Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  I had finally been living in an actual apartment by myself after three years of rooming with two men from 2015 to 2016 and then squeezing into a cramped studio from 2016 to 2018. New Year’s Eve was approaching, and I had a full kitchen all to myself. I always eschewed the Sunday dinner tradition due to having no family and not many friends in Harlem, but there was one ritual that I wanted to perpetuate in my home as a kind of christening: New Year’s Eve dinner.

  Every New Year’s Eve, I could feel the heat surging in my mother’s house. We’d go to a watchnight service* at church and return home. Hours later, I would be sequestered in my room upstairs, but the smell of something heavenly would slip through the cracks in the door. I closed my eyes and envisioned the boiling yams or the black-eyed peas marinating in a large, black Crock-Pot on the counter. The black-eyed peas require the most attention for this meal. They have to soak in a pot of water overnight. A quick hot-water rinse will not do. Then the peas are drained in a colander before being placed in the Crock-Pot with bacon or smoked turkey legs, where they would soften for hours.

  Unlike girls in my mother’s generation, I was not forced to stand in the kitchen beside the women and watch them cook so that I’d be able to feed a family someday. The kitchen was the biggest indication of the generational divide. While my mother cracked eggs, grated cheese, and peeled potatoes, I was upstairs filling out scholarship applications, studying for exams, writing. I wanted to prioritize academic and professional success rather than the culinary arts. Food would have to wait. Until I finally did achieve that success and made a home and realized I had no idea how to nourish myself.

  On New Year’s Eve, I stood in my kitchen and knew that something was amiss. I knew what I had to do to begin this year right: I had to cook the collard greens for money and the black-eyed peas for good luck. I had to make the rice in chicken stock and bake the corn bread just right. I needed the butter, the sugar, the salt, and the pepper. I needed to use my hands for more than writing. My mother was delighted when I told her what I set out to do. She and I hopped on a six-a.m. phone call to talk measurements, textures, and tastes for when things went as planned or had gone awry. Toward the end of the call, I asked my mother why we ate these foods for superstitious reasons. Collard greens were green like money and black eyed peas with their dots did look like dice. She paused. “It’s just something that we done. It’s something black people do.”

  I knew that my mother wasn’t aware of the origins, but that was enough motivation for me. If soul food, like my ancestors, came from the South, then perhaps that’s where my journey had to begin. Eating collard greens and black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day connects black people from the North and South. As African Americans migrated north, they had to decide whether to keep eating their Southern food culture, such as hog or hominy, or assimilate to a middle-class, “respectable” menu, beef and wheat replacing pork and corn?5 Soul food is much richer in flavor and seasoning than middle-class white food, but it’s also saltier and extremely high in fat. Because of soul food’s health risks, criticism was rampant.

  In 1920, Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, a physician and the health editor of the Chicago Defender, wrote a column in which he criticized Southern food for its liver- and digestive-system-damaging condiments, such as hot sauce, “heavy meats,” and “excessive carbohydrates.” Because the Chicago Defender was the most influential newspaper among African Americans at that time (more than two-thirds of its readership was outside of Chicago6), Dr. Williams’s words had an impact and bolstered stereotypes that new migrants were dirty, stuck in the past, and in need of refinement.7 These migrants’ loyalties to class and region were at odds with each other, and food was at the nexus of these struggles. If they were striving for a better life, did their plates have to change too?

  In a place like Chicago, locals prided themselves on the integration of restaurants, but when migrants arrived with their out-of-place behavior, the city’s elite establishments began to ban black people, new and local alike. In my personal life, I have both seen and passed judgment on certain foods for being too Southern or reminiscent of slavery, like the way bacon is exalted but pig’s feet causes one’s face to contort, how ham is desirable but chitlins, or pig intestines, are seen as evidence of backwardness. Growing up, it was not uncommon for me to hear a joke that watermelon was “slave food.” These tensions illustrate the divide between black people of a particular class in the North, those who are the descendants of migrants, versus those who live in the South. As black people moved north, certain foods were forsaken so that we could adopt a modern and progressive identity. Foods themselves don’t have meaning, but we impose meaning on them. The various kinds of meanings and associations that we have with foods all come from our conditioning, that being our background and social standing. Nevertheless, food symbolizes much of who we are as African Americans.

