life

In summing up the sisters’ lives, Betty remarks,

It was good times and happy times, you know, like I said because that’s the time

that we lived. That’s what we knew. To other people it would not have been so

meaningful. To me it was because that was what I knew.

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Understanding what Betty is talking about here raises questions about the epistemology of daily life. Her statement, “It’s what we knew,” is not only about knowing but about how one comes to know. What I hope to have shown through this research project is how one comes to know through sharing. Sharing involves social interaction, typically through mundane contact. How the sisters came to know involves the relationships they formed and have maintained with each other. They cared for each other during these everyday interactions and gave daily evidence of adopting a system of practical knowledge based within their family and in turn within their community and region. That knowledge centers largely and daily on food.

My grandmother expressed her values, attitudes and beliefs as she went about her day to day concerns, especially in obtaining and preparing food. What she thought was good and viable for her children, even though they grew up in the absence of a father was life-sustaining. Above all, she passed her values and her ways on to the sisters through commonsense actions they shared. My grandmother and aunts made time for each other, enjoyed one another and supported each other.

The sisters and their mother, substantially through their food preparation and sharing, created a sustainable context not only for growing up but also for becoming part of the larger social world including church, school and neighborhood. My grandmother emulated what she learned from her mother, and she passed this knowledge on to her daughters. When she did not have the knowledge, she took what she knew and tweaked it with enough love and care to grasp situations that were new to her. The sisters still emulate this process. I hope my work here drives home the importance of all kinds of knowledge. Knowing takes many forms, too many to be counted or tracked.

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I hope to have shown that what is taught through food preparation and sharing by women, as mothers and othermothers, exemplifies knowledge just as much as formal knowledge taught from books or lectures. The sisters’ narratives show an appreciation of what women know. Their stories valorize a type of knowledge less related to gender than to those hardships a family makes to survive and overcome. Any one of the sisters’ narratives promotes awareness of John Dewey’s emphasis on learning in a real world context.

Journey’s End, New Beginnings

Practical knowledge is what children bring to school. It comprises the ever so important “background knowledge” that gives us keen insights into the identities of young individuals so that teachers can provide authentic instruction. It reinforces what

Foucault says about how lived experience constitutes our identities (McWhorter, 1999).

Emphasizing practical knowledge and practical intelligence can empower educators.

Such an emphasis follows Belenky et al.’s (1986) findings about how people learn and how they establish their voices in the process. Our teaching strategies, testing methods, school structures should take such findings into account. Getting to know students better in practical terms could mean curriculum and application of instruction more aligned with who and how they are.

The type of awareness acknowledged by Belenky et al. (1986) in relation to connected knowing is an essential component of what I want to convey in this research.

The sisters embody “women’s ways of knowing” through their daily interactions as they go about “women’s work” confirming a bond between the facets of Belenky et al.’s

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procedural knowledge. Separate knowing falls short in leaving out ways of thinking.

What it means to “know” emphasizes connected knowing. The sisters’ lived experiences illustrate the diversity of knowledge, all ways of learning, the plethora of people in the world, and their relationship to knowledge, learning, and thinking that embraces the individual identity.

Yet women have long been undermined when it comes to revealing their place in history, especially through their own words. If women have the most influence in food preparation and sharing as practical knowledge, then history should be filled with women’s stories. That does not seem to be the case so far (Morales, 1998). What I hope to accomplish here follows what Reinharz (1992) also tells us. Women’s narrative

“creates new material about women, validates women’s experience, enhances communication among women, discovers women’s roots, and develops a previously denied sense of continuity” (p. 126).

Personally, since I am a woman studying women, I have learned much about myself, also a tenet of Reinharz (1992). These beliefs do not set out to exclude other cultures or divide them. They serve to “repair the historical record” (p. 126) written predominately by white men and offer women a chance to tell their side of the story. I hope my analysis of the sisters’ stories broadens the research base illuminating the dense connections between history and social structure.

How women come to know can be a lesson in knowing that goes beyond the feminine. Some knowledge may be gender specific, but most knowledge is not. What the female members did in the family to sustain their lives was substantially gender specific, yet some of the things their brothers and grandfather did to sustain the family were

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extremely similar. I want to promote a postmodernist view of gender where different kinds of knowing do not bring to mind gender, geographical location, age, or socioeconomic status. Instead, what I hope most comes to mind is the sheer force of practical knowledge.

Since practical knowledge involves higher level thinking and develops practical intelligence in addition to creating a legacy, I want my research project to raise awareness of how emotion work, cognitive style, and individuality also interplay in its constitution. I hope my work shows that school is not the only place we learn. We are constantly learning, in all contexts. Each time we encounter each other, the knowledge process is at work.

