Toni will be sharing the story of The Jemima Code at the African-American Foodways dinner at the Roadhouse, Tuesday evening, January 22. This event will revolve around food, as we taste dishes prepared from some of the African-American cookbooks that form the core of the project. While we’re eat- ing, Toni will give an overview of the Jemima Code. Tickets are $45 and you can reserve your spot by calling 734.663.3663.

Toni will also give a special presentation at ZingTrain on the evening of Wednesday, January 23rd. This event will feature a presentation by Toni on the topic of diversity in the work- place. We’ll also have some snacks to tide you over, because it can’t be a Zingerman’s event without any food! Tickets are $25, $10 for students.

Both events will provide an opportunity to see the amazing, nearly eight-foot high photos of “the ladies” (as Toni calls the African-American cooks, and cookbook authors) featured in the project.

I’m thrilled to have Toni up in Ann Arbor to share her story. Here’s a little preview interview I did with her just before the holidays:

ARI: Hi Toni! I’m really excited and honored that we get to host you for these events. Can you tell everyone a bit about the project?

TONI: The Jemima Code is my way to tie together real African-American cooks to American culinary history so that we can view them as role models instead of the kind of the kitchen laborer, “idiot-savant” figures they’ve been portrayed to be in plantation history. Even though we have a lot of African-American culinary history recorded, it’s mostly known only in academic settings, and that has a very limited reach. The contributions of these great African-American culinary professionals of the last 150 years are obscured in an era of Food Network stars.
Historically, African-American cooks were defined by plantation cooking. But they were never acknowledged for the great food that they cooked at work, in their professional contexts. It really doesn’t make sense that way. We recognize Charlie Trotter or Rachel Ray or any of the modern celebrities for the cooking that they share with us on a professional level. We don’t evaluate them for what they do at home for their kids. So, I wanted to see what these African-American cooks had done in their day-to-day work, and do it without looking through the lens of sexism or racism. If we were only going to evaluate these women and men on their culinary ability on a professional level, what would we see?
That’s how I feel we’ll be able to use them as role models. When you look at them as a group, you can see that they brought a wide range of skills and that we can learn from their work at many levels. We can learn from them about healthy cooking. We can learn about vegetarianism because there were some that did that for a living. We can learn about beautiful food from the ones that were amazing professional caterers. We can learn about order in the kitchen, we can learn about entrepreneurial skill from women like Abby Fisher and Malinda Russell who had small businesses back in the 19th century. They’re all things that we just don’t stop long enough to think about. But, they had to be good business people or they wouldn’t have been able to sell their products in the market.
I wanted to get real people to talk about their history and real cooking. People like Freda de Knight. She wrote the Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish in 1948. It was an anthology cookbook, and it takes the home cook all the way from appetizers to desserts. One of the things she made clear with that book is that it’s not true that African-American cooks can only cook Southern dishes.
So that’s my goal with the project. To get people thinking about the great professional culinary contribution of African-American cooks, and making the work they did relevant to people of every age and every background.

ARI: What got you thinking about it?

TONI: A long time ago when I was a reporter at the L.A. Times I discovered there were lots of references in Southern books to African-American cooks but they were generally just acknowledged for providing the labor in the kitchen. The black cook was dismissed as an afterthought. And that just did not mesh with my own experience. So being a good reporter I started looking for a primary source, someone to interview. I was just trying to gather as much information as I could. And cookbooks were the logical place to get that first person report. So I started collecting cook- books written by African-Americans.
John Egerton, who writes beautifully about Southern history, food and culture, and was one of the founders of the Southern Foodways Alliance, got me started on the cookbooks. I was a young naïve journalist and I hadn’t gotten much affirmation for my work. But, I went to hear him speak; he had a Xerox copy of a book he had just encountered at the Library of Congress. I started talking to him, and he said, “I didn’t know what I was gonna do with this when I made the copy, but you should have it.” And what he told me was validated by a talk I had with Jan Longone (founder of the Longone Center for Culinary Research,and Culinary Curator at University of Michigan’s William L. Clements Library)
Doris Witt wrote a great book called, Black Hunger: Soul Food And America in 2004. There’s a bibliography in the back and I decided I was going to get a copy of each book. So, every time I was able to find and buy one of the books I would cross it off the list. When eBay got going I started finding them all over. I paid a lot of money for some them. It became almost an obsession for me. And now I have almost all of those on the list!

ARI: What’s your background? How long have you been working with culinary history?

