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Cooking and Writing in African-American Cultures Representation, Genre, Ceremony

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Cooking and Writing in African-American Cultures Representation, Genre, Ceremony Cooking and Writing in African-American Cultures Representation, Genre, Ceremony Andrew Warnes Submitted in Accordance with the Requirements for the Degree of PhD The University of Leeds School of English September, 2001 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. Acknowledgements This thesis has been improved immeasurably by support offered throughout the last three years by supervisors, other members of the Leeds University faculty, and family and friends. Occasionally, when advice has required me to rethink aspects of my research, I have perhaps not welcomed or appreciated these suggestions sufficiently at the time. To correct this, I must now thank the editors of Gastronomica for commentaries provided on an early draft of the Zora Neale Hurston chapter, which has also benefited greatly from the always encouraging remarks of Rachel Fairbrother. My research on Richard Wright’s Black Boy (American Hunger) has benefited similarly from suggestions offered by Richard King, Richard Godden, Richard Haw and Ben Caines. The difficult task of teasing out the multiple textual references and interconnections of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, meanwhile, has been eased considerably by David Stirrup and Brian Scobie, who played a pivotal role as supervisor in the earlier stages of this research. Mention must also be made of Alistair Stead, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of the American canon has been a source of constant enlightenment over the last three years. Like Alistair, my supervisors Mick Gidley and Dennis Flannery have been a constant source of support, bringing to our meetings an enthusiasm that has helped to ignite (and sometimes reignite) my own. Dennis and Mick’s close readings and sensitive responses improved the following chapters enormously, although any remaining mistakes are, of course, my responsibility. Acknowledgements and thanks must also go to my fiancee Sue McManus and our families, all o f whom, in the help they have offered my research, have been generous in every sense of the word. In particular, my mother Jill Warnes, by always emphasising that the issues dealt with here are neither historical nor abstract but continue to exert effects upon people’s lives, has had far more influence over the following pages than she realises. Finally, thanks must also go to Sue herself, not only for her equally influential suggestions, but for putting up with the intermittent panic attacks and financial crises that are life with a PhD student. This thesis would never have been completed without her. Abstract Introduction Connections between cooking and writing in African-American culture were announced in the slave narratives, which frequently respond to slaveholders’ regulation of the literacy and diet of their human property by recounting episodes of secret reading and eating. These affinities are consolidated by the analogous freedoms cooking and writing opened to the first black cookbook writer Abby Fisher and the first published black poet Phillis Wheatley respectively. Nor are these affinities confined to the nineteenth century: rather, they survive due to the disproportionate occurrence of illiteracy and malnutrition among African Americans both before and after the Great Migration. Recent years have witnessed numerous scholarly investigations of illiteracy, which often identify the recollection of autodidactism as a pivotal episode on which autobiographies by African Americans turn. However, although hunger figures equally prominently within this archive, the interest in writing has contrasted with a relative silence on cooking. Chapters One to Three This thesis concentrates on three narratives: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1938), Richard Wright’s Black Boy (American Hunger) (1944), and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981). These narratives interconnect because, in order to expose hunger as preventable, they all contrast representations of malnutrition with images of food abundance. Implicitly, Their Eyes Were Watching God creates this contrast by representing an autonomous town from which want and white populations have been expelled. This joint expulsion lays blame for malnutrition less with food shortages than with white American privileges. Wright’s autobiography explicitly reiterates this position by enforcing commensurate juxtapositions between its titular condition and white neighbours’ ample food supplies. Spatial intimacy between the hungry and the sated becomes concentrated yet further in Tar Baby’s representation of a Caribbean estate owned by a white businessman but maintained by black servants. This novel, too, repeatedly