Abstract
To reach for one’s past is not about mindlessly following customs. It is not agentless. Ms. Bea had to selectively recall the past and make recollections fit within a present context . . . When Ms. Bea drew on her past, she recalled her 1960s Lexington, Mississippi household where her mother did all the cooking. . .her fondest memories of dinner were when they had cabbage, greens, cornbread, sweet potatoes, and fried chicken.
Ms. Bea’s food voice (Hauck-Lawson 1998) reminds me of my grandmothers. Eva Mae Jackson was my father’s mother and Willie Mae Anderson was my mother’s mother. Eva Mae was raised outside of Waco, Texas, and Willie Mae, in rural Pitt County, North Carolina. I spent a lot of time with both as a child through my high school years and have beautiful memories of my favorite foods they cooked. Eva Mae made the best fried pork steak and creamed corn from scratch in the South, while Willie Mae’s homemade chicken and rice with collards, white potatoes, and hot water cornbread was a staple in my family.
As I was preparing to write this reflection on Joseph Ewoodzie’s Getting Something to Eat in Jackson, I called my parents to ask them about their food memories of their mothers: “Eva Mae’s food,” my daddy said to me, was assurance, comfort, love . . . because I knew it was prepared right . . . no matter what, even when she worked at the restaurant, I had food, even up until the time she started getting sick . . . She did the best she could, with what she had. We wasn’t poor poor, we were comfortable, and she was the hardest working person I’ve ever known.
When I asked my mother about Willie Mae’s food, she said, Lord knows Willie Mae could cook . . . her food gave me a feeling of safety, I never had to worry about being hungry, she always made sure we had food on the table, all three meals. She would take a cabbage, put it in water and boil it with white potatoes, one ham hock, and a little salt . . . she would make stew beef in the oven . . . and those pies, chocolate pies, and banana pudding . . . once the pudding was cool, she could flip it, hold it up and it would never fall out. We never went hungry. They grew the food, took it out their gardens and cooked it.
Thinking with my parents, the food that my grandmothers prepared were sources of care, security, love, and protection. In a world where Black people are deemed inferior, Black women across the world like my grandmothers and Ms. Bea operate in the shadows of time and space transforming food into a portal for the sustainability of Black life. Marvalene H. Hughes (1997:272) writes that a Black woman’s “expressions of love, nurturance, creativity, sharing, patience, economic frustration, survival, and the very core of her African heritage are embodied in her meal preparation.” Reading Ms. Bea’s food voice, Ewoodzie picks up on this line of thought, forcing us to reposition Black women from the crevices of Black life and to recognize their full humanity as they struggle to get us something to eat. Black women play a critical role in shaping the sociology of food in Black life through the lens of what Black writer Alice Walker described as a “womanist” theoretical aesthetic (Walker 1983).
Sociologist Cheryl Townsend Gilkes (1992:149–51) writes that womanist theory is “a dynamic paradigm for thinking about African American women’s experience.” She argues that womanist theory is “an important matrix for interdisciplinary dialogue and multidisciplinary investigation” that “assumes women’s agency and points to the conscious action of African American women in shaping and reshaping community institutions as their work and their life circumstances mobilize them, as migration occurs.” This matrix of womanism cuts deeply through the race, class, and food dimensions of Ewoodzie’s project and offers us notes on understanding the often unseen or simply overlooked food lives of Black women.
To conclude, Ewoodzie’s curated scenes of Ms. Bea’s life from home to work to church to the grocery store amid life changes brings gender to the forefront of Black food spaces and calls us to think critically about Black women. Black women like my grandmothers and so many other unnamed Black women who use food to decipher and overcome life’s challenges. “These mothers, grandmothers, daughters, nieces, sisters, and friends,” Psyche Williams-Forson (2021:173) writes in Bryant Terry’s Black Food, “carr[y] their individual and collective power through care and feeding.” Such power wielded by Black women is always at risk of being disrupted by a myriad of inequalities as Ewoodzie makes clear. But at the same time this power helps so many of us continue our pursuit to become everything Black women like my grandmothers had hoped and prayed that we would be. Just like Ms. Bea, many Black women envision the future through the lens of their food past as they continue to make sense of the present.