TONI: I’ve spent about twenty-five years as a food and nutrition reporter. I grew up in LA. My parents came from the South but they left skid marks when they moved west. They didn’t talk about the South much at all. The only connection I had was through relatives. My mother was vegetarian, a tofu- and yogurt- eating Californian. I was a beach girl. And I started at the LA Times as a food and nutrition writer right out of college. But as an African-American I was invisible on a staff of 16. I was working for Ruth Reichl when the job of Food Editor at the Plain Dealer in Cleveland became available. She said “Of course you have to take this job if you want to pursue this writing and your books.” As part of a staff of 16 at the Times I would never have been invited anywhere. So, when the Cleveland Plain Dealer offered me a position as a food writer I decided to take it. While I was there, John Egerton invited me to the first meeting of the Southern Foodways Alliance back in 1997. So, I’ve been around food history for a long time.
One important thing that happened to advance the project in Cleveland was a woman named Vera Beck who ran the test kitchen at the Plain Dealer. She was from Alabama. She was the most gracious, generous, amazing cook, but she was completely dismissed and disregarded at the paper. I never got over that, or forgot it. She helped me get in touch with my Southern self. Growing up as I did, I didn’t have much connection to my Southern roots. She really helped me connect with the food she would cook for my breakfast while I was pregnant with my middle son—grits, fried green tomatoes, biscuits—things that I love. I got to see in her the expression of love and wisdom that was communicated in her food. And I saw it in a professional way that I hadn’t seen in my aunts when they were cooking at home when I was growing up.

ARI: What has the reaction been to The Jemima Code so far?

TONI: So far, it’s been really amazing and surprising. When I first started, I was giving the talks with just the photographic images of the women from The Bluegrass Cookbook [by Minnie Fox, which Toni has published in facsimile] in beautiful ornate picture frames. And then the next iteration was to put the photo images into a slide show. But then, I was invited to install an exhibit of the cookbook authors in Houston. I thought “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could make it so other people had the same reaction to these women that I did?” There’s a mix of reactions. There’s an expression of pride, like, “These are my people and they contributed in ways I didn’t know about.” There’s a little bit of angst, too, that comes out when other people view the images, especially in the South. The audiences in the South are pretty quiet when I present. But after I speak there’s always a long line to come up and ask me questions or make private comments as people wrap their heads around it in a personal way.
That’s what’s been so cool about blowing the images up to such a big size. Why 7-1⁄2 foot tall images? That was just the height of the ceiling at Project Row Houses where we showed them in Houston. I didn’t want them to seem too big because black women were so often portrayed that way. But, it turned out that the size is ideal for engaging people on a deeply personal level. For instance, connecting with “the ladies” allowed people from the South to explore a part of their upbringing that you hadn’t been allowed to talk about. A friend from Charleston once talked to me about how he worshipped this black woman who was in the kitchen when he was growing up, but then hearing his family disparaging black people in the living room was very unsettling. He’s not the only one that talked about having to close their whole memory about that era, but this exhibit allows them to reopen that set of memories. In that sense, it’s an extension of the work of Southern Foodways Alliance. The South still has plenty of wounds to heal.

ARI: What were the biggest learnings you had while you were doing the work?\

TONI: The black cooks become a pivot point. One of the most valuable learnings is how much evidence there was out there for the positive role that African-American culinary professionals played in creating Southern food. But at the same time it was surprising how little there is. If it weren’t for these old cookbooks, we wouldn’t have much perspective on these women in their own words. There are two sides to every story, of course. But, somehow their side of the Southern food story was never told. This project has reinforced for me the need to be open to more than one view and to encourage others to do that too. The exhibit can be the first encounter some people have with these women and their professional work.
The reaction people have the moment they see the images can be very powerful. I didn’t see the first set of images when the graphic designer sent them until I unrolled them in Houston for the first exhibit we did. And as soon as I saw them, I started crying and I literally fell down on the floor. It took my breath away because it was such a powerful proof for me that what I’d been long believing in my heart was true. And that I was gonna be able to get the word out and provide the way for them to tell their story. Through the images the women were really speaking for themselves. And that’s what this exhibit and the book (available Fall 2013) do for me.

ARI: What are some of the most prominent contributions of African-Americans to modern day American cookery?

