Written: 6/27/24
Coming of Age
Puberty is one of those times in your life that you witness your body undergo changes that you weren’t even fully aware of that the body could undergo. Your neural pathways and hormones flood the body. In culture it’s called “coming of age”. While I was coming into this age, I watched my father coming into his own. My father was a Ph.D candidate for most of my childhood. I, a child of divorce watched my father from a distance. Watching him slowly ascend into his career, watching his extensive library grow and swell, full of cover with faces like mine. I watched him in the corners of cramped one bedroom apartments sipping hot tea, fingers rubbing across the pages of worn books, engraving a sound in my head that cannot be described but felt when I recall those memories. My father, the historian. Before my father, I cannot say that I knew of any black historians. Before my father took me in tow to department meetings or to sit in his office while he gathered papers to grade, I cannot say that I knew of anyone whose career was dedicated to the work, the life, of black history. Reflecting now, watching my father pursue his Ph.D and career as a historian of Africa and the African Diaspora, set the tone for my own second coming. As a child of two educators, my culinary pursuit is certainly written in the same font, from an education and historical perspective.
My time in culinary school became for me the climax and turning point for my culinary career. Everything I thought I knew, everything I thought I wanted changed during culinary school. Have you ever had this repetitive scene playout in your life over and over like a broken record, this sense of deja vu? For me, it’s the moment of realization that I do not belong in the room I’ve found myself in. The sobering realization that I’ve accumulated all that I could from this space, and the acknowledgment that where my desire, my thirst, is taking me next is beyond the four walls that I currently stand in.
My Legacy
Our assignment had been to envision and plan your life after culinary school-where did you want to work, how would you get there, what would you accomplish. In overachieving fashion, I wrote a manifesto. I allowed my thoughts and frustrations to spill on to the pages, stained with anger and a longing for vindication not yet materialized. I wrote about how I wanted to dedicate my life’s work to this singular idea: what the hell does it mean to be black? Birthed from the frustration and sadness of not seeing faces like mine in food media to then entering culinary school and realizing that the food world really doesn’t give a damn about black bodies as I stared into the eyes of my all white-male instructors. Yes, chef–as I time and time again inquired about black cultural cuisine only to be shown a recipe in our textbooks for jerk seasoning. The fans of internal rage were fanned when he scoffed at the idea of Juneteenth being declared a national holiday. When they wore the fact that they made the best gumbo, having never stepped foot into New Orleans, but Emeril Lagase was sufficient enough. When the black girl with the “funny” name was laughed at during the mispronunciation of her name. When black girls were mistaken for other black girls, because they can’t tell the difference “with all these braids”. Lips formed around the word “braids” like the chambers of a gun fit around a bullet, weaponized.
So I wrote a manifesto. I received an A for participation, but an F for understanding. His white Italian world could not comprehend how blackness and culinary could fit together, let alone be profitable. He could not understand a career in culinary outside of being inside the kitchen, or traditional food and beverage roles where I was expected to start at the bottom of the totem pole and yes, massa-yes, chef my way up the food chain allowing pieces of myself to be broken with every advancement. That was my moment of revelation. I had outgrown this space. I had reached the brim on what culinary school could offer me, and if I was going to be courageous enough to pursue those things I had outlined in my manifesto, it was going to require piecing together my own education. Three years ago, I began to outline what is now known as my culinary thesis.
Excerpt from my Culinary Manifesto (circa 2021)
“...to discover what it means to be African American through food and curate the African American experience which is expressed through culinary art. Using culinary arts as the medium, it is the vehicle to facilitate and promote conversation on race, identity and belonging.
“Once I have discovered what it means to be African American and how that can be displayed through the culinary arts, I can then redefine, or define it on my own terms. I want to represent something beyond simply fusion cuisine, I want to represent the essence of the modern African American experience that is not limited to slops and scraps, but still holds space for and honors the traditions of those who forged a path before me.”
