Fifty years earlier, my grandmother had left her husband and home behind in Louisiana and headed to Chicago with her children in tow, part of a tide of African Americans trying to outrun the hot toxic breath of Jim Crow. After hitting rock bottom in Bridgeport, I made the reverse commute. Like Grandma Cassie, I was looking for escape. Unlike Grandma Cassie, it was myself I was running from.
During my lowest lows in Bridgeport, my mom was living in Baton Rouge, working as an executive chef at a catering company. She never knew what I was really getting into, so was spared the details of my drug dealing. All she knew, when I called looking for a new beginning, was that I needed a place to stay.
I’d thought about going back to New York. Jaquan’s couch was always waiting back at Webster, but to have to be seen by the same people, to become again the same Kwame from the corner, a junior member of the B.A.B.Y. crew, to be reminded that I’d dreamt of college but had fallen back to the projects, would have been too humiliating. If others saw me as a failure, I feared that whatever future I had imagined for myself when I left for college would permanently evaporate.
And there was no way I was going back to my father’s house, even though it would have made financial sense. The wounds he had inflicted were what I had been trying to paper over with the money and the drugs and the violence. The wounds I had seen him inflict on others, watching him beat his girlfriends mercilessly while I tried to stop him, still haunt me today.
But my mom, she’d stood where I was standing, caught between here and there, many times before. She was an expert in the art of the skedaddle, something that had affected me in both positive and negative ways. From her relationship with my dad, with Tatiana in tow, to a series of ever-shrinking apartments; from one tight situation after another; and finally from New York City altogether, she had cleared out with ease. How it made me feel depended on whether she took me with her. Sometimes she did, sometimes she didn’t. But from her I learned perhaps the most important lesson in my life: Always keep moving.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been able to move back and forth, uptown and downtown, between the black and white worlds and in between. Going to school in the Gifted and Talented program, I’d been exposed to well-to-do culture, to the world of the Gallaghers. But unlike the Gallaghers, I knew the streets too. And unlike some of my friends from the streets, I’d been to Chelsea, where I’d been surrounded by black people full of pride about who they were and where they came from. I still carried the pride of bringing kola nuts to my grandfather across the dusty paths of his compound, his pride in his ancestors, our ancestors, and me. I knew how to be black in Nigeria, black in Soho, black in Harlem and the Bronx. But I didn’t know how to be black in the South.
When I stepped off the airplane into the humid air of the Baton Rouge airport, the first thing I noticed was how the world seemed settled into black and white—with white at the top, black at the bottom. Every janitor I saw sweeping the terminal, every cashier working at a retail kiosk, every porter with red cap and trembling hands, every cabbie driving a beat-up Chevy, every unlicensed hustler trying to score a fare, was black. In New York, you can be black and rich, black and educated, black and a boss. I’d seen men my skin color in positions of power, as principals and coaches and businessmen and academics. I’d also seen them sweeping the hallways or spearing trash along Frederick Douglass Boulevard in the bright blue uniforms of the Doe Fund. But beside them were Hispanics doing the same thing, and Southeast Asians and Asians and whites as well. No one can deny that America is built on the backs of black and brown people. But at least in New York you can kid yourself.
But from the very first moment I arrived in Louisiana, I saw that down there, the world was black and white. On one side were the whites, on the other were people like me, who had skin so dark they seemed invisible. I was struck by how the white people in their pastel polo shirts and diaper-bottomed khakis glided by the man buffing the floor as if he was furniture. As if he didn’t even cast a shadow. I’d never seen people who looked like me so openly overlooked. Or, if I did, it didn’t matter, because everyone in New York City is equally overlooked. We’re not a city full of people who say, “Good day, y’all!” But here in Baton Rouge, the cradle of the famous southern hospitality, the difference between friendliness and nada was pronounced. This would be the perfect place to reinvent myself. No one saw me as a failure because no one saw me at all.
