FALL 2019 • NO. 73 ISSUE NO. 73 • FALL 2019

FEATURES 28 40 50 RECIPES IN BLACK A COMET CIRCLING HOME AND WHITE CALLED RAJI TO ARKANSAS Michael Graff Mayukh Sen Jay Jennings

2Gravy Editor’s is a publication Note of the Southern 60MARY Busted BETH Sooks, LASSETER Rank Publisher Peelers, FoodwaysSara Camp Alliance, Milam an institute of the [email protected] White-Belly Jimmies Center for the Study of Southern Culture Bernard L. Herman at the University of Mississippi. SARA CAMP MILAM Editor 4 Featured Contributors [email protected] The SFA documents, studies, and explores 68 What’s For Dinner? 7the Director’s diverse food Cut cultures of the changing DANIELLEPriya Krishna A. SCRUGGS Visuals Editor AmericanJohn T. South.Edge Our work sets a welcome [email protected] table where all may consider our history 73 Beholden and our future in a spirit of respect and RICHIE SWANN Designer 10reconciliation. Good Ol’ Chico [email protected] Mitchell Gustavo Arellano JOHN T. EDGE Editor-in-Chief 76CARLYNN Last Course CROSBY AND OLIVIA TERENZIO [email protected] Rooted in Place NathalieJai Williams Dupree Graduate Fellows and Rosalind Bentley Fact Checkers

24 Wait and See ON THE COVER:

Willie J. Allen Jr. Allen J. Willie Jenna Mason Illustration by Ran Zheng Fall 2019 77

10053-20 MMDISTIL_6x9_CharacterMachine_AD.indd 1 9/5/19 2:42 PM EDITOR’S NOTE

LOOK HOMEWARD Can you see it differently? BY SARA CAMP MILAM

Oaxaca is a state that has proudly kept its indigenous traditions

as this issue of g r av y goes to alive—music, clothing, press, I am seven months pregnant. Any and especially food— sense of comfort I normally feel in my own body is fading quickly. If I recall cor- for centuries in the rectly, things are going to get worse before The Griffin Heights face of encroaching they get better. Where I’d really like to be, neighborhood in much of the time, is at home on my couch. Tallahassee, Florida modernity. There, I can recline to an angle that’s almost comfortable, with only my anxiety and my heartburn to keep me company. develop about the places we call home. satisfaction he’s found since returning home cooks and restaurant chefs who When I go on maternity leave, my You’ll read about the homes we are born to his hometown. That talk, which we’ve have forged new homes in this region. fantasy will become a reality of sorts. I’ll into, the homes we adopt, and the ones adapted for this issue, is not a food piece. (Speaking of home, both Krishna and Sen be physically at home a lot. To keep a we leave and return to. Food and cooking And I’m not sorry. It’s exactly the kind quote Vish Bhatt, the chef of my favorite healthy outlook, I will sometimes need are often central to home-making. But of thoughtful, incisive writing I admire hometown restaurant, Snackbar.) to get away. Or I will need to find a new not always. Back in June at our Benton- and want to share with you, Gravy reader. Here in Gravy, I hope you find oppor- this past summer, i traveled way to see familiar surroundings. I relate ville Field Trip, Oxford American senior Elsewhere in this issue, Rosalind tunities to consider your home, neighbor- through Mexico for a week as a guide for to these lessons in the most literal sense, editor Jay Jennings gave a beautiful talk Bentley returns to the Tallahassee neigh- hood, region, or nation in different lights. a Los Angeles Times–organized culinary for I learned them during my first ma- about his native state. Quoting his friend borhood where she grew up. As the ex- Maybe, reflecting on the homes you’ve tour. Our group of mostly middle-aged ternity leave three years ago. Editing this and colleague Charles Portis, Jennings pansion of Florida State University drives claimed, you’ll see an image that you had white Angelenos sampled street food in issue, I recognized that such shifts in described himself as an Arkansan who gentrification, Bentley asks, what will be nearly forgotten, or smell a long-lost dish Mexico City, took cooking classes in the place and perspective are also the kinds had “failed to achieve escape velocity.” lost when the old neighbors are gone? on the stove. Maybe you’ll step out of your colonial city of Puebla, and ate our weight of tricks that the best writers use. He left Little Rock after high school, only Priya Krishna and Mayukh Sen both kitchen to consider life from your neigh- in mole and handmade tortillas in the Working with these writers, I thought to move back decades later. Jay shared explore the Indian diaspora in the Amer- bor’s perspective. As you read, I wish you southern state of Oaxaca. often of home and the various ideas we the deep personal and professional Jr. Allen J. Willie ican South. Their pieces celebrate the a comfortable couch and no heartburn.

2 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 3 FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS

BERNARD L. HERMAN PRIYA KRISHNA

Bernard L. Herman teaches Southern Studies and Priya Krishna regularly contributes to the New folklore at the University of North Carolina at York Times, Bon Appétit, and other publications Chapel Hill, where he explores the material cultures on subjects from cultlike Instant Pot fandom to of everyday life—how people furnish, inhabit, com- Texas grocery chains and her ongoing attachment, municate, and understand the worlds of things. His as an adult, to the classic PB&J. She is the author current work, A South You Never Ate, brings to- of the cookbook Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics gether over one hundred interviews on the food- from a Modern American Family, a tribute to her ways of Virginia’s Eastern Shore as part of a larger mom’s hybrid Indian American cooking. Before project on humanities-based sustainable econom- pursuing a freelance career, she worked for Lucky ic development. He wishes he had written Daniel Peach magazine. The last book she wishes she Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, which blurs had written is Emergency Contact, by Mary H.K. history, parable, and memoir in its evocative account Choi, about a young love that blooms awkward- of the great plague that swept London in 1665. ly over a string of text messages.

JAY JENNINGS MAYUKH SEN

Jay Jennings is senior editor at the Oxford Amer- Mayukh Sen is a New York–based writer whose ican and a freelance writer. He is the author of work has appeared in The New York Times and The Carry the Rock: Race, Football and the Soul of an Washington Post. He won a 2018 James Beard American City, about Little Rock Central High Award for his Food52 piece on soul food restaura- School fifty years after the integration crisis, and teur Princess Pamela and was nominated this year the editor of Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis for his Poetry Foundation piece on Maya Angelou’s Miscellany. He lives in Little Rock with his wife, food writing. He teaches writing at New York Uni- Abby, and his daughter, Marlo, who accompanied versity and is currently writing a book of narrative him to SFA’s recent Summer Field Trip in Ben- nonfiction, to be published by Norton, on the im- tonville. He wishes he’d written Lydia Peelle’s migrant women who shaped food in America. He short story “Nashville,” a terrifically funny por- wishes he’d written Parul Sehgal’s sharp and mas- trayal of Nashville as a rollicking bachelorette terful New York Times profile of English actress party destination. turned politician Glenda Jackson. Top: Gus Gustafson; Bottom: Khan Arshia Top: Bottom: D'Souza; Jason Favreau Edlyn Top:

4 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 5 CALENDAR OF EVENTS DIRECTOR’S CUT

 OCTOBER 12, 2019 JOHN EGERTON PRIZE AT THE SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS Nashville, TN STAKING THE BIG TENT The SFA at twenty BY JOHN T. EDGE

 OCTOBER 2426, 2019 22ND SOUTHERN FOODWAYS DECEMBER 9, 2019  SYMPOSIUM At our best, we tell SFA CELEBRATES Work Songs, new stories about this JENNI HARRIS Po-Boys, Soup Five Generations of Bean Theater dynamic place and its White Oak Pastures Oxford, MS varied people. Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA

OCTOBER 810, 2020 MARCH 28, 2020 23RD SOUTHERN FOODWAYS SYMPOSIUM SFA Spring Symposium The Future of the South The Future of the Restaurant Oxford, MS  • 

,  For more information, visit southernfoodways.org

Fall 2019 7 THIS PAGE: Mississippi farmer and catfish processor Ed Scott fried catfish does not always sit well with our mem- owner, who wore a pistol on his hip while at the 1999 Symposium. bership. What you publish in Gravy now running the juke (but not while running PREVIOUS PAGE: North Carolina seems more aggressive, he said, in a kind the bases.) SFA events used to feel like that, pitmaster Ed Mitchell (left, in overalls) tone that told me he was truly searching he told me, in a generous tone that re- cooked at the 2002 Symposium. for an answer. It feels more threatening, minded me of that New Orleans conver- I heard. Those are not the words I would sation. In the telling, he implied that the have chosen, but I didn’t argue. SFA of today doesn’t feel that same way. new stories about this dynamic place and Our perspective has indeed changed, I’ve been puzzling this through, trying its varied people. Instead of codifying I told him. That’s because the SFA has to make sense of why he feels that way. what’s old, we curate what’s new. We more recently focused its attentions on My friend had responded, I think, to document our region’s ongoing evolu- the challenges the South confronts what SFA intended when we began our tion. In the telling, we aim to change the today. That’s harder, I said. It can be work back in July of 1999. Our audienc- South, for the better. With that in mind, threatening to some, and emboldening es have never met our own standards for we rejected the term preserve and the to others. We never aim to drive inclusion, I told him. Our reach has never finality it implied. members away. We will always aim to matched our intent to represent our We aimed to explain ourselves better. tell honest and unflinching stories of region. Nostalgia for beginnings can often Yes, we preserve stories, but we don’t do this place we call home. cloud realities. that work to halt change or progress. The SFA’s shift in coverage, from past to In truth, our events are more integrat- SFA doesn’t believe that the South was present, unsettled him. Taking into ed than they have ever been. And thanks the sfa, which marked its made at some point in the past. And we to media products including our Gravy twentieth anniversary as an organization don’t believe that, without intercession, podcast, our audience is younger and this summer, has changed. the South might be unmade at some point Culture is not a more diverse, too. This is a start. An What began when fifty founders lent in the future. Culture is not a product. It’s product. It’s a earnest intent. But we can do more and their names to an idea, coalesced at our a process, just as the South is a process. will do more to stake a big tent under annual fall symposium, and gained Because we take that stance, our process, just as the which all may gather. purpose with our documentary and current work, focused on the contempo- South is a process. It is the responsibility of our staff to storytelling initiatives, has evolved and rary South, is often messy and sometimes manage realities and perceptions, and to adapted and morphed and expanded to cantankerous. When you work in the leverage all toward a better South. My do more than our founders conceived. present, nothing comes off as settled, account the rapid cultural shifts and en- challenge today is to help run an organi- Much of that change has been purpose- almost all is debatable, just about every- trenched political tensions of today, when zation that makes room for both of these ful: A healthy organization rejects stasis, thing is in motion. the whole of the nation feels unsettled, I friends, and these different challenges especially an organization that aims to When we focused our energy on can’t imagine another way to be. to SFA work, while acknowledging that document, study, and explore this looking back, SFA work was tidier. Even Back in June, I joined another donor the SFA has changed and will continue vibrant region. when we looked back on contentious for breakfast, this time in Atlanta. Over to change and will always work to be the When people outside the organization moments, like the Civil Rights Movement pan-fried eggs and sausage and peaches, sort of organization through which many talk about the SFA, they often use the era, temporal distance between then and he talked about what he saw and felt people of many backgrounds with many term preserve. SFA once used that term, now made our work a tool of affirmation. when he attended his first SFA sympo- different perspectives may find common too. Our initial mission was to “celebrate, That was then, we said of the Civil Rights sium, more than a decade ago. That event purpose and make community. preserve, promote, and nurture the tra- Movement era and the Jim Crow era had reminded him of the interracial I love this work. Today, our work ditional and developing diverse food before. Wrongs have made right, we sug- softball team he played on back in the matters more than ever. Our work shows culture of the American South.” Our aim gested. Those problems are no longer our 1970s. He didn’t reference The Bad News more potential than ever. And so we then was to preserve the stories of people problems, we implied. Bears, but he implied that sort of spirit. return to that work, fixed on helping the whose narratives had long been over- This April, while enjoying a breakfast Sponsored by a soul food restaurant South realize its potential. Onward Corn- looked, misconstrued, or maligned. of grits and eggs with a friend and SFA and bar, the team included Joogie, the bread Nation. About ten years back, we took a harder donor in suburban New Orleans, I rec- look at what we do and what we intend. ognized that our current choice to set John T. Edge is the founding director of SFA and the host of TrueSouth on the SEC SFA recognized that, at our best, we tell SFA work in the contemporary South Network/ESPN.

8 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 9 GOOD OL’ CHICO

WISDOM OF THE WHITE SAUCE A Virginia Mexican condiment speaks to place and change BY GUSTAVO ARELLANO

the alerts started on twitter. in the South for nearly a decade, and I’ve Then Instagram and Facebook. Texts and written a book about Mexican food in emails from friends, family, and readers the United States. Yet I had never heard soon followed. Did you know Mexican of Virginia’s Mexican white sauce. food in Virginia comes with white sauce?! Right before Korfhage’s piece ran, I They all shared the same article: A May had guest-edited a huge Eater package 3, 2019 piece in The Virginian-Pilot head- on Mexican food in the United States. lined “The story of white sauce, Virgin- One of my contributions was a map of ia’s unique contribution to Mexican Mexican American regional dishes: Tater American cuisine.” tot tacos in the Pacific Northwest. In the piece, reporter Matthew Korf- Walking tacos (a bag of Fritos or tortilla hage dug into the history of a free condi- chips dressed with cheese and beans) in ment offered at sit-down Mexican restau- the Midwest. Sugared carnitas around rants in the Old Dominion, specifically the Mountain West and Utah. Mississip- around the southeastern part of the state. pi Delta hot tamales and ACP—the que- White sauce is exactly what it sounds like: so-smothered arroz con pollo of the a dip originally derived from a ranch-es- South. I would have included Virgin- que salad dressing, “fuming with garlic ia-Mex white sauce, if only I had known. and spice,” as Korfhage put it. Restaura- No reporter likes to get beat on a story. teurs from Virginia Beach to Newport But a gracious one compliments his com- News have served it for nearly forty years. petition, so I called Korfhage. After we I read his piece, simultaneously gnash- hung up, I found myself searching flights ing my teeth and applauding. to Norfolk and fantasizing about a salsa

I have documented Mexican foodways blanca tasting tour. The conversation Oriana Koren Photos by

