Frederick Douglass Opie

by Hog

  At his opulent banquets Divine and his followers served first-rate roasted poultry, vegetable dishes, fresh fruit, and hot and cold beverages from morning to midnight. He was able to do this, argues one biographer, by using a scheme that some restaurants had used for years: serving courses of inexpensive filling foods before serving expensive meats. Divine instructed his staff to serve guests plenty of water, tea, coffee, and other beverages and provide plenty of time for talking and singing hymns. Next, they served starchy foods and some fruits and vegetables. By the time waiters brought out the expensive cuts of meat, most visitors were too full to eat more than a little. The meat would return to the kitchen almost untouched and would be frozen for upcoming feasts.28

  Interviews conducted with people who ate at one of Divine’s places provide a portrait at odds with the inexpensive food scheme theory. No one else describes any attempt to systematically fill guests with starches before serving more expensive foods such as meat. Harlemites Roy and Ruth Miller, their childhood friend Rudy Bradshaw, and Dorothy M. Evelyn said Divine operated pay-to-eat restaurants on the Upper West Side of the city during the Depression (and into the 1970s and 1980s). The main restaurant was underneath the viaduct on 155th Street in Harlem. There was another one on 81st Street, “and I understand that he had several others in Harlem,” says Bradshaw, born in 1926 in Harlem, the son of Caribbean immigrants. Evelyn was born in Harlem in 1924, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants from St. Kits and the Dutch island of St. Martin. She went to Divine’s Peace Centers for meals on many occasions. According to her, they were located “all over Harlem.” They charged ten to fifteen cents for an all-you-could-eat meal “and you didn’t have to tip them,” remembered Evelyn.29

  FIGURE 5.3 Cook at Father Divine Mission, Harlem, 1935. Photographer, Aaron Siskind. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Tennyson and Fern Schad, courtesy of Light Gallery.

  The price of admission, according to Bradshaw, was no more than ten to fifteen cents. And you got an earful of Divine’s followers declaring the virtues of their pastor. “The price of going in,” said Bradshaw, was saying, just like his followers, “peace, peace, peace, peace is truly wonderful.” So if you went to one of his restaurants, you had to be prepared to hear people testifying about the goodness of Father Divine. Inside the restaurants, Divine’s followers would be declaring “peace is truly wonderful, Father Divine, you know, is God,” recalled Bradshaw. “So if you wanted to have a meal you had to be prepared to have a religiosity experience.” Bradshaw’s friend Roy Miller, also the child of Caribbean immigrants, added, “it was extremely clean, from what I understood, the cleanliness was impeccable.”30

  Divine’s Peace Centers were clean spaces where Harlemites could buy very good, inexpensive, white-tablecloth, sit-down meals. Carleton May-bee remembers that the food was “in abundance, and very well cooked, just simply delicious, no complaints about the food or whatever.”31 Father Divine, insists Bradshaw, was not operating mere restaurants in Harlem but “retreats from the rigors of the. . . Depression.” He goes on to say, “When it’s a recession in the white man’s country, it’s a depression in Harlem. Well, it was a depression for the white man back in the 1930s in this country and in Harlem it was devastation.” He maintains, “Those that had a job, they were thanking their Almighty every day. Those that didn’t, and a lot of young brothers didn’t . . . guys like Langston Hughes, doing WPA works, and people of his intellect and guys that didn’t have his sort of intellect were doing much worse.”32

  Having a dime was precious because you had to find a place to sleep and eat. People had to be sure and “make a meal count.” As a result, folks in Harlem would hunt for a Peace Center where they could get a meal for a dime. “And some of the brothers, I understand, were smooth enough to go through the mantra ‘yeah right, truth, peace, truth is truly wonderful, yeah right sister,’ to get another extra plate and make his dime stretch into two meals,” Bradshaw commented.33 Evelyn remembers that for “ten cents and fifteen cents you get fried chicken, corn bread, macaroni and cheese. . . . It was southern cuisine. Most of them must have been southerners because that’s what they cooked.”34