In many aspects, the historical record perpetuates the myth of the Southern Belle or the helpless woman waiting for a knight in shining armor. In turn, this thinking enables what postmodernist’s (Maines, 2001) call a grand narrative about weak women who cannot have a fulfilling or even successful life without a man. The sisters’ stories debunk these notions and help set the record straight (Reinharz, 1992). As my study shows, my grandmother was a strong independent woman who made do for her family through practical knowledge and in so doing developed a practical intelligence. She passed this practical intelligence on to her daughters, and they continue the cycle with their own children.

From the sisters’ stories come many lessons. The first is about how age takes on different meanings in different cultures. Some cultures revere age as a zenith of accomplishment and wisdom. Others view it as a time of futility or ineffectiveness according to Cuddy and Fisk (as cited in Nelson, 2002). I hope to have highlighted the

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former idea with my research. All of the sisters are now retired except for Betty who works part time. Yet each has a very vibrant and gratifying life filled with friends and family that counteract the common stereotypes about aging.

Similarly, poverty is perhaps the most misunderstood concept pertinent here. No one wants to be poor, but poverty is a culture in the sense that poor people tend to share values, beliefs and attitudes. In the case of the sisters’ lives, poverty had a great deal to do with how my grandmother approached her day. In this family, though, poverty strengthened my grandmother’s resolve and moved her to persevere. At the same time, my study shows how communities can rally to help those around them. In many cases, poor circumstances can weaken the people it plagues unless community support is reliably available (Ambert, 1998).

How gender intersects with age and socioeconomic status is also illustrated in the sisters’ narratives. Where gender, age, or socioeconomic status are concerned, prejudice is blind and bites the hand that feeds it. Many of the sisters’ narratives reflect how one or more of these issues impacted their lives. I hope this research sheds light on this unfairness feminist theorists describe as intersectionality. Intersectionality, or the matrix of domination, refers to the interlocking character of established social hierarchies. More than one category of difference can play a role in social problems (Collins, 2000;

Hancock, 2007).

Additional insights also emerge about the culture of the Great Depression and

World War II, including the changing beliefs and attitudes present throughout that period of modernity from the turn of the 20th century and onward. The world was a rapidly changing place. The women in this study were not just part and parcel of that period; they

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witnessed it with their own eyes left their imprints on the local culture as it in turn shaped their identities. Much of their storytelling depicts the social structure and culture of the rural South of that era.

Further, this study offers insights on how food impacts our lives as a medium of exchange for knowledge. I hope to have shown that food preparation and sharing enables the construction of practical knowledge through social interaction. My research shows what life is like in what may be perceived as a simpler time. Today, few people are exposed to rural life or life on a farm. They have not experienced fresh milk and eggs or even vegetables right from the garden.

More and more people rely heavily on processed food according to Retzinger (as cited in LeBesco & Naccarato, 2008). We are finding out increasingly, however, that many people need and desire to go back to fresh, unadulterated food. The sisters and their family grew up with this kind of simplicity. In their reliance on gardening and maintaining domestic animals, they were actually leading a healthy lifestyle. With the loss of this kind of lifestyle are we sacrificing practical knowledge? What kind of legacy will there be for our children?

There are movements today to return to a simpler lifestyle that includes fresh, local food (Kingsolver, Hopp, & Kingsolver, 2008). This lifestyle likely means further participation in food preparation and could mean resurgence in the type of interaction the sisters experienced while preparing and sharing food. Their lives speak to an existence where people cared about each other and their neighbors. There were few locked doors.

Food was simple, local, healthy, and often shared. People talked to one another. I hope my work creates awareness of what these things can mean once again in our own lives.

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Finally, I want to say a word about the connection between the method and the madness for this study and the postmodern implication. Grasping the lived experiences of others validates us as individuals. Qualitative research discloses the individual’s stories.

It gives people a say. It promotes self-esteem and creates camaraderie. Together, our stories create the world we live in.

Perpetual Garden

Every other year or so, the family gathers for a reunion. We do not go to a specific place anymore. It is usually held wherever the planner prefers, allowing us to shift the responsibilities for each event. We have had reunions for as long as I can remember. The last one we had was held here in Florida, with my mother as the major planner. My sister designed t-shirts, and the big day included a picnic on the bay complete with grilled hamburgers and hotdogs. Over 40 people came.

The family now spans four generations. Currently, there are approximately 60 living members of the family. The oldest is Cutie, now 85, and the youngest will be my new grandchild, to be born in July. A legacy has been left over and over through these generations.