My mother said she could get me some work at the catering company, but it wasn’t enough to live on, even if I was staying with her rent-free. She lived in a small one-story brick house on Pecan Tree Drive, a street with neat lawns and houses that all looked the same. Bridgeport wasn’t exactly the center of the universe, but the corner of Baton Rouge I landed in was on the back side of nowhere. I spent most days stoned on her couch, watching reruns of Iron Chef. One night, after my mom came home bone-tired from working an event and found me watching television, she said, “Kwame, you need to get your ass a job.”
She was right, but I felt paralyzed. In Connecticut I had been making $3,000 a week selling drugs tax-free. The idea of working a minimum wage gig in Baton Rouge was just too humiliating. Better not to do anything than to accept this total and utter failure.
“I know, Mom,” I said. “It’s just hard.”
My mom fixed me with a look like a bayonet. “Of course it’s hard, Kwame. What did you think? Life is gonna be easy?” she said, her voice rising in anger. “You think success is handed to you? You think it was handed to me?”
“Mom,” I said, “chill out. I’ll go tomorrow.”
“Don’t tell me to chill out, Kwame,” she said, using that tone of voice I knew meant I was in trouble “I get it. You’re scared. You’re sad. You think you deserve better. But I’m going to tell you this right now, though it’s something you should have learned already: No one deserves anything. You get what you work for.”
My mom’s love is like a mama bird’s. She cared for me and fed me and sacrificed for me for years. But eventually she was gonna push me out of the nest—or, more accurately, off the couch. Her expectation wasn’t that I would fly, because I had tried and failed at that before. But she wanted to teach me a lesson about what to do when you hit the ground feeling broken.
“I love you, Kwame,” she said, “but either you get a job or you get out of my house.” And with that, she left the living room, turning off the light and leaving me to contemplate the future by the glow of the television set.
What followed was a sad-ass parade of short-lived menial jobs with a special southern flair. At my first gig, a high-end rib shop called Zea’s, they had me take an aptitude test. I knew I did well but they wouldn’t let me see the results. They threw me on the dish pit as a porter. I asked if I’d ever work the line and the manager just laughed at me. After six months dismantling huge towers of dirty dishes that rose like columns from the sink, I quit. I made a tour of Baton Rouge’s crummiest restaurants, but the only thing I got was a good weed connect and a couple of friends to smoke with.
I even tried working with my mom, prepping at her catering company and later, when she got a job as the executive chef at a local hotel, doing what she called “the bitch work,” like cutting the tops off eight cases of strawberries. Living with your boss and working with your mother are both bad ideas.
Whatever joy I had found in the past in cooking was gone. It wasn’t a career for me; it was just a way to get my mom off my back. To her credit, she never bawled me out or made me feel terrible about it. The important thing to her was that I wasn’t idle, that I kept moving.
One morning she dropped me off in the parking lot of a nearby restaurant called TJ’s Ribs. TJ’s was founded in the 1980s by a guy who had the novel idea of serving barbecued baby back ribs when everyone else still served spareribs. The place is the local hangout for Louisiana State University sports fans, called Tigers, and the walls were crammed with LSU memorabilia. Before I walked in the door looking for work, I had never been inside the place.
I knew better than to go back home without a job. Luckily for me—I guess—a place like TJ’s is always hiring. Turnover is high, which isn’t surprising when the pay is so low. I walked in and asked the hostess to see a manager. She looked at me a little sideways but picked up the phone to call someone. A few minutes later a white lady in her forties with her blond hair teased up and her eyelids covered in purple mascara, sidled out of the dining room.
“Hello,” I said, sticking out my hand for an eager handshake and assuming a professional tone of voice, “my name is Kwame Onwuachi. I was wondering if you are hiring.”
“You worked in restaurants before, Kwame?” said Janice.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, lying through my teeth, “in New York, where I’m from.”
Janice greeted the news by raising her penciled-on eyebrows. “From New York, huh?” she said suspiciously. “I didn’t think you was from around here. What brought you to Baton Rouge?”
I could have told her the truth. That I was trying to start somewhere new from somewhere bad, that I had decided to abandon my burgeoning career as a drug kingpin because I’d had a moment of self-reflection and realized I had become a stranger to myself.
“Uh,” I said, “my mom lives down here. She’s an executive chef.”