10 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 11 His initial story traced the condiment Korfhage’s colleagues were surprised to a since-closed Norfolk restaurant by the fervor surrounding the pieces, and called El Toro, which was one of the first kicked themselves for letting the story sit Mexican establishments in the region. in front of them all these decades. “They El Toro began serving white sauce as a learned that something belongs to them,” salad dressing in the 1970s, but custom- Korfhage said. “That it’s part of the history ers began using it as a dipping sauce for of Hampton Roads. And they didn’t really tortilla chips. White sauce spread know it until someone else told them.” through Hampton Roads by the 1990s, as Mexican immigrants opened new white sauce probably won’t find spots and took with them El Toro’s sauce. national traction, but I see it as a valuable Over the years, white sauce grew spicier, metaphor for the New South. It’s a stand- reflecting a local embrace of Mexican in for changing customs and communi- flavors that tracks with national trends. ties. For newcomers and regionalism. At first, cooks spiced the dip with crushed For all the things that make el Sur. red pepper and cumin. Later, they minced How many more white sauces are out jalapeños or added the vinegar from cans there? Not the condiment, per se, but the of pickled ones. Milk became the base idea? Local customs that tastemakers instead of Miracle Whip. It was thinner and burghers regard as quotidian, but in some restaurants, oilier in others. that are actually remarkable? That say Like any good reporter, Korfhage con- something about history, migration, and reminded me that the South is changing you see the familiar Mexican American tinued to follow the white sauce trail. an evolving region, yet remain known in ways that we don’t often appreciate, restaurant, you have a tendency to over- After the paper published the article that only by the people who live it? or even notice. look them. And it’s a mistake, because so many people shared with me this Hampton Roads white sauce deserves And while what I just wrote is a truism, you overlook things like [white sauce].” spring, he wrote a follow-up in which he the same praise and promotion as bar- sometimes you need something as seem- He tried his first batch in December revealed that John Villareal, a Mexican becue and bourbon, hot chicken and ingly mundane as white sauce to truly 2018 and asked the restaurant owner American Navy veteran who had run a Hoppin’ John. All of the South’s food- get it. what it was. Korfhage assumed the white chain of Norfolk restaurants in the 1960s, ways do. It took a relative newcomer like sauce was a regional salsa from the had actually created the white sauce that Korfhage to give a Southern tradition korfhage had never spent any time owner’s native Nayarit, a state in western El Toro later adapted as its own. And widespread recognition. That shows in the South until he took a job at The Mexico. But the owner explained that Korfhage also heard from Mexican Amer- there’s still work for all of us to do. Virginian-Pilot in April 2018. But the for- the crema was something he had only icans in Richmond, 100 miles away, who I say that as a challenge to ustedes and ty-one-year-old quickly did important encountered in Virginia. said they had their own unique white to myself. A decade ago, I had never eaten work. He chronicled southeast Virginia’s “Then I began to research,” Korfhage sauce that dated back to the 1970s. at a Mexican restaurant in the South. I disappearing food traditions like Tidewa- said, “and quickly realized it was a The two white sauce articles went assumed they were not just unremark- ter yock (Chinese noodles sluiced in soy Hampton Roads phenomenon.” viral. Nationally, many readers viewed able, but an insult to Mexican culture. sauce–spiked ketchup) and Greek-inspired He couldn’t find much written about white sauce as a regional oddity, like Eventually, I checked myself and visited Norfolk hot dogs. He covered Hampton the condiment, nationally or locally. The Rocky Mountain oysters or burgoo. one. My perspective changed to the point Roads’ vibrant Filipino and Caribbean food Virginian-Pilot had only unwittingly Locally, it was one of the Virginian-Pilot’s where I now cover Mexican food in el scenes. As a critic, he ate at mom-and-pops touched on the topic; every couple of most-read stories of the year. Readers Sur at least four times a year. and white-tablecloth restaurants. years, it would reprint a recipe from 2006 responded with comments, phone calls, Virginia white sauce reminds me how Korfhage initially avoided sit-down due to reader demand. and letters, many bewildered that white much I have to learn, and that my work Mexican spots favored by non-Mexican “The Hampton Roads area is not on the sauce wasn’t as common in Mexican food will never end. And so off to Hampton diners. “There’s a tendency as a food laundry list that food writers have,” he nationwide as, say, cheese dip. Roads I go…. critic to hunt down ‘authenticity,’” he admitted, as a sort of explanation. “And said. “It’s a terrible term. But you want for locals, [white sauce] didn’t seem in- Gustavo Arellano is Gravy’s columnist and a features reporter for the to bring people the ‘real deal.’ So when teresting, because it had always existed.” Los Angeles Times.

12 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 13 14 southernfoodways.org years.for more thansixty Heights homewhere she has lived Evelyn NimssitsintheGriffin University.State Florida of north mile borhood, Griffin Heights, sits less a than because location is everything. Our neigh- this pocket oftown. the elders said, white people would want Calloway, Ellington, Joe Louis. One day, lined with clotheslines out back. concrete blocks and little brick ranchers of haunches bony on teetering guns shot wooden yellow; batter pink, gum ramblers painted Kool-Aid blue, bubble were homes Our ployed. unem the servants, civil mechanics, taries, public school teachers, evangelists, a was Ours stove. the on stewing neckbones of 7Up poundcake risingintheoven or Caldwell next door whose house smelled Mr. Ford who lived They would say it all the time: my mother, Tallahassee,Florida. in neighborhood people who reared me in our very black would come. alwayspeople we white knew BY ROSALIND BENTLEY Staking aclaimincontested zipcode WE’VE GOT THE BEST THAT ROOTED INPLACE They would want it—and likely get it— black the mean “we,”I say I When streets named for black celebrities: neighborhood of janitors, secre janitors, of neighborhood across the street, Mrs. Those houses cinder block cinder - - - -

Photos by Willie J. Allen Jr. black peopleondesirable land. low-income working-class, of cluster a wasFSUus: west. of the north lay What to farther College Community lahassee TalUniversity,by - A&M and Florida by state Capitol and downtown, to the south the by east the to surrounded is campus main power.The money,more tuition That desire brought more students, more powerhouse. People want to be winners. football a into FSU Bowdenbuilt Bobby coach head up, growing was I When I think I was in elementary school elementary in was I think I

block, houseby house, anerosion. by year,block by year crept, it Instead, had longbeenarefrain. took the team 11–1, the elders’ prediction dimes and quarters? By the time Bowden and Golden Flake potato chips with our where we bought cherry Now and Laters Bennett’s,like store neighborhood a be Wouldwith? playwould I Whom there frightened me. Would we have to move? prediction Their displaced. be would when I first heard the older folks say we Turns out, dislocation wasn’t swift. wasn’t dislocation out, Turns What lay northofFSU income blackpeople working-class, low- was us:acluster of on desirable land. A tall wooden fence separates a traditional Griffin Heights home from a new complex inhabited by Florida State University students.

On a visit home this spring, I stood on the front porch of the petite, cinder block ranch my mother bought long ago on a secretary’s salary. A sprawling, gated complex of new, luxury student apart- ments loomed a block away. Up the hill, two more off-campus developments crowded around my elementary school. Every time I visit, the changes make me wonder, What will become of the neigh- borhood that I knew? What I knew was an imperfect place of abundance; of okra stalks towering over homemade fences. It was a place where older neighbor ladies sold five-cent paper cups of frozen Kool-Aid in summer, the juices slithering down our fingers red, purple, and sweet. It was a place where my best friend, Audra, stood forlorn in her front yard for so long one afternoon we went out to see what was wrong. “Muh, muh, Mama’s making chit-lins!” she sobbed. Their funk was flagrant, and she needed relief. Audra stayed at our house until they were cleaned, cooked, and plated. (Even now, no amount of hot sauce will convince her to eat them). Yes, there were burglaries and the oc- casional shooting in our neighborhood. measure. Just under 50 percent of chil- Griffin Heights, the story is grounded in Yes, drug houses sprouted up. Yes, we dren, and 50 to 70 percent of all residents, need, want, and woe. FSU sits directly in were poor. Yet day to day, we didn’t define live in poverty. Shocked and embar- what should be our zip code, but it has ourselves by lack. We defined ourselves rassed, local politicians and business We didn’t define its own postcode, 32306. The last digit by how we helped a neighbor if we had leaders launched a series of “Prosperity ourselves by lack. We officially walls it off—in us but not of us. enough to share. Care was slices of warm for All” community summits. The police defined ourselves In their book, Gentrification, Loretta pound cake from next door or an offering department and the city recently started Lees, Tom Slater, and Elvin Wyly iden- in return of fresh peanuts for boiling. a “clean-up” initiative in the neighbor- by how we helped a tify a language for gentrification which Late last year, the president of the hood. The project targeted trash, crime, neighbor if we had includes terms like revitalization, Florida Chamber of Commerce an- and neglected properties. I couldn’t help renewal, and rejuvenation. The words nounced that 32304, the zip code that feeling it also meant us. enough to share. suggest something better can replace holds Griffin Heights, is the poorest in Each time I read an article in my home- what’s there. They fail to acknowledge the state of Florida by almost every town paper or watch a news clip about the value of what already exists. The city

16 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 17 of Tallahassee employs these terms now seems, mainly to FSU students. That is in a little bungalow with white siding as it tries to figure out how to bring “pros- their right. This is how capitalism works. and russet-red trim at the end of a dead- But as the new perity” to the neighborhood where my It’s less unusual now to see a white end street. residents come, mother and father brought me home person jogging or walking a dog. But as There, she and her first husband reared from the “Negro” hospital decades ago. the new residents come, where do the their sons, Barry and Billie, and daughter, where do the old Their generation is dying out. Mine isn’t old neighbors go? What is lost when they Barbara, just three blocks from Philadel- neighbors go? moving back. Some descendants sell. depart? Who will share the bounty of phia Primitive Baptist Church, where Others allow emptiness and neglect to their gardens and tables? our families worship. Barbara, Billie, and What is lost when ravage their homesteads. Developers buy Three neighbors showed me. I sang in the youth choir together. If I they depart? the properties, fix them up or tear them still lived in Tallahassee, I’d probably be down, and rebuild cheap, nondescript for the last sixty-four of her eighty- a member, too. houses or duplexes. They rent them, it five years, Mrs. Evelyn Nims has lived Mrs. Nims, my mother, and other members of Philadelphia’s Seasoned Saints senior group volunteer at the church’s food pantry once a month. But the neighborhood need threatened to outstrip the larder. So the church started serving Sunday breakfast for some of the kids in the neighborhood—eggs, bacon, grits, and fried fish. In summer, when that wasn’t enough, Barbara told me, the church started feeding the children two meals each weekday. On Sundays, the little ones stay for services. Inside the sanctuary, their gazes likely wander, as mine did, across a series of Biblical wonders painted on the walls: the search for room at the inn, the cru- cifixion and resurrection, the catch of 153 fish. In the frescoes, everybody is black and radiant: Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the disciples. Their afros are buoyant, though the woman at the well has a long, wavy perm. Over on a wall in the amen corner, the Devil—hazel-eyed, clo- ven-hooved, winged, and blond—is tempting a white-robed Christ. It was hot the day I went to see Mrs. Nims. She, Billie, my mother, and I sat in her backyard under a patio-table um- brella. A few yards away, young tomatoes, okra, and peppers sprouted. Mrs. Nims grew up on a farm on the edge of town.

Ed Duffee Jr. grows crops like okra and sugarcane in his Griffin Heights garden. 18 southernfoodways.org A garden in her life is as essential as mr. tony osborne lives kitty-corner Scripture. Her grandfather taught her from my mother’s place. how to grow things. He had learned from A thick layer of rust-colored mulch his grandfather. covers a strip of ground that runs along- “He’d say his grandfather came from side the length of his driveway. Atop the way across the water,” Mrs. Nims told me. mulch stand two big barrel grills and one In that moment, I realized this soft-spo- kettle grill, ashen from use. ken, elegant woman was still farming as It was just past dusk when I knocked her enslaved great-great-grandfather had. on his door. Though we didn’t know each Here, in this backyard, were living ties to other well, he invited me inside. He is a the Middle Passage. relative newcomer to our street, living Many years ago, she brought back some there just three years. Based on the cars Meyer lemons from a visit to Ft. Lauder- that routinely stop at the house, and on dale. She can’t remember what she the stream of young black men who cooked with them, but she saved the gather there, a couple of neighbors won- seeds. As the saplings grew strong, she dered if he or one of his kids sold drugs. gave some away, then planted one in her This despite the fact Mr. Osborne owns backyard. It’s almost as high as her roof a lawn service, one prosperous enough now. At Christmas, there are no sweeter to afford him a shiny, new, black trailer presents than those Meyers. The day I with his company’s name emblazoned visited, both trees were laden with tiny on the sides. The weary way he folded green fruit, promises of gifts to come. his body onto the couch, his already dark Once a quarter or so, Mrs. Nims gets skin rendered ebony from constant labor Griffin Heights resident Tony Osborne operates a lawn service and letters from speculators asking if she wants under a scorching sun, reminded me of hosts regular barbecues for young men in the neighborhood. to sell her house. No need to fix it up, they the husbands and fathers I grew up say. They’ll pay cash, as is. FSU students around, bone-tired from work. addiction. Now he is back on his feet with from his garden. The rest of the barbecue have moved into the house next door. Five His girlfriend, Lovey Harris, a nurse, the goal of expanding his lawn service. feeds some of those young men in the blocks south is a student dorm and a string sat working at a computer in the dining Looking across the living room into neighborhood still in the life. Mr. Osborne of duplexes. A wooden fence separates the nook. Two of Mr. Osborne’s sons lingered the kitchen, I saw a run of counter space is a Freemason given to quoting Scrip- Nims’ house from more apartments. outside under the carport, talking with in spices and condiments. I asked about ture. (“Like God told Peter, ‘Dust your “They want this area,” Mrs. Nims told their girlfriends. Earlier that day, I’d told the grills out front. feet off. Keep it moving.’”) His goal is to me. “It’s closer to FSU, but I’ve gotta have him I wanted to talk about how the “There’s a criminal part of the youth turn the informal counseling he does at somewhere to go. I might as well stay in neighborhood was changing, but before that nobody’s doing anything for and I the cookouts into a formal community my home. I’m not going anywhere.” I got started, he asked me about my try to counsel them. Because I been in mentoring program. As my mother and I rose to leave, Mrs. mother. Just a few days earlier she’d had that life,” he said. “I say, ‘We eatin’ today. We ain’t drug- Nims passed along some of her grandfa- surgery. At eighty-three years old, she Every so often, he soaks ribs or chicken ging or doing none of that. We feedin’ ther’s gardening advice. Take the collard still cuts her own grass, but Mr. Osborne in white vinegar, pats them dry, and dusts the soul today,’” Mr. Osborne told me. stems after you remove the leafy parts, felt it was time for him to step in and do the meat with a rub and maybe some Then he told me about the group of poke a row of holes in the soil, drop in it free of charge, at least until she healed. garlic powder or onion salt. Then he fires young white men who moved into the some fertilizer, bury the stems vertical- “I’m gonna take care of it because that’s up the grills. house on the corner not long ago. He said ly at a depth of roughly half their height, my neighbor,” he told me. There was fi- “I keep that vinegar on it and it brings they are FSU students. The father of one and keep them watered. “And you’ll have nality in his voice, and also care. that smoke and keeps it tender so when of them bought the place because it’s close plenty of greens,” she assured us. As we talked, he told me of the ups in you taste it, you don’t even want no bar- to campus, Mr. Osborne told me. Mr. I’d never thought about starting greens his fifty-two years of life: He once made becue sauce,” he said. Osborne cuts their grass. Another group from cuttings. I usually buy them, fully $65,000 a year as a manager at a grocery He takes a plate next door to Mr. Harris, of white students lives in a house across grown, from the grocery store. Maybe distribution center. He told me of the whose children I grew up with and who from his backyard. They don’t come to this fall, I’ll try it her way. downs: He lost that prosperity to drug used to bring my mother rutabagas the barbecues, and Mr. Osborne admitted

