This week I want to pose a question to you. What rituals of healing and community have we overlooked? How do the rituals of our ancestors keep us connected to collective grief, but also collective healing? Can we properly access healing if we don’t acknowledge the pain, the sorrow, the grief? Is sorrow a collective and generational memory?
I remember I came up with this title, nothing else but a title. I knew it was going to be a nuanced piece about the Church’s role in our Sunday dinner rituals, as the history of Sunday dinners is rooted in chattel slavery practices, Sundays being the day that slaves were given to rest and attend church. When I think about my own family, Sunday dinners were a big thing, even when they weren’t treated as such, and when we didn’t have Sunday dinner, something was always missing. So, I let my mind wander, I let myself access memories and rooms I have nearly forgotten. Its funny how memories are only memories when you allow yourself to remember.
The Church’s Chicken: The Gospel Bird
Frying chicken is a labor of love. No one serves fried chicken because they hate you. Frying chicken is a labor intensive process that requires patience and a keen sense of timing. Buttermilk marinated, soaking in a fatty acidic pool of tears. How did fried chicken become the vessel of consoling black tears? At the end of a long week, a week spent with the anxiety of existing in a world where you have to be aware of yourself and how you allow yourself to show up, we offer ourselves a plate of chicken to wash over our worn souls. Soul food. I believe that soul food may indeed be more than the food we eat on Sundays, beyond the comforting nostalgia of the Sunday spread that reminds us of our maternal figures. Beyond the food that transports you back to the bend of your grandmother’s elbow as you watch from the distance as she stirs bowls of cornbread batter, the skin of her elbow bending and folding as she moves around the bowl, ensuring that every piece of cornmeal has been incorporated.
When I think about fried chicken I see my grandmother, my Nana, standing over a cast iron pan, dust covering her pants, thumbprints scattered in seemingly random places, a smudge of flour above her brow from using the back of her hand to brush back the hair that had fallen into her face, catching the formation of a bead of sweat. She stands there– worn house shoes on her feet that are nearly too big, but the worn grooves have become molded to her feet, still providing room for her swelling feet to expand and protecting her feet from the heat blowing from the vent just above her toes. Without them, at some point the heat would become unbearable and begin to sting and burn your flesh. I still don't understand how we got a heating vent under the stove, but nevertheless. She leans her body towards the pan, barely tall enough to reach the farthest piece of chicken. The kitchen in disarray. An open bag of flour, because the canister never seems to have enough flour in it as soon as you need it, buttermilk still sitting on the counter sweating from the warmth of the room. Always a box of Morton’s kosher salt, black pepper, and a large container of Lawry’s seasoning salt that could have only been obtained from Sam’s Club. Other bottles of seasoning pushed into the background of an already cluttered countertop.
When she died we served fried chicken at her repass, using the crunch of the golden fried, crispy skin like a stopper to contain the ocean of tears trying to escape from my eyes. Clear plastic plates fill the room and pass me like strangers on the street, plates still not strong enough to hold the weight of the sorrow in my chest. I wonder the amount of tears that were shed when my grandmother made fried chicken. Did she make herself fried chicken after her diagnosis, did she console herself with bird after her mother died? Did she stare over a plate of chicken realizing that she wasn’t sure who she was anymore?
That fried bird spills from the pews in black churches, the seasoning dancing in the organ keys, the smell of wood, almost sweet in those old churches replaced by the smell of hot oil engulfing the skin on the chicken. The red carpet that fills the room looks like a sea of hot sauce when hungry mirages play tricks on your eyes. Whether a sermon of hope and redemption or a message of soothing comfort. Funeral services or Sunday services, that gospel bird is there. I wasn't raised in the church, but I was raised on the gospel. That gospel bird. I envision how my ancestors would have been gathered together in these small one room shacks they would have called a church, the way their voices would have echoed and filled that wooden room, the way the timbre of worn voices seep from the narrows of wooden joints in search of freedom. I imagine the way they would have allowed the words of hope to enter their hearts and steady their restless, beaten bodies. For a moment sitting in the brief fever dream of freedom and human decency. Rituals of comfort, filling their bodies with soul food, replenishing their spirit, that place that is nearly an empty carven, but hope, that small but resilient flicker in the distance rekindled by the warmth and textured chew of gospel bird.
For the black body, the gospel really isn’t the gospel until that gospel bird is broken up and dispersed like communion. Blood, shed and poured out on the mounts of the plantation fields when the whip cracks open skin separating skin from the body, like the knife disjointing pieces from the bird sacrificed for the sake of that slave's belly. We are filled with the gospel on Sunday afternoons and after funerals, we rejoice the survival of another week and we mourn the loss of life, but soothe ourselves with the celebration of that soul's freedom. This ritual of affirmations from the pages of the holy bible and the communion of fried chicken wrapped in the warmth of community of a shared resilient mourn, a shared plight covers and protects us like the worn house shoes that protected my grandmother's toes. Without this weekly reminder, without the embrace of solace found in the bite of gospel bird, then we become burned, stung by the heat of this world as a black body. This is our new testament, this is our gospel.
Until next week,
-Kai Moriah
Phew this gave me chills, how food can be apart of grief and praise simultaneously.
Seriously, people use the term "soul food" loosely, not realizing that soul went into the preparation to replenish tattered souls that were beating and broken down on a daily basis. This is phenomenal!