Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America

by Frederick Douglass

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s in Brooklyn, Panamanians started opening small formal eateries in and around Franklin Avenue. “In these restaurants,” says Priestly, “you would find a range of food—those with origins in the English-speaking Caribbean, those with origins strictly in Panama, and those adopted from African Americans here.” The “so-called Panamanian restaurants” sold soul food, “food [with a cornmeal base] that you would think is completely South American,” and West Indian food, “rice and peas and all that stuff. . . referred to as Afro-Panamanian food.”29 These small Brooklyn restaurants drew crowds of working-class West Indian, Latin American, and African American customers. The diverse menu at such restaurants made their multiethnic working-class customers feel as though they were staying within their own culinary environment.

  In the absence of a language barrier, then—and perhaps also in part because of the small size of the Afro-Panamanian community in New York City—African Americans and Afro-Latinos in the city shared food and attended parties together in 1950s and 1960s Brooklyn. In Westchester County, as I discuss in the next section, schools, eateries, and community centers were important meeting places where African American and bilingual Latino youth developed long-lasting friendships. Older Hispanic immigrants with elementary English skills, by contrast, spent the majority of their time in Spanish-speaking barbershops, bars, bodegas, churches, and clubs maintaining friendships with other Hispanic immigrants. Except for GM workers, moreover, most Tarrytown Cubans worked on jobs and in departments with Latino personnel. As a result, Latin American immigrants with very little English fluency largely remained separated from African Americans in the Tarrytowns, cloistered in pockets of Hispanic public spaces.

  YOUTH CULTURE AND CARIBBEAN INFLUENCE ON AFRICAN AMERICANS

  Young people, in particular, tend to travel outside their ethnic safety zones. As studies of rapping and deejaying in New York have shown, youth culture is one of the sites where cultural interaction and hybridization between African Americans and Caribbeans has been most intense. In the words of one study, this is because the lives of youth of different ethnicities “are structured by similar conditions and result in similar understandings of themselves and the world.”30 The mambo, Motown, and salsa mania that influenced youth culture in the 1950s and 1960s did a great deal to erase the invisible line that sometimes separated African Americans and Hispanics in metropolitan New York and suburban Westchester County. Mambo mania coincided with the diminishing cultural and language barriers to African American and Latino relations in New York. Like food, music drew bilingual Hispanic youth to spaces that also attracted African American youth. Latino youth growing up in New York developed a multiethnic consciousness that acknowledged their African heritage rather than denying it, as many of their parents’ generation did.31 By the time Motown mania hit the city in the 1960s, the divide between African American and Puerto Rican youth had virtually vanished. For example, born in 1940, bilingual Sonya Cruz remembers growing up in El Barrio in the 1960s. There was a local luncheonette/soda fountain frequented by Puerto Rican and African American youth. The proprietor of the store had a jukebox that played both “Latin American hits and popular Motown artists.”32 Similar cultural sharing was happening in the Bronx.

  In 1940 the Bronx had a black and Puerto Rican population of about 83,500. Historian Evelyn Gonzalez argues that “after War II, the most important change in the Bronx was the coming of thousands of Southern blacks and Spanish speaking Puerto Ricans” like Harold Jones and Sonya Sanchez.33 The number of African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the Bronx had increased from 160,000 in 1950 to more than 350,000 in 1960, with the majority residing in the South Bronx.34 Bubba Dukes’s father took a job in a furniture factory and relocated his family to the newly opened Patterson House. “And when the projects open up, I guess it’s a big thing for people to move into the projects and move away from the tenement, the tenement housing.”35In the 1950s Patterson House had a mixture of residents from South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Barbados, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. African American Victoria Archibald-Good also grew up in the Patterson House. She recalled growing up with Puerto Ricans neighbors on all sides of her family’s apartment: “The Perez family lived right across the hall from us on the fourth floor. There were the Bonitas too, on the fourth floor, but on the other side.”36 The halls of the Paterson House smelt like an international food court at a mall.

  Nathan Dukes recalls growing up to the smell of chitlins, rice and beans, turkey, and ham being prepared. “You had a lot of vegetables, collard greens, turnips; spinach was one of the main courses that a lot of the moms would prepare. . . . All up and down the hallways” you would smell the different ethnic dishes being prepared, especially on holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter.37 Some of Victoria Archibald-Good’s fondest childhood memories were of the food of Puerto Rican neighbors. “I remember Mr. Bonita used to make donuts for everybody. And he had this big pot of oil and we would just like to sit on the stoop, because we could smell them from the stoop. And he would call us up and everybody would have a freshly made donut. It was a lot of fun.”38 Puerto Ricans in the Patterson House were “our buddies” and “very good” friends, says Dukes. Many of these friendships would later develop into multiethnic marriages.39 As a result of New York City residential patterns in buildings like the Patterson House, familiar friendships developed between the African American and Caribbean children. Starting in the 1960s, if not much earlier, as this chapter argues, African Americans in New York developed a more diasporic conceptualization of soul food than the exclusionary down-home Southern one that the black power partisans of the soul ideology championed. For African American and Caribbean residents in urban New York, soul food was far more inclusive, encompassing the African-influenced cuisines of South Carolinians, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Panamanians, West Indians, and Dominicans that proliferated in multiethnic communities of color in New York in the 1960s through 1980s.