  Going to a Peace Center for something to eat became a regular night out on the town for Evelyn and her friends. “Yes sir, for fifteen cents you could go get fried fish, all you could eat.” Evelyn maintains that she did not feel any pressure to become a member of Divine’s church. “I didn’t intend on changing my religion for theirs. It was a public place and all you” had to do was repeat his famous saying “peace sister, peace brother.” So you would say that, get your food, and keep on going. “Absolutely,” remarked Evelyn, “he had a hell of a following.”35 At first look it may seem odd that Divine served traditional soul food dinners to the integrated northern groups that attended his Peace Center dinners. But as a southerner Divine was continuing a tradition and practice that migrants brought with them from the South and that extended all the way back to the antebellum period. For people of African descent, some foods like chicken, yams, and later others like macaroni and cheese became part of a lexicon of sacred foods identified with religious activities. For Divine, the love feast was religious praxis that required sacred southern foods.

  Other churches provided food during the Depression, but not as southern as Divine’s. For example, the Abyssinia Baptist Church where Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., served operated a soup kitchen. Similarly, St. Mark’s Catholic Church on 138th Street fed its schoolchildren first and then distributed leftovers to lines of neighborhood children during the Depression and World War II. Evelyn lived on 139th Street, one block from St. Mark’s. “Neighborhood kids would go there and get soup, and we called it prison bread at that time, brown bread; peanut butter on one side and jelly on the other. I will never forget that because I went on many of those lines. Not because I had to, but because my friends where going on line and I followed suit.”36

  THE DEPRESSION NORTH OF HARLEM

  As an adult, Fred Opie, Jr., made numerous donations to the Salvation Army as homage to the work the organization had done in the Tarrytowns during the Depression, especially during the holidays. He would periodically say, “If it wasn’t for the Salvation Army, my family would have never survived the Depression.” His sister, Dorothy Opie, said that during the Depression and the war, “I can remember them knocking on the door, and they would bring us food for Thanksgiving and Christmas when we lived [in a cold water flat] down on Valley Street before we owned this house.”37

  FIGURE 5.4 U.S. government pork being distributed to jobless residents in New York City, October 28, 1933. The Emergency Work and Relief Administration hoped to have forty-nine stations in operation to distribute about 250,000 pounds of pork. AP Image Collection.

  In Westchester County, business owners freely distributed leftover food to Maggie White. During the Depression and then the war years, “there was a scarcity of money, but they learned how to make do with a little,” says Margaret Opie. Her aunt Mag, as she called her, lived over Nick’s Market in Ossining, “and Nick would give away the soup bones. . . in other words what you would call waste or scraps, she could make a soup out of that.” She goes on to say, “That’s one of things I remember about black people during the Depression, what other people threw off, black people could make do with, and make flavor[ful].” According to Margaret Opie, Aunt Mag “had flavor. She made you know that she loved what she was doing.”38

  Opie’s Aunt Mag had two ways of cooking: one for the wealthy white family that employed her and one for her own family. When cooking for her own family, she “cooked for abundance and flavor, and [on a] limited budget.” In contrast, when she cooked for the wealthy white folks, “every thing she needed was available to her.” So much in fact that the Brandts, the white family she cooked for in Ossining, regularly gave her food to take home to her children. In addition, her Italian neighbors in her poor, working-class community gave her food to take home. During the Depression and then the war years, the welfare office
in the village of Ossining also distributed flour and lard to needy families.39

  As a single mother, Aunt Mag had to feed four boys and one girl, so she had to make the most out of what she could obtain. “Oh I remember she would cook chicken and dumplings and make pots of cabbage, and they were seasoned with ham hocks. And I always had to have a glass of water because she put red peppers in there and they were hot!” Aunt Mag filled her five children with “wonderful biscuits.” “And she also made what we called spoon bread, which was flour bread in a big black skillet. And we would. . . sop that with molasses. And she made home fries, and when she made home fries she probably do almost five pounds of potatoes. . . in those black skillets.” Opie goes on to say, “And back in them days, they cooked with lard. In contrast, when she cooked for the [Brandts], she used Crisco. So poor people did not use the same things as the wealthy people.”40 Another dish that blacks cooked for their families and friends and not for white employers was chicken. Psyche A. Williams-Forson, author of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, tells us that “cooking chicken, especially when it is fried, is a laborious process from start to finish. (For this reason, some women refused to cook chicken when they worked for white families.)”41 Black women, however, joyously did the tedious work of frying chicken for church events.

