Randall Kenan Reconciliation
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Character isn’t made by machine. Every bottle of Maker’s Mark® Bourbon is still hand-dipped in our signature red wax. Learn more at makersmark.com. WE MAKE OUR BOURBON CAREFULLY. PLEASE ENJOY IT THAT WAY. Maker’s Mark® Bourbon Wh isky, 45% Alc./Vol. ©2018 Maker’s Mark Distillery, Inc. Loretto, KY WINTER 2018 • NO. 70 9065-06 MMADV_6x9_CharacterMachine_AD.indd 1 5/30/18 3:30 PM CALENDAR OF EVENTS JANUARY 21, 2019 POP-UP OXFORD SFA FILM FESTIVAL Burns Belfry Museum, Oxford, MS ISSUE NO. 70 • WINTER 2018 FEBRUARY 9, 2019 WINTER SYMPOSIUM Birmingham, AL Gravy is a publication of the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the 15FEATURES Center for the Study of Southern Culture FIVE WAYS OF at the University of Mississippi. READING FOOD The SFA documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. Our work sets a welcome table where all may consider our history FEBRUARY 21, 2019 VISIBLE YAM 2and Editor’s our future Note in a spirit of respect and Randall Kenan reconciliation. Sara Camp Milam Gravy Podcast Launch 16 BLACK FOOD ON 4JOHN Featured T. EDGE Contributors Editor-in-Chief Your Smartphone 22 WHITE PAGES [email protected] Ravi Howard 6MARY Director’s BETH LASSETER Cut Publisher [email protected] John T. Edge RECIPES FROM A HUNGRY MAN 10SARA Supper CAMP Sanctuary MILAM Editor in the South 32 [email protected] Monique Truong Gustavo Arellano DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS Visuals Editor JUNE 1415, 2019 READ BETWEEN [email protected] Behind the Music SUMMER FIELD TRIP 40 THE LINES As told to Melissa Hall by Paul Burch Bentonville, AR John Kessler RICHIE SWANN Designer [email protected] Meet Jo Ellen O’Hara Annemarie Anderson WE EAT, CARLYNN CROSBY AND OLIVIA TERENZIO 49 THEREFORE Nathalie Dupree Graduate Fellows For more information, visit WE YAM 64and Last Fact Course Checkers southernfoodways.org Laughlin Brandall photo by Ghost of a Dream; Art by installation THIS PAGE: Oriana Koren. by Photograph COVER: Zandria F. Robinson Alisha Sommer EDITOR’S NOTE planning and preparation needed to pull Oaxaca is a state that off the talks and meals of Symposium has proudly kept its weekend. All hands on deck is a cliché, but it’s one that perfectly describes indigenous traditions SFAWHQ in the months leading up to alive—music, clothing, the the big event. and especially food— Yet the Fall Symposium serves only about 350 guests. That’s barely 15 percent for centuries in the of our membership, and an even smaller face of encroaching fraction of our audience. We asked our- this past october marked my selves: If some of our best work came to modernity. tenth Southern Foodways Fall Sympo- life each year at our flagship Symposium, sium. In 2009, the year SFA explored why weren’t we sharing it with as many connections between food and music, I readers as possible? Insert collective staff arrived as a volunteer with little idea of forehead smack. what to expect. Within hours, I was lis- In this issue, we close out our year of tening—and then joining in—as Alice Reading Food with five features from our WHAT HAPPENS Randall led the audience in “Will the twenty-first Fall Symposium. In 2019, we Circle Be Unbroken.” Later, I helped dig into a vital, yet underexplored truth: AT SYMPOSIUM serve a lunch cooked by David Chang. Food Is Work. Planning is underway for ...shouldn’t stay at Symposium (Afterwards, star-struck, I thanked him. our Winter Symposium in Birmingham, I’m sure he remembers.) Summer Field Trip in Bentonville, and of BY SARA CAMP MILAM I returned as a Fall Symposium volun- course Fall Symposium here in Oxford. If teer in 2010 and 2011. Two thousand you can join us for any (or all!) of our three twelve was my first symposium as a full- 2019 Symposia, we look forward to wel- time member of the SFA staff. That year, coming you. And even if you can’t, you I realized how little I’d understood, even can pull up a seat via the pages of Gravy. Photos by Brandall Laughlin Brandall Photos by as a volunteer, about the months of Happy New Year, and happy reading. 