  In addition to public housing projects, other important spaces for black encounters with Caribbean cultures in New York included rent parties, house parties, and clubs. In these spaces, it was quite common for black and Latino youth to become bilingual in their choice of music, language, and food. Afro-Cuban GM worker Freddy Pino married an African American from North Tarrytown named Barbara Ann Cardwell. The two met in 1965 at a cocktail lounge called the White Birch Inn across the Hudson River in nearby Spring Valley, New York. Neither of Barbara’s parents objected to her having an Afro-Cuban suitor; her entire family accepted him from the beginning. Pino taught his African American wife of over forty years about Cuban traditions, such as “little Christmas.” She also learned how to cook rice and beans, Cuban-style pork, and turkey Cuban style. Her husband died in 2006, but to this day she continues the traditions to which he introduced.40

  CONCLUSION

  Describing the culinary influence of Caribbeans on African Americans in New York City and Westchester County from the 1930s through the 1960s requires understanding the complexity of the factors that influenced their interaction, from the initial social and economic conditions that acted as an impetus for various groups’ migrations and shaped their settlement patterns to the constraining and catalyzing roles played by employment, racism, music, entertainment, language, food, and love. Latin American and African Americans musicians in the 1930s shared bandstands, restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouse rooms as they traveled the famed chitlin circuit.

  When a second wave of immigrants came to New York in the 1950s and 1960s, some of them traveling north to Westchester County, language barriers and cultural differences kept African American and Latinos over twenty segregated from each other. As a result, Caribbean influence on African American culinary taste happened at a far slower speed there than in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx. The exception to this rule were African Americans and Latino GM workers in the Tarrytowns who belonged to the same unions: they frequented the same eatery during their lunch hour, and
thus black GM workers (who lived in various parts of metropolitan New York) were far more influenced by Caribbean cultures than were nonemployees. In contrast, black and Latino youth shared a common ethnic subculture: mambo and Motown music. As a consequence, they broke bread far more often in each others homes and at Caribbean-run restaurants in the Tarrytowns. Luncheonettes with mambo- and Motown-playing jukeboxes played an important role in shaping the urban ethnic identity of black and Latino youth.

  Tentatively, then, one can conclude that Caribbeans influenced black culinary taste more often within ethnic subgroups in which they felt the most comfortable. In the 1930s and 1940s it was the jazz subculture of black and Hispanic Harlem. For Tarrytown adults of the 1950s, it was the male-dominated subculture of GM’s multiethnic auto workers’ union. And among immigrant and migrant youth, the mambo subculture of the 1950s and the Motown and Latin jazz culture of Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx were particularly significant in fostering shared cultural identities across the racial divide. In the absence of further study, of course, these conclusions remain only tentative, but they offer a useful starting point for organizing and explaining the declining influence of southern culture in northern urban centers.

  FOOD REBELS

  African American Critics and Opponents of Soul Food

  During the 1960s and 1970s several debates developed over soul food. Some African American intellectuals such as Amiri Baraka and Verta Mae Grosvenor argued that soul food was a unique part of black culture and therefore the intellectual capital of black folk. European American food critics like Craig Claiborne insisted that soul food was a southern regional food that belonged to southerners. And three groups of African Americans I call “food rebels” argued that soul food is nothing to be celebrated or guarded as our own because it was killing us. I argue that black Muslims, advocates of natural food diets, and university-educated African Americans have filled an important role neglected by medical professionals in influencing many African Americans to question the wisdom of eating traditional soul food.

  Alternative diets to soul food, such as vegetarianism, have their roots in the dietary teachings of the Nation of Islam and advocates of natural food diets such as Alvenia M. Fulton and Dick Gregory. African Americans saw how the diets advocated by the Nation and naturalists improved people’s health and began investigating the role of nutrition in health. Some, like Marcellas Barksdale and Yemaja Jubilee, reduced or completely stopped their consumption of soul food. Barksdale says that he only eats it on special occasions because his doctor warned him that his heart and blood pressure could no longer take such rich food on a regular basis. Jubilee explains, “I had a lot of medical problems and used to weigh 238 lbs.” She argues it was because of the soul food: “I cooked it myself, just the way my mama taught me to cook it. I had clogged arteries, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and the doctor said I had to make a change!”1

  Before the 1970s most medical associations did not talk at any length about the health effects of the traditional American diet. Dr. Elijah Saunders, who was head of cardiology at Providence Hospital in Baltimore, insists, “The medical profession as a whole has not done very well at teaching doctors and medical students in training about nutrition.” Historically, nutrition has been one of the “most undertaught subjects” in medical school. In many places, the medical school curriculum still crowds out content on nutrition. It has only been since the late 1970s that the health care professions have realized “how important nutrition is.”2 This coincides with the experiences of several people interviewed for this book. They stated that few medical professionals talked about the relationship between nutrition and health until the 1970s.