20 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 21 on this lot. Much of what he grew he These are gifts. These are ties to an agrar- gave away. ian past first born of force, then nurtured Today he sells plums, red and white by necessity, and, finally, expressed in potatoes, okra, collards, beefsteak toma- choice and joy. Mr. Duffee expects to be toes, (“Top of the line,” he told me), navel the last generation to farm on this hill. oranges, (“The sweetest there are,”) When he’s gone, he says, maybe it will purple figs, watermelons, cucumbers, be sold, the sugarcane plowed under and grapes, Blue Lake beans, five pecan trees, more student housing erected in its place. and rows and rows of sugarcane he grinds After our conversation, as I worried and sells at the Frenchtown Farmers about what might happen, Mr. Duffee Market. (Frenchtown, an adjacent, his- got back to work. There were beans he torically-black neighborhood, is also had to cover with rich earth, okra sprouts being “revitalized” with mammoth apart- to water, bags to fill with potatoes and ment complexes for FSU students.) onions, and the neighbor’s order to fill. Lilies, elephant ears, boxwoods, bego- It was time to share some of the best our nias, and azaleas huddle in the southeast zip code had to offer. corner of the lot to form a small nursery. A home for sale in the neighborhood, August 2019 Mr. Duffee does a lot of the work himself. what will be different the next time He gets some help from younger men in I go home? Who will be gone? Mrs. Cald- he had not invited them. They seem nice The scent of compost and overripe the neighborhood who know little about well has moved in with Audra and her enough, he told me, but he knows they Japanese plums smothered me as I farming but need short-term work. husband across town. The Caldwells’ old aren’t going to be long-term neighbors. entered the gate. Mr. Duffee was there While we were talking, his phone rang. home, where Audra stood outside bereft The white students need him to perform waiting in the shade of one of his equip- I could hear the person on the other end over swine innards, is empty. Mr. Ford, a service. The black young men he feeds ment shanties, cobbled from scraps of making a produce order. The caller lived who lived across the street, died a year need him for something more. corrugated metal and wood. He’d actu- in the apartment complex across the ago. His grown daughters have said they “People keep putting on these blind- ally been there for hours before I got street from his garden. The building is don’t plan to move into his house. Maybe folds, but if you don’t deal with it now, there, an eighty-one-year-old early riser different from others in the neighbor- they’ll rent it. For now, it’s vacant. As my you gon’ deal with it later,” he told me, who long ago learned the cool of the hood; it’s a senior living facility primar- mother gets older, we talk about what I referring to the young men he mentors. morning is best time to get the most done. ily occupied by African Americans. From should do with her place when she’s For him, looking away isn’t an option. Mr. Duffee, who grew up in Griffin their windows, they can watch Mr. gone. She thinks I should sell. My life Heights, did what many of us did when Duffee work. plays out 275 miles away now. A perma- before i left Mrs. Nims’ house, Billie we got older: He moved out. A lawyer Developers offer to buy this farm. Mr. nent return to Griffin Heights is unlike- asked if I’d been “up to the farm” yet. for many years, he was one of the first Duffee said it’s the land they want, not ly. And if I do decide to sell her house or Just a half mile away, and still in the black people in the mid-1970s to integrate the plants. He won’t sell. rent it out, who will live there? Will they neighborhood, it’s a verdant, hillside Killearn Estates, back then an upper-mid- “White people buying houses like smother chicken gizzards and serve them double lot I had passed every day growing dle-class, country-club development on mad,” he tells me. “Mama and daddy buy over rice as we did when my mother’s up, but never entered. A chain-link fence the north side of town. Yet even as he it for them, renovate it, and let them live money was tight? Will they plant a little and no trespassing signs are supposed moved on, he kept a foothold in his old there while they’re in school, rent it potager out back and share the surplus to dissuade anyone who might want to neighborhood. He did what developers back out…. Those kids aren’t trying in- with their friends and neighbors? Will help themselves to the crops without do now: He bought up a few old homes tegrate into the neighborhood and get they want to know anything about the permission. If anyone could help me get and rented them out. The tenants were to know people.” people who came before them? Or, will inside, it was my old neighbor, Mrs. Mary African American. The plums’ nectar, the grape arbor the house and the neighborhood be a Caldwell, maker of the chitterlings. She More than sixty years ago, his late thick and green with leaves and young short stop on their road to someplace told me Mr. Ed Duffee Jr., a deacon at uncle-in-law broke ground on this lot. clusters of fruit: These are precious. else, someplace “better?” her church, owns the farm. All it took Since then, season by season, it has was a call from her and he was ready to produced in abundance. In 2004, when Rosalind Bentley is a Smith Fellow with the Southern Foodways Alliance and a senior give me a tour. Mr. Duffee retired, he started working writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Follow her on Twitter @rozrbentley.

22 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 23 WAIT AND SEE “this is why we shouldn’t announcement kicked off a debate that depend on customers to subsidize has since been fueled by movements servers’ salaries.” lobbying for a single minimum wage for Tori De Leone had just totaled her all workers, most notably in Washing- take-home tips from a slow brunch shift ton, DC, and New York. at Saint Leo restaurant in Oxford, Mis- A one-wage system offers stability to sissippi, where she waited tables while employees who traditionally work for attending graduate school at the Univer- tips, and it can help balance other in- sity of Mississippi (and where I still pick equalities in the industry. up shifts). In an interview with The Washington Tori and I have often joked that we Post, activist Saru Jayaraman explains are basically the same person, despite that, post-abolition, white employers the dozen years between us. Here, our used tipping to hire newly freed slaves opinions diverged. for next to nothing. Today, restaurants I love making tips. In two decades of overwhelmingly hire people of color for serving in diners, fast-casual chains, and lower-level positions like food runners fine-dining restaurants across the South, and bussers, while offering white em- I’ve never met a server who didn’t. ployees more lucrative positions as Tori grew up in Oregon, one of seven servers and bartenders. states that guarantees tipped employees Restaurant Opportunities Center Oaxaca is a state that the same minimum wage as hourly United, which Jayaraman co-directs, has proudly kept its workers. She served lunches and brunch- reports that women suffer sexual harass- es at Saint Leo, whereas I usually worked ment from customers—sexual teasing, indigenous traditions the busier night shifts. In New York, she’d remarks, pinching, touching, and pres- alive—music, clothing, worked as a barista at Maialino, Danny sure for dates—at twice the rate of their and especially food— Meyer’s Gramercy Park trattoria. male counterparts. Opponents of tipping “No tipping was actually a huge selling argue that women feel obligated to tol- for centuries in the point for me there,” she told me. erate these behaviors for the sake of face of encroaching In 2015, Meyer’s Union Square Hospi- making a good tip, and they do not trust tality Group (USHG) began the years- their employers to defend them. modernity. long process of integrating a “Hospital- Then there’s kitchen labor. On gameday ity Included” model into each of its in a college town, for example, many restaurants. The company raised menu servers and bartenders leave with hun- prices to include gratuity and used the dreds of dollars. The kitchen staff, who EIGHTY-SIX additional revenue to pay servers, bar- crank out plate after meticulous plate for tenders, bussers, and runners a steady, eight hours with hardly two minutes for competitive wage. Under this model, a break, see no notable difference on their TIPPING? Union Square offers substantial employ- biweekly check. To keep down labor this past summer, i traveled I’m on the fence. ee benefits, including paid time off, costs, managers often deny overtime in through Mexico for a week as a guide for medical, dental, and vision insurance, the kitchen. Servers, meanwhile, can pick BY JENNA MASON a Los Angeles Times–organized culinary and a 401(k) with company match. up shifts for extra cash. tour. Our group of mostly middle-aged Meyer was not the first to implement Today, only one USHG restaurant white Angelenos sampled street food in a nontraditional pay structure at his remains to be converted to the Hospital- Mexico City, took cooking classes in the restaurants; Alice Waters, for instance, ity Included program, and all remain colonial city of Puebla, and ate our weight eliminated tipping at Chez Panisse in successful. Experiments like Meyer’s in mole and handmade tortillas in the 1989. In an era of both celebrity chef- (and dozens of restaurants that followed southern state of Oaxaca. New York Zoological Society/Library Zoological of Congress New York dom and Twitter activism, Meyer’s suit) counter the common belief that

24 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 25 restaurants could not afford to operate booth with us, still in his bar apron from That’s just it: We know the system is if they paid their tipped employees a full his last shift. I ask De’s opinion on a rigged, and we take pride in navigating wage. Tori urged me to question that no-tipping model. He belly-laughs. “Oh, it to our advantage. We discern whether assumption, shrugging, “There are still hell, no! They can pry my tips from my a party wants a chatty server or one who restaurants in Oregon and Washington.” cold, dead hands.” slips to and from the table unacknowl- Still, the move to abolish a two-tier A fellow server toasts to this. “Give me edged. We feel out if a couple requires wage system has gained little traction my cash tips, or give me death!” We raise all the details of the special or just a gloss- nationally. Rather than ideological, the our beers, tap them on the table, and over. We oblige, and we make our nut. reasons appear to be legal, economic, and drink in solidarity. When you live check to check or work cultural. Over the next hour or so, more long- multiple jobs, as so many servers do, that In the South, a lack of unions weakens term industry employees stop by our table autonomy means everything. We know, workers’ ability to organize and lobby to say hi or share a drink. Each acknowl- deep down, that it’s an illusion. But it for change; meanwhile, national activist edges the inequities of the current system helps us keep going. organizations on both sides concentrate before admitting they’d much rather earn We know that, in the long-term, finding their efforts on fights in bluer regions of position from dishwasher to general tips than an hourly wage. a job that offers health insurance and the country like DC, California, Michi- manager. “The problem is,” Taariq shakes his paid leave and a retirement plan is gan, and New York. We meet for a beer at the Blind Pig, head, “it’s hard to replace that immediate smarter than chasing a wad of cash after The wealth disparity between the the closest thing Oxford has to a dive bar. return on sweat equity.” a killer service. Maybe someday we’ll South and those regions matters. Emily From 4 p.m. until last call, restaurant folks Another server-turned-manager nods, demand change. When we do, it will be Blount, who owns Saint Leo and the filter in and out of the poorly lit, base- “The thrill of getting that big tip for a job because we choose to, not because newly opened Saint Leo Lounge, regu- ment-level retreat to play pool and blow well done is a driving force for those who Twitter told us we should. Until then, larly dined at Gramercy Tavern when off steam over PBRs and shots of Jameson. work well in the service industry.” we’ll take the tips. she lived in New York. She based her Unbuttoned white and blue Oxford shirts business model around Meyer’s princi- dot the crowd as hospitality employees Jenna Mason, who has twenty years of experience in the restaurant industry, ples of “enlightened hospitality” but wind down from or gear up for shifts is SFA’s content and media manager. stopped short of a one-wage system. “I’ve around the Square. gone to [USHG] restaurants and seen a Over a couple of beers, Taariq and I $20 cocktail,” she explained. No one in agree that a single-wage system would Oxford, Mississippi, would pay that for eliminate the disparity in income TIPPING POINT? TRUTHS ABOUT TIPPED WAGES a drink. between servers and kitchen staff. I • Restaurant jobs make • Seventy percent of because they rely Perhaps the biggest challenge in any would love never to hear another cook up seven of the ten tipped workers in the on the aggressors to setting, though, is how servers them- tell me, “You literally made $200 tonight lowest paid jobs in United States are pay their wages. selves feel about tipping. Meyer lost for walking food from one end of the America. Four of women, and two about 40 percent of his staff in the restaurant to the other while we’re back those seven are thirds of these women • The two-tiered system months after he implemented his “hos- here busting our asses.” He would love tipped positions. report experiencing disproportionately pitality included” model. Those who left for the most essential person in any sexual harassment disadvantages people were mostly longtime front-of-house restaurant, the dishwasher, to earn a • Restaurant workers from customers. of color, who tend are twice as likely to Women in the service to work as bussers employees. wage that reflects his value. have to rely on industry are five times and runners, most Logic and ethics convince me that I We agree that tipped employees government assis- more likely to report often in chain rest- should oppose our current tipping system. deserve healthcare, sick leave, and a pre- tance and three times sexual harassment, aurants where tipped I applaud employers like Meyer who dictable income; that the tipping system as likely to live in and many feel they employees make reject the status quo in favor of fairness. makes women more vulnerable to sexual poverty as the general must tolerate inappro- less money. Would I work at those restaurants? harassment; that it almost always favors population. priate behavior Absolutely not. white employees over people of color. This paradox left me conflicted enough We order another round when Delant- Source: Roberto A. Ferdman and Saru Jaramayan, “I dare you to read this and to consult my friend Taariq David. A poet ric Hunt, a nine-year veteran of the still feel good about tipping.” The Washington Post, February 18, 2016.

and a thinker, Taariq has worked every Oxford service industry, settles in the Jack Delano/Library of Congress

