INTRODUCTION

Learning to Be Hungry / Holdin’ On Together

In the summer of 1987, I was stopped in my tracks, like Smokey Robinson, tears welling, the pit of my stomach churning, when I came across Candace Hill-Montgomery’s installation at New York’s Art on the Beach. On the sands approaching the Hudson River in the middle of virtually nothing stood throngs of refrigerators, different models, years, some vintage, some right out of anybody’s kitchen, filled with collard greens and not one more thing. Not even doors afforded the “owners” privacy, dignity, or a menu option. There were some greens, that’s all. Fatback, hog maws, bacon, or smoked turkey wings were not available to these hungry folks, whoever they were, wherever they were. All we got to eat this day was some unseasoned greens with nary a stove in sight.

I thought about our children, I remembered our grandmother’s tending mustards and collards just beyond cracked cement. I thought about slavery. We came here hungry, trying to fill our souls and stomachs with anythin’ll sustain us ever since. I heard the deacons and deaconesses in spotless white strolling the rows of pews in any church not chosen to burn in these terrible times, and I saw the baskets being passed for those in need; heard the pastor mumble “Jesus wept.” Knew again our task in the New World was to fill our horn with plenty, speak Ben Webster, Coltrane, and David Murray. To make manna out the air, to survive. That takes food.

I’m drawn to visions of Africans, like me, during the Middle Passage. I want to know what we yearned for, dreamt of, talked about, if we could manage. But then there is the problem of who could we talk to or with, since we came from so many varied regions of the continent, a plethora of tongues forced into some pidgin dialect to dispel the possibilities that this experience of slavery, indeed, erased our human abilities/needs to communicate: to share a meal.

We can extrapolate the Middle Passage to the daily sojourns of homeless families in Washington, D.C., or Portland. We can even be more concrete and dwell on the experiences of the Haitian boat people, whose rafts, small fishing vessels, carried more black folks away from home to forcible detention. What did / do they bring with them on these desperate jaunts toward North America? Is it the stuff of dried meats, putrid drinking water, and filth that the Middle Passage cargo endured? Or is the “plenty” that sustains these political refugees, food of a differing nature?

In “Mississippi Gulag” by Keith Antar Mason, Prince of the Hittite Empire, the black male performance company featured at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun Festival, a character by the name of Azaka reveals to us on his trip toward Florida an amazing perception of our realities, of what we need to survive.

I am coming here to find you. I got plenty of fresh water and food. I’ll make it. Then I will walk right up and say hello and give you back the cheap radio that fell from the sky. And you will know my voice. And I will spit in your privileged face. Do not be upset . . . We were free when you were still in chains. We never stopping worshipping our gods. The loa [deity] still come to us. I got to get you right. Privileged little boy, who can feel the anger of the earth. You deny too much of your pain . . . you avoid my face. Look at me, Black life has value.¹

Amen.

These perusals of history, literature, vernacular, culture, and philosophy, ’long with absolutely fabulous receipts (Charlestonian for recipes), are meant to open our hearts and minds to what it means for black folks in the Western Hemisphere to be full.

Enjoy in peace,

—NTOZAKE SHANGE

Olde City, Filadelphia

May 18, 1997