attributes dietary differences between these racial groupings less to shortage than to white employers’ wish to preserve racial hierarchies. Conclusion Although these nax'ratives all thus insist that hunger is avoidable, however, their portrayals of theft, foraging and culinary innovations simultaneously dramatise moments when food is acquired from sources outside the capitalist market. Consequently, these narratives all employ writing in order to invoke cooking as another form of cultural production that, like autodidactism, destablises racial inequality. Table of Contents Page 6 Introduction 11 A. Cooking and Writing in African-American Culture 34 B. Representation and Genre 38 C. Ceremony Chapter One 45 Orange County: Citrus Fruit and Barbecue in Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville 50 A. Citrus and the Utopianism of Their Eyes Were Watching God 71 B. The Familial Meal of Janie and Joe Starks: A Private Ceremony 81 C. Eatonville’s "Street lamp” Barbecue: A Public Ceremony 100 Interlude #1 Chapter Two 102 The Political Uses of Hunger in the Autobiography of Richard Wright: Protest and Resistance 106 A. Protest 125 B. The Political Uses of Hunger: from Protest to Resistance 132 C. Resistance 146 Interlude #2 Chapter Three 148 Hunger Overcome: The Blossoming of Brier in Toni Morrison’s Tar B aby 151 A. ‘Tar Baby* as Racial Allegory: the Critical Debate 164 B. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? 178 C. Soul Food and Tar Baby’s Reconstitution of Western Value 194 Conclusion 198 A. African-American Hunger: a Colonial Context 206 B. African-American Hunger: a Domestic Contest 218 Bibliography List of Illustrations Page Figure One 157 Frederick Church and James Moser, “The Wonderful Tar Baby’ in Joel Chandler Harris, Legends o f the Old Plantation (1881) Figure Two “Sugar Processing Diagram, Illustrating the Sources of the Main 183 Ingredients of 'Valerians’ and ‘Teddy Boys’”, amended from Neil L Pennington And Charles W Baker, Sugar: A User’s Guide To Sucrose Introduction I lived in Master Hugh’s family about seven years. During this time, I succeeded in learning to read and write. In accomplishing this, I was compelled to resort to various stratagems. I had no regular teacher. [...] From this time I was most narrowly watched. If I was in a separate room any considerable length of time, I was sure to be suspected of having a book, and was at once called to give an account of myself. All this, however, was too late. [...] Colonel Lloyd kept a large and finely cultivated garden, which [...] abounded in fruits of almost every description, from the hardy apple of the north to the delicate orange of the south. This garden was not the least source of trouble on the plantation. Its excellent fruit was quite a temptation to the hungry swarms of boys, as well as the older slaves, belonging to the colonel, few of whom had the virtue or the vice to resist it. Scarcely a day passed, during the summer, but that some slave had to take the lash for stealing fruit. The colonel had to resort to all kinds of stratagems to keep his slaves out of the garden. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)1 This thesis investigates the uses cooking and writing have extended to three narratives published by African Americans: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1938); Richard Wright’s Black Boy (American Hunger) (1944); and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981). From this investigation, it extrapolates the distinctive ways in which twentieth-century African-American culture has upheld, endorsed and reformulated the connections between cooking and writing that were introduced into the public tradition by Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass among other slave autobiographies. It contends that, no less than this nineteenth- century archive, recent writing by African Americans connects cooking and writing together since it, too, often identifies both as cultural processes by which 6 Andrew Warnes Introduction which inequalities created by racial injustice can be eroded and even overcome. These abiding and profoundly politicised interconnections are signalled most clearly when Their Eyes Were Watching God, Black Boy (American Hunger), and Tar Baby turn to the description of hunger and of the ministration of hunger’s cure: cooking. For these moments, when the resourcefulness and ingenuity of individual cooks fill a nutritional absence in which both racism and capitalism are characteristically implicated, vividly evoke that pivotal autobiographical episode, featured in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964) among many others, when another void — illiteracy — is filled via self-education. Connections between cooking and writing and, specifically, between autodidactism and culinary resourcefulness thus issue from these narratives’ shared insistence upon the capacity of both
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