26 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 27 Does a THE LITTLE COOKBOOK ENTERED THE cookbook world in 2018, edited by a black professor and a white author, collected from members of a white have the church and a black church, maybe a peacemaker power or maybe a disrupter, maybe too late or maybe Oaxaca is a state that to heal? right on time, but defi nitely in the right place. has proudly kept its Recipes in indigenous traditions Wilmington, North Carolina, should Memorial Park to honor the victims of alive—music, clothing, be the most prosperous city for African the only coup d’état to take place on and especially food— Black and White Americans in the United States today. United States soil, when murderous for centuries in the More than a century ago, it stood as an white men overthrew the elected local example of successful Reconstruction, government and wiped away three face of encroaching by integrated and proud along the Cape Fear decades of progress in a single day. modernity. MICHAEL River near the state’s southeastern coast. That day, November 10, 1898, white It was North Carolina’s largest city, with supremacists lynched dozens or more GRAFF more black residents than white resi- black people and burned the black- dents. One of the country’s few black- owned newspaper. Some accounts put owned newspapers published here. Black the number killed at eleven; others say businesspeople owned ten of Wilming- as many as 250. The National Memorial Photo illustrations by ton’s eleven restaurants, and the black for Peace and Justice in Montgomery YODITH DAMMLASH male literacy rate was higher than that lists twenty-two lynching victims that of white males. day on the weathered-steel monument  , 
 Now, the most visible reminder of for New Hanover County—thirteen through Mexico for a week as a guide for those times stands on a bluƒ at the in- named, and nine inscribed as •–—–˜™–. a Los Angeles Times–organized culinary tersection of Third and Davis streets. Six It’s the most reprehensible event in tour. Our group of mostly middle-aged bronze oars rise in 1898 Monument and the city’s history, and it was, for the white white Angelenos sampled street food in Mexico City, took cooking classes in the colonial city of Puebla, and ate our weight in mole and handmade tortillas in the 28 southern state of Oaxaca. southernfoodways.org defend the violence, 108 years too late. to do the important work of collecting It’s hard to trace where black families the story behind each dish. scattered throughout southeastern North The recipes and as-told-to essays form Carolina that November. One hundred something modest but profound: In a twenty-one years later, people of color city whose history has been defi ned by make up a signifi cant portion of the area’s segregationists, the most segregated time population, but have comparatively little of the week remains Sunday morning, power and wealth. which means the most segregated local A little cookbook cannot heal that. literature is probably church cookbooks. Tammy’s mom’s cornbread cannot heal In these pages, though, the parishioners that. share their kitchens and most personal Mary’s banana cake cannot heal that. dishes, one next to the other. Danyce’s baked fl ounder cannot heal that. Ž‘ ’ “”Ž• the book this spring, I Cookbooks don’t have that kind of thought of all the ways I’ve seen people power, but they can highlight a commu- try to use food to bring people from dif- nity’s ambitions and project its unifi ed ferent backgrounds together. beliefs. And if you stop there, Memories, I’ve lived in six North Carolina cities, Molasses & More, containing more than reported from every military base and forty recipes from members of the his- estuary and most of the mountaintops; torically black Macedonia Missionary I’ve visited all 100 counties and eaten Baptist Church and historically white meals in most of them, and I married a Winter Park Baptist, achieves its mission. Charlotte native on the grounds of the On November 10, 1898, as many as 2,000 white men marched on the offi ce of Novelist and professor Clyde Edgerton, state’s fi rst art museum. My love for North Wilmington's African American newspaper, the Daily Record, and burned it beyond repair. from Winter Park, and retired professor Carolina is, like most love, complicated. Dr. Deborah Brunson, from Macedonia, Here, people will proudly tell me that terrorists, brutally e ective. Black resi- be buckshot and let it be at close range.” came up with the idea for the book in European settlers once called the North dents fl ed inland; most never returned. Empowered whites reframed the coup 2014, when they were colleagues at Carolina “the goodliest land” and “the The murderers took control. Their as the Wilmington Race Riot, insinuating UNC-Wilmington. They brought in Peggy pleasantest place,” and they’ll recite the leader, a former congressman named that there were bad people on both sides, Price, a retired high school English state motto, esse quam videri (“To be, Alfred Moore Waddell, who’d fallen on as if the black victims shared blame for teacher and former student of Edgerton’s, rather than to seem”), but in the same hard fi nancial times and had boasted of the violence. Schools across the state breath they’ll call a massacre a race riot. his mission to “choke the current of the referred to it that way for decades, as On the last Wednesday of each month, Cape Fear River” with black corpses, did encyclopedias of North Carolina Cookbooks can I eat breakfast with a group of thirty to became the mayor. Afterward, he pos- history. Only since the 2000s has the highlight a forty men who hold various leadership tured as a reluctant leader called to carry more honest name—the Wilmington community’s positions in Charlotte, about four hours out a necessary mission. Indeed, several Massacre of 1898—become mainstream. west of Wilmington. We meet under the prominent North Carolina families sup- The state’s largest newspapers, the ambitions and banner of “building trust across race and ported the coup, including Rebecca Raleigh News & Observer and The Char- project its culture,” and we’re an offshoot of a Cameron, a novelist who wrote to lotte Observer, apologized in 2006 for women’s organization that started with a Waddell: “There is a time to kill. Let it their editorials that helped incite and unifi ed beliefs. similar mission several years earlier. Most 30 31 southernfoodways.org Gravy • Fall 2019 months, we’re evenly split among black United States Congresswoman: “Send men and white men, with a handful of her back.” Latinos. Some are banking legends, media Under those clouds and concerns, I presidents, and community organizers. leave my house in Charlotte one Friday We’ve been doing this since the police morning to spend a weekend in Wilm- shooting of a black man led to protests ington, to see what, if anything, can come and riots in Charlotte’s streets in Sep- from a little cookbook. tember 2016. Recently we started moving the breakfasts to di erent neighborhoods ’“ ”•– —˜™š” day, Deborah Brunson’s each month. Over biscuits and casseroles husband, Bernard Brunson, shows me and co ee, we’ve discussed everything the Wilmington he remembers. from Confederate monuments to jobs, “Fourth Street was the hub of the black propelled political careers and raised experience,” he says. We’re near down- money for a ordable housing, and had town, four streets east of the riverfront. more personal moments where we share “When I grew up this was all I knew.” the words we heard as children about Bernard, age sixty-nine, is a US Army people from di erent races. veteran who grew up here and attended Often, it seems that our sharpest divi- all-black schools until the eleventh grade, sion is not race but age. For the older when integration sent him to New men, a breakfast conversation provides Hanover High. a candid space to refl ect and rethink a He joined the Army at nineteen and lifetime with racism as a backdrop. visited thirteen countries before coming The younger guys are more urgent: home to stay. He fell for Deborah in 1992, Great talk, but now, what do we DO? not long after she moved here. A friend The first shots of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 rang out I’ll be forty in December, just old invited her to a cookout to meet a poten- at this intersection. Two white x marks drawn on the image by an enough and just young enough to believe tial date; that man didn’t come, but eyewitness mark where the first two African Americans died. the tension is good. After nearly twenty Bernard was there, and they married two years as a writer here, and after attending years later. They love Wilmington, but says, “and it’s been converted into apart- draped beauty here, there are historical countless breakfasts and international that love is complicated. In the same car ments.” images of people like the Wilmington festivals and supper events and lunch- ride, Bernard tells stories of catching a “All of this that you see around you was Ten, nine men of color and a white time panel discussions aimed at “cele- fi fty-fi ve-pound amberjack o Johnnie 99 percent African American. Now, woman wrongfully convicted in 1971 of brating our di erences,” I do wonder: Mercer’s Pier, and then others of the because of the economy and everything, firebombing a white-owned grocery What have they accomplished? Charlot- closed-down, all-black Williston High a lot of things have been taken over. And store. Recently released notes show that tesville still happened one state to the School and James Walker Memorial now it’s more whites.” the white prosecutor on that case made north. Charleston still happened one Hospital. He pauses and attempts to soften his notes like “KKK? … good” while selecting state to the south. And in an arena in At times he talks so fast about what description. a panel of ten white and two black jurors. eastern North Carolina this summer, used to be that I can’t keep up. “It’s a blended area.” Two cemeteries sitting side by side off about one hundred miles from Wilming- “This was a boxing gym and now it’s But his words “taken over,” hang in the of Rankin Street might be the clearest ton, thousands of people still attended a a bar.” car. In Wilmington, he knows, the phrase illustration of Wilmington’s racist past. presidential campaign rally and un- “This was Harris barbershop.” holds meaning. Brunson turns the car toward the first, leashed a chant aimed at a foreign-born “This was a bakery, ABC Bakery,” he For every picture of Spanish moss– Pine Forest, enclosed by a bent and 32 33 southernfoodways.org Gravy • Fall 2019 broken chain-link fence. It includes hell with the school board for four years graves of the country’s fi rst profession- about admissions practices in a Span- ally trained African American architect ish-language immersion program. The and North Carolina’s fi rst African Amer- program admitted white children at a ican lawyer. Several Wilmingtonians from much higher rate than black children in the late 1800s are buried there in its early days. Edgerton believes the unnamed graves. Maybe they were store problem persists; the school board says owners or musicians. We will never know. it’s fi xed. He sparred with the superin- Bernard turns around, makes two tendent in the Wilmington Star-News rights and heads into Oakdale, the white editorial pages in April. cemetery next door, fenced in wrought Now in his seventies, Edgerton faces iron and sheltered by magnolias. a question familiar to many white pro- “That’s how deep the system ran,” gressives from his era: He’s been an ad- Deborah says from the back seat. “Liter- vocate for civil rights throughout his ally from the cradle to the grave.” Bernard tells me that his sister, who died at birth, is buried at Pine Forest. Now in his seventies, I ask him what he would think if, by Edgerton faces a chance, one of his relatives wanted to be buried at Oakdale. question familiar “Personally, it wouldn’t aŠ ect me,” he to many white says, pausing to look out the window at the pristine grounds of Oakdale, “but that progressives from would not be my fi rst choice.” his era: Did he do enough? ‹ŒŽ‘’ ’‘“’”•–—, •˜’ author of twelve books and a former Guggenheim Fellow, lives in a 1953 ranch house about adult life, but did he do enough? In the two miles from those cemeteries. I visit cafeteria at UNC-Chapel Hill in the him on Saturday afternoon. He’s sitting 1960s, his roommate asked him what he’d on a bench on his back porch dropping do if the new black students sat down red beans and rice on his shirt while next to them. The roommate said he’d talking about racial justice with his leave; Edgerton said he’d eat with them. mouth full. At the time, that might have been “Other Americans see the South as the notable—as it was in 2008, when Edger- cradle of racism,” he says, “so it’s not a ton hosted a big fundraiser for then-can- big jump to think that the cradle of didate Barack Obama in his backyard. racism might hold some of the solutions.” But in the past four or fi ve years, he’s He drifts between big, systemic trou- come to a hard-stop realization: “You Alfred Moore Waddell, previously a United States congressman, bles in America, and smaller, local prob- can’t have racial reconciliation without became the mayor of Wilmington after the Massacre of 1898. lems in Wilmington. He’s been raising racial justice.” 34 35 southernfoodways.org Gravy • Fall 2019 of 1966, he took a position as the head pulpits a few times over the years, and counselor in the Chapel Hill chapter of some members had spent a Sunday or Upward Bound, a federally funded two in the other church. Edgerton, an program aimed at giving low-income accomplished banjo player, was drawn students better opportunities to attend to the music at Macedonia. college. He says about 90 percent of the By then, the idea of racial justice con- counselors were black, and the person sumed Edgerton. He thought of his child- who hired him, a black woman, joked hood in rural North Carolina and how the that when she saw his application she black people in his segregated communi- said, “Oh, here’s a little white one; we ty were invisible to him, except when they better let him in.” shopped for groceries. Food, he thought, Edgerton served in the Air Force in was the one thing they must have in Vietnam before becoming the “Mark common. And that’s how Memories, Mo- Twain of North Carolina,” as his most lasses & More came to be. Edgerton and devoted fans call him. His books, starting Brunson arranged for UNC-Wilmington with Raney (1985), often use humor to to publish and print a few hundred copies expose contradictions in Southern and to sell to the churches. Christian customs, and the impurities of For the project to reach a wider audi- institutions such as, say, universities. ence, they needed more than recipes. Through fi ction, he’s fearlessly honest They wanted to take readers into the about the places where he grew up and contributors’ homes, for holidays and worked. ordinary days, and desegregate dinner After he met Brunson in 2014, he tables in print. Manhattan Park, a gathering place for Wilmington's African American invited her to speak to one of his classes, Peggy Price interviewed most of the community, was severely damaged during the Massacre of 1898. and they became friends. They learned contributors personally. Some stories go that they were members of sister church- into great detail. Dorotha Cahill’s tale Deborah Brunson grew up in Wash- Brunson graduated from Howard Uni- es—Edgerton at Winter Park, Brunson about her cranberry salad, for instance, ington, DC, in the 1950s. Her mother was versity, earned a master’s in communi- at Macedonia. The churches had traded takes us to her Oklahoma childhood from Alabama and her dad from South cation from the University of Southwest- home during the Depression, when her Carolina. They’d moved north during the ern Louisiana (now UL-Lafayette), and mother would feed “hobos” out of her Great Migration. They didn’t have the a doctorate at Florida State. At that last But in the past four back door. Clif Harris writes of his chance to advance past grade school, but stop, she learned about 1898 in Wilming- mother, Mary Willie Yelton Harris, who they were avid readers, and they made ton. She landed a job at UNC-Wilmington or fi ve years, he’s brought her “Mountain Pie” down from sure their children knew the importance in 1991 and spent nearly twenty-seven come to a hard-stop the hills when she moved from Appala- of the Civil Rights Movement. years teaching courses on interracial chia to eastern North Carolina in 1918. Brunson remembers sitting with her communication, communication theory, realization: “You Gloria Dutch’s picnic potato salad is so parents at dinner to talk about accom- and community and interracial dialogue. can’t have racial good, she says, her mother and aunt plishments and setbacks over potato A few years older than Brunson, Edg- reconciliation without argued over who taught her to make it. salad and collards. Her mother’s maca- erton grew up outside of Durham, North And Jessica Monroe oœ ers a snapshot of roni and cheese recipe appears in the Carolina. His grandparents were share- racial justice.” life at James Walker Hospital during cookbook. croppers. After college, in the summer segregation. Her grandmother worked 36 37 southernfoodways.org Gravy • Fall 2019 OK, well, we’ve been here before. This’ll are two meditation areas, named Peace make people feel good for like fi fteen Circle and Hope Circle. The memorial Invitations to come together are hardly minutes, and then, what has really has become a gathering spot for rallies in short supply for people of color. changed?” for everything from the National Day of That’s what I came to Wilmington to Prayer to immigrant rights. The organizers are often well-meaning ask, I tell Brunson and Edgerton. What Deborah takes a seat in Hope Circle white people who want people to reconcile, has really changed? and looks up at the trees. Bernard stands It’s hard to quantify, they say. The book on the hill with the paddles. We all but who, even in their invitation, reveal can be a piece of a resolution to the city’s remain quiet. It’s a solemn place. that they’d like it done on their terms. long history of racism, but hardly the Bernard points toward the highway whole thing. And its importance depends and the bridge over the Cape Fear River. as much on the reader’s perspective as He tells me a chilling story that was in the kitchen there, and the sta allowed supply for people of color. The organiz- on the words themselves. passed down to him. Apparently, after Jessica to hang out after school while ers are often well-meaning white people Zach Hanner, a white man who directs white supremacists killed several black she waited for her mom or dad to pick who want people to reconcile, but who, the local theater company TheatreNOW, people along this road on November 10, her up. even in their invitation, reveal that they’d read it and decided to turn it into a stage 1898, they lined the streets with body Through stories like those, the book like it done on their terms. production. Memories, Molasses & More, parts of the deceased. Then, the whites memorializes people and places that “I can speak for white people—well, the theater version, ran during the late gave the road a repugnant nickname. might otherwise be lost. Yet I did not fi nd some white people,” Edgerton tells me. summer and early fall of 2018. Everyone Bernard tells me the nickname, then asks a single, direct mention of race or racism. “They sit around and talk, and they leave who contributed a recipe was invited to me to not include it in the story. and they feel better.” (Edgerton and I attend, and most did. “That’s something people don’t talk   ­ € mine in Charlotte talked for nearly two hours about this on The ninety-minute adaptation starts about,” he says. “There’s the truth and runs workshops aimed at bridging racial his porch that Saturday, and when I left, with white characters and black charac- then there’s the truth.” gaps in the workplace. In his program, I felt pretty good.) ters cooking separately and ends with If I forget everything else from the trip, he explains that achieving trust between But then what? them around a large table saying grace. I’ll remember this moment. It’s as if two people is a fi ve-step process. The Brunson calls initiatives like the cook- If only it were that simple. Bernard wishes he could erase the words fi rst step is getting to know each other, book a “sensory involvement” in diver- from my notepad, delete them from my followed by fi nding a connection, relating sity. She means it’s a surface-level en- Š‹ ŠŒŽ ‘Ž’“’‹” tour of his home- tape recorder, and swallow them back to each other, sharing a common expe- gagement—or, as my colleague in town, Bernard Brunson’s last stop is the down to a place where they’ll never come rience, and fi nally trusting each other. Charlotte says, part of the relation- 1898 Memorial. He and Deborah walk up again. If he were contributing to a Submitting a recipe and a story for a ship-forming stage. up the brick walkway, past a patch of cookbook, this would be just the kind of cookbook fi ts more or less in the third “This is wonderful,” Brunson says. “But black-eyed Susans and wiregrass, and thing he’d edit out. By now we’ve spent stage. It’s an act of relating, but it’s a long how does it advance the quality of life if stand in front of the six vertical paddles. most of the day together, riding around way from trusting another human after I leave here, I have these encounters The paddles are meant to symbolize his beautiful and complicated hometown, enough to address topics like racism. with the police? Or I can’t get a loan? Or water, its importance in spiritual beliefs eating crab cakes on the Intracoastal For some, though—especially those a house? Or I’m dealing with issues with in African culture, and how it is a symbol Waterway, telling stories about big fi sh who grew up in Jim Crow North Caro- how my child is being treated at school. of purifi cation, forgiveness, and renewal. and family. Still, some truths are too dif- lina—even sharing the stories is a big And I’m speaking as a person of color, So says the inscription. Another plaque fi cult to share because they’re too hor- step. and I think for people of color, that’s why tells the abridged story of the massacre. rible to shed. Of course, they’re skeptical. Invitations there may be a hesitancy to step into On either side of the monument, about to come together are hardly in short these kinds of things. Because it’s like, halfway down a semicircular walkway, Michael Gra is a writer in Charlotte. 38 39 southernfoodways.org Gravy • Fall 2019 Oaxaca is a state that has proudly kept its indigenous traditions alive—music, clothing, and especially food— for centuries in the face of encroaching Today’s South Asian Southern modernity. chefs stand on the shoulders of the late Raji Jallepalli

