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Portrait of a Cook as a Young Man
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I was born in D.C. which makes me a native Washingtonian!
I grew up in Washington and Montgomery County, Maryland off and on, back and forth.
I am a book addict, I have over 2,000 in my collection, and growing, and I have a story to tell.
Sometime in the fourth grade, my teacher asked us to do a project on our family history. My youngest uncle, tired from working day and night to complete his degree, took me aside after dinner and brought out maps and genealogical research he had been conducting since the year I was born (1977 — the year that Roots: An American Saga was televised). To that point, I loved learning about history, and cultures from all over the world. I grew up in a family that took Black history seriously and saw it as important to my upbringing and sense of self. Yet I never loved it more than when my uncle showed me where I came from. A couple of years later, Alex Haley died, and I was Roots-struck myself. The elders in our family were starting to pass away, and I wanted to know about Africa, the Deep South, and the migration of my family to the North and my connection to the land they once called home.
The “furthest-back” Americans I have in my blood line were Native Americans — some were Muskogee (Creek), others were Tutelo-Saponi, others were Cherokee and some were Choctaw. They were followed by English ancestors — who in part came from the family of Oliver Cromwell in 1674 to North Carolina; as well as Scots-Irish and Irish ancestors. Our family may also have Jewish roots, and that in part explains my connection to Judaism, my chosen spiritual path. My African ancestors — well the verdict is still out — came from at least Angola (the source of my grandfather’s first name), Ghana (or the Gold Coast of family legend), and quite possibly Senegambia (one of my ancestors was named Plenty — a name of Manding origin), and Southeastern Nigeria — the source from which many Igbo were brought to Prince Edward County, Virginia, the home of my maternal grandmother. My African ancestors were forcibly brought to Virginia and South Carolina at least over 230 years ago.
The Ellis Island of Black America |
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Praying at the Spot My Grandfather's Ancestors Entered America: Sullivan's Island, Charleston, SC |
As slavery became more entrenched, we spread out across the South — in central and southern Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Not only was my family part of the largest forced migration in world history, but it was part of the largest forced migration in American history as enslaved people were marched from the Tidewater to the Deep South, where cotton became big after the popularizing of Whitney's gin.
As a kid, I also loved experimenting and playing with food — I boiled up Indian corn trying to make my own hominy, and I spat out kush-kush and salt pork trying to re-create breakfast from 1790’s Virginia. I helped my grandmother and mother in the garden, and learned about growing tobacco, cotton and barbecuing from my Dad. Coming from a family of enthusiastic eaters I learned from my elders about the garden crops of the past, how they cooked things, and how they worked across the year and seasons. I also learned about how things changed drastically when they moved to the cities of the North and Midwest, and had to leave behind rural life. At the same time I loved to watch cooking shows and gardening shows. In the last two years of high school I grew cotton in the backyard and started learning about our history from the ground up. I spent half my summers collecting wild plants that my elders mentioned were edible or medicinal. Hanging around the A.M.E. church down the street, I learned about Spirit and started to take G-d more seriously as a source of personal guidance and direction. Fortunate to grow up in a culturally diverse area, I learned about Africa and the West Indies from my classmates, the children of immigrants.
Yet Africa was not far removed from my family. My grandfather negotiated contracts with railway Unions in East Africa, and lived all over the continent — in Liberia, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Kenya. My mother and her siblings spent several years in England and Kenya, and thanks to her I first learned how to count in Swahili as well as English. Our homes were peppered with pictures of men and women of the Kikuyu, Masai and Danakil. There was a drum covered with zebra skin; a portrait of an Ethiopian saint on parchment, albums of traditional music from the peoples of Liberia and Nigeria, and other reminders of my family’s experience during the first days of independence in Africa.
From eight to eighteen I made many trips with my family to our "homeplaces." I traveled to Russell County and Huntsville, Alabama--where the ancestors of my maternal grandparents are buried, and saw the sword my great-great-great grandfather used when he was a captain in the Confederacy. I visited Prince Edward County, Virginia with my father, and walked through red clay tobacco fields and tobacco barns built by my great-great grandparents just after Emancipation. My father took me on several trips to see my Grandfather and his family in Lancaster, South Carolina. To this day, unmarked quarry rock in a Baptist church cemetery stands as a monument to my great-grandfather — who left his descendants 100 acres of land when he died — rare for any Black man in his day. The cotton gin where my grandfather took his yearly crop still stands hollow as a husk. As far back as I can remember my imagination has been fired by the sensory impressions and memories left by my ancestors.