  Much of the food that has sustained us for centuries came from West Africa through the plantations. Cured pork was one of the biggest staples on a plantation. The American sweet potato is reminiscent of, though not identical to, the African yam. Other foods that were imported from Africa and grown on American soil include peanuts, okra, and of course, watermelon. The fusion of African and Anglo-American cultures brought new foods to our cuisine: fried chicken, fish, collard greens, corn bread, corn fritters, grits, beans, and rice, to name a few. The community or family cohesion fostered by eating soul food at a particular time or day isn’t something we “just do.” All my life I thought that Sunday dinners had become a tradition because Sunday was a day of rest, the last few hours of freedom before the workweek began again. Then I learned that slaves would eat a large breakfast, remnants of it for lunch, and a one-pot meal for dinner. On larger plantations, a staff prepared the meals for the day. On Sundays and holidays, however, slaves would gather for a communal meal. The need for communal eating persisted throughout the centuries due to enslavement and then the economic constraints of segregation. Sharecroppers often came up short because of the boll weevil or soil exhaustion growing tobacco and cotton without crop rotation. Compounding these stressors, white landlords refused to allow black tenants to farm their portions of the land for food. No free man or woman of color wanted to buy a single product and risk careening the family further into debt. Communal eating benefited all, and black people maintained this connection with one another and with their ancestors.8

  Despite all the research I did, I could not figure out why the superstition was attached to these foods. Why did collard greens and black-eyed peas have to be eaten on New Year’s Day and why for money or good luck specifically? Where did that come from?

  The answer to my persistent questions should have been a no-brainer. Once when I opened a bag of black-eyed peas—Goya, the brand my mother told me to buy—I noticed on the back a recipe for something called hoppin’ John. Hoppin’ John called for black-eyed peas, bacon, celery, bay leaves, thyme, scallions, bell peppers, onions, and a few other ingredients. I wondered if the name was a nod to Southern dialect or some element of black Southern cuisine. As it turns out, the answer was the latter. Hoppin’ John and its associated superstitions originated from the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry and its people known as the Gullah, Geechee, or Gullah Geechee. The origins of the names are undetermined. Some say that Gullah derived from Angola or the Gola people, who live in parts of Liberia and Sierra Leone. As for Geechee, the origin could be the Ogeechee River, which flows for close to three hundred miles through the state of Georgia, or the Kissi people, who reside in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

  Hoppin’ John for good luck and collard greens for prosperity is a tradition found in the Gullah Geechee culture. Every time African Americans adhere to this custom on New Years’ Day, their plates link those at the table with over three hundred years of African American history. The Lowcountry is a two-hundred-mile stretch of land that spans the Georgia and South Carolina coasts, along with the Sea Islands.9 It is believed that over half of the 388,
000 Africans brought to the lands that became the United States first arrived in the Lowcountry.10 According to the International African American Museum, 80 percent of African Americans can trace an ancestor who set foot onto a Charleston dock first.11 Despite this rich history, I had heard of Gullah people only twice in my life—on Nickelodeon’s 1990s children’s television show Gullah Gullah Island and from a close friend whose late grandmother was Gullah. The Gullah Geechee people are the oldest sub-ethnic group of African Americans.