by this past summer, i traveled through Mexico for a week as a guide for MAYUKH SEN a Los Angeles Times–organized culinary tour. Our group of mostly middle-aged Illustrations by white Angelenos sampled street food in RAN ZHENG Mexico City, took cooking classes in the colonial city of Puebla, and ate our weight in mole and handmade tortillas in the Fall 2019 southern state of Oaxaca. 41 schooling, parked in the American South. Raji’s food was as unorthodox as she Comets have was. She freed Indian cuisine of the ste- tails, too, and reotypes that bound it and put it on equal footing with French gastronomy. She Raji left a rotated the prix fixe menu nightly: a tan- doori quail one night; potato gratin ani- particularly mated with onions, garlic, and saffron on another. long one. French and Indian cuisines may have seemed like unlikely bedfellows to diners Maybe we’re primed to think of foie gras and curry as ready to see discordant. But not to Raji, whose view of the world was giving and open enough it now. to tease out the complementary traits One day near the end of 2001, between the two cuisines. She served tamarind consommé. Corn compote in the chef and cookbook author bowls made from papadums. Pan-seared we’re in the midst of a welcome scallops on zucchini perfumed with movement in Southern food. A class of garlic and ajwain, smoothed to a paste chefs born on the Indian subcontinent, Raji Jallepalli emailed her as green as wasabi. now based in the American South, is Putting French and Indian cuisines in widening Southern food’s contours. literary agent, Janis Donnaud, conversation with one another, she These chefs—among them Asha Gomez leveled the imbalances in an unspoken of Atlanta, Meherwan Irani of Asheville, to say goodbye. Raji was dying. hierarchy that placed French cooking Cheetie Kumar of Raleigh, Maneet above Indian. “Fusion” had already Chauhan of Nashville, and Vishwesh become a dirty word by the time she Bhatt of Oxford—have, since 2018, gath- She learned she had late-stage gastric with those closest to her, was in charac- made a name for herself. It connoted ered around the region to stage a supper cancer that November. In the preamble ter. She was a renegade. Raji’s noncon- confused attempts to patch together series, Brown in the South. The existence to her death, Raji prepared herself for formity began with her choice to devote different cooking languages under the intimated in the title finds expression the inevitable: At the end of December, her professional life to food, a sharp pivot patina of multiculturalism, as if two through Irani’s kale pakoras, through she closed down Restaurant Raji, the from the days when she incubated tissue worlds jostled for dominance on a plate. Chauhan’s “meat-and-three” thali. These daring Franco-Indian Memphis restau- in a microbiology laboratory. Her puri- Raji disentangled fusion from the grace- dishes take cues from ancestral and rant that had earned her two James Beard tanical Hindu Brahmin family in the lessness that the label implied. adopted homes, planting roots in South- Award nominations in the previous Indian city of Hyderabad had pushed Her blazing ingenuity tempted food ern soil without squandering a sense of decade. She shuttered a bed-and-break- higher education; they believed cooking writer Kerri Conan to compare her to a the immigrant soul. fast, Maison Raji, which had just opened to be beneath her birthright. “comet ... generating a culinary light- If this cohort feels like a family, Raji a few doors down from the restaurant. She resisted food’s pull even as she show.” The comparison feels inescapable may be their foremother. “She’s such a She wound down her consulting work moved to the United States as a bride in when you consider the trajectory of her legend,” says Chauhan. “Somebody that at New York City’s Tamarind, where she 1969, but she heeded the call two decades career and its tragic coda, the force with all of us are so inspired by.” was executive chef. later when she opened a thirty-seat, res- which she arrived and the speed with Two decades ago, the notion of inter- Donnaud was alarmed by how casual- ervation-only Memphis restaurant meant which she vanished. Cancer claimed her laced cuisines like Raji’s may have pro- ly Raji disclosed the news. “I called her—I to be her husband Panduranga Jallepalli’s near the end of January 2002, nine weeks voked skepticism. The American South was like, are you kidding?” Donnaud tax shelter. Her decision to begin a restau- after her diagnosis. She was fifty-two. now seems more open to blended cuisines. remembers. rant constituted a risk. Raji was an out- But comets have tails, too, and Raji left Think of Edward Lee, with his union of But the blasé manner with which Raji sider in every sense of the word, an im- a particularly long one. Maybe we’re Korean and Southern cooking, or of accepted her fate, and bluntly shared it migrant Indian woman with no culinary ready to see it now. Andrea Reusing, who grabs influences

42 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 43 rajeswari rampalli, as she was Raji underwent what Prasad calls an Jean-Louis Palladin. Leveraging these “I am having born in Hyderabad in May 1949, wobbled “amazing metamorphosis.” She gradual- relationships, according to Hood, helped an affair,” she her way into the world of food. Her father ly began slipping into shirts and pants, a Raji draw an audience to her restaurant. was a high-ranking government official cosmetic shift that mirrored her embrace She cooked with Palladin at his Wash- reportedly in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. of her adopted Southern home. ington, DC, restaurant, Jean-Louis at the Because of the diplomatic nature of his Watergate Hotel, and with Charlie shot back. “But role, the family traveled to Europe often. Trotter in his eponymous Chicago restau- Young Raji was especially drawn to “ ­ €‚ƒ„ † not at rant. Her connections to these chefs it’s with the France. the front end of the food curve in terms helped Restaurant Raji attract patrons As a child, Raji spent much time in of bringing things in from the outside,” from outside the city. restaurant.” places where her family told her she Prasad says. This was the partial impetus “There was a lot of orthodoxy in the didn’t belong, like the kitchen and the for his mother starting a restaurant: French culinary world,” Prasad says. She garden. She couldn’t help it. The art and “Simply the realization that, gee, there was willing to disrupt that dogma. alchemy of cooking beckoned her to the isn’t really any Indian food.” Trotter wrote the foreword to Raji’s from the whole continent of Asia and kitchen, a cavern of coconut milk, lem- Raji opened the East India Company cookbook, christening her a “Spice Poet” interweaves them with North Carolina ongrass, and ginger in the hands of Mrs. on Valentine’s Day in 1989. She fashioned ingredients. In Memphis, the building Ayyer, the family cook whose side she the original east Memphis restaurant in that formerly housed Restaurant Raji is refused to leave. Some afternoons, she the likeness of a curry house. The initial now Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, wandered through the garden, with its menu included aloo samosas and chicken where the menu knits together Italian amaranth leaves and ripening fruit. Her vindaloo one could’ve found at a restau- and Southern ingredients. grandmother would snatch the young girl rant dotting Manhattan’s Curry Row or Raji dealt with a far more inhospitable back inside, fearing the sun would make Atlanta’s Lawrenceville Highway. climate than these chefs do today. One her too dark for a man to marry her. Those choices weren’t quite working to two generations younger than Raji, Raji did get married, though. She for her clientele. So, facing failure, she the current faction of Indian-born chefs moved to the United States at age twenty took a greater gamble. Raji gave her menu in the South still deals with diners who with her husband and transitioned into a French facelift, motivated by a sudden expect buffets with butter chicken. But work as a medical technologist. Over desire, Prasad says, to mount a fusion whose culinary creations were charac- unlike the chefs of Brown in the South, the next three years, she gave birth to project. By 1992, she rechristened the terized with “a lyricism, even a feminin- who blend elements from Indian and her sons, Prasad and Satish. After living place Restaurant Raji. ity, not with rugged, bold strokes.” Southern cuisines, Raji’s food was res- in New York and New Jersey, the family Raji made friends with the Memphis Raji’s plates, marked by what Trotter olutely Franco-Indian. She occasional- moved to Memphis so Panduranga food community. A lover of French wine, labeled a “minimalist approach, maxi- ly borrowed from her Southern sur- could complete his clinical fellowship she turned to Shields Hood, a wine dis- malist result,” were quiet but vivid in roundings, spicing grits with mustard in endocrinology. tributor in the city. He warned her about fl avor. Take her seared, semi-boneless seeds and ghee or using collards in lieu There wasn’t a sizable Indian commu- the challenge of her undertaking. tandoori quail, which she prepared on a of banana or lotus leaves to hug veal nity in Memphis in the early 1970s. Shop- “I kept saying, ‘Look, you’re in one of segment of Great Chefs, Great Cities, a medallions. But her primary objective, ping for Indian spices was a “serious the worst markets in the country to do program broadcast on the Discovery as she wrote in her cookbook, Raji journey,” Prasad says. In those early years, an Indian restaurant,’” Hood remembers. Channel in the 1990s. She rubbed the Cuisine, was to “retain the basic princi- Raji committed herself to the role of a “She said she liked my outspokenness.” quail with tandoori masala and pan-sau- ples and balance of French cuisine while stay-at-home mother, occasionally doing There were virtually no Indian restau- téed it for three minutes, its skin turning introducing the profound bouquets of lab or managerial work at her husband’s rants in that part of the South at the time, wildfi re red. She rested the bird on a bed Indian cooking.” practice. Free from the gaze of her parents, Hood says, especially ones that were of corn and cilantro compote that she’d This key nuance separates Raji’s work Raji’s attraction toward food intensified. white tablecloth, special-occasion sautéed in butter and seasoned with from those of her spiritual successors Near the beginning of that decade, she restaurants like hers. cumin and turmeric, painting the plate like Chauhan and Irani. Still, Raji recog- began writing a vegetarian Indian cook- Raji wasn’t deterred. Her strategy for with a sesame-sage vinaigrette. nized a shape-shifting possibility in book that she never completed. success, according to Hood, was to be- Though Prasad insists that the family Indian cuisine that would enable it to Back in those early days, she wore saris, friend some of the country’s most lauded greeted his mother’s decision to open a appeal to American Southerners. but as she spent more time in Memphis, chefs, including Charlie Trotter and restaurant with support, Raji claimed in

44 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 45 an interview with the Boston Globe that game hens in a lentil ragout reminded exhausted from a recent trip. The food her husband became frustrated with her her of a soup that she once saw her fa- Raji had no she cooked on the night Kessler visited new career, and the marriage faltered as ther’s workers make. Her cooking applied interest had fallen short of her standards. Follow- her profi le rose. Panduranga, who died French precision to the intense tastes ing the call, Kessler understood her as in 2018, couldn’t understand his wife’s that had never left her tongue. She en- in conforming someone who cared deeply about her romance with cooking. He asked if she couraged others to share her curiosity, to craft. He regards Raji as a “pioneer” today. was having an a air. She responded in see recipes not as mandates but as ideas to American Raji was pushing Americans to think the a rmative. with fuzzy edges, “rough sketches for of Indian food beyond the expectations “I am having an a air,” she reportedly your own culinary adventure.” imaginings of they’d set for it. “In the US, we did tend shot back. “But it’s with the restaurant.” At the same time, Raji analogized to be stereotyped in all kinds of boxes cooking to science, says Prasad. The two India and, that are convenient for people to put us practices were bound by a need to ground in particular, of into,” remembers Indian-born chef Suvir ‚ƒ„ †‡‚ˆ‰Š † ‹Œ a sole assistant your whimsy in technique, to have a tight Saran, a friend of Raji. “Raji broke out out of a small kitchen that resembled grasp on what variables you could play Indian women of them and was happy to be out of them that of a home cook, not a chef de cuisine. with and which ones were infl exible. She and shocked people in not fitting into In the event that she was out of town, a coupled her patience for the rigors of their version of what they thought Raji message on her answering machine trial-and-error with her surplus of ideas. should be.” would instruct hopeful patrons to “order Her process resulted in dishes like “She had really long hair—I don’t know Raji had no interest in conforming to pizza tonight, guys. See you next week.” sautéed scallops piled high with match- why, but it was just something that was American imaginings of India and, in par- She let impulse and spontaneity steer sticks of fried leek and planted in a such a part of how she moved through ticular, of Indian women, says Saran. “You her in the kitchen, where chefs with puddle of zucchini coulis. She seared the the world,” he says. “She definitely had could call her a sassy, brassy broad and she more formal training might have relied scallops in a shallow pool of brandy and kind of a star presence.” would agree with it. She wasn’t a shrinking on canon. In her cookbook, sheexplained oil until they turned amber. But Kessler found his meal there un- violet.” He was struck, for example, by that when devising a menu, she began “You never knew what was going to satisfying, and he didn’t hold back in his Raji’s unflinching love of cigars, which picturing a dish while shopping for fresh come up, because she cooked every day review. “I’ve eaten at Raji only once, but rivaled her love of French wine. ingredients. Afterwards, she began think- for that night,” Fredric Koeppel, former I was frankly disappointed by the menu Raji earned national recognition in the ing of the sensory elements— “texture, restaurant critic for the Memphis Com- I sampled,” he wrote. The review wasn’t 1990s. She cooked at the James Beard color, fl avor, and lightness.” mercial Appeal, remembers. Koeppel was an outright pan. He noted that Raji’s gre- House six times between 1992 and 1998. She drew on her memory of Hyderaba- a fan of Raji—the woman and the garious personality enlivened the dining She earned Beard Award nominations di fl avors. A velouté of curried butternut restauarant. He confesses that the food room, and that he’d heard from reliable for Best Chef: Southeast in 1996 and 1997. squash soup recalled the abundance of could be erratic because of the shape- sources that she could be brilliant. He She became a consulting chef at Surya, squash during monsoon season. Cornish shifting nature of the menu. just didn’t see that brilliance in cucumber which opened in Manhattan’s Greenwich “You didn’t always get a really polished soup with yogurt and poached shrimp Village in 1998. Raji’s 2000 cookbook, restaurant experience, but what you got that was “pretty but kind of flavorless,” published by HarperCollins, crystallized was something, to my mind, even more he remembers, a good idea that faltered her Franco-Indian culinary philosophy important than that,” Koeppel says. “That when it came to technical execution. To for home cooks. It was a rejoinder to the was an experience of great authenticity him, these dishes were hypothetically dominant Indian cookbooks of the time. and great character.” Above all, he says, great but lacked cooking finesse. Even the book’s title, Raji Cuisine: Indian Raji “gave worth to the notion of Writing the review was a point of Flavors, French Passion, reads like a French-Indian cuisine.” stress for Kessler, who liked Raji and branding statement: Raji’s style of John Kessler experienced this un- wanted a reason to like the restaurant. cooking was hers and hers alone. steadiness fi rsthand. A longtime dining He wondered if his own predisposition “She came along at a time when her critic at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, toward fiery Indian food had set him up kind of cooking, the flavors, the spices— Kessler traveled to Memphis in 1998 on for disappointment. they were around, certainly,” says Raji’s assignment. While there, he stopped by In his recollection, Raji called him after coauthor, Judith Choate. “Madhur Raji in the hopes of writing about it. He the piece’s publication and somewhat Jaffrey was already around. But she faced found Raji herself magnetic. tearfully explained that she had been it in a very different way.”

