Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America

When World War I started in Europe in 1914, food prices in the southern United States increased, and a business depression occurred that lasted until the summer of 1915. In addition, the boll weevil’s destruction of black belt cotton crops and the flooding of some sections of the South and beyond led to a shortage of crops in 1916 and low demand for agricultural workers. There was also a “demand for labor in the North and higher wages offered there,” according to a 1919 black migration study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor.¹

For the first time in their lives, owners of large plantations in states such as Alabama had to tell their tenants they could not advance food to them and advised them to relocate. Food shortages, low wages, and unemployment resulted in the exodus of large numbers of African American wage-earning farmhands, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers, who supplied the lion’s share of unskilled labor in the rural southern United States. In addition to economic factors, political forces also shaped their decision to leave the South.

In small towns and villages in states such as South Carolina, whites roughly handled and corporally punished African American residents. The 1919 Department of Labor migration study reported: “The beating of farm hands on the large plantations in the lower south is so common that many colored people look upon every great plantation as a peon camp: and in sawmills and other public works it is not at all unusual for bosses to knock Negroes around with pieces of lumber or anything else that happens to come handy.” African Americans also regularly faced lynch mobs throughout the rural South. Seldom encountered before or during Reconstruction, incidents of lynching became quite common by 1910. The situation for blacks in urban centers was not much better. In southern cities, white public officials shamefully neglected public services and badly needed infrastructure improvements in African American neighborhoods. Harassing and humiliating to African American southerners, jim crow laws were a constant threat to civil rights, even within educational and recreational facilities.²

Many southern blacks traveled north by rail after receiving letters from friends and family testifying to better conditions and wages in the North. Others learned about the “real advantages of the North”—such as better educational opportunities, higher wages, and better options—through African American–owned-and-operated newspapers published in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and New York. These papers kept black southerners aware of jim crow oppression, including lynchings and mob violence. By 1917 almost half a million southerners migrated to the North and Midwest to work in fast-growing basic industries. They created new lives for themselves in Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and other major cities.³

Writer Langston Hughes, originally from Kansas, migrated to New York City to attend Columbia University, arriving there at the start of the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1920s African American artists such as Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Alain Locke, Ethel Waters, Duke Ellington, and others received unprecedented and widespread support and enthusiasm for their work.⁴ Artists of the Harlem Renaissance reflected a new radical consciousness associated with a “New Negro” movement that championed black culture and the ideology of self-determination.⁵

Many migrants traveled by rail from the black belt to the “freedom belt,”⁶ as northern employers desperate for laborers provided free passage. African Americans accustomed to confronting jim crow policies while traveling acquired the habit of packing food for train rides. This allowed them to avoid humiliating treatment at segregated eating establishments that refused black customers or required them to go to a rear window of an eatery with a sign marked “Colored” over it (I discuss this in greater detail in a later chapter). Family and friends packed empty shoe boxes with cold sandwiches and other goodies. James Weldon Johnson remembered taking the train from Jacksonville to Atlanta. He wrote, “In those days no one would think of boarding a train without a lunch, not even for a trip of two or three hours; and no lunch was a real lunch that did not consist of fried chicken, slices of buttered bread, hard-boiled eggs, a little paper of salt and pepper, an orange or two, and a piece of cake.”⁷ In the 1930s Maya Angelou and her brother traveled on a train without adult supervision from California to Arkansas. “A porter had been charged with our welfare—he got off the train the next day in Arizona—and our tickets were pinned to my brother’s inside coat pocket.” Angelou recalled African American “passengers, who always traveled with loaded lunch boxes, felt sorry for ‘poor little motherless darlings’ and plied us with cold fried chicken and potato salad.”⁸

Mothers, unaware of how long a trip would take, supplied relocating family members with enough provisions for the trip and more. South Carolinian Liza Bowman, as the story goes, must have spent days preparing for her son’s move from one region to another. She prepared “tons of hoecake biscuits, pan after pan of cornbread, fried rice cakes, pickled vegetables, tomatoes, okra, beets, string beans, squash, and jar after jar of cooked beans.” In addition, she sent along “cured and smoked bacon, slabs of salt pork, hams and jerk beef; she packed sacks of cornmeal, flour, grits, dried beans, and rice,” dried fruit, and herbs.⁹

Lack of space for gardens in the North altered African American eating habits. In the South, people ate peas and beans of one kind or another two to three times a week. In the North, people ate them only occasionally and then often ate the canned variety because of the limited access to land and because the colder climatic conditions restricted their ability to grow inexpensive garden vegetables. In the North, cooks continued to make corn bread regularly, but for some unknown reason it became distinctly sweeter. Southerners dismissed the sweeter northern interpretation of corn bread as unfit for consumption. Over time, however, the corn bread of newcomers from the South became more northern in style, just like the migrants themselves.

Moving North provided African Americans with the opportunity to cook on more modern stoves than were found in the South. In addition, moving to the North required that the cooks who prepared southern food improvise and make do, which is the historical hallmark of African American cuisine. Except for the handful of wealthy migrants who prospered, most southern migrants continued inventing dishes that stretched and transformed what they could afford to purchase on meager working-class wages. Generally, this meant the continuation of the very unhealthy practice of eating the cheapest cuts of meat, particularly pork; seasoning legumes and vegetables with salt pork; and deep-frying chicken and other food.

Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., son of the pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, recalled his childhood days and the food he grew up eating in Harlem in his autobiography. Representative Powell was also a minister and became the pastor of his father’s church. Both of Powell’s parents were southerners. His father was born in 1865 in Franklin County, Virginia, at Martin’s Mill, and his mother was born in 1872 on the campus of Christiansburg Academy, in Christiansburg, Virginia. The mother of the senior Powell was a “Negro-Indian woman named Sally,” and his stepfather was a former slave named Dunn. In Franklin County, Virginia, the family rose to a breakfast of “fried fatback, cornpone cooked in the ashes of the fireplace, and coffee made of rye grains.” In 1875 the family relocated to Coldsburg, West Virginia. After accepting a call to the ministry in 1884, the senior Powell attended seminary in Washington, D.C., and then served as the pastor of several Baptist churches in the Northeast between 1888 and 1908. In 1908 he accepted the job of senior pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.¹⁰

The younger Powell remembers that, during his childhood years in Harlem, his mother stretched the meat or fish from the Sunday meal into dishes that lasted through the next Saturday: “A whole boiled cod, which I loathed, with its head and eye balefully looking at me, always offered its bones, tail, fins, and again that head as the basis of a New England fish chowder.” When his father started fishing in the spring, his mother cooked fried “fish four times a week until the cold weather rolled in.” Similarly, when rabbit was in season, “hucksters drove through the blocks with barrels of rabbits” for sale. His mother purchased enough rabbit to serve it in one form or another for a week. Culinary repetition also occurred when quarts of oysters and large smoked country hams arrived from relatives still living in the South. “Fresh greens were always cooked with this ham, from wild watercress in the spring to winter kale.”¹¹

