Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America

by Frederick Douglass

  Fields’ did a brisk business, especially on Fridays and Saturdays, when it offered live jazz. The place also had booming business on Sunday afternoons, when African American couples in the 1950s and 1960s traditionally went out for lunch or dinner and a movie. Greenburg resident and photographer Gordon Parks was a regular at Fields’ on Sundays. In addition to chicken and ribs, Fields’ served fried shrimp, collard greens, sweet potato pie, and delicious rolls. Customers would rave about the rolls, though Boswell says, “I guess I can say this now, they were store-bought rolls.” And the sweet potato pies, “frozen, store bought,” he confesses. “Nobody knew [and] nobody” ever suspected that some of the down-home food was not made in-house. It was the Fields’ family secret. The other bars and grills in the area, Farmer’s and Tark’s, had smaller food menus, and people went to them principally for the liquor. According to Boswell, “Fields’ was the place in the area” for southern food and live jazz.65

  Similar venues for food and live jazz existed in the African American sections of the Westchester towns along the Hudson River. There was Club Six, owned by southern migrant Martin Cotton and five other African American business partners (hence the name). This African American honky-tonk, located under a bridge just up the road from the Tarrytown train depot, provided live hot jazz played by local virtuosos. Bass player Benny Molten, drummer June Bug Lindsay, and saxophonist Carmen John Leggio, all from North Tarrytown, along with piano player and Yonkers native Ketter Betts, began their careers playing local venues like Club Six before going on to join big-time bands with jazz legends Maynard Ferguson, Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Buddy Rich, and others. In addition to great music, Club Six had “a lot of soul food and really good eating” says Alice Conqueran. Like the Greasy Spoon in Atlanta and the one in Richmond, Club Six was a place where you could get fried chicken and just about anything else on a sandwich.66

  Alice Conqueran remembers that De Carlo’s was up the street from Club Six in the middle of Cortland Street’s African American neighborhood. De Carlo’s, she says, “used to be a poolroom and then became a bar.” North Tarrytown native Mary Tweedy used to be the cook at De Carlo’s, where you could order fresh fried porgies and other items.67 According to Margaret Opie, before the end of de facto segregation in Westchester, “black bars had to have food” because white restaurants did not serve African American customers or, if they did, they served them with such haste and hostility that you did not want to go back. Thus African American bar owners usually looked for someone whose reputation as a cook could draw customers, someone who could really “throw down,” says Opie. “Usually it was a separate person that had that concession in the bar.” In short, these concessions of really good southern food were important “appendices to these places.”68

  If you took the train from Tarrytown ten miles north along the Hudson, you would arrive in the village of Ossining, the home of Sing Sing Prison. At one time, the village of Ossining was officially called Sing Sing, named after the Sing Sing Indians who inhabited the small hamlet just thirty-five miles north of New York City. African Americans would frequent a neighborhood bar and grill in Ossining called Bar Harbor, located on Hunter Street just a couple of blocks from the railroad station. The prison was a stone’s throw south of Bar Harbor on Hunter Street. Two southern-born brothers, Raymond and Walter Cook, originally from Virginia, owned the establishment.69 If you continued north on the train along the banks of the Hudson for another twenty minutes, you would eventually make your way to the city of Peekskill. Here, African Americans, especially from Ossining and the Tarrytowns, went to Green’s Bar and Grill to dance and dine with African American residents of Peekskill. Howard Green owned and operated the bar and grill. According to Joan Lewis, Green’s, located in downtown Peekskill, was nicer than Ossining’s Bar Harbor and Tarry-town’s Club Six and De Carlo’s. All these clubs had essentially the same type of southern food: fried chicken, potato salad, corn bread, greens, sweet potato pie, and layer cakes.70

  Mom-and-pop operations, bus stop lunch counters, and bars and grills represent the modern origins of the restaurants that started appearing with the phrase “soul food” in their signage and other marketing materials in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. African American cooks in what I call pre–civil rights, black power, and soul institutions established the definition of a good menu in restaurants that specialized in southern food. In the South, African American women reserved the labor-intensive process of making rolls and sweet potato pies for special occasions: Sundays, holidays, church events, weddings, and funerals. In commercial establishments throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, “southern fare” became synonymous with fried chicken or fish on a sandwich, chopped barbecue, rolls or biscuits, collard greens, sweet potato pies, and cakes. Thus special-occasion foods became the food that these honky-tonks and restaurants sold to African American consumers. It was food that was easy to market because it was relatively inexpensive, it tasted good, and it was attached to memories of special times spent with family and friends in tight-knit African American communities. It was also food that could be obtained without jim crow restrictions.

  African American responses to de facto jim crow in New York were similar to those of blacks in the South. African Americans in New York kept mental ratings of the restaurants where they lived. White-owned restaurants were rated on their food, service, and civility toward black customers. The African American rating list also included all the black-owned restaurants where one could obtain down-home southern food and, with favor, southern hospitality. Thus African Americans visiting other communities, from New York to Atlanta, learned from each other the best places to eat before 1954, when lunch counters and restaurants in North America were desegregated.