46 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 47 the most promising sign that Raji had no desire, for example, to be on tele- already started turning heads.” was on the cusp of stardom came in 2000 Raji is remembered vision like Emeril Lagasse. Her primary Through Bhatt, Meherwan Irani of the when restaurateur Avtar Walia tapped by few and goal was to have her restaurant and bed- Chai Pani Restaurant Group recently her to be the executive chef of Tamarind, and-breakfast coexist in Memphis under learned of Raji. He found a copy of her a fine dining restaurant in the Manhattan forgotten by many. her control. cookbook, which is no longer in print. neighborhood of Tribeca. Walia gave her Raji’s premature death froze her in “There’s a couple of restaurants, I’m not carte blanche to design the menu. After This may be proof time, almost cosmically so. “They have going to name names, with chefs that Tamarind opened in January 2001, Raji this picture of her in their minds—her at think they’re groundbreaking with occasionally traveled to New York, that food media, her peak of doing what she did,” Prasad Indian cuisine,” says Irani. “I’m flipping though she spent most of her time in says of his mother’s acolytes. “I’m sure through a book and I’m like, Dude, this Memphis. predisposed to Mom would’ve liked being remembered was done twenty years ago by this woman It was a time, Saran remembers, when venerate rising that way very much.” and nobody’s giving her recognition.” Indian food was still struggling to gain Many colleagues say they were blind- What struck Irani about Raji’s story wider appreciation in the United States. stars, suffers from sided by Raji’s death. Outside of her was how ahead of her time she seemed. “We’re always the next best cuisine,” he family, she had told few people of her Similar struggles echo in the current says, speaking of Indian cuisine in the a distressingly cancer diagnosis. One admirer, chef Vish- generation of chefs to which he belongs. context of fine dining today. “When she wesh Bhatt of Snackbar in Oxford, Mis- “When I read her story, what jumped out started Tamarind, it wasn’t even close to short memory. sissippi, had no idea she was sick. He at me was that, that early, she had the next best thing.” says he owes his career to Raji, whom he managed to break through,” he says. Raji’s cooking at Tamarind was a show- met a few times throughout visits to the Diners would be mistaken if they be- case for her culinary guile. She served restaurant in the late 1990s. lieved that chefs like Irani, Bhatt, she-crab soup jolted with ginger juice aborted promise. “Everyone thought it “I don’t think I would be doing what Chauhan, Gomez, and Kumar were the and dusted with saffron and chives; she was a shame because she was so young,” I’m doing without seeing her do what first to express their respective takes on cooked a nargisi kofta, an ancestor of the Wells says. “She had just opened this she was doing,” Bhatt says. Indian cuisine in the American South to Scotch egg, with chopped lotus root and place that seemed to have so much to say An immigrant from Gujarat in India, national acclaim. These chefs stand on cheese in place of meat. Though the that no one was saying.” Bhatt was pursuing a culinary career in Raji’s shoulders. Yet Raji is remembered restaurant still stands today, only a If the wider nation dealt with the Oxford when he first visited the restau- by few and forgotten by many. This truth handful of Raji’s original dishes live on. tremors of her loss, Memphis felt her rant. There were unspoken parallels may be proof that our food media, pre- In a 2001 New York Times review, death more acutely. The city knew it lost between the two chefs: He grew up in a disposed to venerate rising stars, suffers restaurant critic William Grimes wrote more than a restaurant when she died. middle-class family, spending his child- from a distressingly short memory, that Tamarind “treats Indian cuisine as “It lost her vision of how food could hood in the city of Ahmedabad. After a looking forward without reaching into a genuine culinary language, like French, be expanded and turned into a sort of gap year with his family in Strasbourg, the past. able to assimilate nontraditional ingre- ideal of world cuisine, rather than just France, where his physicist father took The new class of Indian chefs in the dients and techniques.” His two-star focusing on one country,” Koeppel says. a post as a visiting professor, Bhatt even- South appears to be winning the battle review read like a three. “And it lost a great personality.” tually attended the University of Ken- Raji fought over two decades ago, assert- Current New York Times restaurant tucky. His own route to food, like Raji’s, ing that Indian cuisine that resists con- critic Pete Wells ate at Tamarind shortly was a jagged detour from academia. He vention can thrive in the American South. after it opened, when he was the restau- in the weeks following her cancer found her outlook affirming. Bhatt recalls Raji often for this very rant editor at Food & Wine. diagnosis, Raji faced her imminent death “She was the first one to make this light reason: Her career has become a guiding “It’s not like she became a fixture on with clear eyes. bulb go off in my head that you can do credo for his own. the New York food scene, but on the “She took it a lot better than her kids elevated Indian food and people will “I had somebody that I looked up to,” other hand, she did it right in the sense did. Probably better than I did,” says come to eat it,” says Bhatt. “She was in Bhatt says. “A living example of what was that people accepted that restaurant her second husband, Louis Reiss, whom this little restaurant in Memphis and had possible.” immediately,” Wells says. “A lot of out- Raji married in 1999. “She was all ready of-town chefs have a hard time with that.” for it.” Mayukh Sen is a writer based in New York. He is working on his first book, to be Raji died less than a year after Wells’ visit In Reiss’ recollection, Raji didn’t die published by W. W. Norton & Company, about the immigrant women who have to Tamarind. Her flight path suggested with many unfulfilled aspirations. She shaped food in America, and he teaches writing at New York University.

48 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 49 C L R I N I CIRCLING G C Oaxaca is a state that HOME TO has proudly kept its indigenous traditions

alive—music, clothing,

ARKANSAS and especially food— On not achieving escape velocity for centuries in the

face of encroaching

by JAY JENNINGS H modernity.

O

O

T M

E

O n ity no loc t ac ve hieving escape

by JAY INGS

JENN MattPhoto by White

Fall 2019 51 The author (r) with his siblings in Little Rock, ca. 1968

I was born in November of 1957, the same fall when the integration battle for Little Rock Central High earned national headlines. The fallout stained the city’s and the state’s reputations, rendering Arkansas in public consciousness a place of intolerance and intransigence.

straight-line parallels that define the On my father’s side, my grandfather, a north and south, the cartographic lean timber man, traveled from Chicago to West that forms the western line, and the ec- Helena, Arkansas, in 1912. He worked for centric notches that have Missouri fon- the Chicago Mill and Lumber Company, dling us from the northeast and Texas branding his initial J into the cut end of thrusting unnaturally into our southwest. trees he approved for processing. He fell Those borders, of course, have been in love with and married a woman from subject to dispute, negotiation, treaty, Clarksdale, Mississippi. After living in West broken treaty, political influence, war, and Helena for a decade, they moved to Little the natural mutability of rivers. Once es- Rock in 1925, and my grandfather started tablished, however, the lines reify the idea the first Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in of being a member of a community within town, which my father joined when he got boundaries. And I find something moving out of the service in 1945. about the desire to permanently declare I was born in November of 1957, the your allegiance to a place so flawed in the same fall when the integration battle for making in a tattoo so simple. A tattoo that’s Little Rock Central High earned nation- merely an outline, with a big empty space al headlines. The fallout stained the city’s in the middle, an image that says, “I share and the state’s reputations, rendering a kinship with everyone here.” Arkansas in public consciousness a place I’m no historian or poet, but I have of intolerance and intransigence. been writing and reading and thinking My own schooling was marked by legal about Arkansas for most of my life. My and bureaucratic maneuvering to find family roots here are deep. On my moth- integration remedies through busing, our er’s side, we have a diary of an ancestor’s attendance zone changing yearly so that WHEN SUMMER ARRIVES IN ARKANSAS journey from Limestone County, I was enrolled at a different school every Alabama, to Camden, Arkansas, in 1838. year from fifth through ninth grades. By and tattooed arms hang from car windows and It is mostly an account book, but he did the time I graduated from high school, I strum guitars on street corners, there’s one inked complain about Randolph, Tennessee, was eager to leave Arkansas. That was being “a little ugly town.” No complaints in 1976. To my inchoate mind, there was image that seems to be more prominent than after he got to Arkansas. My mother’s no there there (yes, I had already read family lived in Camden until she and her Gertrude Stein, and yes, I was kind of an others. It is a simple outline of the state’s borders: mother moved to Little Rock in 1954. She a-hole). The “higher” culture I aspired the ragged Mississippi River to the east, the Photo courtesy of the author married my father that same year. to, the kind you found in Stein’s salon in

Fall 2019 53 54 southernfoodways.org54 Rock so that everyone might have a cheap and night in Tokyo and Geneva and Little “The watch factories were humming day watches: having not meets he hippies some about complains Ray when one, this like jokes, Rock Little private some the Game and Fish Building. There were behind lived who woman a “pill”; a Ray mother-in-law and wife, Norma, who call Ray’s Avenue; Asher on shops auto the knew: I language and people and places The Dog of the South contained Little Rock also pretty punctilious but directionless. was I and Midge, Ray protagonist South directionless but punctilious himself lived inLittleRock. Portis that revealed book the about story a kinship with you.” And a telling me, like the outline tattoo, “I share was cover whose book a was HereRock. a map of Arkansas with a big star over Little included it because me at out leapt cover Portis and called Charles by was It culture. and literature Arkansas about ideas my change would Half Price Books, I discovered a novel that and taught high school in Dallas. There, at in Tennessee, graduate school in Chicago, kansas, orsoIimagined. Ar in found be to nowhere was Paris, I was twenty-six, the same age as the the as age same the twenty-six, was I Over the next decade, I attended college and base its headquarters inBentonville. headquarters and baseits out behemoth ofafive-and-dime international matter, SamWalton hecould thinking build an Rock Geneva inwith andTokyo; or, for that pride, likehome-state Ray Midgelumping Little irrationalindividual outsizedandsometimes with eccentric the andArkansans: of Arkansas Portis’ character ofthe work captures something The Dog of the South. The New York Times Dog of the the of Dog -

both setting and subject for these pieces. is Arkansas not, than often play.More an 8,000-word memoir, and a full-length travel stories, deeply reported journalism, longform including substantial, quite are pieces the of some descriptor, that lection of Mr. Portis’ miscellany. Despite frequently thoughtofhimself. “freelance writers,” which is how he most beer, the day-drinking prerogative of two afternoon an for together get frequently years after the integration crisis, we would Rock, about football and Central High fifty book my on work to 2007 in When I moved back to Little Rock for good parents. my visit to returned I when er up a correspondence, and we’d get togeth moved. Once I was in New York, we kept I before that after times more couple at a bar called the Town Pump. We met a He quite unexpectedly invited me to lunch a writer, as he had done back in the 1960s. moving to New York to pursue a career as was I that mentioned and PortisMr. to briefly moved back to Little Rock, I wrote was abigTimex factorythere. Little Rock, you wouldn’t know that there from weren’t you if Probably,watch.” watch, but not one of these hippies had a In 2012, I edited When I left my Dallas teaching job and It was the funniest book I’d ever read. Escape Velocity , a col Carry the the Carry - -

Photo courtesy of the author favorite lines in of this collection is taken from one of my quarters in Bentonville. In fact, the title out of a five-and-dime and base its head behemoth international an build could he thinking WaltonSam matter, that Tokyo;and Geneva or,with in Rockfor Little lumping Midge Ray like pride, home-state irrational sometimes and outsized with individual eccentric the Arkansans: and Arkansas of character Johnny Cash and Pharoah Sanders and SandersPharoah Johnnyand Cash like artists but Clinton Bill Waltonand Sam like people on just Arkansas—not tational pull of the particular place called and it also locates the mysterious gravi- everyone’sthat hold them on has home the to refers It universal. and specific both poignant, and funny both is line can’t quite achieve escape velocity.” That They later. or sooner back come them lot of people leave Arkansas and most of Portis’ work captures something of the The author's parents, Walter andMedora Jennings,ontheirwedding day The Dog of the South: “A - Iris DeMent andMary Steenburgen. are theplacestogoforthat. whose work I encourage you to seek out, writers from Arkansas like Henry Dumas, American African lesser-known and kansan was like, but Angelou and Wright the experience of what being a black Ar glimpsed dimly I writing, and research a man named John Carter. Through that about the last lynching in Little Rock, of book My Camden. of west miles sixty about my mother and grew up in Stamps, a town trees. Angelou was born two years before marking and woods the walking was Helena at the same time my grandfather Westin lived Wright Sings. Bird Caged Angelou’s Maya and directness of Richard Wright’s eccentrics but by the brutal and beautiful Portis’ by not represented best is state the in experience life whose Arkansans There is, of course a large group of group large a course of is, There includes a chapter chapter a includes Rock the Carry I Know Why the Why Know I Black Boy -

with which the national press, airdrop- ping in without having suffered through the painful upheaval, often tarred the state’s citizens. He lampooned the out- siders as a collection of “wilted Dacron and damp mustaches.” Nine years later, he would express himself again through the True Grit protagonist Mattie Ross, who declares, “People who don’t like Arkansas can go the devil!”

When I moved to New York in 1986, I had the vague idea that leaving the place I was from was the way to capture the experience that had formed me, as Joyce had to settle in Paris and Italy to write about Ireland. I believed that distance was required for some perspective. And much of what I did write in New York had to do with Arkansas. During the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s ascent to the highest office in the land gave -Ar kansans nearly a decade of elevated self-importance. In business, that same era saw the astounding growth of north- west Arkansas, thanks to Walmart, Tyson Foods, and J.B. Hunt trucking. When I A child watches as marchers, some carrying American flags, would come home to visit from New York protest school integration during the Clinton administration, my in Little Rock, August 1959. mother often greeted me at the airport with a hyperbolic but still proud, “Welcome to the center of the universe.” When I conceived of writing a book Arkansas’ benighted history of school, and the governor’s continued coverage by the local newspaper, the about the Central High football team and race relations exploded into one of tele- devotion to segregation caused all public Arkansas Gazette, which won a Pulitzer the history of Little Rock race relations, vision’s first documentary miniseries schools in Little Rock to be closed the for editorials decrying the resistance to I knew that I could not do the required with the daily broadcast of events on the next year. Arkansas’ troubles were esti- integration. Nor were the efforts of the reporting from a distance; I’d need to lawn outside Little Rock Central High mated to have cost the state enormously. city’s leading women, who organized as uproot my New York life and come back. School, where mobs harassed the nine By the account of one of the state’s the Women’s Emergency Committee to I had no book contract. I had not written black students who attempted to enroll leading businessmen, William Bowen, successfully pressure the powers that be one word. All I had was a promise from there. The students were first prevented “the city and the state had become to accept integration and open the Central High coach Bernie Cox that he’d by Governor Orval Faubus from that pariahs to investors.” schools. When the schools did open again allow me to follow the team through the right, then escorted in under the protec- The most frequent comment I heard in the fall of 1959, big-city newspaper 2007 season. tion of federal troops when President about the events in my youth was that reporters returned to write about it, and There was another reason to return Eisenhower intervened. All year, they they were “shameful” and “embarrass- a young Gazette columnist named Charles as well.

were tormented inside the halls of the ing.” What wasn’t embarrassing was the Bledsoe/Library of Congress John T. Portis took exception to the broad brush In the summer of 2006, a cleaning

