The Heritage Month Project: "The Cooking Gene" By Michael W. Twitty

I know it's Women's History Month, but I had to finish my last read for Black History Month! It was a good book. Pretty amazing, in fact.

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty is another book I've owned for some time but didn't read. I was attracted, I'm sure, by the culinary history aspect. But now that my body is shot and I'm limited in what I eat, reading about food, itself, doesn't interest me as much as it used to. I've started following gluten free Facebook pages to give you an idea how my mind runs these days.  

This book, though, isn't just about food.

Twitty is a food writer, culinary historian, independent historian, and historical interpreter. I'm not sure if he's a cook/chef, though he does cook as part of his work as a historical interpreter, demonstrating food cooked as slaves would have done it in the south. For my last unsold book, I did research on independent historians for one of the characters, and I am delighted to be able to point to The Cooking Gene as an example of the kind of work that historians who are not connected to an academic institution can produce. 

And as a food writer, Twitty does very fine work, too. If he cooks a third as well as he writes, he must be very good with that, too.

What Twitty is doing with The Cooking Gene is using his family history to connect with the history of slaves in this country and tying it together with food. We get genealogy with this book, just as we did with Pearl's Secret, though Twitty has the benefit of DNA testing, which Neil Henry didn't have when he was doing his family research. Twitty did more than one DNA test and got dramatically more information than I got with the one Ancestry.com test I was willing to pay for. He also had a personal genealogist. Here's something you never hear: "If I win the lottery, I'm hiring a personal genealogist!" Just so you know, I'm saying it now.

Twitty travels to different parts of the south where his ancestors lived and writes about the different foods that were common there, as well as historical issues for each area. Once again, I'm supposed to know a little history. When I thought of crops in the old south, I thought of cotton. But it wasn't just cotton. It was tobacco (which I sort of knew about) and rice (which I didn't). As nasty crops to work with go, rice sounds the worst.

Twitty makes an interesting point about cotton: We think of cotton as having a huge impact on the enslavement of Blacks, but it did more. It had an impact on immigration in the north, because of all the cotton fabric mills that employed them. Evidently the so-called "Americans" who didn't want to work in the fields in the south, meaning we needed unpaid slaves, also didn't want to work in the mills in the north, so we needed underpaid immigrants. Which raises the question, what did "Americans" want to do?

The issue of immigration in the north connects with my people, because French Canadians came into this country in the nineteenth century to work in those mills Twitty mentions. But that's a story for another month. 

While I was reading this book, I was acutely aware that Twitty was raised knowing a great deal more about Black cooking than I was raised knowing about French Canadian or even Franco American. But, again, that's for another piece of writing.

This was a great book to finish my Black History Month reading, since it relates to two of the other three books I read. As I said, it does some of what Neil Henry does in Pearl's Secret. But it also covers  grim material like The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. It's grimmer, in fact, because when Twitty writes about auction blocks and Black men and women being stripped so white shoppers can check them out, that was real. Readers can reassure themselves that The Underground Railroad is fiction. The Cooking Gene isn't. 

I've had a good month of reading. Time to move on to Women's History.

The Heritage Month Project: "The Underground Railroad" By Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Underground Railroad, and while I don't know what other books were being considered for those awards that year, I have to say I have no problem with The Underground Railroad taking the top spots. It is a great read, both character- and plot-driven and very substantial. You finish this book, and you feel, Now, that was a book. 

The Underground Railroad is the story of an American slave, Cora, living in the early nineteenth century south. The time is significant, I think, because we know the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) is long in her future, assuming she's even still alive when it comes. The beginning of her tale is heart-breakingly grim, about life on the plantation. But it's a kind of heartbreak most of us have heard about before. It's not until she enters the underground railroad that something unique happens.

What happens is that The Underground Railroad turns into alternative history. 

The historical underground railroad was an informal network of people who helped American slaves escape into free states, where they might end up being captured and returned to the south, or into Canada, where slavery had been against the law since 1834, when Great Britain outlawed it in its empire. The railroad metaphor for the system was enhanced by the use of the terms "conductors" for guides, "depots" or "stations" for buildings where slaves could be hidden, and "stationmasters" for the people who owned the homes or otherwise were responsible for a building, accepting and hiding slaves there.