Powell describes a time in Harlem “when it was a disgrace to bring in bread from a store and, for that matter, anything that was already baked.” In his middle-class Harlem home, the family’s black coal-burning stove “was a place of magic,” where his mother made corn bread, biscuits, and muffins. For breakfast she fixed pancakes, salted mackerel, codfish cakes, and baked beans. The beans cooked “all night long on the back of the stove with plenty of black molasses on top and hunks of salt pork inside.”¹²

Stories of eating from Powell’s youth provide evidence that migration to the North did not alter African American cookery significantly. Migrants in the North continued to feel that breakfast should be a banquet, complete with ham, fried fish, eggs, sausage, bacon, grits, red-eye gravy, corn bread, and molasses. Lunch and dinner also remained the same, featuring large amounts of corn bread, greens, and various parts of the pig. For some migrants, cooking traditional dishes like pork chops with red-eye gravy, chitlins, trotters, snout and jowls, and hog maws reminded them of their past and their southern roots.¹³ Some migrants, like the Powells, received pork by mail from relatives in the South who slaughtered hogs in the winter. Collards and cabbage seasoned with salt pork, fried chicken, and sweet potato pie carried with them similar memories of childhoods in the South.¹⁴

As members of Harlem’s upper class, migrant families like the Powells could afford to eat like northern white elites or maintain their southern traditions. Studies on the city of Chicago by Tracy N. Poe, St. Clair Drake, and Horace R. Cayton show that black elites in that city could afford to eat very differently when they wanted to from working-class African American migrants who regularly consumed traditional southern food.¹⁵ Two characters interviewed by Drake and Cayton, named Baby Chile and Mr. Ben, were a case in point. Mr. Ben recalls a dinner party at Baby Chile’s apartment: “Baby Chile called us to the kitchen for supper—a platter of neckbones and cabbage, a saucer with five sausage cakes, a plate of six slices of bread, and a punchbowl of stewed prunes (very cold and delicious). Baby Chile placed some corn fritters on the table, remarking, “This bread ain’t got no milk in it. I did put some aig [egg] in it, but I had to make it widout any milk.”¹⁶ In contrast, the social gatherings of the Chicago’s black upper class featured food and beverage that was far more expensive than the traditional southern meal items that Baby Chile and Mr. Ben enjoyed. Speaking of northern elite African Americans in Chicago, Drake and Cayton write: “All through the year there is a continuous round of private informal parties and formal dinners. . . . On their tables one will find wild duck and pheasants in season, chicken and turkey in season and out, and plenty of their finest spirits and champagne.”¹⁷

Perhaps members of the black upper class enjoyed fried chicken, yams, grits, and greens at home with their families and served more expensive foods at important social gatherings. The lower classes, however, made do with cheap ingredients almost all the time. An African American women living on the West Side told Drake and Cayton, “One thing, over here you can always get something to eat at the market like a basket of beans or tomatoes and potatoes for a dime, before they are graded.” She added, “If you get more than you can use yourself, you can always sell or trade what you don’t want.”¹⁸

South Carolina agricultural experiment station reports about family diets in the Piedmont and lower coastal plains areas of South Carolina provide excellent insights into the eating traditions migrants brought with them when they left the South.¹⁹ Researchers studied black and white farm families in Marion, Florence, Darlington, Lee, Dorchester, Sumter, and Charleston counties. Some owned, rented, or sharecropped land; others worked as wage-earning farmhands. The records showed that the “dietary habits” of African American families “resembled those of white families in corresponding sections of the state.”²⁰

The focus here will be on the lower coastal region of South Carolina because records of food menus in black and white homes for summer, spring, fall, and winter are available. Not surprisingly, the spring and summer menus in the lower coastal region contain greater food diversity than the fall or winter menus. As for meat consumption, both black and white coastal farmers ate a lot of fried meats. A typical spring and summer menu primarily consisted of pork dishes such as “fried fat meat,” “fried ham,” “fried [pork] shoulder,” and “fried side meat [salt pork and bacon].” African Americans cooked fried pork dishes in addition to boiled pork dishes such as boiled pork shoulder and boiled ham.²¹ A similar study done in 1928 in the Mississippi Delta by Dorothy Dickins of Mississippi A & M, an HBCU, showed that blacks in that region also typically fried and boiled their food, with most vegetables “overcooked in fat” and meat “fried done and hard.” Both meats and vegetables were “over-done as well as greasy,” which at least in part explained “the high death rate, the frequent illnesses, and lack of energy” among African Americans in the Delta.²² Coastal South Carolinians prepared vegetables, meats, and fish in a similar fashion to farmers in the Mississippi Delta.

Both white and black cooks regularly ate fried fish. During the summer months, however, white families ate shrimp dishes such as “fried shrimp” for breakfast and shrimp and stew for dinner. Similarly, gumbo only appeared on a white menu. For African Americans, shrimp appeared at only one time, and it was on a fall menu as the breakfast dish “shrimp and gravy.” Side dishes also reveal ethnic similarities and differences in coastal South Carolina. Both black and white cooks regularly served corn bread, rice, and “okra and tomatoes” in the spring and summer months. Side dishes distinctive to white coastal cookery were “hambone with green beans,” “stewed pears,” potato salad, “squash with butter and cream,” and “fried corn.” In contrast, “hominy with fat meat gravy,” “cabbage with fat meat,” and “green beans boiled with fat pork” were all distinctly African American.²³

In the fall and winter, common meats prepared among black and white cooks included fried pork, fried fat pork, fried pork shoulder, and more fried side meat. “Beefsteak” sausage, “liver hash,” beef stew, salmon, and “salmon and gravy” appeared only on white menus. In contrast, “shrimp and gravy,” oysters, fried rabbit, and pork stew cooked with pig ears, feet, and backbone appeared only on African American menus. These distinctive African American dishes were made in addition to southern staples such as fried pork and fried fat pork. White coastal cookery in the fall and winter included side dishes such as “dried peas cooked with fat pork,” “field peas with fat pork,” “turnips cooked with pork,” cole slaw, baked sweet potato, “peach pickle,” and “macaroni pie.” The side dishes that were common to both black and white cooks were biscuits, corn bread, baked sweet potatoes, turnips, and what Africans Americans called “dried peas boiled with fat meat,” which appeared as “dried peas cooked with fat pork” on white menus. The only distinctively African American side dishes on the menu were “collards boiled with meat” and “collards boiled with fat pork.”²⁴

