Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America

by Frederick Douglass

  78. Ibid.

  79. Warren and Warren, interview.

  80. Jubilee, interview.

  81. This interpretation was first suggested by Jessica B. Harris in Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking (New York: Atheneum, 1989), xvi; the dab-a-dab dish is mentioned on p. 47 of [Africanus, pseudo.], “Remarks on the Slave Trader, and the Slavery of the Negroes,” in A Series of Letters (London: J. Phillips, 1788).

  82. Lamenta Diane (Watkins) Crouch, interview, summer 2005.

  83. Outlaw, interview.

  84. White, Soul Food, 1–3.

  85. Marcellas C. D. Barksdale, interview, summer 2005.

  86. Mary A. Poole, “Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo,” November 5, 1937, p. 1, box A 13, file Alabama Cities and Towns, Mobile Cuisine, Work Project Administration (State Records), Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter WPA SR).

  87. White, Soul Food, 1–3.

  88. Ibid.

  89. Smalls, Grace the Table, 73.

  90. Banks, interview.

  91. Gracilla, “Barboursville, Virginia,” August 18, 1941, p. 1, box A 829 file, WPA SR.

  5. THE BEANS AND GREENS OF NECESSITY

  1. Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., “An Economic Profile of Black Life in the Twenties,” Journal of Black Studies 6, no. 4. (June 1976): 311–313; William A. Sundstrom, “Last Hired, First Fired? Unemployment and Urban Black Workers During the Great Depression,” Journal of Economic History 52, no. 2 (June 1992): 420–422.

  2. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 293–295.

  3. Sundstrom, “Last Hired, First Fired,” 417–418.

  4. “Unemployed men in front of Al Capone’s Soup Kitchen [Chicago],” February 1931, RG 306-N, Records of the United States Information Agency, box 677, file 1, U.S. National Archives II, College Park, Md.

  5. Lorena Hickok quoted Malcolm J. Miller in a letter to Harry L. Hopkins (Federal Civil Works administrator), Athens, Ga., January 11, 1934, Georgia Field Reports, p. 4, Papers of Harry L. Hopkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.; Hickok to Hopkins, Moultrie, Ga., January 23, 1934, Georgia Field Reports, Papers of Harry L. Hopkins, p. 4.

  6. “Food Crisis in Cleveland,” photo and caption, May 5, 1938, RG 306-N, Records of the United States Information Agency, box 677, file 1, 306-NT-677–2, National Archives II, College Park, Md.

  7. Nina Simone, The Autobiography of Nina Simone: I Put A Spell On You, with Stephen Cleary (New York: Da Capo, 1993), 5, 6.

  8. Hickok to Hopkins, Columbia, S.C., February 5, 1934, Florida Field Reports, pp. 4–5, Papers of Harry L. Hopkins.

  9. Simone, Autobiography, 6.

  10. Joe Gray Taylor, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South: An Informal History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 142.

  11. Hickok to Hopkins, Georgia, January 16, 1934, Georgia Field Reports, pp. 7–8, Papers of Harry L. Hopkins.

  12. Nora (Burns) White, interview, summer 2005.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Frances Warren and Jim Warren, interview, summer 2005.

  16. Simone, Autobiography, 8–9.

  17. Ralph David Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 6; see also 8.

  18. Ibid., 6; see also 12, 25–26.

  19. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969; reprint, New York: Bantam, 1970), 19–20.

  20. Ruth Miller, Roy Miller, and Rudolf Bradshaw, interview, summer 2005.

  21. Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  22. Langston Hughes, The Langston Hughes Reader (New York: Braziller, 1958), 372.

  23. Ibid., 373.

  24. Sheila Ferguson, Soul Food: Classic Cuisine from the Deep South (New York: Grove, 1989), xv.

  25. Robert Weisbrot, Father Divine: The Utopian Evangelist of the Depression Era Who Became an American Legend (Boston: Beacon, 1983), 37–40.

  26. Ibid., 9.

  27. Carleton Maybee, interview, summer 2005.

  28. Weisbrot, Father Divine, 11–12, 34–38, 40.

  29. Miller, Miller, and Bradshaw, interview; and Dorothy M. Evelyn, interview, summer 2005.

  30. Miller, Miller, and Bradshaw, interview.

  31. Maybee, interview.

  32. Miller, Miller, and Bradshaw, interview.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Evelyn, interview.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Fred Opie, Jr., and Dorothy Opie, interviews, summer 2005.

  38. Margaret B. (Cooper) Opie, interview, summer 2005.

  39. Ibid.; Katie Green (White), interview, summer 2005.

  40. Margaret Opie, interview.

  41. Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 145.

  42. For an in-depth discussion of African Americans and chicken, see Williams-Forson’s Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs

  43. Gracilla, “Barboursville, Virginia,” August 18, 1941, p. 1, box A 829 file, WPA SR,” 1.

  44. Nettie C. Banks, interview, summer 2005.

  45. Yemaja Jubilee, interview, summer 2005.

  46. Benjamin Outlaw, interview, summer 2005.

  47. Joan B. Lewis, interview, summer 2005.

  48. Stephen Erwin, “[Southern] Food,” November 8, 1984, box 1, Autobiographical Writings: 1974–1990, Stephen Erwin Collection, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

  49. Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, 25–26.