TONI: Robert Roberts is fascinating. His book is the rarest one I have in my collection. It’s from 1827 in Boston. He was the butler for the governor of Massachusetts. The book has been available in facsimile for years. But I recently obtained a first edition. I have been to the mansion where he wrote and worked near Boston. So, I got to see the kitchen that he worked in every day and it gave more life to the work I was doing on the project. What he did in the early 19th century was to set out a course that showed that African-American cooks were so much more than just faceless hands that stirred the pots. His book was really written for the next generation of employees. It’s basically a training manual. He was sharing what he believed was important in the ways you run a household on a professional level: how to organize the house, the proper order for things, how to train servants, house management. He addresses all that. And when you can see an African-American in charge of a very well run, very upscale, very professional kitchen like that, you see that the stereotypes people had of black cooks were completely wrong. It’s the opposite of the stereotypes. What Robert Roberts does is to set the table for all the future authors. From his voice going forward, nothing that we’ve been told about these people can completely define them. They offer so much more than people know them for.

ARI: What about some of the least known?

TONI: I love Dori Sanders. Her cookbook is Dori Sanders’ Country Cooking. And she wrote a novel as well, called, Clover. She’s so gracious and generous. When you read her material you can hear her grandmotherly voice. She forces you to think about things; she challenges you.

ARI: I love her writing, and I love her. She’s an amazing woman! Who else comes to mind?

TONI: B. Smith teaches that black cooking can be elegant party cooking. Or Lucille Bishop Smith. Her goal was to lift culinary arts from the commonplace. These authors were keenly aware of the social circumstances in which they were working. They used their food and their words to uplift their community. Some of them were caterers and cooking-school teachers. They were witty and they created original recipes. There was all this competency and insight. And despite what others said, that African-American cooks couldn’t do this or that, they did lots of things and did them well. And they transferred their knowledge about food and cooking very eloquently.

ARI: Any thoughts about coming to Ann Arbor?

TONI: I’m thrilled to be coming back. I love that (African-American cookbook author) Howard Page is from the area. His work was profound. Or Mother Waddles of Detroit. I love to be in a place where the authors I’ve been researching and writing about are from.
I’m excited too because I get to see Jan Longone and her collection at the University. She was so supportive of my work. She was so excited when she found the original copy of the Malinda Russell book. It’s the first African-American cookbook published that is primarily recipes. (Roberts‘ book includes home care instruction as well as recipes.) She put it out in 1866. Mrs. Russell was from Paw Paw, Michigan. When Jan obtained an original copy she told me that, “if anyone should be involved with this book it’s you.” That’s the same experience I had with John Egerton. He believed in what I was doing. The other really fun thing about visiting the Clements Library collection with Jan Longone is that we once shared the pursuit of a book that is now in my collection. The book is Eliza’s Cookbook and it was published in 1936. Back in the early days of eBay, I used to just throw in a name of one the cookbooks I was looking for and see if anything would turn up. Miraculously, Eliza popped up for a dollar! I hadn’t done any bidding on eBay, but I got my neighbor to show me how to do it. I waited until the last minute and then I put my bid in and then someone else started bidding against me, and I started freaking out because the bids kept going up. I ended up buying it for a lot of money. Later, when I showed the slides of all the books, including that one, at a talk I gave at the Clements Library, Jan Longone stood up and smiled and said, “That was you that was bidding for this?!”

ARI: When do you hope to have The Jemima Code book out?

TONI: The hope is that it will be published next fall (2013). It’s a bibliography of my collection. I review 200 books that cover a span of 175 years and include photos of the books, their recipes, illustrations, and photographs of the cooks.

ARI: What do you think the most important things are for people to know about the role of food and cooking in the African-American community?

TONI: That African-American cooking is far broader than the dozen or so dishes that are usually credited to them. That examining the publishing they did establishes a social history for them as well. There was proficiency and skill in the professional African-American culinary community all over the country and it all beyond goes so far beyond the pigeonholed, stereotyped version of a black Southern cooking of biscuits and cornbread and sweet potatoes.

The State Department is deploying a new, elite force onto the precarious stage of international diplomacy. More than 80 top chefs from across the nation were inducted into the first-ever American Chef Corps on Friday.

How will these culinary soldiers serve their country? The Associated Press says:

“These food experts could help the State Department prepare meals for visiting dignitaries, travel to U.S. embassies abroad for educational programs with foreign audiences or host culinary experts from around the world in their U.S. kitchens.”