A survey of the seasonal menus reveals that white coastal farmers economically fared much better than African Americans in 1939. This is evidenced by the appearance of luxury drinks and foods such as iced tea, jam, jelly, preserves, pies, cakes, and “jello with custard” on white menus. All these required store-bought sugar, baking powder, and spices. Coconut, bananas, “loaf bread,” “bakers bread,” cocoa, salmon (most likely canned salmon), and macaroni are other examples of luxury store-bought items that only appeared on white menus. The store-bought items that African Americans in coastal South Carolina apparently liked and ate were bologna, cheese, and crackers. When hog-killing meat was used up, both black and white families probably purchased their side meat, salt pork, and bacon from a store.²⁵

The macaroni pie that appeared on white menus may possibly refer to macaroni and cheese.²⁶ There is another reference to the southern preparation of macaroni and cheese in the 1928 report about farm families in the Mississippi Delta by Dorothy Dickins. Dickins found that most African American women had never tasted macaroni and cheese and only a few cooked it for their families because they complained that it was too “starchy and gummy.” Dickins goes on to say, “The majority feels that they have too little cash to spend on something which they perhaps cannot properly prepare or which, if they can, the family probably will not like.”²⁷ What is interesting about this quote is that since the 1960s no African American feast I have attended prepared by southern-born women was considered complete without at least one large pan of labor-intensive homemade baked macaroni and cheese with bread crumbs on top. During research for this book, neither oral nor written sources provided an explanation of how and when the dish became apart of the culinary lexicon of African Americans.

Dickins’s 1928 study found that, as African Americans improved their environment and education, the variety in their diets increased. As a result, the high school and college educated had more nutritious eating habits, with larger amounts of fruits and vegetables composing their overall caloric intake, than did their less-educated neighbors. For an uneducated African American in the Delta, an increase in income “generally means an increase in quantity but not necessarily an increase in variety of food. As environment and intelligence improve, variety of food used increases,” writes Dickins.²⁸ For many black belt residents, migrating northward provided access to education and exposure to people from around the world. In their new environments, southerners worked and lived in close quarters with Jews, West Indians, Latin Americans, and Europeans. These “foreigners” taught southern African American migrants how to cook and enjoy foods—like macaroni—that back home they called white folks’ food. Over time they adopted foods such as macaroni and cheese and pancakes as their own.

Immigrants from the Caribbean who migrated to New York after World War I started a number of restaurants in East Harlem. (An extensive discussion of Caribbean migration to New York will come in a later chapter.)²⁹ Cubans in New York had a reputation for being epicureans. As one report noted, Cubans “love food, drink and delicacies of every kind, but it must be good.” The Ideal, at Lenox Avenue and 115th, and Toreador, at 110th, introduced African Americans to traditional Cuban food like agie el dulce, a sweet chili con carne typically served with a side order of fried plantains.³⁰ One of the oldest Puerto Rican restaurants was Pascual Quintana’s El Caribe, which opened in 1920 at 235 West 116th Street. It started off as a place where working-class folks would go to order a thirty-cent mixta dinner—meat or fish and rice and beans from a steam table—and a coffee. In 1927, a year before the start of the Depression, the restaurant relocated to Fifth Avenue, where new management changed the menu to attract wealthier customers. Famous Latin American professional boxers as well as locals came to enjoy traditional dishes such as mafongo con chicharrones, mashed green plantains mixed with mashed fried pig skin and covered with garlic, onion, and hot pepper sauce, and pollo frito, fried chicken served with fried plantains or fried potatoes and a salad. Arroz con gallina, chicken and rice seasoned with ham, salt pork, tomatoes, green peppers, annatto seeds, salt, garlic, and onions, was another popular dish.³¹

The Saturday special was sancocho, a stew made with sweet and plain potatoes; chicken, beef, and pork; green and ripe plantains; yucca; Spanish yams; and a typical Spanish sauce seasoned with annatto seeds, salt, garlic, and onions. Sunday’s menu included sancocho plus lechon azado, oven-roasted pork basted with a mixture of annatto seeds, black pepper, salt, vinegar, and oil. “An individual ration of this dish, with an addition of fried plantains and salad (tomatoes and lettuce), usually costs 45 cts.” Chefs at the restaurant followed the rural Puerto Rican custom of cooking with tubers and seasoning with pork and lard. Cooks at Fuentes, for instance, prepared rice with lard and saffron. They also made refried white, red, and black beans with salt pork, garlic, and annatto seeds. Other migrant cultures evidently influenced foodways in New York City’s Puerto Rican diaspora: Fuentes’s menu also included Virginia ham, Mexican tamales, and other foods outside traditional Puerto Rican cuisine.³²

El Favorito was another well-known Puerto Rican eatery in Spanish Harlem. It was located at 2055 Eighth Avenue between 111th and 112th streets. Puerto Rican, African American, and British and French West Indian low-wage factory workers lived in the neighborhood; the great majority of the residents spoke Spanish. The spotless restaurant remained open twenty-four hours a day serving meals as cheap as thirty-five cents. El Favorito also sold traditional Latin American desserts such as flan, rice pudding, and sweet breads.³³

Like many Harlem eateries, El Favorito did its best business on the weekend between 1 and 4 A.M., when “the merrymakers once more crowd the restaurant as soon as the theatre and the dance halls are closed.” Following a night out on the town, customers ordered tons of “Puerto Rican style tamales” made from mashed green plantains stuffed with chopped chicken and veal, pepper, olives, and capers, wrapped in a special paper, and then boiled. A Sunday afternoon favorite was paella a la Valenciana. This saffron rice, meat, and seafood–based dish from Spain was very popular in both Cuba and Puerto Rico. It contained “trout, clams (in shells), shrimps, eel, and devil fish in an addition to chicken, olives and partially covered with pimentos.” Non–Latin American offerings on the menu included traditional New England clam chowder, southern pig’s feet, North American bacon and eggs, “and all kind of American sandwiches and desserts.” ³⁴

In urban areas in and around New York, Europeans, Caribbeans, and southerners interacted in tenement houses, on the job, and on the streets, where they purchased new types of inexpensive good-tasting foods. Italian vendors sold pepper-onion-sausage sandwiches and Italian ices. Yiddish-speaking Jews sold arbis, knishes, and sweet potatoes. Arbis were large cooked chickpeas served with salt and pepper in paper bags for between three and five cents. Knishes were “crisp, brown-crusted cakes made of potatoes mashed with oil, onions, salt, and pepper and sell[ing] at two for 5 cents.” Puerto Rican vendors sold meat patties filled with ground meat and garlic and finished with decorative crusts; the patties came in a variety of styles including “cuchifritos, moricillas, alcapurrias, and empanadillos de yucca.” African American vendors sold soft-shell crabs, fried fish, and oysters.³⁵ Migration and immigration in short meant more than re-creating one’s culinary traditions in northern urban centers such as New York and Chicago. It meant maintaining old inexpensive rural eating traditions and incorporating new ones from Europe and African-influenced ones from the Caribbean.