  FIGURE 6.4 “White” and “Colored,”: Durham, N.C., May 1940. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF33-020513-M2.

  Joan Lewis, the Ossining native who went south to attend NCCU in Durham, provides interesting insights into the significance of the 1954 Supreme Court decision officially ending segregation in the United States. When she went to Durham in the summer of 1953 to start her freshmen year, city restaurants and the bus depot lunch counter were all segregated. “Now everything changed. I was down there in 1953; in 1954 when we came back after the summer, for the next year, all the signs were gone because they had to integrate in 1954.” The change in racial tolerance was drastic, says Lewis. In Durham, white restaurant owners changed their behavior toward African American customers, and “you could do what you wanted to do,” says Lewis. She recalls that during her first year, “we were sitting way up in the balcony, they put the black people up in the balcony at the theatre downtown.” The “next year,” however, “we came and we could sit anywhere we wanted to sit.” Similar changes happened in the restaurants. After 1954 “we could eat downtown then. They had some little shops. We would go down there and eat” without encountering hostility or indifference from restaurant employees. In short, some white owners quickly recognized there was more economic opportunity in serving African American customers than in snubbing them.71

  But on Route 31 in Maryland, it was still hard for African Americans to find hospitable places to eat. Lewis recalls that, in her junior year, she began to carpool back and forth between Westchester and Durham with two male students from Peekskill who had cars. In 1955 “we got so we could stop in some parts of Maryland, [but] not too much.” But by the time Lewis graduated from NCCU in 1957, she says, “we could ride up and down and you could do what you wanted to do.”72 In other parts of the country, jim crow died at a much slower pace. Speaking of her experience in the South, Motown superstar Diana Ross writes, “Segregation did not stop in the 1950s but continued well into the sixties and, in some areas, even the seventies.”73 In urban centers on the East and West Coasts, the black spaces that were a consequence of jim crow segregation helped assimilate black immigrants from various re
gions of the South and the rest of the Americas into an urban African American identity. In many instances, these social spaces helped push many into a veritable African American melting pot of native blacks and blacks from the South and the Caribbean. And so it was that African Americans developed the worldview they called soul. Soul became very popular, and many blacks used it to counteract the painful realities of racism on both coasts.

  THE CHITLIN CIRCUIT

  The Origins and Meanings of Soul and Soul Food

  Born and raised in Augusta, Georgia, singer, songwriter, and choreographer James Brown is considered the undisputed father of soul. In his autobiography, he writes that by 1962 soul “meant a lot of things—in music and out. It was about the roots of black music, and it was kind of a pride thing, too, being proud of yourself and your people.” He adds, “Soul music and the civil rights movement went hand in hand, sort of grew up together.”1 Before the civil rights movement, black entertainers like Brown, B. B. King, Ray Charles, Al Green, Gladys Knight, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin made their living on the “chitlin circuit,” a string of black-owned honky-tonks, nightclubs, and theaters. The circuit wove throughout the Southeast and Midwest, stretching from Nashville to Chicago and into New York. Performers would often do consecutive one-night stands, frequently more than eight hundred miles apart. The routine went: drive for hours, stop, set up the bandstand, play for five hours, break down the bandstand, and drive for several more hours. On the road, performers often settled for sandwiches from the colored window of segregated restaurants until they arrived at the next venue.2

  On the circuit were the New Era in Nashville; Evan’s Bar and Grill in Forestville, Maryland (just outside of the District of Columbia); the Royal in Baltimore; Pittsburgh’s Westray Plaza, the Hurricane, and Crawford Grill; and New York’s Club Harlem and Small’s Paradise, to name just a few venues. The chitlin circuit was crucial to black artists like James Brown and B. B. King because it offered the only way for them to perform for their fans during a period when the white media did not cover and mainstream venues did not book black artists. The entertainers called it the chitlin circuit because club owners sold chitlins and other soul food dishes out of their kitchens. Early in her career, Gladys Knight performed in a house band on the circuit, playing at “roadside joints and honky-tonks across the South,” she recalled. “No menus. No kitchens. Just a grizzly old guy selling catfish nuggets, corn fritters, or pig ear sandwiches in a corner.”3 The circuit went beyond small hole-in-the-wall clubs, however. Elaborate African American–operated theaters like the Regent in Washington, D.C., the Uptown in Philadelphia, the Apollo in New York, the Fox in Detroit, and the Regal in Chicago were big-time venues considered part of the circuit.4 These theaters did not have kitchens that sold food, but savvy African American entrepreneurs established places nearby where you could purchase good-tasting meals.

  FIGURE 7.1 Negro bunkhouse, Childersburg, Ala., May 1942. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF34-082813-C.