The list of chefs is enough to make most Americans salivate: Jose Andres, Top Chef competitors Mike Isabella and Bryan Voltaggio, Ming Tsai, Art Smith, Vikram Sunderam, Rick Bayless and Alex Young, to name a few.

click here to read the full article

If you’re from New Orleans, you might feel immediately at home coming inside the Roadhouse and ordering a really great po’boy sandwich. If you’re not from that fabled city than you might not even be familiar with this Louisiana favorite at all. The po’boy has a history as rich and multi-cultural as jazz music, and after eating one you’ll feel as content as if Mr. Louis Armstrong himself was crooning in your ear.

It reportedly all began in 1929 during the transit strike in New Orleans. Many people that lived in the city were sympathetic to the union workers who were striking. These workers couldn’t leave the picket lines in order to eat, and since they were currently unemployed, they also had no money. Bennie and Clovis Martin, the owners of the Martin Brother’s Coffee Stand and Restaurant, were former streetcar operators and members of the employee’s union and were among those who sided with the union members. They got a local Italian baker to make 40-inch long, evenly rectangular loaves for them so there would be less bread waste. Then they filled these with fried potatoes and brought them to the men on the picket lines. They fed these sandwiches to the “poor boys” on the picket lines at no charge until the strike was over. The strike may have ended, but the sandwich, and its name, stuck.

Here at the Roadhouse, we take a great loaf of soft french bread from our Bakehouse, load it full of crispy fried shrimp or catfish and pile it high with shredded lettuce and absolutely delicious tomato relish. We know you’ll enjoy it whether you’re from New Orleans or just around the corner!

I would be crazily remiss to talk about life in Ann Arbor without mentioning Zingerman’s Deli. These folks opened in 1982–yep, that is 30 years ago, meaning not that far off from the time period when Perrier was considered to be a human being (as I previously mentioned) and if you asked for a “knish” you might very well have been responded to with a “Gesundheit.”

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” — Gandhi

On Saturday, March 10, director (and Ann Arbor native) Graham Meriwether brings his film “American Meat” to town for its Michigan debut. Co-sponsored by Slow Food Huron Valley (of which I am a board member), Real Time Farms and Zingerman’s Roadhouse, the film “looks at our agriculture from the perspective of the farmers, and provides real, everyday solutions for how we can shape our food system,” says Meriwether.

Read the full article.

If I’d been writing this piece a little over a year ago, I’d have said that few Americans knew much about Tunisia. While a fair few had probably heard the name, only tiny percentage could have correctly and quickly pointed it out on a map. In the last year though Tunisia has emerged from the political shadows—the “Arab Spring” that started in Tunis a little over a year ago put Tunisia into the headlines. Still, few Americans know much about Tunisia’s history, and even fewer still have had any experience with its food. We at Zingerman’s have been working hard to change that—we love Tunisian food and culture and have been studying it, serving it and selling it, with ever greater frequency over the last few years.

We continue our campaign for Tunisian cuisine this coming spring when we feature the foods of the Tunisian Jewish community for a special dinner at Zingerman’s Roadhouse on the evening of Wednesday, April 4.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Tunisia sits pretty much in the center of North Africa, squeezed up against the Mediterranean Sea, between the far larger lands of Libya (to the east) and Algeria (to its west). Having been to visit twice in the last three years, I will say that it far exceeded my expectations on almost every level. Both culturally and culinarily, I found it one of the most intriguing places that I’ve ever been to. It’s is small (population, roughly 10,000.000) with a relatively high standard of living for a Third World country, impressively high levels of education and health care, and a much freer environment for women than I expected to find. It’s a country with a history that dates back to ancient Carthage, one whose citizens include both Hannibal and St Augustine.

The main thing for me though was that I fell in love with the food. While it has elements common to what you might imagine in North Africa (couscous, harissa, preserved lemons, etc.) it’s also has a great deal in common with the food of Sicily (just to the North) and ancient Greece (to the east). Tunisian food is deliciously flavorful, exotic yet accessible, totally foreign, and yet still oddly familiar. Olive oil, olives, a great deal of seafood, spices, vegetables, lamb, and fruit all show up in force in Tunisian cooking. The most prominent flavor in Tunisia though is probably its harissa, the spicy chile pepper tapenade that’s served with and in most everything.

Jews have been living in Tunisia for thousands of years, at least since the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem and well before there were Christians or Moslems. As they have everywhere, the Tunisian Jews adapted the local foods to Jewish tradition and the laws of kashrut. At its peak before 1948 the Jewish population was over 100,000. After independence in 1956, the majority of Tunisian Jews emigrated, mostly to France and to Israel. But, of course, they carried their cooking traditions with them and this special dinner will be a tribute to that cooking.