2 southernfoodways.org Winter 2018 3 FEATURED CONTRIBUTORS ORIANA KOREN RAVI HOWARD Oriana Koren is a Los Angeles–based Ravi Howard lives in Tallahassee, where photographer and writer whose work is he teaches creative writing at Florida State anchored in food, culture, and identi- University. To date, he is the only Gravy ty. When not traveling to document contributor who has won both the Ernest stories on location, Oriana works out of J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence a daylight studio in downtown Los and a Sports Emmy. SFA director John T. Angeles’ Fashion District. For this issue Edge developed a crush on Howard’s of Gravy, Oriana drew inspiration from the I Spy children’s book series. “As an artist, writing three years ago and eventually convinced him to speak at the 2018 Fall I love the idea that photographs can be read as riddles to be solved—there’s always Symposium. We hope it’s the fi rst of many Ravi Howard symposium presentations. more information in an image than we realize,” Oriana says. RANDALL KENAN ZANDRIA F. ROBINSON Randall Kenan is the author of six books Zandria F. Robinson is a former SFA of fi ction and nonfi ction and the editor, neighbor and colleague—she taught so- most recently, of The Carolina Table: ciology and Southern Studies at the Uni- North Carolina Writers on Food. SFA versity of Mississippi from 2009–2012. managing editor Sara Camp Milam fell She now teaches at Rhodes College in in love with his fi ction when she was in her native Memphis. A scholar of pop graduate school because it reminded her culture, she seamlessly weaves academ- of the Latin American literature she studied as an undergrad. She once wrote a term ic and popular references in her writing. You’ll get a taste in her feature essay, which paper on Kenan’s fi ctional community of Tims Creek, North Carolina. Nearly a is adapted from her remarks as Symposium Coach at the 2018 Fall Symposium. decade later, she would be very embarrassed to show it to him. Robinson is at work on her third book, which is about the Memphis soul sound and the Soulsville, USA community. JOHN KESSLER MONIQUE TRUONG John Kessler spent almost two decades Monique Truong fi nished manuscript at the Atlanta Journal Constitution and edits to her third novel, The Sweetest now writes a dining column for Chicago Fruits, two weeks before this issue of Magazine, but we like his byline best Gravy went to press. Look for it in your when it appears in Gravy. John T. Edge, local bookstore in fall 2019. Meanwhile, who used to pore over Kessler’s AJC if you’re new to Truong’s work, SFA man- reviews when plotting Atlanta trips, once aging director Melissa Hall (who, like ate galbi and drank canned beer with him in the back parking lot of a Buford Highway Truong, is a recovering lawyer) recommends her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth. Korean Restaurant while staring down a soaring tangle of kudzu vines. It involves barbecue, synesthesia, and canned peaches, among other delights. Photos by Brandall Laughlin Brandall Photos by Laughlin Brandall MIDDLE and BOTTOM: Oriana Koren; TOP: 4 southernfoodways.org Winter 2018 5 LEFT: Cornfields outside Greenville, MS; DIRECTOR’S CUT BELOW: David White in November 2018 THE POWER TO FEED A Delta epiphany BY JOHN T. EDGE “And particularly for our children, who had nothing to do with asking to be born into this world…This is a reflection on our society, on all of us.” I wrote about this moment in my book The Potlikker Papers. In my telling, young David White’s hunger taught a lesson about America’s failure to care for its most vulnerable citizens. But his life, as I depicted it, was without dimension. Then I read Delta Epiphany, a new book by my friend and University of Missis- sippi colleague Ellen Meacham. david white was twenty months Open sores pocked his young body. From Ellen, I learned that, at the time old when the crowd of politicians and David’s eyes were flat and his belly was On his visit to the Kennedy toured the Mississippi Delta on reporters came to his Cleveland, Missis- distended. Robert F. Kennedy stroked a poverty fact-finding mission, David’s sippi, home on a spring day in 1967. As the David’s cheek and touched his belly, but Mississippi Delta in mother, Annie White, was fighting hero- man with the fop of brown hair stooped he could he not capture David’s attention. 1967, Senator Robert F. ically to feed her family. She fished. She this past summer, i traveled to the floor, David hungrily scratched for Kennedy was helpless in the face of planted a garden and canned and pre- through Mexico for a week as a guide for crumbs of cornbread and grains of rice. the poverty that David endured every Kennedy was helpless served the harvest. Her brothers shared a Los Angeles Times–organized culinary Annie White raised six children in that day. Dressed in a suit and tie, his shoes and chastened in the the blackbirds, raccoons, squirrels, deer, tour. Our group of mostly middle-aged house with one faucet, no hot water, and glossy with wax, the junior U.S. Senator face of the poverty that and possums they hunted.