Judging from Janice’s arched eyebrows, the answer surprised her. “An executive chef?” she asked, as if pondering the impossible. “Where?”
“Yes, ma’am, an executive chef,” I said evenly, “at the Radisson Hotel.”
She was clearly doubtful, trying to ascertain whether I was a liar, which I was, but not about this. She didn’t even try to hide the appraisal. In fact, I think she wanted me to know that she was a cool customer, nobody’s fool. Was I a hard worker or would I give her trouble? The answer, I silently responded, was yes to both. I held her gaze and refused to look away. The moment was a tiny tug-of-war that hinted at a larger battle raging just under the surface.
But I needed a job and Janice could offer me one. So when she nodded to a back section in the dining room and said, “You can be a server if you want; we’re a man down,” I said, “Oh, thank you very much, ma’am. When can I start?”
When I arrived for my first shift the next morning, there was an LSU game at the nearby stadium so the place was packed. The dining room was a sea of white faces and purple-and-gold jerseys. A good number of people wore purple-and-gold face paint on which barbecue sauce was smeared into Joker-like smiles. This wasn’t a normal lunch crowd. This was a tribe, and I was an outsider.
Though nearly the entire back-of-house staff was black, I was the only nonwhite server. When Janice led me to my section for the first time, the far corner of the restaurant near the restrooms, I noticed that all my customers had one thing in common: they were black. At first I thought it was a coincidence. But after the third party walked in and sat down, I understood that it was not. This was a revelation only to me. Everyone, including my customers, knew the game already.
The most difficult part of working at TJ’s wasn’t that the pay was pennies compared to my dealing days, and it wasn’t the endless sidework, and it wasn’t leaving every day smelling like a fry station. I actually loved being a waiter, and in the South, it is true that people are friendlier. Some people. The hardest part was enduring all the eyes that were turned on me.
So many of the eyes I met at TJ’s didn’t so much see me as look through me. Like the black men and women I saw in the airport or by the sides of the road, I was, to Janice, to most of the other waiters, to many of the patrons, a thing. An object. The eyes of my customers were even harder to take. Those whose money was just as green as the white patrons’ but who were led back to my section. Was it rage I read? No, though there was anger. It was resignation born from enduring indignities that I could never fully comprehend, among which being led to the back section of a rib restaurant was more than likely the most benign. What they sought in my eyes, in the unscripted moments before I launched into my welcome spiel, before we settled into the familiar patter of server and customer, was recognition and brotherhood. We’re in this together, their eyes said. I felt their claim on me and I shied from it. I regarded them as things too. “No,” I said to myself, “I’m not in this together with you. I’m just passing through.”
But the front-of-house looks were nothing compared to those in the kitchen. The kitchen staff were, almost to a man, black men my father’s and even my grandfather’s age, who worked twelve- to fifteen-hour shifts for $6 an hour. Hair hidden under bandanas, chickeny arms extending from white short-sleeved uniforms, aprons spotted and splattered with barbecue sauce and fry oil. The kitchen was hot as hell and poorly ventilated. The wheezing hood above the racks of ribs did little to clear the smoke. When I came in to pick up my orders, I’d catch the line cooks’ eyes as they hefted the meat-laden plates to the pass. This is what it looks like, I thought, to be bone-tired and beaten.
Periodically, the GM would crash into the kitchen to yell abuse at the men who worked there. Even the shoutiest chefs on television didn’t shout with this level of malice. This wasn’t tough love or motivation. The managers verbally lashed the staff for no other purpose than to demean and dehumanize them.
“There are so many people who need a job!” I remember one GM yelling, a kid just out of college whose pale pimply cheeks were flushed with anger. “You guys are fucking disgusting! You’re scum.” When Janice came back, she tossed “your kind” and “you people” into her tirades. “You people are so lazy!” she’d rail. “Your kind just don’t know how to work!”
Behind the window of the pass, the cooks bowed their heads in silence and continued working. They moved not like men but like machines running on fumes. I think Janice humiliated them on purpose in front of me, as a cudgel and a caution, and as a wedge. It worked. One time, a few minutes after I had witnessed one of Janice’s rages, I came back to pick up a plate of brisket. The cook behind the pass, a guy around fifty, I’d say, looked out at me.