Today there are only about 1200 Jews left in Tunisia. Most of Jewish life today—and in its heyday—was centered around the island of Djerba and the Tunis suburb of La Goulette. At one time the latter was home to over a dozen different synagogues. The beautiful jewel box of a synagogue at Djerba remains open to this day and the Grand Synagogue of Tunisia is also still open in central Tunis.

One of the best known of Tunisian Jews is the writer, Albert Memmi. Author of the semi-autobiographical Pillar of Salt (one of my favorite works of fiction) and the non-fiction mid-20th century class, “The Colonizer and the Colonized,” Memmi, like so many Jews left Tunisia for France in 1956. Memmi’s fictional works are insightful, thought provoking, challenging and intellectually engaging; they also include some wonderful food references and this dinner will draw on his work. The dinner will be led by two Roadhouse staffers—Amos Arinda and Sarah Mays—who have been studying the food and history of Tunisia for over two years now. They’ll be cooking along with Roadhouse chef and managing partner Alex Young. To reserve a seat call the Roadhouse at 734-663-3663.

Reserve a seat to this special dinner here.

Hola, seekers of all things culinarily magnificent! Today’s review is one that’s close to my heart, because it resides in what I consider to be my hometown, Ann Arbor, Michigan (the hospital I was born in is there, so that counts, right? ).

For those who fancy themselves a hardcore foodie, the name Zingerman’s should already be on your short list when it comes to places to eat or order food from.

Click for the full review

I first met Audrey Petty at the Southern Foodways Symposium in Oxford, Mississippi. We got on well from the get go. I LOVED the essay she wrote on “Chitlins”—I actually read it to the audience at our first annual African American foodways dinner back in 2005. I’m really excited to have her hear to speak to us this year at our 7th annual dinner!

Ari: I’m thinking it’s about eight years now since we first met at Southern Foodways. I know that you and I both grew up in Chicago, we’re both fascinated with food, culture and history and we both like to write. But maybe you could give folks a sense of your background?

Audrey: Well, I’m a writer. I’m a Southsider by birth. Born in Chicago and, after living all over for most of my adult life, I’m back living there again. I grew up in Chatham, on the far South Side, off 83rd and Cottage Grove on a little street called Langley. When I was 7 we moved up to Hyde Park. My mom was a career music teacher. We all made music as kids. My dad was a chemist. My dad grew up in a coal mining town Alabama. My mom grew up in southern Arkansas. They met in college in Alabama, got married in Texarkana, and then they moved here.

I went to Knox College and that’s where I gave myself permission to really write more seriously. They had (and still have) a great creative writing program and I tried out writing stories and kept going. Decided I wanted to go to France. So I spent a year in Besancon in the Franche-Comte, and that cemented my interest in writing. Living in France made me a lot more conscious of language and what it took to come to a different fluency by living in that culture.

I came back to Knox and waited tables and worked as a teaching assistant. I already knew that I wanted to teach. My mom came from a long line of teachers. Teaching was always in the air as a great way to live and to connect. I knew it was for me. I knew I wanted to teach. So I did go on to grad school at U Mass where I worked with John Wideman. He’s an African American writer from Pittsburgh who writes a lot about place, a lot about memory of place. He grew up in a neighborhood in Pittsburgh called Homewood. His writing and his mentorship really inspired me.

From grad school, I went back to Knox and taught a creative writing classes, literature classes, and an interdisciplinary seminar on slavery in America that took me to the slave coast and got me very interested in studying how the West African folkways were carried into African American traditions. At Knox I taught with (poet) Beth Ann Fennelly and that’s how I learned about the Southern Foodways Alliance. It was like no other community I’d been part of before. All these connections became really electric. It got me thinking about things I’d never really thought about it and it made me look at my personal history really differently. It got me to taste food really differently. (SFA director) John T. Edge asked me if I wanted to do something at the Symposium the year that the topic was “Race and Food.”

Ari: I remember that year really vividly. It was hugely powerful for me. There were great speakers—Bernard Lafayette (who’d worked with Dr. King) spoke about the Civil Rights movement and food. Jazz musician Olu Dara and the Reverend Will Campbell both came back to Mississippi for that conference and it was the first either had been back for decades since leaving under duress during the Civil Rights Movement. There was also a panel called “Mammy and Ole Miss: Domestic Relations”—and that was long before the book, “The Help” came out.