  SPECIAL OCCASIONS AND THE “GOSPEL BIRD”

  By the twentieth century, Methodist and Baptist church people in the South served fried chicken, the “Gospel bird,” as a traditional sacred food, for many years offered only on Sundays, holidays, and special events like camp meetings.42 As I reported earlier, this was an adaptation of an Africanism: sources show that chicken played a similar role in West African religious celebrations and rituals. In the southern United States, fried chicken “was not cooked hard and dry, but it was sweet and juicy and could be easily digested and enjoyed,” writes one WPA contributor from Virginia.43

  Nettie Banks recalled that when she was growing up in rural Middlesex County, Virginia, black people fried their chicken with the lard they made during winter hog-killing days. When that ran out, they would use lard purchased from a store.44 Yemaja Jubilee’s family always had plenty of food because her father operated a country store in Charlotte County, Virginia. Traditionally, on Sundays, Jubilee’s mother, born in 1926, cooked “fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, yellow chocolate layer cake, potato salad, and sometimes she did not have chocolate cake, she would have sweet potato pies, and home-made apple pies.”45 At age eighty-four, Benjamin Outlaw of Windsor, North Carolina, still had a vivid image of his mother’s Sunday cooking. “Now I am going to tell you what we cooked. You cooked collards. . . chicken, baked, fried, and pot pied, fish, rolls, sometimes a turkey, sometimes a geese, sometimes, a duck.” He added, “vegetables now, sometimes she cooked cabbage, she cooked collards, corn, okras, and tomato pudding.” For dessert, Hattie Outlaw made blueberry, blackberry, and strawberry dumplings: “we’d go out in the woods and pick them and can them up.”46

  Joan B. Lewis was born in 1935. Her mother was from Windsor, and her father was from Washington, both located in Bertie County, North Carolina. Her father did most of the cooking in the home. On Sundays, “we would have fried chicken, sweet potatoes, green beans, or my father made biscuits, and leg of lamb. Now my father was good about stuff. . . . Then with that we would have some kind of scalloped potatoes. Once in a while, my mother would make cakes for desert. My family really were not dessert people, we would just have peaches in the can.”47

  In his autobiographical writings, Stephen Erwin, a 1925 graduate of Duke University, former high school principal, and newspaperman, describes Sunday meals at his home in Harnet County, North Carolina, in which fried chicken played the leading part. “On Sundays the mainstay at the table was fried chicken along with sweet potatoes, collard greens cooked southern style with a hunk of pork meat, and biscuits and butter. Sometimes we had a large chicken stew, chicken dumplings cooked together in a large cast iron pot.”48

  On Sundays, chicken was also the center of the meal in Alabama. “Back then [the 1930s], chicken was the best of all meals to serve,” recalled Ralph David Abernathy; “better than ham, better than pork chops, better even than roast beef or steak.”49 During his childhood in rural Alabama, his mother cooked fried chicken generally on Sundays; he and his siblings therefore “lived for Sunday.” His mother also served it on the “grand occasion” when the preacher came to their home for dinner.50 In Choctaw County, Alabama, and in most of the South, “every family was expected to feed the preacher at least once during the year” writes Joyce White. In addition to roast pork, rice with gravy, stewed tomatoes, corn, macaroni and cheese, corn bread, pies, and crowder peas with okra, White’s mother always served fried chicken when the congregation’s minister, Reverend Barlow, came to dinner.51