Whitehead's alternative underground railroad involves a real railroad that is truly under the ground. When Cora gets onboard, she begins a journey story in which she makes stops that provide her with respite but only for a while. 

Her first stop is in South Carolina where we immediately understand that we're not in the historical south anymore, because one of the first things Cora sees is what is called a skyscraper. Life is a lot better for Blacks in South Carolina, which has what might be called an enlightened attitude. But there's something not quite right here, in a very futuristic scifi kind of way. Sure enough, South Carolina has a little eugenics thing going on. Before this can become an issue she has to deal with, Cora finds out she is being hunted by someone who makes his living catching and returning escaped slaves to their owners. 

She boards the railroad again.

A second stop has a Holocaust feel and another a utopian commune vibe. The ending reminded me of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, which makes sense. The Handmaid's Tale is a story of a woman caught in a nightmarish future, and The Underground Railroad is a story of a woman caught in a nightmarish past.

I'm not totally comfortable saying I enjoyed a book dealing with a historical issue that is so painful. But the alternative history aspect helps to give distance. Black experience makes some great source material for genre writing. 

Other Alternative History Dealing with Black Experience

I loved Dread Nation by Justina Ireland. It's a zombie story and there were no zombies in the nineteenth century, so while the young Black women in this book are trained as zombie hunters as sort of cannon fodder to protect young white women with money, I can be assured this never happened. Right? As I pointed out in my original post, zombie stories supposedly are never just about zombies, and Dread Nation isn't. It definitely deals with race and politics.

Dread Nation has a sequel! Deathless Divide. Oh, I often recall one of the zombie hordes attacking a town in a scene in this book. Do not know why. Again, this isn't so much about zombies. It's about race and gender. 

More Genre Writing From Black Authors

• Science Fiction and Fantasy 
• Mysteries and Thrillers  I've read My Sister the Serial Killer
• Historical Fiction Several things here look good. So many books. So little time.
• Essays and Memoirs I've read a couple of these and am presently reading The Cooking Gene.

The Heritage Month Project: "Pearl's Secret, A Black Man's Search For His White Family" by Neil Henry

Pearl's Secret by Neil Henry is an older book, published in 2001. It's been on my To Be Read Shelf for a number of years. I probably bought it because of the genealogy and history aspect. I didn't know much about it beyond that.

By the time I finally started reading Pearl's Secret, I thought it was going to be a Finding Your Roots thing. That worried me since I stopped watching that show, because I find it so formulaic. ("Your ancestors suffered horribly. How does that make you feel?") Then I thought the book was going to be a memoir of Henry's experience hunting for his white family members, maybe some nerdy stuff about hunting high and low. You do get a little of that. Genealogical research was much more of a chore before the Internet, even if today sites like Ancestry.com are only as accurate as the strangers who are doing the posting there.

But what the book really is is a family history as it relates to race, first through the Black side and then the white side of Henry's family, once he connects with them. I personally think family histories relate to the greater histories families lived through, and Henry's story supports that.

Henry describes his childhood in Seattle as the youngest son of a surgeon and a librarian as being Leave it to Beaverish. It was an idyllic suburban life interrupted by episodes of racism. He's invited by a couple of little white girls in his neighborhood to come over and play only to be chased down the street by their grandfather when he goes to the door. Not at all surprised he remembered that years later. In his family there is talk of the value of having light skin and good hair while at the same time feeling great respect for their Black history and culture. Believe me, no one was talking about French Canadian achievements and listening to French Canadian music when I was growing up. My mother's side of the family didn't know they had any kind of achievements or music, which I suppose can easily happen when your name is Adams.  

Henry's own story of being adrift while attending Princeton and working for Ben Bradlee at The Washington Post tended to drag for me, because I've read about guys going to private schools and having good jobs in journalism before. His grandparents are nice people, but he doesn't talk that much about them. The relatives who are the stars of his family show are his parents, who experienced life under Jim Crow and survived and overcame it. Their stories are riveting, shocking. Seriously, I am shocked by how little I, who have taken a history course or two and read a few history books, have known about the Jim Crow era until recently. I kept talking about these people at the dinner table while I was reading about them. 

Netflix! Where are you? I would watch this mini-series.  

I don't want to say too much about the Beaumonts, Henry's white family, because there's sort of a creative nonfiction thing going on here, with a narrative climax that I don't want to give away. Though I will just say, "boll weevil." Yes, I had heard the name, just as I had heard "Jim Crow." I had no idea the significance, though.