Audrey: That’s where I read my piece on chitlins. When John T. was telling me about the symposium, I thought to myself, “I gotta write about chitlins.” I felt drawn to it because it was such an important food in my household but also because it was something you weren’t supposed to talk about. Writing that piece… it was really a pleasure to write. It became an opportunity to have a different relationship with my parents and the work received a really great response. That essay which led to all these great conversations. I figured there was more memory to revisit, and that I needed to follow the plate and follow what my parents had brought with them when they came up from the South. It got me to reframe some old questions and raised some new ones. I try to follow the questions. My mom passed last February and… it’s kind of like a whole new life without her here, but the things that I want to capture and record are a way of rediscovering her.

Ari: What are the questions that you’ve followed?

Audrey: I’ve been thinking about my dad… I wanted to know and sit with him and learn more about his boyhood and his coming of age. He’s a very modest man. Very soft spoken and a good listener. My mom was the singer and the performer and larger than life. And my dad was mostly in the background, observing. But the piece I wrote that ended up in Southern Review—”In Search of My Father’s Kitchen” was a lot about that. I wanted to ask him about where he came from. I wanted to know what it felt like for him when he first experienced the North after he moved up to Chicago from Alabama. And what it felt like to be serving people (in diners, restaurants and country clubs) during Jim Crow in his hometown and in the South-at-large. Having traveled to my parents’ hometowns and also to Oxford (so many times for Southern Foodways), I’ve realized that I eventually want to live in the South. And I tried to figure out what it was that was drawing me there; I think that in coming to closer term with my parents’ mortality, I know there’s something nourishing me about being back down there. I finally became clearer that this was a way for me to be with them even when the time comes that I can’t be with them physically. And also to give that tradition to my daughter. Writing about place and where we grew up, has made me think a lot more about what I want to pass on.

My mom dying made me rethink Chicago. She lived here for nearly fifty years. Except for returning for her father’s funeral (shortly after she’d graduated college), sShe never went back to Arkansas to the town of Eldorado where she grew up until we told her we wanted to go back there with her a few years ago (and we made the arrangements to make the trip as a family) I think there’s some part of me that still feels some sense of appreciation of Chicago as her chosen home, but there’s still this mystery about that small town in Arkansas, El Dorado, and I want to be able to spend time in the places that she mentioned to me.

Ari: What about the African American migrations from the South?

Audrey: My parents always presented the move to the North as matter of fact. My dad had a brother who’d relocated to Chicago to the west side and he ventured up a summer before he finished at Talladega College (founded in central Alabama in 1867, it’s the oldest black liberal arts college in the state). When he came up here he worked at a factory where they made cabinets. Eventually he’d work in the dining hall at Kraft Foods. He always described the decision to move as about his brother being in Chicago. He skipped over some about the part about being suddenly in this place where the all “codes” were different. It was certainly a segregated city back then but there were still a lot of freedoms he and my mother would have experienced that were significant and novel.

Traveling South with him over the past ten years or so has been a trip. Really, wonderful and emotional. We went to his hometown in Alabama and while we were there I could see him struggling with piecing it all together. Having this muscle memory of what it was like to be a boy in that place. There was a lot of stuff that they just swallowed. My mom would occasionally say more than my dad. She said “Mississippi was the worst of ‘em all.” As for relations with white people in the South, they were close with several teachers there who’d immigrated to the States having fled the Nazis. So they had in their history they had a real affection for a few folks who weren’t black. But Chicago was still a big leap for them in their deepening friendships with whites. They joined a multiracial Unitarian Church on the South Side and they had a white minister there whom they adored. Martin Luther King came to speak at Soldier Field and the congregation joined in the audience. They had this opportunity that they seized. Later on when pressed, my mom would tell me about ways that her dad was mistreated routinely while walking down the street in Eldorado. He was the school principal but he would be insulted by random white people as he ran errands around town. She talked about her sadness and her anger about that. But they didn’t really talk about it. I can count on one hand the times they talked about the brutalities of that system. The Jim Crow that they and thousands and thousands of other black folks fled.

Ari: Do you know some of the statistics on the migrations?

Audrey: Over 500,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago along between approximately 1916 and 1970. In 1910, Chicago’s black population was at 2 percent. By 1970, the population had increased to 33 percent of the city’s residents. The first big wave of the great migration hit in the 1940s and 1950s. My parents were definitely part of the second wave.

When I was first working on my novel I went and talked to my dad’s younger brother in Montgomery. He was able to trace my great, great-great-grandfather who was a slave in Virginia. After Emancipation, he made enough money to buy a parcel of land in Mississippi. That place is still in our family. My Uncle Andrew told me about a great uncle who was lynched. He carries a lot of our story.