  50. Ibid., 25.

  51. Joyce White, Soul Food: Recipes and Reflections from African-American Churches (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 104.

  52. The name of the town is in question.

  53. Lamenta Diane (Watkins) Crouch, interview, summer 2005.

  54. Alexander Smalls, Grace the Table: Stories and Recipes from My Southern Revival, with Hattie Jones (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 3.

  55. Nora White, interview.

  56. Beryl Ellington, interview, summer 2005.

  6. EATING JIM CROW

  1. Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” in The New African American Urban History, ed. Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), 192–197.

  2. For more on jim crow, see Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); R. Douglas Hurt, ed., African American Life in the Rural South, 1900–1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003); Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998).

  3. Eugene Watts, interview, summer 2005. This chapter is modeled after studies on black community formation such as Joe W. Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); and Kenneth L. Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976).

  4. Joseph “Mac” Johnson, interview, summer 2005.

  5. Diana Ross, Secrets of a Sparrow: Memoirs (New York: Villard, 1993), 82.

  6. Joseph Johnson, interview.

  7. Watts, interview.

  8. Litwack, Trouble in Mind. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham talks about the politics of respectability in Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

  9. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); idem, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

 
; 10. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem,’” 190–191.

  11. Lamenta Diane (Watkins) Crouch, interview, summer 2005; Reginald T. Ward, interview, summer 2005.

  12. Margaret B. (Cooper) Opie, interview, summer 2005; Alice N. Conqueran, interview, summer 2005; and Joan B. Lewis, interview, summer 2005.

  13. Lewis, interview.

  14. Dr. Rodney Ellis, interview, summer 2005; Lewis, interview.

  15. On the geography of Richmond’s African-American business community and neighborhoods, see Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball, “Mapping the Terrain of Black Richmond,” in The New African American Urban History, ed. Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996).

  16. Yemaja Jubilee, interview, summer 2005.

  17. Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 26–27. Langston Hughes uses the “Bottoms” to designate an African American community in his novel Not Without Laughter (1969; reprint, New York: Touchstone, 1995).

  18. For more on black migration to and settlement in Cleveland, see Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape; and Wiese, Places of Their Own, 70–90.

  19. “Eugene ‘Hot Sauce’ Williams, Barbecue Operator of Cleveland, Ohio,” Ebony, March 1950, 37–40.

  20. Ibid., 37–38.

  21. Joseph Johnson, interview.

  22. Watts, interview; Betty Joyce Johnson, interview, summer 2005.

  23. Betty Johnson, interview. See William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 109–120.

  24. Lewis, interview.

  25. Sadie B. Hornsby, revised by Sarah H. Hall, “The Barbecue Stand,” Georgia Folder, 2301A-2318, pp. 5–7, 3709, Federal Writers Project (WPA) Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Manuscript Department.

  26. Ibid., 8–9.

  27. Bennett Marshall and Gertha Couric, “Alabama Barbecue,” pp. 1–3, U.S. Work Project Administration (State Records), Alabama, box A 18, file “Alabama Cuisine,” 2, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. See “Monroe, Louisiana Barbecue,” p. 8, U.S. Work Project Administration (State Records), Louisiana, box A 160, file “Cuisine.”

  28. Hornsby, “The Barbecue Stand,” 8–9.

  29. Ibid., 9–11, 15.

  30. Ibid., 12, 14, 15–16.

  31. On the history of black Georgia and the southwest Atlanta area in particular, see John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); and Wiese, Places of Their Own, 174–196.

  32. Stanlie M. James, interview, summer 2005.

  33. Marcellas C. D. Barksdale, interview, summer 2005.

  34. James, interview.

  35. Alton Hornsby Jr., interview, summer 2005.

  36. James, interview.

  37. Ralph David Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 64–67.

  38. Ibid., 64, 65, 67.

  39. Crouch, interview.

  40. Neely, interview.

  41. Crouch, interview.

  42. Neely, interview.

  43. Crouch, interview.

  44. Ross, Secrets of a Sparrow, 83.

  45. Segregation and the desegregation of restaurants in New York are documented in Martha Biondi’s To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 36–37, 79–82, 85, 89–90.

  46. Sarah Chavez, “Harlem Restaurants,” October 2, 1940, two different drafts available, FCWPA, roll 144.

  47. Burton W. Peretti, Jazz in American Culture (Chicago: Dee, 1997), 126–136.

  48. Carmen John Leggio, interview, summer 2005.

  49. Rudolph Bradshaw, in Ruth Miller, Roy Miller, and Rudolf Bradshaw, interview, summer 2005.

  50. Sarah Chavez, “Southern Cooking,” p. 7, FCWPA, roll 153; idem, “Harlem Restaurants,” September 26, 1940, p. 3, FCWPA, roll 144.