Regarding Peal's secret, itself--That's a bit of a surprise, too. It's not that she was a Black woman hiding her white background or a Black woman passing as white, because she was neither of those things. Her secret is something else. 

Pearl's Secret is a great example of how reading about people you are less familiar with opens up opportunities to see something different, to add to your personal knowledge base. My feelings about this book reminded me of reading Don't Hold Me Back, a picture book memoir written and illustrated by the late artist, Winfred Rembert. Rembert was a few years older than me, but not a lot, and I actually met him. In his book, he writes about growing up in the south at the end of the Jim Crow era. I found it disturbing that someone nearly my contemporary had to pick cotton as a child and saw the bodies of lynched Black men hanging from trees. Now I realize that growing up poorish in rural Vermont when I did, without weekly news magazines or a daily paper coming into the house, was probably a great protector for little Gail in terms of what was going on in the rest of the world.

James Marriott, a columnist with The Times (London), wrote a few days ago that "Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable."  It's also inconceivable if we never knew it happened.

 

The Heritage Month Project: "Colored Television" by Danzy Senna

My very first read for my Heritage Month Project, and Black History Month, was a good one, Colored Television by Danzy Senna. This novel was a Good Morning America Book Club Pick (there's some good stuff at that link) so it has had plenty of attention. I, however, didn't hear of it until I saw it on a list of humorous novels. As is often the case for me, while I liked the book very much, I had mixed feelings about how funny it was.

Jane, our biracial main character, is going through a desperate period. She teaches writing at a so-so college where she is at a crucial point. She has been on leave for a year where she is supposed to be finishing...and selling...her novel about mulattoes that she has been working on for ten years. If she can't sell it, she won't get tenure and will be stuck with the heavy workload that the untenured have to shoulder there. Additionally, her funny (yeah, he is funny) artist husband is talented, but his work doesn't sell. The family is constantly moving from one less than desirable living situation to another. One of their two children appears to be in the early stages of being diagnosed with a neurodivergent issue. (Seriously, that can take what seems like forever.) Jane's hopes for a black bohemian bourgeois life for herself and her family are all pinned on that book. That desire is intensified after having housesat for a year in her wealthy TV writer friend's home and experiencing the good life. 

I may not have found this book particularly funny because this white/failed middle grade writer/homemaker identified a lot with its mixed race/failed literary writer/academic. I mean a lot. I, too, am a woman writer who can no longer sell a book and is flailing around with other kinds of writing and has a little boy like Flinn in my family.  I found myself shouting to Jane in my head. "Come on, Jane! You wrote and published one book. You know another book isn't going to fix everything." "Jane! Jane! Don't drink all Brett's expensive wine!"

Jane leaves novel writing after it becomes clear her second book is dead before it even gets in the water. She finds it a relief. I have left novel writing, too, and Jane is right. It is a relief. Except all the little writing projects I come up with for myself can be overwhelming. And, wouldn't you know it, Jane comes up with smaller writing projects that are overwhelming her. Her's involve pitching a comedy show about mulattoes to a Hollywood wheeler and dealer named Hampton Ford.

Now Hampton Ford is also desperate. He complains that the ideas Jane pitches him aren’t mulatto enough, that they’re about random things and the characters she's talking about don’t have to be mulatto. They could be anybody.  I wonder, is that why this book grabs me and evidently a lot of other readers? Is this a book about a mixed-race woman living a desperate life, writing a book about mulattoes, pitching ideas about mulattoes, but she could be anybody?

She could be so any of us?

Terrific Bio And Giveaway

Authors who write historical nonfiction look for stories from the past that haven't been told. A lot of untold historical stories come out of the experiences of groups whose actions have been ignored. African Americans, for instance. For the general public, that's the case with African American fashion designer Ann Cole Lowe, the subject of Fancy Party Gowns by Deborah Blumenthal with illustrations by Laura Freeman.

Lowe is probably known within her field. She got a New York Times obituary when she died in 1981, and some of the clothes she designed can be found at The Met. She also appears to be experiencing a revival over the last couple of years. She's all over the Internet. (Yeah, you can look.) But she certainly doesn't have the same kind of high profile that designers from the same era whose design houses still exist have. Lowe designed for individuals, not the mass market, which also limited how many people knew about her, either in her lifetime or now.