Ari: What things would you want people to understand about African American experience of that era?

Audrey: From my own experience, looking at my parents, one thing I know more than ever is that it really matters to show interest and to ask people to talk about things that are difficult and important. It’s really worth it. It’s worth going back there to the South to experience the place (as it is now) in person. I think that another thing that I’m constantly interested in are the fingerprints of the migrations. The way the South is in Chicago. Hybridized, for sure, but the South was present in Chicago as I was coming up, whether it was what was on the table in my parents’ house, or in being able to sneak into blues clubs to hear music that my parents probably had ambivalent relationships to because it came from the place (and experience) that they wanted to make some distance with. I remember going to the Checkerboard Lounge (on Chicago’s Southside) and my parents being kind of bemused and bewildered about why I would seek out that sort of music in “that sort of place..” But I knew in some deep way that I was finding something there. I think I had a hunger for a deeper knowledge and understanding of where they had come from. So I’d say that there was a way that this Northern city informed me about where my parents had come from.

Ours came frozen solid in a red plastic bucket. Butchered and packaged by Armour. Ten pounds in all. Cleaned, they’d reduce to much less, not even filling my mother’s cast-iron pot.

We usually shared them in the wintertime, Momma and I. Negotiations regarding their appearance began weeks in advance, around the dinner table. My mother would tell my father she was considering fixing chitlins for the holidays. My father would groan, twist his mouth, and protest in vain.

“Why you got to be cooking them?”

My two sisters backed him up with exaggerated whimpers, calls for gas masks, threats to run away from home.

“I’ll cook them next Saturday,” Momma would say, suddenly matter-of-fact. Daddy would plan that next Saturday accordingly: out of the house for hours, in protest, then coming back with the Sunday papers, opening the living room windows wide before heading upstairs to read and watch football in his La-Z-Boy, behind a closed door.

My mother turned to me, smiling and winking. “You’ll help me eat them, won’t you?”

I nodded in time to my sisters’ gagging noises. I stuck my tongue out at anyone who cared.

I was actually a pleaser, plagued by the classic middle-child complex. With the exception of fierce bickering and the occasional smack-down match with my sisters, dissent tended to make me nervous. Maybe my love of chitlins all began with me feeling sorry for my mother. In terms of labor and attention, cooking proper chitlins is as involved as cooking paella or fufu or risotto Milanese. Cleaning them took hours. Hours. So I’d keep Momma company while she rinsed the tangles of pig intestines in the basement sink. And I’d sit with her in the kitchen once they’d simmered down to something that needed watching. By that time, the house was filled with their sharp scent. “Potatoes will absorb the odor,” Momma would insist during the negotiation phase. Everyone knew that absorb was too optimistic a word. The smell was pervasive—vinegary and slightly farmy. When one of my sisters would storm in, holding her nose, proclaiming her disgust, I’d puff out my bony chest and call her stupid.

I’d stay up late with Momma, and we’d eat the chitlins off of small saucers as a bedtime snack. For all their potent smell, their flavor was calm and subtle. They had a distinct taste; they didn’t remind me of anything. Their texture was pleasing, tender but not soft. My mother’s were never greasy, though I marveled at how the leftovers emerged from the fridge, congealed in a murky gelatin. Momma would warm up a few in a frying pan, and we’d douse them with hot sauce and put some cornbread on the side. They never failed to build a craving after the first bite. Precious, strange and furtive food, I longed for them even as I consumed them.

I am a first-generation Northerner. My mother was reared in a middle-class family in El Dorado, a boomtown in Southern Arkansas; my father, in a coal-mining camp in Alabama. The two met and fell in love in the late ‘50s, while students at Talladega (a historically black college in Alabama), married and then moved to Chicago. My sisters and I came of age in Hyde Park, at the time one of the city’s few intentionally racially integrated neighborhoods. My dearest friend was Jewish (and white). We shared Sassoon jeans, watermelon Now and Laters, Judy Blume books, a mania for Shawn Cassidy, and plenty of secrets. My mother grew to love Karyn, but in the first days of our acquaintance, her anxieties about our closeness showed itself. She had lots of questions about how I was treated by the Levins. Were they kind? Had they made me eat the matzo ball soup? Did Karyn have other black friends? What about her parents? Gradually it emerged: she was trying to prepare me for the prospect of rejection, once recalling to me how little white girls in El Dorado customarily grew out of their friendships with little black girls. At the time, my only response was confused irritation. Karyn was my best friend.