One of the most important aspects of this study is that very notion. How life evolves to enable other lives is what legacy involves. I have attempted to examine how we come to know through others. Social interaction and epistemology are far from mutually exclusive. We are truly not only what we eat but also a fusion of our ancestors’ knowledge and experiences as these get passed on to us in everyday interactions

(McWhorter, 1999). Bits and pieces of what we know come from those who have come

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before us similar to the harvest cycle. Seeds of knowledge are planted by our ancestors.

How they grow depends on our surroundings and the support we receive. Just as the new garden was planted each year for the sisters, with the coming of spring, so too can I offer evidence of knowledge growth and the development of practical intelligence.

I cannot find the words to convey what working with these “women who’ve come before” me has meant to me. I feel as if I have been richly linked to the nature of learning through my findings. These women are the very heart of my learning. They are my teachers, especially my mother. What I gained personally and professionally speak to the knowledge they have passed on to me and other family members.

Embarking on a project such as this one is a major life event, even more so for me because I did not anticipate having to manage my own impressions and all the emotion work entailed in working with these sisters, who are my mother and my aunts. I feel somewhat ashamed that so close to the surface of each of these women is their stories and

I did not value and honor them until now. Even though I had heard some, and some more than once, I had no idea what bringing them together in this fashion might mean.

The emotion work I experienced while conducting this research might offer a classic example of how in some cultures lived experiences and practical knowledge get devalued. I am still not sure whether I have paid the utmost respect and homage to these sisters’ lived experiences although that was my highest priority. I feel honored to have been a part of this study.

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Coming Full Circle

To some, social science research involves a researcher as an outsider looking in.

However, Alfred Schutz (1967) reminds us, “Living in the world, we live with others and for others, orienting our lives to them” (p. 9). I experienced this project as an “outsider within.” I am an outsider in terms of my position as researcher and insider as a member of the family with all the preconceived notions our lived experiences brings.

Yet, I moved in and out of the insider-outsider roles with a “logic of inquiry that respects [the] paradoxical positioning” of the researcher (Rogers, 2000, p. 382). From the beginning, this role was a key concern for me and I consider it the primary limitation. On the other hand, I do not see how I could have conducted this study differently. The stories the sisters tell are of such a personal nature that in their telling, they are imparted explicitly as a lesson, a legacy through the sisters’ care, love, and nurturing for me, not as a researcher but as daughter and niece.

I also consider the insider/outsider roles to be a major strong point as few could have gotten closer to these sisters except my siblings or cousins. I want to acknowledge them as recipients of the same love, care, and nurturing in the variety of meaningful things they do in their own lives as it, too, honors these women. I like to think that whatever they do is also, in some way, a reflection of these women in its unique way.

Personally, this project serves as a legacy for my siblings, cousins, and future generations.

There are many ways to approach a project such as this. Had I conducted this study differently, I would have liked to find a way to incorporate more members of the family. Including siblings and cousins could have offered an increased awareness of

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practical knowledge in relation to the cognitive process and the legacy it offers. Another focus group including these extended family members and how they experienced the sisters’ narratives and what it meant in their own life-world might generate substantial insights.

Extending the study into additional types of practical knowledge in terms of traditional women’s work, such as working with cloth, may also be advantageous. Food preparation and sharing are but one way to see how social interaction perpetuates the knowledge process confirming knowledge as a journey and not a destination. Learning today, seems to exemplify what can be gained and not what is given leaving gaps in the literature calling for future research in this area.

Future research can extend the ideas presented here in other realms serving as a catalyst. One direction is drawing on the ethnomethodological idea of background knowledge as it applies to students entering school for the first time. In comparison with the lived experiences of parents’ school days, research such as this might reveal how parent’s perceptions of school can impact children’s primary and secondary socialization in addition to how well they adapt to a formal school setting. Paying more attention to background knowledge may serve to revitalize the school experience.

Another direction for future research might be to study how practical knowledge gets conveyed through the many aspects of child-rearing today, say, in the life-worlds of parents who work outside the home or for single mothers. So often today, we find children home alone much of the time. In addition, we find children heavily exposed to media that espouse instant gratification with fewer and fewer physical endeavors.

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The greatest impact for future research in my view might follow the multicultural theme of this research. Since practical knowledge seems to be part and parcel of the feminist tradition, increasing the literature can bring women’s diversity to the forefront.

As Johnson (2005) suggests, we have to label things in order to create a dialogue. We cannot do away with labels until they are recognized and validated. Talking about these concepts can either authenticate or undermine them. In turn, such talk can validate individuals like the sisters as well as the lives they led, the hardships they endured, and the legacy they leave behind.

In conclusion, the sisters’ stories speak louder than any words on these pages.

They did not need a written text to promote their legacy. Their memories will live beyond these pages through my siblings, cousins, children, grandchildren and beyond through the practical knowledge conveyed through social interaction as they continue preparing food and sharing it with each other.