I started at Howard, and in my first years there I met a couple of very important people including Dr. Russell Adams, formerly the chair of Afro-American Studies, and Dr. Sandra Milner of blessed memory, Learning and traveling in a lot of places, I was hit with a number of influences both academic and spiritual — and I grew intellectually by learning about art history, cultural anthropology, Black political philosophies, Yoruba religion, Akan spirituality, Judaism, Islam, and Christian intellectual traditions. Through one of the first of several paid internships with the Smithsonian Institution, I met a man named John W. Franklin, who like his father, was a scholar of the African Diaspora and a supporter of Black students like me. Between the fantastic teachers I had in high school, family friends, the professors at Howard and American Universities, and my mentors and supervisors at the Smithsonian I was exposed to a wider world of people interested in the same questions that had fired my imagination since my boyhood.
The Smithsonian opened up a new path for me — working with the Center for Folklife and Cultural Studies. In what I call an ethnographic TGI Friday’s, I rubbed elbows with Cape Verdeans, wrote down recipes for tamales from the Mississippi Delta, and helped a South African woman build a traditional Swazi dwelling. I also learned about something folklorists called “foodways.” Finally in one word — there was my area of interest — the study of food as the product of culture, a part of identity, and not merely as the answer to a biological need. Starting with the African American, Jewish, Muslim and West African foods of D.C., I began to present at several Folklife festivals — including the Silk Road, American Food (the curator was my friend Joan Nathan), and got to know entirely new ways to approach food. Working for a brief period at the National Park Service, I lent books and advice for their program on Africanisms, led by my friend Brian Joyner and was a guest of the Park Service. That year in Atlanta, I was able to meet the leading scholars of African American material culture — Robert Farris Thompson, John Michael Vlach, Barbara Heath, Judith Carney and Mary Twining. Within a year I had delivered my second academic conference paper — on the relationship between traditional African religions and the foodways of Blacks in the New World.
George's Washington's Plantation |
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Paying my respects to the enslaved community of Mount Vernon, VA |
Over the next few years I would travel to as many sites as possible that had anything to do with the early colonial and antebellum South. I went in search of my history, in search of signs of slavery and its legacy. Most roads led to stories about the rich and powerful planters who owned the land; few sites made room for the enslaved person's experience. With that missing piece, I knew there was a story to tell--about slavery as a culture, a civilization that produced a unique folklife and from that, a unique approach to food. Power, race, class, heritage, tradition, and cultural dialogue all came together for me in the same stew of ideas.
Through another research project I got to meet with Tony Cohen, whose own journeys on the Underground Railroad led to his creating his own non-profit, the Menare Foundation, Inc. Menare uses living history to explore the history of slavery and the legacy of the Underground Railroad to educate and create dialogue, and promote personal and societal change. Tony found we had a lot in common and he told me about two farms in rural Montgomery County where he was developing them into living history sites and community supported agriculture projects where the past would meet the present in creative ways. I became his program director/Director of Interpretation, and I’m still at it. I also teach Hebrew school at four congregations in the community, grades 6-12.
Last year I finished the first of several self-directed projects on the community life and foodways of African Americans in the colonial and antebellum South. The first volume is Fighting Old Nep: The Foodways of Enslaved Afro-Marylanders 1634-1864. I wanted to put everything I had learned together from reading about slavery and the African experience, watching documentaries and cooking and gardening shows, visiting museums and the Library of Congress, classes, visits to twenty plus living history sites, doing interpretation myself, the Folklife festivals, and new found skills — wildcrafting (identifying and collecting edible wild plants and animals), open hearth cooking, heirloom gardening, and learning about heritage breeds — into one effort. Now I am pursuing it with all the passion I’ve got—getting my fingers dirty every spring and fall, cooking at the hearth, gathering in the woods and seeking out critters, and beginning to find out how to take care of livestock. Although I’m starting with the Upper South, I intend to spread my research interests across the South — from Maryland to Texas — I want to tell the story of how African foodways moved from one continent to the other, and from one person to another, and changed the world.
It’s been a long journey, but I hope to see more good things come to pass. I’ve done presentations at the Library of Congress, American University, the National Colonial Farm, Poplar Hill at His Lordship’s Kindness, The Partnership for Jewish Life and Learning, and many other organizations (see the contact page to see how I can do a presentation for yours!) I hold memberships in the Southern Foodways Alliance, the Historic Foodways Guild of Maryland, and the Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education (CAJE). This summer, I’ll be on the National Mall again with the Smithsonian, for the first time as a participant — presenting a garden of my own creation interpreting the agricultural and food traditions of African Virginians in the colonial era.
My next two books are already completed and on the way: I’m Gwine to Leave You: Sixteen Narratives by Former Maryland Slaves; and Simmons, Cymlins and Sweet Potato Pumpkins: The Foodways of Enslaved African Virginians 1619-1865. G-d willing there is more to come! I’ll keep you posted!