56 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 57 woman entered my brother’s apartment the people around you, you don’t need in Dallas per her weekly schedule and to get an MFA in creative writing. You’ve found him lying in bed, a washcloth over got all the material you need right there. his eyes, dead. He’d suffered a massive That friendship with Charlie Portis gave Everything that I treasure in my life, coronary at age fifty. My sister, who lived me the opportunity to unearth and pre- everything that I will remember on my near him, called me in New York to tell serve all of his work that had been for- deathbed, occurred after I moved back to me. Six months later, my mother died in gotten. I believe it will endure. Little Rock on New Year’s Day 2007. Arkansas and reconnected with this place. She’d been taken to the hospital on New Year’s Eve, and I got the call that night Sometimes when you fail to achieve that things were not going well as I stood escape velocity, you don’t just return on my stoop in Brooklyn, watching the aimless and lost. You complete a circle. generis as Portis’, and though he often was baptized at Christ Episcopal Church fireworks from Prospect Park burst over Back in Arkansas, I found a stronger teaches at the University of Iowa, will not as well, sixty-one years after my own the trees and illuminate the New York voice as a writer by breathing the air and live anywhere other than Little Rock; and baptism there. sky. Some five months after that, I pulled walking the ground I’d left. I wrote about Hot Springs native Trenton Lee Stewart, into Little Rock in a Ryder rental truck, my brother’s death after I sat in the who created the middle-grades series The filled mainly with boxes of books, my two stands of Little Rock’s historic mi- Mysterious Benedict Society. In Bentonville, Arkansas, some three cats in stacked carriers between the seats nor-league baseball field, which was due And of course, there is the Oxford hours northwest of Little Rock, an art trail of the cab. I moved into the same apart- for demolition, and remembered the American, where I was invited to join the dotted with sculptures and installations ment building where my then eighty- summers we’d roamed the bleachers. I staff as a senior editor in 2015 by Eliza leads from the edge of downtown to the five-year-old dad lived. wrote about my mother for the Oxford Borné, a Little Rock native with deeper Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Despite the tragic circumstances that American, about how the seemingly roots in Arkansas than I have even, and About halfway along the trail is a circular brought me here—the deaths of my mundane diary she kept as a fourteen- who is the equal of any editor in New building, one of the artist James Turrell’s family members, the needs of my elderly year-old subtly revealed her grief over York. (She proved it when the magazine Skyspaces. Inside, a round seating area father—everything that I treasure in my the death of her father. And as I wrote won a National Magazine Award for reclines you at an angle, directing your life, everything that I will remember on my book, I asked my father about General Excellence in 2016.) I never eyes toward the large opening in the my deathbed, occurred after I moved growing up in Little Rock in the 1920s. imagined in 1986 when I left that I could ceiling, framing the sky. Some of Turrell’s back to Arkansas and reconnected with He even remembered, when he was six enjoy such a fulfilling and challenging Skyspaces have square holes; this one is this place. years old, a mob gathering outside the professional life here in Arkansas. round. Twice a day, some twenty minutes I wrote my first book,Carry the Rock: house of the police chief, who lived three One Sunday, at Christ Episcopal before dawn and again before dusk, the Race, Football and the Soul of an American or four houses down on his street, before Church in Little Rock, the church where artist has designed a gentle light show that City, a story that I’d been preparing my they went on to lynch John Carter. my father was an altar boy and the one changes the colors inside the building, whole life to tell. The Arkansas I returned to was differ- in which I was baptized and grew up, I around the opening, and therefore changes I enjoyed ten more years with my dad. ent from the one I’d left in 1986, in many was ushering and struck up a conversa- the sky. It’s mesmerizing. The first time I He died in 2016, at age ninety-five, just a good ways. The state, like much of the tion with a woman who was leaving after visited the Skyspace, I woke a half-hour few days after we enjoyed Thanksgiving rest of the country, now had good brew- the service. More conversations followed, before dawn. I was alone as I reached the dinner at the Capital Hotel in Little Rock. eries. The continuing academic excel- as did lunches, movies, and dinners. She structure and took a seat and waited for I also got to spend almost every lence of Central High acted as a firewall, was a Mississippian like my grandmother. the sky to gradually lighten with the Monday afternoon from 4 to 5:30 drink- in some ways, against the complete re- We fell in love and were married at the sunrise, charged with the light of Turrell’s ing with Charles Portis and other char- segregation of public schools. There was church where we met, where my family artistry. There I was, tilted at an angle like acters at the corner of the bar of the a more robust literary culture. The Ar- had been members for nearly a century. my state’s western border, not trying any Faded Rose. We rarely talked about kansas Literary Festival (now called the In January, our daughter was born, the longer to achieve escape velocity, perfect- writing. I learned from him—and from Six Bridges Book Festival) brought writers sixth generation of my family to have ly at home, gazing up through a circle at the others there, a collection of brilliant, from all over the country, and I met native been born in Arkansas, and in April she Arkansas’ limitless sky. kind, hilarious Arkansas eccentrics—that Arkansans who were doing work at the if you have your eyes and ears open to highest level. Among them are Kevin Jay Jennings is a senior editor at the Oxford American magazine and the author of the language and concerns and jokes of Brockmeier, whose books are as sui Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City.

58 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 59 southern state ofOaxaca. the in tortillas handmade and mole in colonial city of Puebla, and ate our weight Mexico City, took cooking classes in the white Angelenos sampled street food in middle-aged mostly of group tour.Our a through Mexico for a week as a guide for t Los Angeles Times–organized culinary his past summer, i traveled i summer, past his

60 southernfoodways.org is there for the peelers that he will shed basket and heads out to the dock. H. M. bushel proprietor,a house grabs oyster into the oyster house. H. M. Arnold, the drifts voices and off shutting motors of counts hailed from the wharf. The sound his cell phone and writes down the catch as Andrew fields and confirms orderson and scratch in their packed confinement wriggle crabs The landed. and caught bushel basket stuffed with blue crabs just a with furnished office an created he’s count. In the shadow of a seafood truck, can’t who people and quality, catch, about fulminating and tabulating there apeake Bay blue crabs. Andrew Bunce is two-man crew offloads bushels of Ches its with boat Each succession. in wharf Bayford at up tie Crabbers blinding. is white boat hulls and shimmering water bright on sunlight the fresh, and clear is air up,the kicks breeze A Bayford. at it’s an early summer afternoon BY BERNARD L.HERMAN Mudlarking words forcrabs BELLY JIMMIES AND WHITE- RANK PEELERS, BUSTED SOOKS, BOOKSHELF -

and two-thirds twos.” and two-thirds ones.” to Andrew. Russell, unloadingtheirboat. words tocomplicateit. of lot a and crabs for code a realize, I Listening to the back and forth, there is, threes.... number twos, number ones, number condition: and size, sex, crabs’ baskets, and organize their cargo by the bushel of contents the consolidate trucks, refrigerated their load Drivers ings, one-liners, and rough good humor. Andrew smiles. fee,” “Docking crabs. soft-shell into “Two threes. Two and a third fours,”third a Two“Twoand threes. Russell, “Yep.” inventory,“Twothe to adds Andrew Russell affirms, “Yep.” Andrew calls back, “I got you for three “So, what’s the count?” Walter shouts father, his with works WalterBrunk exchanginggreetFolksgo and come

-

Photos by Bernard L. Herman A basket ofjust-caught jimmies has proudly kept its Oaxaca isastate that alive—music, clothing, indigenous traditions for centuriesinthe and especiallyfood— modernity. face ofencroaching Crabbers' premises in Exmore, Virginia

elaborates, “Tangiermen call them lemons because they’ve got that yellow sponge on them. Cushions. That’s a busted sook, too. That’s what Tangier- men call them—cushions and lemons.” The number system, he notes, “They’ve always had that for going up the road and selling them. That’s what they go by.” A glossary, I speculate, could be useful. Russell agrees, “So people under- stand what the hell the lingo is. They’ve probably got a whole other language up there in Maryland.” William W. Warner’s masterful and poetic book of 1976, Beautiful Swimmers, chronicled the crab industry, concentrat- ing on the Crisfield area and its environs on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He provided sidebars to the crabbing indus- try in Virginia with a particular empha- sis on winter crab dredging, when boats would work the bottom for dormant female crabs slumbering until the arrival of the springtime mating season. Andrew Bunce remembers crab dredging without pleasure: “I was crab dredging, which used to be our winter fishery. I ain’t the only one this has happened to. You pull these big steel dredges on the bottom that dig the crabs out when they’re hi- bernating for the winter and the hydrau- lic hoses broke. My hand was caught in the dredge and I went straight down to Andrew hollers, “And one busted.” Walter stakes his reputation, “I stand and a good hard crab. The threes are the bottom with the dredges. It wasn’t Russell confirms, “Yep. Sounds good by them today, because I touched them.” clean sooks, shedded sooks. Fours are fun! It was winter! It was January! We to me.” He turns to his son, “What’ve you I ask about fours and busted sooks. just white-belly jimmies—shedded ones. were working in a fleet of probably sixty got? Three threes, Walt?” “White crabs,” Russell enlightens me, Ones that are hollow, ain’t got much meat or seventy boats. Some people rode right Walter replies, “Two threes.” “are fours and busted sooks are fives.” in them, are fours.” He illustrates, “Like by me because they didn’t want to miss Russell asks, “What’s this here?” Then he says, “They’ve got a different these. See, they’re just shedded, they’re a lick on the crabs.” He laughs grittily. “Busted sooks,” Walter responds. system here.” I take his word for it. not real hard. They’re still a little soft “Of course,” Andrew continues the tale Andrew confirms, “You got two threes, Russell senses my confusion and help- under there. There’s not much meat in of his journey to the bottom of the bay, two and two-thirds twos.” Andrew cau- fully explains, “Number ones are five and them.” A five, he clarifies, “that’s a busted “the boat looked like it was about a mile tions, “They got to be hard and five and a half and on up and a hard crab. A good sook.” Referring to the watermen of away, although it was probably only fifty a half.” full-meat crab. The twos are five inches Tangier Island further up the bay, he yards. I guess I was panicking. The guy

62 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 63 I was working with, he picked up one he ships to market in gallon tin cans. He arm and throwed me right over the top has employed in his crab factory at of the dredge into the bottom of the boat. Franklin City from 15 to 25 women and I think he was more scared than I was! children.” Little remains of Franklin City Still had my boots on. Some people today, and crab-picking operations on drowned with that happening.” He looks the Eastern Shore of Virginia are a dwin- out over the creek on this warm after- dling enterprise. noon, “Hell, that was about one of the There is much to be learned from commonest jobs you could mate on was words for crabs and how vocabulary crab dredging. You were working grass. expresses the taste of place at a point You were out in the cold. It’s just nonstop where natural history, commercial en- work. It’s a labor-intensive job. They’ve terprise, and community life come to- cut it out, trying to make the crabs come gether. Words for crabs break down into back. I don’t care if they bring it back or overlapping categories. First, there is the not. You won’t see me doing it!” Our Latin (Callinectes sapidus), which trans- conversation stutters and breaks on a lates as beautiful swimmer with the af- rising breeze. Later I tell the tale to Steve terthought of savory appended. There Bunce, Andrew’s older brother, and he are words that describe the crab through shakes his head, “He’s hard. You can’t the arc of its life cycle. There is an abun- kill that son of a bitch!” dance of words, some overlapping, that The trade in blue crabs remains an place the crab in its market and kitchen important part of the Eastern Shore histories. Kenny Marshall, retired wa- economy, and it traces its origins back to terman and decoy carver, cuts to the the arrival of the railroad and advances essence of the labor those many words in food processing and preservation in for crabs perform. “There is no such a the late 1800s. A correspondent to the thing as a crab,” Kenny Marshall an- Eastern Shore crabs Accomac newspaper the Peninsula En- nounces. “My dad,” he says, “used to get bound for market terprise enthused in 1888 about “the on me if I said, ‘I sent my ball into that possibilities of the crab industry and the tree.’ He’d say it landed over by that source of revenue it opens up to many of maple tree or that black walnut tree or our people at a season of the year when that cherry tree. It’s not just a tree! Call has just entered the shedding stage; is news to me. I need help and turn to H. they are comparatively idle.” Offering it what it is. Same thing as with a hammer. third, a “peeler,” when the old shell has M. Arnold. proof, the editor quoted an Onancock There’s no such thing as a hammer. It’s begun to break; fourth, a “buster,” when H. M. tutors me on the Eastern Shore businessman, “‘This is our second year a claw hammer, a ballpeen hammer, a the new shell can be seen; fi fth, the of Virginia crab lexicon. Cleaning spot in in the crab business at this point, and on carpenter’s hammer, a rip hammer.” “soft crab”; sixth, a “paper-shell,” or the cool interior of the oyster house after last Monday and Tuesday we bought Kenny is laughing, “You don’t just have “buckram,” when the new shell is be- a summer dawn of gill-netting on Nassaw- about 13,000 crabs and on those days a crab!” Point taken. Precision seasons ginning to harden. During hot weather adox Creek, we listen to radio news reports shipped to New York 860 dozen soft the language of terroir. it takes from two to three days for a of the rarity of a tornado that hammered crabs.... The wages of the ‘crabbers’ Writing on the crab industry in Mary- “snot” to become a “peeler.” One tide the shoreline just to our south a week amount to from $1 to $6 a day.” A subse- land for Field and Stream in 1905, Win- will often change a “peeler” to a earlier. H. M. lays out the crab basics that quent contributor to the Peninsula En- throp Roberts provides some basic ter- “buster,” and another from a “buster” others will embroider in conversations to terprise wrote in 1896, sharing the par- minology that serves as a starting point: to a soft crab. A few hours after shed- come. He begins, “You got the he-crab, the ticulars of another firm, that “has ding the crab has reached the “paper he-peeler, then you got the jimmy. Number engaged quite extensively in the soft crab There are six stages of a crab’s life, shell” stage, and within three days the one jimmies are fi ve and a half up. Then trade, and also utilizes thousand[s] of commonly classified as follows: First hardening process is completed. number twos, they’re fi ve to fi ve and a half hard crabs. He has the hard crabs the “hard crab,” or one [in] its natural for the jimmy.” In the progression, H. M. steamed and the meat picked out, which condition; second, a “snot,” or one that I grasp the process, but the term “snot” provides, a he-crab is an immature male,