“Order up!” he shouted angrily, even though I was standing in front of him. When I looked at him, he was staring at me hard. An expression met me behind the metal pass, a look full of anger and animosity I couldn’t figure out. As I ran the brisket out to the dining room, the look haunted me. Was it that he saw me seeing him be humiliated? Was it that he thought I wasn’t just on the other side of the pass, but that I was really on the other side, Janice’s side? The fury of that man’s look still smolders in my memory all these years later.
I used to call Jaquan after work sometimes, just to check in. He was still selling, and it was nice to hear his voice. Jaquan was now on a different track than me, for better or worse. Certainly he was living larger than I was. I remember his uncontrollable laughter when I told him I was making $20 a shift.
“Kwame,” he said, “you’re crazy. Just come back up here. I made four grand, dude, and that was just today.”
“I can’t,” I’d say. “I can’t go back to selling. It’s gonna be all right down here.”
I tried to sound upbeat and certain, but the truth was I had no idea. I worried that I had made a terrible mistake, that I had driven myself into a dead end and thrown away the keys. As days turned to months I grew to dread waking up, I grew to dread every shift at TJ’s.
When my mother decided to move to New Orleans to work as an executive chef for a catering company called Fleur de Lis, I decided it was time to get out of Baton Rouge too. Without knowing quite what I’d do next, I marched into TJ’s to resign. I wish I could say my last shift was dramatic, that I cut Janice down to size with a speech about the equality of men and the dignity of work. I wish I could say anyone noticed at all. But the truth is, when I quit, Janice nodded like she’d expected it all along. After all, she thought all my people were lazy. As far as the kitchen staff went, they saw me as a transient anyway. This was their reality, for days, months, years, decades, lifetimes, generations. But I could get out, so I did.
Shortly after my mom left, she introduced me to a chef at her new catering company. It turned out the guy had worked on a cleanup ship for the Deepwater Horizon spill that had happened a few months earlier. When he told me how much he made working as a cook there, I couldn’t believe it: $1,900 a week. I wanted in, and he assured me that because there were so many crews—and so many ships—in the Gulf, they weren’t picky at all. I was excited about the opportunity and to get out of the minimum-wage rut. I had no idea whether I could hack it, but I’d get paid $1,900 a week regardless, so I had nothing to lose.
When I told my mom the plans, she was less cocksure. “This is going to make you or break you as a cook,” she told me, “and you’re not going to have cell phone service or anything.”
“I know, Mom,” I said. “I’m not that addicted to my phone.”
“It’s not that, Kwame,” she said “You can’t look on the internet for anything, no recipes, nothing. You just got to cook from the heart.”
Sure enough, the contractors responsible for staffing the cleanup ships weren’t picky at all. I filled out an online application form, had a five-minute chat on the phone with a human resources coordinator about nothing in particular and barely touching on my cooking experience (which was a good thing), and at the end she asked, “Can you start tomorrow?”
I was so anxious I could hardly sleep that night. I’d never really been on a ship before, save for a few visits to see my grandfather, who had also been a ship’s cook, and his vessel was docked the whole time. I had never been responsible for ordering, planning, or executing meals for a group, let alone thirty exhausted guys cooped up with no other options. I was excited but also scared. It occurred to me that just because an opportunity was offered didn’t mean it was a good idea to take it. But it was too late to reconsider. They were expecting me on the ship the next night. I threw a week’s worth of clothes and a few books including The Autobiography of Malcolm X—which was ultimately responsible for me giving up the N-word—in a duffel bag and I was ready.
The next day my mom picked me up midmorning and we began the journey, arriving in Houma, Louisiana, in late afternoon. The city was an old Cajun outpost of fishermen, shrimpers, and oystermen, but due to the oil spill it had become a hive of industrial activity. We made our way to the Port of Terrebonne, past the towering rigs of shrimping boats, barges, and drydocks to the tiny office to which I was told to report. I gave my mom a quick hug in the car, grabbed my bag, and headed inside.