  51. Sarah Chavez, “Harlem Restaurants,” September 27, 1940, FCWPA, roll 144.

  52. Irving Ripps “Specials Today—and Everyday,” September 17, 1940, p. 10, FCWPA, roll 144; Macdougall, “Poor Men’s Fare,” p. 11, FCWPA, roll 153.

  53. Evelyn Gonzalez, The Bronx (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 109–110.

  54. Mark Naison and Maxine Gordon, interview with Kwame Brathwaite, May 17, 2002, pp. 2, 3, 6, 7, Bronx African American History Project, Bronx County Historical Society Archive Collection, Bronx, N.Y. (hereafter BAAHP).

  55. Mark Naison, interview with Frank Belton, n.d. (ca. 2006), pp. 4–5, BAAHP.

  56. Mark Naison, interview with Nathan “Bubba” Dukes, n.d. (ca. 2006), p. 1, BAAHP.

  57. Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 158.

  58. For more on black neighborhoods in Westchester, see Wiese, Places of Their Own.

  59. Conqueran, interview, summer 2005.

  60. Ibid.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Margaret Opie, interview.

  63. Conqueran, interview, summer 2005; Christopher Boswell, interview, summer 2005.

  64. Boswell, interview.

  65. Ibid.

  66. Conqueran, interview, summer 2005. See also Leggio, interview; Lewis, interview.

  67. Conqueran, interview, summer 2005.

  68. Margaret Opie, interview.

  69. Ibid.; Lewis, interview.

  70. Lewis, interview.

  71. Ibid.

  72. Ibid. See Robert E. Weems, Jr., Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

  73. Ross, Secrets of a Sparrow, 82.

  7. THE CHITLIN CIRCUIT

  1. James Brown and Bruce Tucker, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul (1986; reprint, New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1997), 173.

  2. A good example of the chitlin circuit is portrayed in the first half of the movie Ray, starring Jamie Fox. Also see Oscar J. Jordan III, “Jimi Hendrix and Chitlin’ Circuit,” P-Funk Review, February 2004; Charles Sawyer, The Arrival of B. B. King: The Authorized Biography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980), 73.

  3. Gladys Knight, Between Each Line of Pain and Glory: My Life Story (New York: Hyperion, 1997), 125.

  4. Information on venues gleaned from a recording of a radio feature on the chitlin circuit found at www.soul-patrol.com/soul/chitlin.htm.

  5. Aretha Franklin and David Ritz, From These Roots (New York: Villard, 1999), 95, 106.

  6. Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green, eds., Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 3; Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

  7. Bayard Rustin, “Black Folks, White Folks,” in Peter Goldman, ed., Report from Black America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 144.

  8. Ibid., 143; Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 37–38, 44, 46; Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within A Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of New Carolina Press, 1999), 32, 86.

  9. W. A. Jeanpierre, “African Negritude—Black American Soul,” Africa Today 14, no. 6 (December 1967): 10–11.

  10. Doris Witt, Black Hunger: Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity (New York: Oxford University Press. 1999), 97. See also Scott Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003); and Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

  11. Lamenta Diane (Watkins) Crouch, interview, summer 2005.

  12. Clara Bullard Pittman, interview, summer 2005.
/>   13. Ella (Christopher) Barnett, interview, summer 2005.

  14. Margaret B. (Cooper) Opie, interview, summer 2005.

  15. Sundiata Sadique (formerly Walter Brooks), interview, summer 2005. For more on the Nation of Islam, see Ogbar, Black Power, chap. 1; William L. Van Deburg, Hoodlums: Black Villains and Social Bandits in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004);and C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdsmans, 1993).

  16. Sadique, interview.

  17. Ibid.; Margaret Opie, interview.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Rustin, “Black Folks, White Folks,” 157. See William L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 27–28.

  23. Rustin, “Black Folks, White Folks,” 152.

  24. Robert Blauner, “Black Culture: Lower-Class Result or Ethnic Creation?” in Black Experience: Soul, ed. Lee Rainwater (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1973), 153–161.

  25. Ulf Hannerz, “The Significance of Soul,” based on fieldwork in Washington, D.C., July/August 1968, in Black Experience, 19.

  26. Alton Hornsby, Jr., interview, summer 2005.

  27. Witt, Black Hunger, 97.

  28. Hornsby, interview.

  29. Joseph “Mac” Johnson, interview, summer 2005; and Nora (Burns) White, interview, summer 2005.

  30. Joe Gray Taylor, Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South: An Informal History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 89.

  31. Barnett, interview.

  32. 1930 federal census of the villages of Tarrytown, North Tarrytown, Ossining, and the City of Mount Vernon.

  33. Barnett, interview.

  34. Reginald T. Ward, interview, summer 2005; Joseph Johnson, interview; and Pittman, interview.

  35. Ward, interview.

  36. Joseph Johnson, interview.

  37. Ibid

  38. “Soul Food Moves Down Town,” Sepia (Fort Worth, Tex.) 18 (May 1969): 46, 48–49.

  39. Pittman, interview.

  40. Ward, interview.

  41. Hornsby, interview.

  42. Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 29.

  43. “Soul Cookery Described on TV Series,” Daily Defender (Chicago), January 9, 1969, 24.

  44. Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 29.