  As the child of a Baptist preacher in Virginia, Lamenta D. (Watkins) Crouch ate Sunday dinner at different homes all over the state. She was born in 1947 in Greenbay, Virginia, in Prince Edward County, about ninety miles from Richmond, but her father accepted a call to pastor a church in Keinridge, Virginia.52 In addition to this position, he also served as a pastor at several churches out of town. Lamenta Crouch spent many Sundays eating at other people’s homes. Most of the time she received a fried chicken dinner complete with sweet potatoes, greens, potato salad, succotash, and rolls. Crouch recalls what a treat it was to have “really, really tall hot rolls.” Crouch never got sick of fried chicken. “Some had the knack of having fried chicken and the meat was tender. Some knew how to season it,” she said. “Today I am very health conscious, but it is still very difficult for me to resist fried chicken.” In addition to fried chicken and fixings, southerners in Virginia served Lamenta Crouch and her family pound cake, chess pie, and “very rarely apple pie.”53

  CHESS PIE

  Before doing research for this book I had never heard of chess pie. I thought perhaps others might be interested in learning more about its ingredients and want to see a recipe.

  4 oz. butter

  ½ cup brown sugar, packed

  1 cup granulated sugar

  3 large eggs

  1 tbs. vinegar

  2 tsp. vanilla

  1 tbs. cornmeal

  Melt butter and blend in sugars. Add eggs and other ingredients and stir until blended. Do not beat. Bake in unbaked pie shell for one hour at 350 degrees.

  Like Ralph Abernathy, South Carolinian Alexander Smalls liked Sunday best, the day his mother would make fried chicken. “I’d start thinking about Sunday on Wednesday. Southern fried chicken, fried okra, creamed corn, powdered buttermilk biscuits, a mountain of potato salad with sweet pickles. . . caramelized brown onion gravy dripping off the largest roast loin of beef ever, the bowl of slow-cooked green pole beans with ham hocks” and fluffy Carolina long-grain rice. “There was no order or balance to Sunday dinner, health wise or otherwise, except plenty of everything and everything good,” recalled Smalls.54

  Nora Burns White was born in 1928 in Blaney, South Carolina, just twenty-two miles from Columbia. Her mother, a sharecropper and midwife, raised several girls alone during the Depression as a divorcée. Nora’s eldest sister, Ella, did the cooking in the home. Nora recalled that a typical Sunday meal growing up was “fried chicken, usually some kind of vegetable, maybe collard greens, and macaroni and cheese and rice—two starches—I still do that today on most Sundays.”55

  The preparation of rice and collard greens on Sunday was not just a South Carolina tradition. Jamaicans also made similar foods on Sunday. Beryl Ellington was born in 1915 in the small rural village of Manchester, Jamaica. Ellington’s mother had nine children, seven boys and two girls, whom she fed on produce and meat she raised. On Sundays she baked cassava “bammy” (or bread), fried plantains, and cooked goat’s meat, rice and peas, yams, and collard greens. Rice and peas was made with “gongo beans,” what Americans call pigeon peas, and Ellington’s mother cooked the collard greens in a pot of water seasoned
with onions, garlic, vegetable oil, and salt. On Sundays the family also had “yellow yam, or negro yam, and coco banana” cooked in a pot with a little piece of codfish, and a salad with lettuce and tomatoes.56 A special Sunday meal was a tradition for southern-born blacks and West Indians. Fried chicken, collards, biscuits, and/or corn bread were the most popular items served by black cooks on Sundays following a long and soulful Protestant church service. It is easy to see how fried chicken’s association with Sundays and church earned it the nickname “the Gospel bird.”

  CONCLUSION

  Migrants tried to maintain their eating traditions as best they could despite the severe economic hardships of the Depression; this was particularly the case on Sundays and special occasions. Most often, however, unemployment and scarcity created incentives for migrants to accept food relief in the form of groceries and prepared ethnic dishes outside their culinary traditions. Food relief came from various public and private sources, including the government, white employers, churches and merchants, the Salvation Army, gangsters like Al Capone, and neighbors of various ethnicities. Indeed, I argue that the Depression created a climate in the United States that fostered a great deal of culinary exchange between black Southerners and European, Latin American, and Caribbean immigrants in urban centers like New York and Chicago.