What follows are case studies of various individuals who migrated North during their teens and twenties. Their stories illustrate the point that most often families and networks of extended families migrated North with time spent in more than one northern city before they settled. Most of the case studies are about people who became food professionals in the North, working as live-in domestics for white families. The majority of migrants worked as domestic. They were also quite entrepreneurial; it was not uncommon for domestic servants to have side jobs taking cake and pie orders and catering parties and weddings for the friends and associates of the white families who employed them full time. Other migrants went to work in the kitchens of hospitals and restaurants. Each migrant brought along his or her own food traditions, and their stories map episodes of southern migration to Harlem and Westchester County. The case studies are important because they provide essential biographical details about southerners whose written and oral histories I discuss in later chapters. Some of them are my older, southern-born relatives who adapted and mixed their culinary traditions as they moved North and passed them on to our family’s northern-born younger generations.

Tillie Eripp

At age eighteen, a poor African American woman named Tillie Eripp migrated alone from Tampa, Florida, to Philadelphia. Writer Sarah Chavez interviewed her for the WPA Federal Writers’ Project “America Eats,” which was never published. New York City’s WPA unit called their study “Feeding the City.” In it, Chavez and other writers gathered insightful records about Depression-era food history. Chavez learned that teenager Eripp suffered desperately from loneliness after she arrived in Philadelphia. “Soon, through the help of a friend, she secured a job as a cook in a boarding house, where she remained for several years,” wrote Chavez. She migrated from Philadelphia to New York in 1928, just before the Great Depression started. Her first job was operating a concession stand selling fried chicken at Harry Hansbury’s speakeasy. Increasing demand for her chicken led her to move to a storefront space next to the speakeasy, where she ran Tillie’s Chicken Shack.

Eripp struggled in getting the business off the ground, depending entirely on inexperienced help. “Once the success of the venture was assured she added to her menu, occasionally serving collard greens, pig tails, black-eyed peas, yams and hogshead,” wrote Chavez. The restaurant served hot biscuits and coffee with every meal, “and each customer was permitted as many biscuits as he or she desired.” Later she added spoon corn bread, a variety of vegetables, and salads to the menu. In 1932 she moved her place of business to 237 Lenox Avenue, just above 121st Street.³⁶

Migrants from Windsor, North Carolina

Matilda Taylor worked as a schoolteacher in Windsor, North Carolina (Benjamin Outlaw’s hometown as well). There, she raised four children—Luesta, Maggie, Bertha, and Dick—apparently alone. Bertha was the first to leave Windsor, migrating to Ossining, New York, in Westchester County, where she found a job working as a domestic doing cooking and cleaning for a wealthy white family. In 1930 Westchester County, the nation’s “premier suburban region,” had an African American population of 23,000.³⁷

Luesta was the next to go, originally leaving Windsor to earn a teacher’s certificate at North Carolina Normal School for teachers. She dropped out of school, eloped, and migrated with her husband to Philadelphia. Apparently Bertha sent word that she had jobs lined up for her sisters in Ossining. “My mother [Luesta Duers],” recalled Margaret Opie, “was the upstairs maid, and my aunt Bertha was downstairs, they all did domestic work. And one of the things you will find is that a lot of the women, especially black women, those were the jobs available to them.” Luesta “did laundry, there was always a way in which they took the skill they had and marketed it.”

The oldest child, Maggie, born in 1903, was by all accounts the best cook in the family (after her mother), renowned for making an abundance of great food out of scraps, handouts, and leftovers, all assembled in a black cast-iron skillet. Maggie married Charlie White of Windsor. The couple had a daughter named Katie and three boys named Booker, Charlie, and Horace before they split and Charlie began a second family with another woman in Windsor. Maggie, following the lead of her sisters Bertha and Luesta, migrated with her children to Ossining.

Eventually she found a good job working as a cook for a white family in Ossining named the Brants.³⁸ She rented a flat in the Italian immigrant section of the village. Katie, Maggie’s only daughter and one of our family’s best cooks, remembered her neighbors well. “You know I learned how to cook using Italian” seasonings like sage because the neighbors “used to give us food.” Merchants “would give mama different things you know, meat leftover that they didn’t sell.”³⁹

Migrants from Cloverdale, Virginia

Ella (Christopher) Barnett was born in the rural farming community of Cloverdale, Virginia, in 1915. When she was thirteen, she worked for a white women and her husband as a domestic in Cloverdale, and “they were as nasty as they could be to colored people. . . colored people had a hard time.”⁴⁰

Her largely absentee father, Claven Christopher, was one of the earliest members of her family to head north from Cloverdale in search of opportunity. “He worked in New Jersey but lived in Cloverdale, and he came home maybe once every two or three years,” said Barnett. Claven Christopher worked as a cook in the railroad camps of the black workers who laid track in New Jersey and New York, including through the Tarrytowns. Apparently, railroad contractors laying track up north hired southern-born African Americans, paying for their passage north and providing wages in addition to room and board in work camps as far north as New York.⁴¹

Barnett’s father was the best cook she knew of as a child growing up in Cloverdale. “He was one of the best cooks in the world. He was such a good cook that people named him Cook.” Up north, people did not know him as Claven Christopher but instead by the name Cook. No one where he worked in New Jersey knew him as Christopher, says Barnett, “but all you had to say was Cook, and everybody knew him.”⁴²

Washington “Wash” Opia (a name later changed to Opie by a local official during a property transaction) came to Cloverdale, Virginia, as a railroad camp cook. He was a West Indian migrant that decided to purchase land and start a farm in Cloverdale after marrying Mollie Cox in 1898. She died, and he remarried, taking up with Fannie Christopher in 1913. She was an unwed mother with two boys to raise: Fred, born in 1908, and Neal, born in 1910. The couple had several additional children together. Lucy Demmie married Fred Opie. Barnett’s sister, Martha, married Lucy’s brother, Horace Demmie.⁴³

Lucy Opie migrated from Cloverdale to North Tarrytown in the late 1920s or the early 1930s. In North Tarrytown, the majority of the southern-born migrants came from Virginia, the remainder from North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and Maryland, in descending numbers. Most of them rented homes, creating a black enclave in the Valley Street section of town. They worked predominately at private homes for white residents as cooks, live-in domestic servants, chauffeurs, and laundresses. Others worked as laborers, truck drivers, and factory workers.⁴⁴

All indications are that the first job Fred Opie, Sr., had in New York was as a heavy equipment operator with the construction crew that built the Rockefeller estate at Pocantico Hills. “I think that when John D. was developing Pocantico Hills. . . in the 1890s and early 1900s a lot of migrant workers from the South, black migrant workers from the South, came up to work primarily for the Rockefellers. Because there was a lot of manual labor that had be done,” said Fred Opie, Jr. He added, “because until the war [World War II], General Motors did not hire black people.”⁴⁵ As a result, most of the male migrants from the South in the Tarrytowns found employment at Pocantico Hills during the almost seventy-five years it took to build the miles of stone walls and dozen or more stone barns and houses and the mansion. Once the construction was completed, black southern women staffed the kitchens and cooked food for the Rockefellers and their guests.⁴⁶