  Three crucial elements explain how the Gullah Geechee people were able to retain so much of their African-ness, including their cooking: the landscape, their immunity to diseases, and the conditions of slave labor on plantations. The Lowcountry was distinguished not only by its formidable heat, ubiquitous palmetto trees, and Spanish moss, but also by the crops that could be grown there. In the eighteenth century, tobacco ruled the Chesapeake region, and cotton dominated the South, but for the Lowcountry, nothing compared to the rice cultivation.12 White settlers knew how to profit from rice but not necessarily how to cultivate it and that’s why Africans from the aforementioned countries were captured and used as labor. In 1839, Georgia harvested 12.2 million pounds of rice,13 but South Carolina was the foremost producer, averaging sixty-six million pounds a year before the Revolutionary War and becoming one of the richest colonies.14 Africans enslaved in the Lowcountry retained not only their farming methods, but also their West African foods, such as watermelon, peas, okra, rice, collard greens, and sweet potatoes. In addition, their nearness to water added plentiful seafood to their diet.15

  The wetland environment is a hotbed for diseases, but enslaved Africans were more resistant to them than white people, so whites were vastly outnumbered in the Lowcountry. Unlike other plantations, where slaves were not done working on their particular duties until the entire crew was finished, on rice plantations, if slaves were done early, they could assist others, till their own plots of land, or engage in cultural activities. Therefore enslaved Africans were able to foster community within a rather isolated region, and anthropologists and historians have argued that these preconditions have made Gullah Geechees a distinct people who were able to keep West African traditions alive in spite of their oppression.16

  If the Gullah Geechee people had been able to protect unadulterated customs from the motherland, then I would go to them. I would start in Georgia and then move on to South Carolina, where I would conduct research in the Sea Islands of both states. But I couldn’t venture into either territory blindly. I made sure to make contact with someone from each of the places I planned to visit ahead of my trip. Although I’m black like my liaisons, I’m not from the area, and I thought it best to tread carefully.

  My instinct served me well when I reached out to one local historian from Georgia via e-mail. Instead of responding through the same medium, she called me early in the morning to get a sense of who I was as a person. Her name was Tiffany Young, and she was born and raised in Gainesville, Georgia, before moving around in the state from Darien to Savannah. She calls herself the Gullah Geechee griot, and she’s been doing genealogical and historical research independently for over thirteen years. I just wanted to get the logistics down about where I was going to and how to best prepare in terms of apparel and budgeting, but Young was more focused on how Gullah Geechee people were losing their ways due to governmental interference and people moving to the mainland.

  She wanted to talk about Sapelo Island, a barrier island that can be accessed only by ferry, a place where she said the remaining Gullah Geechee people were being taxed 500 percent more than in previous years. I wish she’d been exaggerating. On the contrary, she was understating the figure. In 2012, McIntosh County, Georgia, of which Sapelo Island is a part, wanted 540 percent more than the previous year.17 For some parcels of land on the island, taxes increased as much as 1,000 percent from those prior to 2012. She recalls a time when Gullah Geechee people would sew fishnets and grow tomatoes, onions, bananas, blueberries, collard greens, and yams. But their numbers are dwindling: “So many people want to move to the cities or surrounding cities where they get more. The job market that they’re interested in isn’t prevalent here. From the language to the food—even the healing remedies are dying out. People are just getting more dependent on going to the doctor.” Young was excited that I would be coming down and confirmed that I was doing the right thing by reaching out ahead of time because her people were so vulnerable. But she warned me: what I was about to see was like nothing that I ever had seen before. The spiritual force of the Lowcountry would be more easily felt and the threat of racial intimidation more widespread than elsewhere. I should trust in my calling and be aware.

  In April 2018, I traveled to Darien, which is about an hour outside of Savannah. While New York City was struggling to climb out of the mid-60s in temperature, Darien was swirling between the mid-70s and high 80s. I could smack my lips and taste the salt from the marshes. The scenery reminded me less of an American coastline than the mangroves of Liberia or the swamps of Sierra Leone. The heat made the sweat cover my skin thickly like a pomade, and the mosquitoes were relentless. The cheap insect repellent that I wore was no match for the gnats’ hunger for flesh, either. There was no Lyft service; I’d assumed there would be and so hadn’t rented a car. There were no restaurants within walking distance of my hotel; I had to settle for Burger King. There was no nightlife. Large cypress trees were all I could see from my hotel window. As night fell, I began to regret not staying in Savannah, renting a car, and making the daily trip back and forth.