  Joan B. Lewis is a member of the American Dietitian Association and a registered dietitian with more than forty years of experience. She has worked in hospitals in metropolitan New York and the District of Columbia, predominately with African American clients. She observed that before the 1970s most people paid little attention to what they ate unless physicians spoke to them about it.3 Clara Bullard Pittman says recommendations to exercise, watch what you eat, stop eating pork, and reduce your intake of sugar and salt, “you didn’t hear any of that in the 1960s and 1970s.” She adds that you also did not hear medical professionals talking about the alarming rates of high blood pressure and diabetes among African Americans.4 Lewis, born in 1935, says that, growing up, “We didn’t have a whole lot of sodas, we drank water or milk.” In addition, “everybody walked everywhere.” But in the 1970s it seemed like “everybody got a car,” and walking became the exception, not the rule. Many people drastically increased their portion sizes at the table while decreasing their daily physical activity. Before the 1990s doctors rarely talked about the need for more fiber in people’s diets or referred to childhood obesity as a national problem. “Schools took out the physical ed. programs, and everybody needed to do some exercise,” recalls Lewis.5

  Dr. Rodney Ellis, who specializes in cases of obesity, agrees. African American southerners who have lived past the age of one hundred generally ate pesticide-free foods, walked a lot more, and did regular physical activity that kept their blood pressure low and their high-density lipoproteins (favorable cholesterol levels) up. Moreover, before World War II, people drove less and depended less on power tools to do manual labor like cutting wood, brush, and grass. In the rural societies that most southerners lived in, people did more physical activity, which reduced incidents of obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. In contrast, in post-1960s North America, in both urban and rural settings, Americans started getting much less physical activity. Classic soul food contributed to poor health because the consumption of animal fats clogged arteries. Foods high in saturated fats like lard-fried chicken “are just not good for you,” says Ellis. In addition, “classic soul food has a fair amount of salt in it. And chronic high amounts can cause hypertension.”6

  Over the years, Joan B. Lewis has observed that “predominately black people have high blood pressure and hypertension, that’s the salt involved. And large numbers of African Americans have diabetes,” passed on to them genetically. “Remember now, high blood pressure leads to strokes and heart attacks. Diabetes leads to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and strokes and heart attacks. . . . And now we have a lot of black people that have what we call renal or kidney failure and my father had that, because his blood pressure was so high that it destroyed the kidney.” North Americans are historically more overweight than residents of any other nation in the world; African American eating habits are just as problematic as the eating habits of other ethnic groups within the United States. According to Lewis, historically the eating patterns that you see among most Americans including consuming “sugar, salt, fat, you know fatty products, a whole lot of fried stuff, a whole lot of pork products, a whole lot of fast food, no vegetables, no fruit, [and generally] no good wholesome things.” Lewis goes on to say that, over the last eight to ten years, the younger generation has “leaned heavily” on “vegetarian items. It was a blessing in disguise” because those that do are consuming less fat and reducing their chance of obesity and risk factors for high blood pressure and diabetes.7

  In the 1970s there were a few African American physicians who spoke out against the soul food diet by publishing articles in Ebony magazine that called for food reform. For instance, Dr. Therman E. Evans was way ahead of his time in his understanding of the relationship between food and health. In March 1972 he wrote that, as African Americans, “We cannot continue to disregard what we eat as if our diet has no effect on our health status. In fact, what we eat is both directly and indirectly related to every major illness we know of, including heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, and infectious diseases.” Evans observed that African Americans needed both more nutritious food and exercise.8 Five years later, Ebony published the article “Good Health Is a Family Affair: Good Nutrition, Exercise, Sleep, Physical Examinations, Etc.,” in its May 1977 issue.9 In this article, Dr. Keith
W. Sehnert recommended the increased consumption of “raw fruits and vegetables because they add necessary vitamins and minerals and valuable bulk to your diet.” Moreover, Sehnert wanted African Americans to cook and bake with “polyunsaturated vegetable oils” instead of high-cholesterol saturated fats like butter and lard. He also championed the replacement of whole milk products with skimmed milk products and advised the consumption of only three eggs per week. As for meat, Sehnert believe it was much wiser to consume more fish, fowl, “beans, nuts, and new soya-meat extenders and substitutes. . . because they are lower in calories and fat than beef, lamb or pork.”10 A year after that, a Dr. Lemah of Meharry Medical College, an HBCU in Nashville, was interviewed for an article in Ebony that said African Americans needed to reduce the amount of refined carbohydrates in their diets. In different ways, all three physicians were calling for radical food reforms, or the transition to what Dr. Elijah Saunders of the University of Maryland Medical School calls “heart-healthy meals.”11