Lucy Opie did domestic work, particularly cooking. A superb cook, she prepared traditional southern dishes. What was unique about her cooking, according to her daughter, Dorothy, was that “the first ingredient she put in was a piece of love, stirred it up. Then she put in the ingredients, salt and pepper and whatever.” In addition, as a southerner, she had the habit of cooking with a lot of lard and seasoning her vegetables with pork. She also continued the southern tradition of canning produce. “My mother canned everything, she did a lot of canning, she worked very hard.”⁴⁷

Lucy Opie was also an excellent baker, often preparing biscuits; hot cross buns; cakes; mincemeat, rhubarb, sweet potato, and cherry pies; and peach cobbler. Many of these baked goods were made from the fruits and vegetables grown in the family garden her husband kept. She and her husband also operated a storefront bakery in North Tarrytown until the Depression put them out of business. According to her son Fred Opie, Jr., “in Tarrytown there were not too many black businesses” like the one his parents operated. “Most of the black businesses were moving businesses, moving companies.”⁴⁸

In time, Lucy Opie sent for her brother Horace, who came to New York with his wife, Martha. After Martha arrived, she sent for her cousin, Ella Barnett, and her other sisters down in Virginia. Barnett explains, “My sister [Martha] got married and her husband’s sisters were up here. And when she married their brother they brought her and her husband up here. Then when she got up here she brought her family up here, one by one.” Barnett was thirteen when she migrated to New York.⁴⁹

Nora Burns White

Nora Burns White migrated from Blaney, South Carolina, to New York City with two other girls in 1942. She was fourteen. White recalls, “My mother was a very smart person. But how she let me come to New York with two other girls” the same age continues to perplex her daughter. One of the girls lived in the Bronx, and she was down in South Carolina visiting her cousin. “Luis was going back with Mary and I said to my mama ‘Could I go?’ and for some reason or another she said ‘yes.’” White’s older sister, Luella, had already migrated to Harlem the summer before. But, “Luella did not know that I was coming to New York.” ⁵⁰

Her mother packed a box full of “fried chicken, bread, and cake” to eat during the train ride, “enough to last us all the way to New York. I think it took us something like twenty-four hours to get there.” She adds, “On the train then, there wasn’t any place to eat on the train because it was segregated.” Jim crow laws restricted black passengers to the coach car, and most of the other African Americans sitting there with the three young girls had similar boxes filled with food. “And we were in the coach, right there next to the [coal-burning] engine. And by the time we got to New York, everybody was so dirty and greasy.”

They arrived at Penn Station without a clue as to how to exit the station, never mind how to get to Luella’s apartment building. A boy just a little older than they asked them if they were lost and showed them how to get the A train up to 125th Street in Harlem where her sister rented a room. At this point in the interview, White yet again wondered, “What went through my mother’s mind to let me go to New York?” Yet her mother likely realized that White would have better opportunities in New York than as the daughter of a single parent who tenant farmed in South Carolina.

Georgia, another roomer in the same building, originally from Roanoke, Virginia, worked as a cook for a private home on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan near Columbia University. She asked her employer if she was interested in hiring someone to help out in the kitchen. “She said yes and hired me, so of course I put my age up to twenty-one. . . . I think she paid me fifteen or twenty dollars a week,” recalled White. She learned most of her cooking skills working with Georgia on that first job.

Trained and inspired by her mentor, Georgia, at eighteen Nora White left her sister and the Harlem rooming house on 121st Street for upstate New York, where she worked as a cook for the family of a Dr. Kensdale, a scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project. When she questioned whether she was qualified for the job, she reports, “Georgia said to me, ‘Oh no you can do it. Get yourself a cookbook, and add a little something, or take away a little something so that it taste right.’” She remembers learning on the job, like the time the Kensdale family requested eggplant Parmesan for dinner. White recalled thinking, “Oh my Lord! What am I going to do?!” So she went to the cookbook, found the recipe for eggplant Parmesan, and went ahead and fixed the meal; it turned out very well. She learned how to make a host of dishes using a similar tactic: the help of a cookbook and taste buds well versed in the southern African American culinary tradition of how to make something taste just right.⁵¹

Understanding what African Americans in the South used to make their food taste right is the key to explaining the uniqueness of down-home cuisine. In African American culture, seasoning was an art form passed down through oral tradition. It could only be learned through a lengthy apprenticeship like the one Nora White had with her mentor Georgia, an experienced cook, followed by years of practice. Ultimately, it becomes instinctive.⁵²

African American children, mostly female, began their cooking apprenticeships at a young age, closely observing older cooks within their family and extended family. Over time, adults would assign chores of ever-increasing difficulty to acclimate the child to the art of cooking. “Because our recipes were seldom written down, we had to rely on momma’s and grandma’s experience and what we could learn by watching as they went about their chores in the kitchen,” writes one author of a soul food cookbook. “The advantage of learning at grandmother’s elbow is discovering things which are not found in any book.” You learn how to season and cook food by being there when momma does it. Then one day somebody finally turns to you and tells you to make something and you do it. “For this reason the soul food cook usually knows instinctively how much salt to add, when the grease in the pan is hot enough, and how long before it’s time to open the oven.”⁵³

South Carolinian Alexander Smalls learned how to cook while serving as his mother’s “chief helper” in the kitchen on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. “My mother and I would begin cooking about eight in the evening if there were pies or cakes or yeast rolls to be made. . . . By Sunday morning, breakfast and dinner were both happening at once—roast roasting, bacon frying, grits bubbling, potatoes boiling—so the kitchen was already a profusion of smells” by the time the macaroni and cheese and fried chicken were started. In addition to apprenticing in his mother’s kitchen, Smalls also learned the art of seasoning and cooking from his grandfather, who was a great cook: from him, he learned how to season and cook catfish, “red-eye vinegar gravy with sage sausage,” and “skillet rice with fresh parsley.”⁵⁴

Seasoning was learned by tasting other people’s food and inquiring what ingredients and cooking techniques they used. It was during informal “kitchen conversations” that people exchanged family secrets for cooking fried chicken and other dishes. Some of the secrets were as simple as the use of a seemingly unlikely seasoning or marinade. For instance, one cook’s mother marinated her chicken in peanut butter thinned with milk the night before frying it. In the morning, she would pat the chicken dry and fry it in seasoned cooking oil. Another secret was in the cooking fat. “Momma [saved] not only all bacon drippings, but sausage [drippings], too.” If there wasn’t enough to fry all the chicken, then she flavored her frying oil with it, which gave “an extra-special tastiness to the meat.”⁵⁵