I’d be working on the Maine Responder, an oil spill response vessel that was capable of skimming and recovering up to 444,000 gallons of oil and water a day. To get out to the ship where I’d be cooking, I had to take a series of ever smaller crafts, and I seriously questioned what the hell I was doing more than once on that bumpy ride into the unknown. The trip took about three hours, and it was after nightfall when we arrived.
The Maine Responder was a massive ship, 210 feet long, weighing 1,300 tons, with nearly forty workers on board, a helipad on the back, and four tanks, each capable of holding 1,000 barrels of oil. In the dead of night, it just looked like a constellation of red and blue lights in the sky. A rope ladder was flung down and the gruff captain on the boat I was leaving just nodded and said, “Good luck.” That night I was so tired I stumbled sleepily into my bunk, not noticing much beyond the strong smell of gasoline and the constant hum. I slept in a cabin on the lowest deck. There were two of us in a space smaller than the closet I had grown up in.
In the morning I put on my clean white chef’s coat, black pants, and clogs and made my way to the deck. The sky was beautiful, pink around the edges. But the water all around us was jet black. I had never seen an oil spill before, and the sheer volume of it was shocking. The smell was overpowering.
There were two chefs on a ship this big: a lead and the assistant. I was going to be the assistant. The guy I’d be assisting was standing in the cramped space when I walked in, pouring an industrial-size bag of frozen hash browns into a fry basket. He looked like he was in his fifties, with thick stubble and no chin, and was wearing an apron with only a tank top and boxers underneath. He had a belly, but his spindly legs and arms stuck out like a bug’s.
“Hello,” I said, “I’m Kwame, I’m the new sous.”
“I’m Tex,” he said with a strong Texan drawl.
“What can I help with?” I asked.
“I need to ask you a question,” Tex replied, looking up at me for a sec before turning again to the fryer. “Can you fucking read? That’s all I need to know.”
I looked at him, speechless with anger. I wanted to tell him off. Had I just consigned myself to the same treatment I’d endured in Baton Rouge but in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, where I couldn’t walk out? I stood there silently for a long enough time that it became even more uncomfortable in the small hot kitchen.
Finally I said, “Yeah, I can fucking read.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” said Tex, spinning around, trying to backpedal. “You’re clearly educated. I just see a lot of these people not knowing how to read. I didn’t know if I had to teach you everything from scratch. I was just trying to help out.”
My temper wasn’t assuaged, and it only got worse from there. The way the work was set up, Tex would plan and dictate the menu and I would help execute it. Though I hadn’t really worked in a kitchen before, the extent of Tex’s cooking was essentially dumping Sysco ingredients either into deep fryers or spilling them, still frozen, onto a flat-top. I don’t think I saw the man use salt or pepper, let alone any other spice, the entire time I was there.
The boat and senior staff came from Maine and ate in a separate kitchen. But the thirty or so guys I would be cooking for, the guys who actually did the grunt work of skimming the oil, were deep-country Louisiana boys. They were all young, all white, and all poor. I began to see why Tex had asked whether I could read. It had less to do with my being black and more to do with the simple fact that many of these guys probably couldn’t. Watching them crowd into the mess hall, their faces covered in grime, their teeth yellowed and rotting, I was, I have to admit, terrified. I was the only black guy on the ship—well, there were two black engineers, but they didn’t eat at the same mess hall—and this seemed straight out of Deliverance. These men called themselves “coonasses,” a word, like the N-word, that had been used against them and that some of them had reclaimed as a badge of pride. When I first glimpsed them, every stereotype I harbored came to mind. I thought by default they’d be dumb racists.
Life on the ship was rough. For the two weeks on board, they worked nonstop. Shifts stretched twelve to fifteen hours and the labor was backbreaking. They made good money and had perks. For each week off, we’d get helicoptered back to Houma and given free airfare anywhere in the country.