64 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 65 and the mature males, jimmies, are clas- I wonder about the smallest crabs. H. sified by size for market. Andrew amplifies M. sometimes refers to them as bugs but this point, “Males, they’re called jimmies. notes that there is no real terminology They grade them out different sizes. You for the smallest. Kenny Marshall under- have your number ones, which are five scores this point, recalling that there and a half and up. You have your jumbos, were no words for the small crabs he which are six inches and up. Your number found up in the guts, “They were incon- twos, which are five- to five-and-a-half- sequential. You didn’t talk about them. inch crabs.” They didn’t exist as far as anybody was Words for female crabs are a bit more concerned.” No market, no name. involved, but the fundamental principles Number threes, the just shedded of categorizing crabs in the lingua franca jimmies, are known variously as white of the marketplace holds sway. “The crabs, paper shells, buckrams, and female,” H. M. starts, “she doesn’t have buckys. Kenny Marshall clarifies, “A to have any size. Once she’s mature, the buckram is a soft crab that’s stiffening female, she’s done all she’s going to do up getting ready to get hard shell again. as far as getting any size. Could be a small . . . We call them buckrams. Some people one; could be a big one.” Andrew helps call them paper shells. It’s poor. It’s not out, “You have your females, which they good to eat, for steaming or anything. call them sooks, and they go any size. They’re real white. They haven’t had When they have their eggs, they call them time for the weather or the water or busted sooks, lemons, and sponge crabs whatever to brown them up. Easy to pick, and cushions. They’re the ones that are there’s not much meat to them.” A buck getting ready to rub their eggs off.” Kenny all but hardened is a white crab or Marshall elaborates, “A sponge crab, number four. A hardened crab—sook or that’s an adult sook who has dropped her jimmy—grown heavy and dull in color, Loading pots in egg apron out and you can see the eggs on occasion even barnacled, is “rusty.” Bayford, Virginia in under her apron. They’ll start off real Words for crabs are piling up. pale orange and get darker and darker Their existence crosses a threshold into and darker until they’re almost black just the universe of soft-shell crabs. Crabs before they hatch out.” emerge from winter dormancy in a “first Culling is its own art. “A lot of people,” see how it’s fat-looking and all that—it’s Andrew explains, “Then you have your run” in May or, as Oyster waterman Jack Andrew begins, “have to flip the crabs a rank peeler. Just by the looks of it.” immature females, which are called she- Brady times it, “If they were picking the over to see whether a male or female, but Andrew explains his expertise, “That crabs. I’ve heard the immature ones called strawberry field, we’d start mudlarking the longer you do it, you can just look at just comes from years of looking at them.” virgin females. I heard that one last year the next day.” These crabs, crowded into the tops because you know jimmies got He pauses for an instant and dismissive- when some guys from Carolina sent a their old shells, ready to forage, and blue claws and the sooks got orange ly adds, “It’s a lot of all back and no brain. bunch of she-crabs up, and they told the starved for sex, are set to shed their old claws. You get where you can tell just by You don’t have to be too smart to do this truck driver they were virgin females,” armor—an event that provides procre- looking at them. Like peelers, you look job.” I could not disagree more—experi- Andrew laughs. “A crabber will pull your ative opportunity around a moment of at the fins for the signs. But H. M. and I ence and a fine-tuned sensibility with leg in a second to sell his stuff,” he snorts vulnerability. As H. M. teaches me, you can damn near look right at the crab and nature are rare gifts. with good humor. Under the umbrella of can see the process unfold through signs the female crabs, I learn of the she-crab discerned in the back fin, or swimmer. It Bernard L. Herman is the George B. Tindall Professor of Southern Studies and the (in addition to virgin, I’ve heard sally), commands a practiced eye. All crabs en- interim chair of the American Studies department at UNC-Chapel Hill. sook (a clean sook for market is a number tering the molting or shedding phase are three), busted sook or lemon or cushion peelers. Peeler crabs become the soft- From A South You Never Ate: Savoring Flavors and Stories from the Eastern Shore or sponge (an egg-laden crab for market shell crabs favored by gourmands—or of Virginia. Copyright © 2019 by Bernard L. Herman. Used by permission of the is a number five). Dizzying! serve as fish bait. University of North Carolina Press. www.uncpress.org

66 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 67 HOME COOKING

WHAT’S FOR DINNER? Home cooking can—and should—include Indian cuisine BY PRIYA KRISHNA

more than forty years ago, in to involve versions of expected restaurant her first cookbook, An Invitation to fare—butter chicken, tikka masala, naan— Indian Cooking, Madhur Jaffrey wrote adapted for home cooks. Through their an optimistic introduction about the prolific work, people like Jaffrey and acceptance of Indian food into American fellow cookbook author Julie Sahni in- households: “Today Americans especial- sisted that Indian food could be a part of ly seem to have a great desire to experi- everyday American home cooking. Still, ence the ‘real’ thing, an authentic taste, somehow, dishes like roast chicken and a different life style,” she wrote. “It is a spaghetti are seen by many as the norm hopeful trend and leads me to believe for home cooking, while Indian food, that if Indian food is ever going to come when featured, is relegated to “project” into its own in America, this is perhaps cooking—rarely the kinds of dishes you the time for it.” could make on a Tuesday. I recently interviewed Jaffrey at an Indian food is also still largely defined event, and I read back that quote to her. by the word “curry,” a somewhat mean- “How wrong I was,” she said, sighing. ingless term popularized by Europeans Since Jaffrey wrote An Invitation to during their colonization of India to Indian Cooking, the population of Indians describe the various sauces and stews in the United States has grown from about they encountered. The term allowed 206,000 in 1980 to close to 4 million. them to erase regionality or nuance Yet Indian home cooking occupies among dishes. It led to “curry powder,” scant territory in food publications, recipe the yellow-hued seasoning sold in Amer-

Illustrations by Ran Zheng by Illustrations sites, and cooking shows. Coverage tends ican grocery stores. Even Jaffrey herself,

Fall 2019 69 Indian home cooking when she immigrated to the United Cheetie Kumar co-owns the restaurant States. Rooted in the Indian food of her Garland in Raleigh, North Carolina, occupies scant territory childhood in Delhi, but used ingredients where she serves coconut shrimp in a in food publications, and fl avors that she found in Dallas, Bengali-inspired broth and corn cakes recipe sites, and Texas, where I grew up. My mother with paneer. “Bringing a personal story didn’t spend all day standing over the to these Indian restaurants and impart- cooking shows. stove in our suburban Dallas home. On ing the memories of our childhoods and Coverage tends to weeknights, when she returned from her our mom’s kitchen is the fi rst step” to job as a software developer, she pulled people accepting Indian food into their involve adaptations of together twenty-minute dinners like dal own kitchens, she says. This is not a expected restaurant chawal and aloo gobhi. She used feta for dumbing down of Indian food—it’s a fare—butter chicken, saag paneer and roti as a pizza crust. thoughtful, deliberate localization. Once I started testing the recipes for “I don’t think Indian food will come tikka masala, or naan. Indian-ish, I decided to position the book to America through regional foods” of become accepted into the canon of as an accessible entry point into Indian the various Indian states, says Ja† rey. American home cooking, and now so home cooking, and a story of migration We may instead get paneer corn cakes many households keep a few boxes of after railing against “curry,” published and culinary evolution. and my mom’s saag feta. People like pasta and a can of diced tomatoes on cookbooks with the word in the title This blended approach might be the Kumar and Bhatt “have taken real ideas hand for whipping up a quick dinner. simply because, she told me, she felt like best way forward in America, says Vish- from Indian food and put it into a modern There are plenty of time-intensive she had no other choice. wesh Bhatt, the chef of Snackbar in way of American eating,” she says. “That’s Italian dishes out there—lasagna from Grocery stores now sell multiple vari- Oxford, Mississippi. He says that Indian wonderful, and if it comes from us, that’s scratch, timpano—but in American eties of miso and fi sh sauce—but rarely Americans need to speak directly to always good.” The next phase is trans- grocery stores, there’s even more refrig- curry leaves or chaat masala. That may their heritage and setting. The problem lating those restaurant dishes to the erated ravioli, frozen eggplant parmi- have to do with food publications, which with the way Indian food has been mar- weeknight dinner table. gana, and jarred tomato sauce. Italian have written those East Asian ingredients keted “is that we are trying to sell this Indian home cooking may never look food is convenience food. into consumer pantries for weeknight as something that is far away and some- like what it does in, say, London—where Indians fi rst arrived en masse to the cooking yet have overlooked so many thing exotic and di‘ erent,” he says. “We Indian ingredients are more commonly United States in the 1960s. We’ve still common Indian ingredients. The cuisine forget that all of this is in the history of understood and available. Ja† rey points got time before our food truly settles continues to be portrayed and perceived America. America doesn’t exist without out that the tie between Britain and India into American kitchens. It may not take as complex, di cult to execute, and the search for Indian spices. We don’t runs much deeper due to colonization. a full 100 years, Ray says. There are overly rich. As a result, home cooks are talk about the importance of spice trade Consider that the United States is only more Indians in America now than less likely to embrace Indian recipes. to the formation of this country.” He 243 years old, whereas Britain has mil- there were Italians back then, and ideas Chitra Agrawal, who owns a line of points to popular dishes in the South— lennia of history. America “is just begin- move much faster thanks to the Inter- Indian condiments called Brooklyn like deviled eggs, Country Captain, and ning to learn about food,” she says. “We net and social media. Delhi, nearly shut down her company piccalilli, all of which rely on spices have to evolve a cuisine, and we are all I belong to a generation of relatively last year. Her achaars just weren’t selling. from South Asia. going to be a part of it. There are a whole new challengers to a barrier that Ja† rey, So rather than focus on pickles, she re- lot of us who have a say in the matter.” Sahni, and others have long tried to crack. luctantly pivoted to products with more That evolution could mimic the tra- The di† erence, Ja† rey tells me, is that my familiar names and uses: curry mustard jectory of Italian food in America, says peers are less willing to compromise, and and curry ketchup. Tikka masala- and Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food we exist in a more open landscape than curry-fl avored “simmer sauces,” which studies at New York University. When she did. We won’t write books with “curry” similarly rely on consumer recognition, Italians fi rst came to the United States in the title just because our publisher told are the brand’s newest additions. in 1880, their cuisine was abhorred. It us to, she says. And she’s right. We are This is the environment in which I took about 100 years for Italian food to ready to tear down the kitchen wall. wrote my cookbook, Indian-ish, which came out earlier this year. It’s about the Priya Krishna contributes to The New York Times, Bon Appétit, and others. She is dishes my mom taught herself to cook the author of the cookbook Indian-ish.

70 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 71 MATERIAL CULTURE

THE FUTURE OF THE RESTAURANT

MARCH 28, 2020 at HAVEN 2515 6TH AVE S, BIRMINGHAM, AL

TICKETS, PRICED this past summer, i traveled AT $150, GO ON BEHOLDEN through Mexico for a week as a guide for a Los Angeles Times–organized culinary SALE TUESDAY, This object speaks. What does it say? tour. Our group of mostly middle-aged JANUARY 7, 2020 BY SHANE MITCHELL white Angelenos sampled street food in Mexico City, took cooking classes in the colonial city of Puebla, and ate our weight in mole and handmade tortillas in the Special thanks to Greater Birmingham Convention & southern state of Oaxaca. Visitors Bureau and Alabama Tourism Department Image courtesy of the author

Fall 2019 73 subjugation. Our needlework potholder, with an author or artist. To understand dating from the mid-1860s, was stitched how this potholder could have been an to communicate a di erent message. emblem of the abolitionist movement, It was born of a moment when white but is now considered offensive by women’s societies, focused on abolition modern standards, she compared it to and, later, black uplift, used their domes- Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the 1852 novel, tic skills to raise money for these causes. Harriet Beecher Stowe depicted black They baked cakes. Used needle and characters in ways we would now rec- thread to express their political views. ognize as racist, yet in Stowe’s day, abo- Sold potholders like ours at anti-slavery litionists used her novel and those cari- bazaars and fairs. catures to argue against slavery. But representing the other was fraught Four hundred years have passed since and subjective, as it remains so today. slave traders fi rst shipped West Africans, Language and drawings from this era by force and under threat of violence, to often infantilized enslaved people, says the Virginia Colony. America is still reck- art historian Cheryl Finley, a visiting oning with that reality and the culture professor and curator at Spelman College. created by that commerce. Our •–’— ˜™–– Even the language and drawings used by potholder was never intended for prac- abolitionists relied on these tropes. “The tical use at a hot stove. It was made to be a symbol. In search of symbolic context, I dis- The •–’— ˜™–– covered the existence of an earlier abo- potholder was never litionist potholder with the same dancing intended for practical couple, one that includes a more radical and subversive message: ›œž Ÿ¡¢£–™ use at a hot stove. ¤¥¦ › —¢›§–Ÿ¡¢£–™. This style was still It was made to popular in 1882, when a young admirer gifted one to Frederick Douglass. On be a symbol. receipt of his potholder inscribed with that message, Douglass, the great advo- potholder seems to celebrate the pros- cate of black liberation, responded, Freed African American children in front of their schoolhouse in Beaufort, South Carolina, pect of freedom, but actually subverts without apparent condescension, “It was ca. 1862. Their missionary teachers stand on the schoolhouse steps. it,” Finley says. “That iconography, to- beautiful in a dear little girl like you to gether with the use of dialect, produces read and think kindly of my life and his-       were abolitionists. One served as a con- a caricature that mocks the freedom of tory…I appreciate the holder and the about this old potholder, with its tiny, ductor on the Underground Railroad. formerly enslaved people.” From our letter very highly….” meticulous stitching banded in fragile The potholder may have belonged to him. present-day perspective, “it is denigrat- Both of these potholders are artifacts blue silk ribbon. On a stained brown It defi nitely passed down to his grand- ing,” says Finley. of material culture, embedded with needlepoint fi eld, two black fi gures daughter, Margaret “Mimi” Thompson On the other hand, craft objects can stories from the past. These require con- dance. One holds her red skirt high, the Quackenbush. After Mimi died, my be hard to read, says Whitney Stewart, textualization and benefi t from histori- other kicks up his heels. In freeform mother-in-law inherited it. who teaches material culture history at cal knowledge. That’s why the next cross-stitch below, a celebratory message My husband and I are now custodians the University of Texas at Dallas. Stewart home for the •–’— ˜™–– potholder that proclaims: ‡’ ‰Š. of this Black Americana artifact. That argues that determining the intent of a has been in our family for so long will My family, rice planters in the Caroli- genre, which has earlier roots in Europe- craft-maker is more di‹ cult than it is be a museum. na Lowcountry, owned slaves and fought an blackamoor art and extends to Jim for the Confederacy. My husband’s Crow–era mammy iconography, employed Shane Mitchell is a James Beard Award–winning journalist and writes the

family, rooted in northern New York, dehumanizing caricatures to rationalize & Mix/Liibrary of Congress Hubbard “Problematic Crop” series for The Bitter Southerner.

74 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 75 LAST COURSE

Piece of Land, Peace of Mind

my ninety-eight-year-old grandmother is most at home in her garden. Like the rainwater that nourishes the red-clay Alabama soil she tends, gardening keeps her full of life. It serves as her connection to our landowning ancestors. I am not an avid gardener, but I find comfort in photographing her work. I took this photo on her ninety-fifth birthday. Her garden is sacred ground to both of us, serving as a symbol of our fam- ily’s past, present, and future.

— JAI WILLIAMS, photographer and writer

Gravy is a publication of the Southern MARY BETH LASSETER Publisher Foodways Alliance, an institute of the [email protected] Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. SARA CAMP MILAM Editor [email protected] The SFA documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS Visuals Editor American South. Our work sets a welcome [email protected] table where all may consider our history and our future in a spirit of respect and RICHIE SWANN Designer reconciliation. [email protected]

JOHN T. EDGE Editor-in-Chief CARLYNN CROSBY AND OLIVIA TERENZIO [email protected] Nathalie Dupree Graduate Fellows and Fact Checkers

76 southernfoodways.org Fall 2019 77 WORK. EAT. REPEAT.

SUMMER 2019 • NO. 72

A better cocktail for a better world.

Water is at the heart of everything we do at Maker’s Mark. Without it we couldn’t even begin to make our bourbon. To help combat the rapid rise in ocean pollution, this summer we’ve partnered with United By Blue to remove trash from our world’s oceans and waterways. Help us create change by choosing a Maker’s Mark® cocktail and posting a picture of it with #CocktailsForCleanups. Find out more at makersmark.com/cleanups.

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WE MAKE OUR BOURBON CAREFULLY. PLEASE ENJOY IT THAT WAY. Maker’s Mark® Bourbon Whisky, 45% Alc./Vol. ©2019 Maker’s Mark Distillery, Inc. Loretto, KY All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.