Various amounts of spices and herbs, particularly salt and pepper, crushed red pepper, bay leaf, sage, and sugar, are partly responsible for the “down-home” flavor associated with southern African American cuisine. African American seasoning also depends on several fresh vegetables, including chopped scallions and /or onions and garlic. Apple cider vinegar and Worcestershire and Tabasco sauces are also staples in seasoning southern dishes. As mentioned earlier, the final component that makes African American food unique is the addition of pork flavor into dishes. Collards, kale, and turnip greens are seasoned with pieces of pork; fish, and chicken and are deep-fried in cooking oil made of or flavored with pork-based drippings (oil and sediment left in a pan after cooking bacon or sausage). Perhaps what’s most southern about southern food is the inclusion of pork in some shape or fashion in just about every dish.⁵⁶

Nettie C. Banks

Nora White eventually became a good friend and catering partner with southern migrant Nettie C. Banks. Banks was born in 1921 in the farming community of Samos, Virginia, in Middlesex County. Traveling to Baltimore to visit her sister and mother, who were working there that summer, she ended up staying. All three women earned money working as domestics. “In the South you kind of migrated to wherever you had relatives. My mother had a brother in Baltimore who had a big house.”

While in Baltimore Banks attended public school. Later, the family returned to Virginia. “I was good at school and loved school. But the community did not have a high school; finally the ministers got together and built a high school. But they built it like in mid-county and you had to pay to get to the high school.” During the Depression, there were a lot of Monday mornings when her mother could not afford the $1.50 per week bus fare. “I was embarrassed I guess. . . but that’s when I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore.” So, at age seventeen she told her mother she would go to Philadelphia to find work. It was 1938. People used to go to Samos for vacation, and migrants like Banks would then catch a ride with them to Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia Banks met her husband, George, also a migrant from Virginia. They worked as domestics in Philadelphia until the end of World War II (her husband left to serve in the military), when a wealthy white family offered them “a job with more money and, we thought, better opportunity in [Ossining] New York.” Most of the African Americans in Ossining in the 1930s and 1940s were southern-born, just like Nettie and George Banks. In my interview with her, she explained that she had relatives who had moved to New York to work as domestics for a white family. The family was looking for someone else to do the same kind of work. “And that’s how we came, we had an interview,” and they took the job as sleep-in domestics. “At the time that we came up, it was normal that we were sort of relegated, doomed to do house work.”⁵⁷

Firsthand accounts of migrants who settled north of New York City are evidence that Harlem was not always the final destination for southern migrants. Some stopped in Harlem and stayed with relatives until they located better opportunities. Many of them marketed their cooking skills to wealthy white families further north. Westchester County was attractive to southern migrants because jobs as cooks were much higher paying than were those in the South. By the time of the Depression, there were pockets of southern African American migrant communities in river towns along the Hudson River in places like Ossining, the Tarrytowns, and Peekskill. There were similar communities east of the Hudson in Mount Vernon, Elmsford, and White Plains. All these communities were accessible on the Harlem and Hudson train lines that carried passengers north of New York City several times a day.

In the host communities to which they migrated, southern migrants were introduced to new eating traditions, particularly influences from Italian immigrants. In Ossining, Katie Green learned from Italian neighbors how to season food with “Italian spices.”⁵⁸ As a domestic, Nora White had to learn how to prepare new dishes like eggplant Parmesan that her white employers requested. The creolized eggplant that she cooked surely tasted different from the one an Italian American would have prepared. Nora’s cooking up north was influenced by her mother’s South Carolina cuisine, the kitchen traditions of her Virginia-born friend and mentor Georgia (who also taught her how to cook and modify recipes from books), and the recipes she found for foods like eggplant Parmesan, which were largely unfamiliar to southerners.⁵⁹

Migrants from the South introduced southern traditions to African Americans born up north. Lucy Opie, for example, taught her northern-born grandchildren to carry box lunches when they traveled and to enjoy peach cobbler and mincemeat and rhubarb pies. Mincemeat and rhubarb pies were exotic alternatives to those made with apples that her grandchildren were accustomed to eating as New Yorkers raised in the apple-rich Hudson Valley region. After a couple of slices accompanied by a tall glass of cold milk, they grew to love them. In fact, they recall getting excited about going to Grandma Opie’s house as children during the holiday season because her southern hospitality meant she would always offer something sweet like a slice of pie or cake served with a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream.

Christmas for African Americans has traditionally been a very special holiday centered on sweets and offerings like chicken, ham, and a tableful of complementary side dishes. For those without much, Christmas might have meant little more than killing a chicken for dinner. Those in better financial condition celebrated with an assortment of meats and sweets such as “cakes, succulent pies, and luscious puddings.”⁶⁰

Ruth and Roy Miller, whose parents migrated north in the 1920s, shared with me their memories of holiday cuisine. Ruth was born in Harlem in 1932. Her mother migrated there from Savannah, Georgia; she worked as a professional cook. Ruth has vivid memories of her mother’s holiday cooking. “We would have chicken and dumplings. We would have macaroni and cheese. We would have. . . sometimes cabbage with some smoked meat; collard greens, actually many times all of the greens would be combined: collards, kale, turnips; candied sweet potatoes; and many times red rice, okra, and tomatoes. . . . We would have spareribs with cabbage and sweet potatoes.” Roy Miller, born in Harlem in 1924, said, “That’s interesting because that’s a crossover. Because my [West Indian] aunts used to do red rice and all of that. I can’t say that is a purely West Indian dish, it may be part of an assimilation. . . . It emanated from the South, but my aunts used to do that beautifully also.”⁶¹

Dessert was a celebrated part of the holiday menu. For dessert, “my mother made banana pudding, sweet potato pie, you know, apple pie, lemon meringue pie, and cakes,” said Ruth Miller. West Indians made fruitcake, which was also traditional among southerners. Clara Bullard Pittman was born in 1948 in the very rural farming community of Pine-hurst, Georgia. She recalls that on Christmas her mother made homemade fruitcake from what she grew in her yard. She also made “cakes and pies from scratch.”⁶² Making Christmas fruitcake was a long process, according to Benjamin Outlaw. When asked what Christmas was like growing up in Windsor, North Carolina, Outlaw responded, “Oh boy, it was like heaven.” Mother “would start cooking her fruitcake, sometime about a month before Christmas. And she always made [either apple or grape] wine” and poured the “wine on the cake until Christmas. . . building it up. . . . It was the best fruitcake I have ever eaten.” Hattie Outlaw also made “all kinds of cakes: chocolate, vanilla, coconut, lemon.” He went on to say, “Now Christmas was wonderful, she had everything you could mention, all kinds of meats.” In addition, the family ate all kinds of vegetables at Christmas because the family raised their own vegetables, and “during the summertime she put that stuff up in a jar . . . butter beans, snap beans, corn.”⁶³