At first Tex and I tried to work together, but the man didn’t make food. He made fuel, tasteless bland slop meant only to keep the workers fed enough that they could continue working. It didn’t have to be this way. If he had given just the tiniest of shits, these self-described “coonasses” could have found a taste of home, a bit of love, in the mess hall. Unlike in the kitchens of Baton Rouge, it was just me and Tex in the middle of the Gulf. If I wanted to take a stand, here was a good place to do it. Plus, since BP was picking up the tab for all of this, we could order whatever ingredients we wanted. Strangely enough, sitting hundreds of miles from land, the world was our oyster. So one day I said, “Look, man, why don’t you let me order this week?”
“Fine,” he said, shrugging, “less work for me.”
On the next helicopter drop I rushed excitedly to the kitchen to unpack the boxes I had ordered. I thought of the food that had given me the most comfort when I was a kid. It had to be something I knew so well I could cook without a recipe. So I decided to make the guys something I had grown up with, my mom’s shrimp étouffée. I spent all day preparing the shrimp stock, peeling the shrimp, and perfectly chopping the onions, celery, and bell peppers. I must have tasted it a million times, wanting to make sure it was perfect. This was, after all, the first meal I had ever made, not as a cook but as a chef. I wasn’t following any recipe other than my own. As the kitchen filled with the aromas of my childhood, guys kept on peeking into the kitchen with funny looks on their faces.
“Damn, that smells good!” said one guy.
“It’s like I’m back home,” said another.
I felt the same way.
By dinnertime word had gotten out that I was making shrimp étouffée, and the guys weren’t shy about expressing their excitement or ratcheting up the pressure. One of the men yelled out, “It had better be good, ’cause I’ve been eating this my whole life!”
They carried their bowls back to the mess hall. I waited. The dining room went silent, which is always a good sign. One guy came back to the pass-through where I served the food and announced, “The next time we get to shore and I go home, I’m gonna smack my mama for what she’s been feeding me my whole life, ’cause your étouffée is ridiculous!”
Tex, meanwhile, didn’t take kindly to being upstaged, and the animosity between us grew. I was constantly trying out new recipes, doing whatever I could to make the lives of these guys easier. I baked cupcakes between meals, which I’d carry up to the main deck and pass out to the crew. I started plating their meals instead of just slopping the food on a plate as they passed by. I don’t think those boys had ever eaten as well as they had with me. This all, naturally, infuriated Tex. He started cursing me out regularly and sabotaging my plans.
“Look,” I said one day, “you cook your food. I’ll cook my food.” For the rest of our time, I cooked breakfast and lunch, and he’d cook dinner. Then we’d rotate and he’d do breakfast and lunch and I’d do dinner. The only time I saw the man was at night. He slept on the bunk below me, although I wouldn’t call what he did sleep. Tex was an inveterate sleepwalker and sleeptalker. As for what he said, it’s too obscene even to write here. Suffice to say, he was a man stuck on a ship with a bunch of other men and craved the company of women, and this craving came out at night. But he’d also just wander around the ship. One night they found him wearing nothing but his boxers and a life jacket, standing on the railing, about to jump into the Gulf. It would have been the end of Tex, and that would have suited me fine.
As it turned out, I was the end of Tex. Because I cared, because I actually tasted what I made, because I treated these “coonasses” not as animals but as people who deserve food made with care, I quickly became their favorite. So when Tex went on his one-week break, the captain told the contractor and the contracting company to make me the lead cook. Tex wasn’t invited back, and his replacement became my sous. And that was that.
Not just in the kitchen but out of it too, I bonded with these backcountry guys. In our downtime, we’d crowd into a cabin and play Nintendo Wii or just bullshit with each other. I found myself thinking they’d get on pretty well with my friends back in the Bronx. I listened to their stories of home, of the gumbo and red beans and rice, jambalayas, crawfish boils and fried catfish their mamas made. Then I tried to re-create those recipes for them, drawing from my memory and from their descriptions. Seeing their crooked raggedy smiles beyond the pass was one of the greatest feelings I’d ever had.
That time on the Maine made me a chef. Granted, my kitchen was small and my staff only one other person, but that’s not what mattered. I learned to see beyond my own biases, to see that when it came to eating, these guys, who looked nothing like me, just wanted something that reminded them of home, something made with love. And I learned that I could be the guy who could give them that. I had the skills, the palate, the recipes, the heart.