  Various soul food traditions cropped up in connection with the circuit. In New York, for example, soul food was eating fried chicken and waffles—perhaps early on a Sunday morning after spending all night listening to bebop jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk. The legend goes that this northern soul food tradition began when artists in New York ordered chicken for breakfast after missing dinner on Saturday night because they were performing and ordered waffles as the hot bread to eat with the fried chicken. Similarly, at Kelly’s restaurant in Atlantic City, the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin, remembered after-hours meals of “hot sauced wings and grits for days.” Franklin also recalled that near Chicago’s Regal Theater there was a “food stand, tucked a few doors away from the theater, that served greasy burgers made with a spicy sausage in the meat, topped with crispy fries, Lord, have mercy. The artists couldn’t wait to get offstage to wolf down those burgers.”5 When performing in northwest Washington, D.C., African American entertainers ate at Cecilia’s Restaurant, conveniently located across the street from the Howard Theater. Harlem, the site of New York’s Odeon and the Apollo theaters, had a bunch of restaurants: Grits ’n’ Eggs, Well’s Waffle House, the Bon Goo Barbecue, the Red Rooster, and Tillie’s Chicken Shack, among others. Most of these restaurants had been open since the 1930s and 1940s. But nobody called them soul food restaurants then.

  FIGURE 7.2 Negro café, Washington, D.C., July-November 1937. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF34-008544-D.

  It was in the 1960s that African American urban dwellers, first in the Southeast and then in the Northeast, gradually made the transition from talking about rock music (rhythm and blues) and southern food to calling it soul music and soul food. In the face of the increasing ethnic diversity of urban centers, soul became associated with African American culture and ethnicity. People with soul had a down-home style that migrants from the rural South could unite around. For this working class, composed predominantly of underemployed urban dwellers, soul made them members of an exclusive group of cultural critics. Soul gave them insider status in a racist society that treated them like outsiders, and it emerged as an alternative culture that undermined white definitions of acceptability.6

  Beginning with discussions in the 1960s and 1970s, soul was considered the cultural component of black power, the most visible black nationalist idea of the twentieth century. At its heart, soul is the ability to survive and keep on keeping on despite racist obstacles to obtaining life’s necessities. In the language of soul, the more you have been through and survived, the more soul you have. Soul roots go back to the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance movement.

  THE POLITICAL ORIGINS OF SOUL

  The 1920s movement began after democratic struggles in Europe during the post–World War I era failed to carry over and improve conditions for blacks in the United States. Similarly, the black power and soul movements of the post–World War II era were, among other things, a response to the limited gains made after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education, the outlawing of school segregation, and the civil rights movement that followed. Black power and soul in their various manifestations, depending on the group, were rooted in the black revivalism of Malcolm X, the direct action protests as well as the political and economic organizing campaigns of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the armed resistance to police brutality of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. In addition, militant African independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s stirred African Americans to action, producing a new and “brilliant generation” of angry black intellectuals that rivaled those of the Harlem Renaissance.7

  Both the urban riots that followed the assassinations of Medger Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and several other important figures within the civil rights movement in the 1960s and the failure of American liberalism shaped the development of soul. In Report from Black America, published in 1969, activist and civil rights strategist Bayard Rustin observed that African Americans in the early 1960s “began to get Blackenized.” Black power and soul proponents such as Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), H. Rap Brown, Amiri Baraka, and others called for “thinking black” and moving beyond the double consciousness outlined in W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic book The Souls of Black Folk to a new, independent, proud black identity. Rustin argues that soul was the cultural arm of the black power movement that called for, among other actions, singing, talking, and eating according to the African heritage of black people in America.8

  In a 1967 article entitled “African Negritude—Black American Soul,” published in the journal Africa Today, W. A. Jeanpierre argues that soul is the same as African negritude. Both negritude and soul were political and cultural concepts rooted in the values that informed black Americans about African civilizations, black genius, and the things that made black people across the globe unique. T
he difference between negritude and soul was in their origins: elite African intellectuals, many of them living in Europe, created the idea of negritude; northern working-class urban African Americans with southern roots created soul ideology, which subsequently spread to more affluent northern black communities. From Jeanpierre’s article, one can conclude that there is a class and regional formula to soul: poor black folks have more soul than wealthier ones; urban black folks have more soul than suburban black folks. In this formula, the more black, poor, and urban you are, the more soul you have.9

  Soul and soul food, according to one scholar, developed out of a larger black power project that called for creating black cultural expressions different from white society.10 Oral interviews conducted with those who lived through the civil rights and black power movements illustrate this point. For example, Lamenta Crouch, a longtime educator in Prince George’s County, Maryland, associates the term “soul food” with the black power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Crouch graduated from an HBCU in Virginia in the 1960s and moved to Washington, D.C. She remembers black power in the metropolitan Washington area largely as a black identity movement. Crouch says, “I can’t remember exactly the first time that I heard it, but it was in the same era of black power, soul brother, and all that business of having an identity that was uniquely ours.” She adds, “It was during that era that the soul food term came up and I think it was kind of like, ok this is ours. This is something we can claim is ours that identifies us as a people and we [have] some value and we have something to contribute.”11