On Christmas in Blaney, South Carolina, Nora Burns White recalled, “we always had a ham, you know, because we raised pigs.” They also had “all kinds of cakes, that’s when my mother would do some cooking because she would do some baking about a week before Christmas.”⁶⁴ In Charlotte County, Virginia, Yemaja Jubilee’s mother always made lemon icebox pies for Christmas. “She made it out of condensed Carnation milk, vanilla wafers: she’d squeeze fresh lemon juice in it, egg whites, sugar, and butter and she would cream that up and put it inside a vanilla wafer crust. . . . She did all this from scratch,” says Jubilee, except for the vanilla wafers. It was called icebox pie “because you have to put it in the refrigerator for it to chill.” The pie was only made on special occasions like Christmas. In addition to dessert, her mother also cooked capons for Christmas. A lady who lived down the street raised them. Jubilee’s mother would stuff and bake them “the same way you did a turkey. . . the regular roosters were tough . . . but capons were tender and flavorful.” Jubilee adds, “We always had ham on Christmas and Thanksgiving.”⁶⁵

In Virginia, Nettie Banks grew up with the tradition of eating pork and poultry on Christmas. If there was a ham left over from a hog-killing day earlier in the winter, her mother would boil that, and it would become a part of the Christmas feast. “Then they would have roast chicken. We didn’t do a lot with turkey. . . people didn’t have turkeys. My grandmother raised turkeys but we did not ordinarily have turkeys. We would have what they called fowl. And they would boil that then put it in the oven and baste it and bake it some. It was nice and brown.” Before she migrated north in 1938, she recalled eating chitlins on Christmas if there were any leftover from hog killing. “You know they would make whatever was available.”⁶⁶

For Reginald T. Ward, Christmas in the city of Robinsonville, North Carolina, was similar to Christmas at Nettie Banks’s home. Christmas meant ham, turkey or chicken, and barbecue, “chopped barbecue.” Ward left North Carolina right after high school to attend the University of California at Los Angeles and later settled in the city of Mount Vernon, in Westchester County, New York. He explained that barbecue in New York meant barbecued ribs or chicken, “but in North Carolina barbecue, a whole pig is barbecued, cooked, and they chop it up with the different spices in it like vinegar and red pepper.” At Christmas, Ward’s mother would also make “oyster dressing” from leftover corn bread and bread, oysters, celery, onions, salt and pepper. “And some made sausage dressing.”⁶⁷

Joyce White recalled that for Christmas dinner in Choctaw County, Alabama, her mother “roasted fresh pork and made corn bread dressing, potato salad, and greens.”⁶⁸ (Duke University’s Stephen Erwin argued that collard greens were best when one ate them southern style. “It helps a great deal if one has pepper vinegar to sprink[le] over the collards before eating them and corn pone and fresh pork make collards a delight to eat.”)⁶⁹ Joyce White’s Christmas in Alabama would be filled with the “warming aroma of Chicken ’n’ Dumplings, which was made with a big hen, since we seldom had turkey.” Often her mother would “simmer the hen whole and then bake it in the oven with the corn bread, and that was our ‘turkey,’” reflected White.⁷⁰

Another African American southern religious tradition that should be mentioned is the Watch Night, or New Year’s Eve service. Watch Night dates back to the end of the Civil War. In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln declared his famous Emancipation Proclamation, which set slaves in Confederate territories free as of January 1, 1863. As a result, African Americans across much of the South held religious services, many of them secretly, in which they praised and otherwise worshipped God as they watched the New Year and freedom arrive. Thus after 1863 African Americans regularly celebrated Watch Night and New Year’s Eve in honor of Emancipation Day. Southerners carried their religious traditions with them when they migrated north.⁷¹

St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton hold that the religious traditions of the rural South were “modified by contact with the complexities of a large northern city.”⁷² Yet southern migrants did not abandon their tradition of church membership. By 1945 the South Side of Chicago had about five hundred African American churches: “To the uninitiated, this plethora of churches is no less baffling than the bewildering variety and the colorful extravagance of the names. Nowhere else in Midwest Metropolis could one find, within a stone’s throw of one another, a Hebrew Baptist Church, a Baptized Believer’s Holiness Church, a Universal Union Independent, a Church of Love and Faith, a Holy Mt. Zion Methodist Episcopal Independent, and a United Pentecostal Holiness Church. Or a cluster such as St. John’s Christian Spiritual, Park Mission African Methodist Episcopal, Philadelphia Baptist, Little Rock Baptist, and the Aryan Full Gospel Mission, Spiritualist.”⁷³

In addition to church membership, southern migrants brought with them a tradition of important yearly church programs and free food. Most likely to include free food were services on special occasions such as Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Watch Night. “In addition to these Christian red-letter days,” report Drake and Cayton, “Baptisms, anniversaries, installations [of new ministers], youth nights, and choir nights” were well-attended yearly programs where down-home southern cooking was available in abundance for free.⁷⁴ In Chicago it was “not unusual to find a total of over 10,000 people attending” an important event at the four largest churches, and “an equal number distributed among the smaller churches.” African American churches in Chicago continually offered “concerts, pageants, plays, suppers, and other similar activities.”⁷⁵

As in the South, one of the most important events of the year was Watch Night service on New Year’s Eve. This southern tradition had people filling church pews as early as 6:45 P.M. to secure a seat for a 7:00 P.M. Watch Night service at any of the five largest African American churches in Chicago. During the service the congregation sang hymns, listened to choirs, prayed, and worshipped until midnight. Then came an important part of the Watch Night service: the feast that followed the arrival of the New Year. Just after midnight, the members of the hospitality committee—the wives of the church—slipped into the kitchen to heat up food and then arrange it on the table of the fellowship hall, generally located in the basement or on the second floor of a church.

Frances Warren noted that, during her childhood, most families in the South ate black-eyed peas (cowpeas common to Igboland) and rice, especially at midnight on New Year’s. For an unknown reason, some southerners believed “it was good luck.” Warren was born in Atlanta in 1928 but spent most of her childhood in Miami, Florida. Her husband, Jim, grew up on a farm not far from Birmingham, Alabama, where blacks and whites followed the same New Year’s eating traditions. Born in 1925, Jim believed that the black-eyed peas and rice on New Year’s tradition had something to do with the influence of “black culture,” but he was not exactly sure where the practice originated.⁷⁶ North Carolinian Reginald Ward said, “I don’t care where you are, in New York” black folk on New Year’s Day are going to eat “strictly pork.” Tradition calls for cooking “black-eyed peas, hog head, a whole hog head now, pig tails, pigs feet.” Ward went on to say, “You can go just about anywhere, and people who were born in the South, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee,” cook pork on New Year’s Day.⁷⁷

