preparation beneath an old pine where the tire swing hang—the swing I often rode back and forth, up and down, pretending I captained a vessel along the steep billows of a tropical sea. I might have been a Caribbean pirate—like those the winds once dragged into Georgia ports—many of them, like the fleets of Blackbeard or Bartholomew Roberts, largely staffed with African crews, black men fueling their passion for pillaging and plundering with plantains and yams they first knew in nations along the West African shores. I might have pretended to drink as they did from tankards of rum distilled from the sugar cane captive Africans were compelled to sow and reap—the same sugar cane that generations of deep Southern, emancipated African Americans would grow and mill along with poor whites to produce the variety of rich, slow, black molasses and syrup in which I remember “sopping” the light biscuits my mom made from scratch whenever she fried the Mediterranean “mullet,” or Alaskan salmon croquettes to deep golden brown. Often, she deep fried local bream and catfish, too. Or bass. And there was mustard to spice the syrup. And hushpuppies—a Black Southern original inspired by or derived from the Mexican migrant tamales-and salads as sides. Such stories I can imbibe with the deep and pleasant ache of longing. Tell me yours and, in exchange, I’ll continue sharing mine. But such stories as these we ultimately have to actually see and smell and feel and taste. For that, we may need that fire I mentioned earlier. But a good stove will do. Memories, like history, are writ in blood, kindled like heat in the pulsing loam of the heart. I remember my Grand Grand stuffing oak and sweetgum logs into an old wood stove that belched smoke up through an aluminum chimney out the roof of a small, country home. She’d lift the metal eyes with an iron rod, plunge blocks of wood into flames that leaped licking to singe the bark before it settled. I wanted to stand close. But she told me to stand back.
This was dangerous. Only a small child, I was not initiated to kindle and harness the flames that both fed and warmed the home. The heat lived. The heat was life. I understand that now. It coaxed and quickened leaves and fruit and roots and flesh to food—feasts…crackling, crusting, dripping pans, pots, and plates of living lore. I remember my own mother always cooking over an electric stove. The spiraling eyes glowing orange red with voltage. Just like Grand Grand, no matter how hard she worked or how long—no matter how tired-Mama almost always cooked. And she’d sing as she chopped, sliced…rolled and kneaded…stirred. She sang songs from her youth that were songs from generations of youths long gone. Spirituals some were. Black gospel. Soundtracks to the meals she composed by memory—by feeling, she called it. A subliminal sense that transcended recipe—to treasure the palates and trove the soul. After all, to the degree that it is divine, humanity is a soul. That’s what the Christian heritage maintains. Theologians would confuse and confound it to mean that people have or possess a soul. But that’s not what the story says in Genesis. It says God breathed life into human beings and the human became a soul. When Africans became Christians--when the many nations and villages were dragged across the deep to claim their place in the motley, rhetorically human body of God--they performed the ancient identity in original ways unmistakably linked to lost lands and people that would become Ghana, Nigeria, Congo, Senegal, Gambia, etc in the “long ago and far away” of their absence. And those original ways involved traditions of food they performed according to the uniqueness of places throughout the new world--from islands to port towns to plantations, of course, and the myriad communities throughout the United States to which these sites of struggle dissolved. With time, Black Southerners called the shared performances “soul.” And the food it characterized was “soul food.” As such, it honors the life to which the human sculpted of topsoil might aspire and--by inspiration--be transformed. For when the United States armies conquered the region, they brought with them an apocalypse that soldered the
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