  As a visitor, I thought Darien to be stuck in the past, an assessment shared by the locals. There is a story in Darien. The son of a conjure woman was said to have robbed a bank. No evidence had been uncovered to prove that this man had done it, but in those days black skin was enough proof. The story goes that he fled the town before the mob could get to him, so they lynched his mother instead. Before the mother’s neck snapped, she declared that the city shall never prosper, and it seems her words outlasted her life. According to Tiffany, every time people bid on properties or buy them outright to bring stores and therefore capital to the community, they are never successful. In 2016, Darien had a poverty rate twice as high as Georgia’s average.18 There is a strip mall in the center of town, eerily vacant. People say the mall was built where a plantation house once stood. Before that, it was Indian sacred ground. Some people claim to have seen an indigenous person on horseback silently passing through to observe the defilement that had taken place. The bodies of enslaved children are said to be buried underneath Highway 17. Whether or not one believes in the effectiveness of the mother’s curse, the message is quite clear: life is infused with death within these town limits, and there is something spiritually aberrant about this place.

  The night before my adventures began, I watched Daughters of the Dust, the best-known depiction of Gullah Geechee culture in American cinema. Coincidentally, at the beginning of my first book, on black womanhood, I used a long quote from this movie to explain complexity, without realizing that soon I’d be here in the Lowcountry where the movie is based: “I am the first and the last / I am the honored one and the scorned one.” The words were spoken by Nana Peazant, the matriarch of the Peazant family. The family’s cohesion is on the brink of disappearing because some relatives will stay on Saint Simons Island in Georgia and others will cross the water and depart to the mainland. Their children and their children’s children will scatter all over the United States. The knowledge of the island will grow dimmer with each generation that passes. My first interpretation of Nana’s words were that of contradiction. Nana Peazant is both all and nothing at all. But as I sat in my hotel room only a boat ride away from one of the most famous Sea Islands, the words took on a different form. I am the first and the last. I interpreted this statement as Nana saying that she has started her legacy and even when she dies, she’ll be around to see it through to the end. That, to me, was hopeful.

  In
one of my favorite scenes in the movie, the Peazant family is having a picnic on the beach. While the women are preparing the food, the man of the family is out looking beyond the shore. I drew parallels to my family life, how the women convened together to cook and the men were preoccupying themselves with other affairs. The camera pans toward the large helpings of okra, shrimp, onions, potatoes, and corn. One woman is plucking a chicken, and another is boiling water, a bucket of live crabs next to her. I could identify all the foods on their plates and taste them in my mouth too. Viola Peazant, Nana’s daughter, is returning home for a final meal with her family. She reads a prayer from Prayers for Dark People, by W.E.B. DuBois. She says, “The earth about us, O Lord, is swelling with fruitage and may remind us that this is the seedtime of life.”19 Her words, interposed with her relatives’ cooking, are most appropriate because it’s at this dinner that Nana will stress the importance of cultural preservation. For black Americans, food and cultural memory cannot be divorced. When we eat soul food, we are sated with nutrients and endowed with a mindfulness of the past.

  When I chose not to cook with my mother and grandmother, I was missing out on more than learning a vital skill. I was losing a connection with them and the mothers who came before them. As I looked down at my Whopper Jr. with cheese and medium fries, I envisioned a plate of seafood and vegetables that I hoped to devour sometime during my trip. I wanted to compensate for all those years of removing myself from cooking by learning all that I could about this place and its riches. I tried to push past the shame of all that I didn’t know, because I was there now. And if Young believed that it was my calling to be there, I had to lean into that belief.