Having lived in California in the 1960s, Ward noticed that, “everybody born in the South was looking for pork” on New Year’s. As a result, the price of smoked and pickled pork parts like pigs’ feet and hog maws in California supermarkets became expensive around New Year’s. Ward reported that pork, collard greens, and black-eyed peas seasoned with smoked or salt pork, along with “potato salad, candied yams, macaroni and cheese, and corn bread” were traditional dishes that southern black folk around the country ate on New Year’s.⁷⁸

A child of white southerners, Jim Warren was raised on the same type of southern cooking. He recalled that during the Depression that he would share meals with black farmhands at his family’s farm in Alabama. In the process, he learned that his mother shared the same cooking traditions as black women. These traditions included those like New Year’s dinners complete with black-eyed peas and rice, beans and greens cooked with ham hocks, and sweet potato pie.⁷⁹

On New Year’s, Yemaja Jubilee’s mother oven-roasted a whole, hickory wood–smoked hog’s head and prepared black-eyed peas. She explains, “We raised hogs, and when they harvested the pig they would put the head down in salt [for about six weeks] and then they’d smoke it.” In Charlotte County, Virginia, “where I was raised, most of the people ate that or some kind of pork” on New Year’s.⁸⁰

Southern superstition established the tradition of serving hopping John in addition to other traditional dishes that depended on where the southern migrant community was from. Hopping John is a combination of black-eyed peas and rice, beans, red peppers, and salt pork cooked to a stewlike consistency. It is probable that the dish evolved out of the rice and bean mixtures such as dab-a-dab, the rice, beans, vegetables, meat, palm oil, and pepper dish that West African slaves survived on during the Middle Passage.⁸¹ “On New Year’s Day,” in Virginia, recalled Lamenta Crouch, “we always had black-eyed peas and some kind of greens” along with “ham hocks or country ham.” “Country ham” refers to the type of ham typically cooked on Christmas, “smoked ham, what they called the good old Virginia hams.”⁸² In Bertie County in northeastern North Carolina, Hattie Outlaw prepared her New Year’s Day meal on the sixth of January, which she called “old Christmas.” What is noteworthy here is that Hattie Outlaw’s menu did not include pork. “Mama would make roast chicken, collard greens, desserts, and stuff like that,” recalls her son, Benjamin Outlaw.⁸³

After the start of the Great Migration in 1914, most southern-born African Americans who left for the North referred to revivals down South as “homecoming week.” For instance, after moving up north, Joyce White, raised in Choctaw County, Alabama, recalled how “many of the people who had left our county years before would mark their return home by the revival at such and such church.”⁸⁴ Churches typically held revivals in July and August after farmers had harvested their crops, when people had an abundance of food, money, and time for leisure. “I remember homecomings quite clearly” said Marcellas C. D. Barksdale, born in 1943 in Annandale, South Carolina. “My mother was a churchgoer and she would drag me [along], especially to the big events. We had the homecoming, pastor’s anniversary, Easter program, and all of them were social as well as cultural and religious programs.” He adds, “More often than not, when they had those big occasions, they would have these big eatings, as I called it. All the members would bring food, sometimes they would have commonly cooked food. The men would make a barbecue pit, put coals in and put a grill over it.” There would be “potato salad and macaroni and cheese, and none of it was refrigerated, it’s no [sic] wonder we didn’t die from the mayonnaise.” The food would be put outside on long tables with white tablecloths.⁸⁵

Some churches held fish fries the day before revival Sunday. Southerners would rig large galvanized iron drums with charcoal burners. Deep cast-iron pans or skillets were placed on top to fry the fish a “rich golden brown,” and it was served “piping hot.” At one Mobile, Alabama, fish rodeo, “one thousand pounds of fish was fried and served to anywhere from six hundred to a thousand guest[s].”⁸⁶ Despite the popularity of a Saturday fish fry, revival Sunday and the start of a week of preaching and dinner on the grounds was the event of the year in most southern communities. Joyce White remembers Sunday was the big day and “all the families in the Negro community who were active in the church would prepare an array of dishes for the afternoon dinner.”⁸⁷

In African American religious tradition, men and women had different labor assignments. Men preached and were responsible for making a crudely built long table, while women were responsible for singing and cooking food to spread out on the table. There were often turf battles over who was the best cook in a congregation. These were a part of the culture and dynamics of a church family.

Joyce White remembers the competition well in her hometown in Choctaw County, Alabama. She observed that the womenfolk “would vie to outdo one another” with their “peach cobbler, blackberry pie, banana pudding, chocolate cake, pound cake, and sometimes even homemade ice cream.” Although the culinary competition was intense, it did not disturb another important role African American church functions played in the South. Events like revivals were “soul-satisfying” affairs where African American southerners could pass time in “comfort and security” free from “the harsh reality of our Jim Crow world. . . .”⁸⁸

Southern African American churches established a tradition of continuous interchurch visiting that cut across denominational lines. Generally, when a pastor went to preach at a revival service that another church held, his congregation, choir, and soloist accompanied him. After moving up North, soloist Alexander Smalls, originally from Spartanburg, South Carolina, recalled performing at a southern revival.

The best was to sing on a revival Sunday at a rural church. . . . There was never any pay for the soloist, but with a spread of food running from one side of the church to the other, money simply didn’t matter. These sisters and brothers had harvested a table fit for Baptist Pilgrims full of the Holy Spirit and very hungry. Platters of beans and rice, turnip greens and poke salad, butter beans with chopped tomatoes and fresh onions, yellow squash casserole with brown bread crumbs, fresh beets in orange sauce, stewed greens beans and ham hocks, wild turkey in brown gravy, hams glazed in raisin sauce, all the fried young chicken a body could want, trays of deviled eggs, macaroni salad, baskets of biscuits, cornbread and hoecakes. Stacked-up pies, cakes (pineapple upside-down being my favorite), peach cobblers, and all kinds of Jell-O molds in every shade.⁸⁹

Nettie Banks remembered scenes of her mother cooking for a church revival meal in Middlesex County, Virginia. “I can see my mother in the kitchen, with water just running down, she would be soaking wet.” The women of the congregation spent long hot hours boiling and peeling potatoes, cleaning, cutting, seasoning, and cooking collard greens, chickens, and fish. In addition, there were the buttermilk biscuits, yeast rolls, and layer cakes, all made from scratch. Women would bring baskets of food with them to church, where they would spread it out on a long outdoor table on the church grounds, “and people came and ate.” There were plenty of vegetables and “some people who were good at making corn pudding, . . . brought corn pudding, macaroni and cheese, and chicken; chicken, of course, always chicken.”⁹⁰ In addition to serving as a spiritual fueling station for the soul and a refuge from racism, revivals kindled a passion for African American foods like fried chicken, pound cake, cobblers, and sweet potato pie. “Sweet potato pie,” wrote one WPA staffer, “is very tasty when made right. It should not be too stiff, so as not to choke you, having enough milk and plenty of butter, sugar, nutmeg, and vanilla or lemon flavoring.”⁹¹