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EPILOGUE

This project has been a labor of love since the participants include those very close to me. Poetic transcription is a poem-like composition created from the words of interviewees (Glesne, 1997). Here, I have created a poetic transcription from the words of the participants, my mother and four of her sisters. Generated from interviews beginning with what was said about my grandmother, and then words about the kitchen. Next, I chose words from the dialogue about gardening, bread, diary, and poultry. Finally, I end with special events. I saw this as a fitting end to this project.

Go ask yo’ momma… in the kitchen, out in the yard, or sewing. Strong willed, determined…took care of everything, Salvage anything she could, peaceful home…loved, We might’a gone hungry…don’t ever remember going to bed hungry, Proud…but she would get something to eat…embarrassment…don’t think she ever let on, Could always see a family more needy. We knew how she did things just from watching, Passed down from generation to generation…gonna come from Mother.

Hub of the family…good aromas…everything went on in the kitchen, Table became like family…center of everything…a gathering place, Always ate together. Scrub dishes with fingernails. Wood stove…Mother chopping wood…heat source…feet on door. Ice box…good and cold…iced tea. Steal a biscuit, poke a hole…molasses syrup.

Start out the seedlings…hand plow…stepping in footprints…little trenches…dropped in…carry water…hoe and weed…get that stuff put up…canned jar after jar…we survived. Six or seven, marching off, carrying a bucket…blackberries, huckleberries, peaches, persimmons, muscadines, plums…old bull come charging…climbing trees…broken

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arm…front porch…peeling…hands brown from stain…cooked, mashed, canned, pressured…jam…jelly. We just kinda’ knew what to do…from watching mother.

72 biscuit…big ol’ pan…for breakfast, lunch… ashamed to pull out a biscuit…lots were rich enough to have ‘light’ bread. Didn’t eat without cornbread…best cornbread there ever was…ready when we got home…crumbled…buttermilk on top. We ate what we had whether we liked it or not.

Cow…milk…sour…butter…churn, up and down…buttermilk, cream, clabber…and sugar…never knew anybody sick from anything we ate or drank. Chickens…Joshua, Ezekiel, Jeremiah…gather eggs…clean nests…young rooster pecked, going in the pot, ring neck, dress, soak, cut up, salt, pepper, flour, fry, Southerners like fried chicken.

Amen, halleluiah, pray, get saved, fed the preacher…best pieces of chicken. Catfish hung in a tree, skinned, fried, shared. Fed the hobo, all of ‘em that ever come to the door…our house was marked. Hot, humid…milk, eggs, cook, cool, pour, chip, salt…big metal container, sit on top, crank, peach ice cream. …because that was what I knew.

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APPENDIXES

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Appendix A

Institutional Review Board Approval

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Appendix B

Informed Consent Form

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Informed Consent Form for Research Conducted by Kathy M. Hoover Doctoral Student at the University of West Florida

Title of Research: Women’s Social Constructions of Everyday Life: An Epistemology of Food Preparation and Practical Knowledge

I. Federal and University regulations require researchers to obtain signed consent for participation in research involving human participants. After reading the statements in section II through V below, please indicate your consent by signing and dating this form.

II. Statement of Procedure: Thank you for your interest in this research project being conducted by Kathy M. Hoover a doctoral student at the University of West Florida. The purpose of this study is to generate an understanding of the life-world and the lived experiences of six sisters and their social construction of every day life through food preparation and practical knowledge. Please carefully read the information below, and if you wish to participate in this study, sign your name and write the date.

I understand that:

(1) All individuals voluntarily participate in this study agree to do several interviews that last several hours for generating data that will be audio or video taped.

(2) The researcher assured all participants of confidentiality and will use only the first names of participants while using a pseudonym for the last name, refer only to geographical region, and change any other identifying information that will be referenced in the study’s result.

(3) The researcher will share the results of this study with my committee members and chairperson and other participants if requested. No participant will be identified in any information shared, except by first name, with the committee members for the purpose of improving future instruction.

(4) I may discontinue participation in this study at any time without coercion.

III. Potential Risks of the Study: There are no foreseeable risks to participants in the study.

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IV. Potential Benefits of the Study: The results of this study may provide an understanding of the life-world and the lived experiences of women and their social construction of knowledge through food preparation and practical knowledge.

V. Statement of Consent: I certify that I have read and fully understand the Statement of Procedure given above and agree to participate in the research described therein. Permission is given voluntarily and without coercion or undue influence. It is understood that I may discontinue participation at any time.

If you have any questions, please contact Kathy Hoover.

E-mail: [email protected] Phone: (850) 453-5222 Address: 8002 Onyx Trail, Pensacola, 32506

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Participant’s Name (Please Print)

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Participant’s Signature Date

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