“To create culinary experiences that showcases history and heritage while claiming its own place within history. My legacy will be to write the narrative of the modern Negro through culinary arts, to stand as the modern tradition of oral history passing and storytelling…”
A Culinary Thesis
Over time, I have refined this thesis, reexamined this thesis and goal through different lenses, but at the heart of it, what has remained has been the pursuit of understanding what it means to be black, and learning so through food. This pursuit has been nothing short of painful. The pain of realizing that I know nothing about blackness, even as a daughter of black historian, who specializes in black history. This pursuit has shown me that I have not to this point been an active participant in learning, sharing, or documenting the history to which I belonged. This same realization made me feel fraudulent to even begin such a pursuit. This manifesto, this declaration made me feel like an Uncle Tom. It made me feel as if I had no right trying to stick my nose in black business. It unearthed identity crises. I had always identified as black, while also never feeling like I wore the name comfortably. Considering maybe that I yell about blackness, just to feel heard. The black girl who was too black for white people, and too white for black people, never clearly belonging. Then enters the identity crisis associated with being African American. Having genetic relation to your African brothers and sisters, but existing in a world so far, so vastly different, that it feels out of place to claim connection to the same land you share. Your connection to a land only through ancestry reports and imagination. To know that America isn’t the point of your origin story, but a large portion of it. Tracing my ancestry through the west banks of Africa to the west banks of New Orleans by way of Haiti and other Caribbean islands. I know that I am Black, I see my skin tone, I cannot escape the way that white eyes fix themselves onto me, target locked. I know I am Black when I think about Sunday dinners, and black-isms. “Stay black and die”. And even that still begs the question, how do you stay black? I was born black, I am aware of this blackness, but this blackness doesn’t feel like it belongs to me.
It’s funny that I’ve even called it a thesis. As a child of two educators, with a long time of educators before that, it makes sense why I was tickled, proud of myself for thinking to call this pursuit my culinary thesis–it was witty. But by definition, a thesis is a statement as a premise to be maintained or proved. At this point, the only statement that I have really made in the last three years of this pursuit, is that I still know nothing about blackness. What I have gathered is that I am not the only one. This process of piecing together my own education to become an expert, or at least more educated, in blackness and black foodways, I began to learn how to ask questions and to start reading more than I probably have since being an English major. One of those books being “The Cooking Gene” by Michael Twitty.
Up until coming across this book, I had honestly felt lost in my pursuit, and often questioned if it was something worth pursuing, or if I was passionate enough about it to keep pursuing it. Its hard to explain the frustration of being a black woman, who wants to pursue and excel in black food, realizing that simply being black wasn’t enough of a qualifier. But in the pages of this book, I finally felt heard. I was no longer black girl, too black for the whites and too white for the blacks. I was a black woman on a journey, a path that other black persons on similar pursuits had journeyed. There was a comfort in knowing that allowed me to anchor myself. Early in the book, Twitty has a conversation with Theresa Nelson, a black culinary historian. She talks about how black history has largely not been taught, not taught in schools and met with silence when asking our elders. The absence of being instilled with black pride and history caused Nelson to feel like a fraud. “Put all of that together from not learning my history at school and only knowing a little bit from home, and I felt fraudulent because I didn’t know my roots, I didn’t know where to start.”
That line caused me to pause, to close the book and weep. YES. Someone understood. I could now understand the many changes I watched my father undergo in the pursuit of his Ph.D. I could understand why it was so important for us to take ancestry DNA tests, why he encouraged us to call my grandmother and ask her questions about her childhood while she was still living. The pursuit of his Ph.D., was rooted in the longing for understanding and self-discovery as is my pursuit. Now at 29, I can begin to appreciate the gifts my father gave me, such as texts like “The Classic Slave Narratives” that I didn’t appreciate at 8, when other kids were getting American dolls. My father was trying to instill in me black pride and history, that he knew at this age, my age, would be seeking desperately for.