All of which makes her a great subject for a picture book bio. She's not generally known, but at the same time, there is information about her out there, so that when you want to hunt down more info about her, you can.

Okay, Fancy Party Gowns is the story of an African American woman who was sought out by wealthy white women who wanted her to design and make their clothes for important events at a time when people of her race weren't accepted just anywhere. Like design school, for instance. She got in, but had to study separate from white students. So what we have here is a tale of an outsider who makes the insiders come to her. She had something they wanted. They wanted it bad enough to let her in the front door.

Lowe designed one particular gown for one particular person, an act that ties her to history in a big way. I wasn't aware of this when I read Fancy Party Gowns and getting to this part of the book was an eye popper. Hope other readers will have the same experience.

A note about the illustrations: They are both realistic and bigger than life at the same time. Lowe often appears as some variation of the cover image. In my humble opinion, it gives her power.

Black History Month Giveaway

Little Bee Books, publisher of Fancy Party Gowns, provided me with two copies of Fancy Party Gowns to give away here. I'll give away one copy this month for Black History Month and the other next month for Women's History Month. Leave a comment below. When we reach ten comments, we'll pick one at random to receive this month's copy.

A Throw Back Thursday Post For Black History Month

Back in 2015 I did a post on Vaunda Micheaux Nelson's Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshall, which was published in 2009. I'm republishing it below as a Black History Month observance.

Bass Reeves

I happened to recall this book recently because last week the television show Timeless featured Reeves in an episode. Timeless is a time travel story, a genre I'm not that fond of as a general rule. In this one, the main characters go to a different time every episode chasing a bad guy who's doing something I don't quite understand and there are some other bad guys I don't get at all. But here's what I do get about Timeless. It's a show for history geeks. It's a show for those of us who sit on our couches watching it and shout, "That's Judith Exner! Judith Exner! That's Kennedy's mistress!" "Oh, you know, there was a serial murderer at the Chicago World's Fair and look how cool Houdini is in this episode." "Bass Reeves? I know him."

Colman Domingo as Bass Reeves

The Bass Reeves' episode was actually called, The Assassination of Jesse James. But the character of Bass Reeves, and the actor who played him, left me thinking, Jesse Who?

Something happens when a genre show aimed at a general audience features lesser known historical figures like Reeves. The show places those figures into popular culture where lots more living people have a chance to hear about them. It takes them out of their niche--Black history, say, or western history--and places them into history with a capital H. It gives them their shot at being remembered for what they did.

We history geeks think that's a good thing, a very good thing.

Throw Back Thursday Post: "Bad News" Is Good News For Readers

I was so taken with Vaunda Micheaux Nelson's article Mind the Gaps in The Horn Book last winter that I went on to read her book Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal. Like Nelson, I grew up watching westerns, so I had noticed a review for this book when it was released in 2009.

Bad News for Outlaws is a fantastic book. It's marketed to grades 3 to 6, so expect more text than in a traditional picture book. It is fascinating text, well-constructed as Bass Reeves' life story. The Reeves' story is told within the context of his world, as well. Just what was the deal with the so-called Indian Territory, anyway? And what were the deputy marshals vs. any other kind of lawman out in the west? Additionally, Nelson uses some great stories about Reeves' activities as a marshal to illustrate what was so interesting about him. And she subtly throws in language from Reeves' era.

In addition to the great writing, this is a beautiful looking book, illustrated by R. Gregory Christie. The design of many of the pages calls to mind old books or maybe wanted posters. The back material is some of the best and most inviting I can recall seeing.

Because Bass Reeves was an African American, I imagine Bad News for Outlaws being displayed prominently in libraries during Black History Month. But this is a book that could be used for so much more. It could support history units because it is so good on the time period when Reeves' lived. It could be used to support a writing unit with the the stories Nelson uses about Reeves lives illustrating use of detail in writing. Oh, and the book also illustrates using an opening hook.

I learned from this book. I was left wondering about one thing, though. Was poor pretty Jennie Reeves left raising Bass's eleven children on her own while he was off taming the Wild West? But then I wonder about that with many books about men from the past.

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Historical photo of Bass Reeves from Timeless Wiki.

Photo of Colman Domingo as Bass Reeves from A.V. Club.