As my sisters and I reached adolescence, my parents became more visibly concerned about our assimilated ways. While the Jackson 5’s ABC had been our very first album and we still crowded around the television on Saturday afternoons to watch Soul Train, we also knew the entire content of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I even played air guitar. None of us showed much interest in attending a Talladega or a Howard or a Spelman. And, at seventeen I fell for a boy with blonde hair and blue eyes. He also fell for me. On more than one occasion, my sisters and I were summoned to a dialogue that began with my father’s question: “Do you all know that you’re black?” As adults, my sisters and I laugh about it now. My parents do, too. But their uneasiness was real and deadly serious, and I’d sensed it for years. Maybe I ate chitlins to please Momma and Daddy.

My grandfathers died before I was born; my grandmothers, when I was quite young. I have missed their embraces, their indulgence, and seeing my face in theirs. I have especially missed their stories. The down-South tales my parents passed on to me and my sisters were rather limited. We’d hear about my Uncle Booker T. setting the mean goat after my father or how my mother’s nickname came to stick. We learned that my father, his siblings and his cousins worked the family farm in Columbus, Mississippi and how the sections of the farm had names. The Five Acre. The Melon Patch. The Prayer Cut. We learned that my mother’s father was a high school principal and an avid fisherman, and that my mother’s mother taught piano and Latin. My parents gave us their South as best they could: in their politesse and their hymns and verses. In their ways with words. They gave us only what they hoped would be nourishing: a sip of pot liquor for our growing bodies and black-eyed peas for good luck at New Year’s dinner.

I never saw anyone’s chitlins but my family’s when I was coming up. At least a few of my classmates must have eaten chitlins at home, but I, for one, never raised the subject. Chicago was a Great Migration city, where a wave black folks had begun arriving in the early 1900s and had been redlined to black belts on the South and West Sides. That was my story and the story of so many of my childhood friends. We all had roots and people down South. And we ate like it, too. I remember red beans and rice at Kim Odoms’s house, fried gizzards at LaTonya Mott’s, and my junior-high business teacher eating take-out rib tips from Ribs n’ Bibs during our fourth period typing class. I remember hot sauce on everything. But chitlins were their own category of soul food. Chitlins were straight-up country. If you called someone country, you were calling that someone out. Country meant backwoods, backwards, barefoot, ‘Bama-fied. K-U-N-T-R-E-E.
I once believed that my father didn’t like chitlins because of how they smelled. That was his core complaint, but as I got older, I began to contemplate my father’s childhood and I formulated a more complex theory. My father had eight brothers and sisters; his father was a miner and a preacher and his mother was a domestic worker (a fact I discovered only this year). I assumed that Daddy rejected chitlins as suffering food—a struggling people’s inheritance. It wasn’t until just this year that I finally learned the truth. “He had a bad plate of chitlins as a boy,” my mother told me. “He never got over it.”

When my mother cleaned our chitlins, she never failed to stress how important it was to clean them well. This meant washing them, one intestine at a time, with a mild saltwater solution. “You don’t just eat any old body’s chitlins.” I knew this rule by heart. I’ve eaten chitlins at the hands of my mother and my aunts Mary and Annie Bell (my father’s sisters, who would occasionally make a pot when we’d all gather for Christmas). When a cafeteria called Soul by the Pound opened and quickly closed down on State Street, my mother was not at all surprised. “Black people don’t live that way. Risk-taking for no reason at all. Flying from bungee cords or buying all you can eat chitlins made by God knows who.”

My mother has not cooked a pot of chitlins in fifteen years. Perhaps the ritual ended the year I lived in France and sorely missed Christmas with my family. My mother and I shared a good laugh when I told her about chitlins in France, how they called them andouillette de Lyon and topped them with dijon mustard. I smelled them before I saw them, in a Left Bank bistro. Et voila!—there they were, on a nearby plate, wrapped tightly as sausage. I trusted the chef at Les Fontaines, but I couldn’t imagine eating his chitlins. Not without my mother’s company. And not without Louisiana-style hot sauce as generous seasoning.
As my mother has gotten used to the idea of me going public with our chitlin habit, she’s reminded me that she cooked hers with onion and a green bell pepper or two, and she also splashed in cider vinegar to taste. I’ve learned how some people add white bread instead of potatoes for the odor. And I’ve shared Momma’s excitement about the new technology in chitlin processing. “They really clean them now. More expensive, but you don’t have to do all that work.”
She doesn’t have to ask me twice; we have a date for chitlins this coming December.