Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America

Migrants from the South and the Caribbean came to New York, Chicago, and other northern cities during the Depression in search of opportunity. In their home regions, they worked most often as agricultural laborers, waiters, domestic servants, and porters. Up north, migrant men gained a foothold in the metalworking, automobile, meatpacking, and construction industries. Women most often worked as domestics and in commercial laundries, and the less skilled branches of the garment industry. Within a given industry, migrants were likely to be assigned the least-paying job on a piecework basis. By 1929, however, New York City, the center of the nation’s wealth and finance, was in economic collapse. Migrants were hit particularly hard because many of the men worked in industries and occupations disproportionably affected by the Depression such as construction and the steel and automobile industries. Another problem was that migrant workers did not have seniority and were clustered in non- and semiskilled jobs; they were thus the first to be laid off when the Depression hit.¹ Conditions were only a little more favorable for African Americans in the public sector.

Drake and Cayton argue that the job discrimination in the postal service in Chicago ensured that whites dominated the best positions even though these were federal jobs secured through civil service exams. For example, in the postal service in Chicago in 1930, the largest percentage of African Americans worked as laborers (69.5 percent), clerks (28 percent), and mail carriers (16 percent). In contrast, they made up only a small percentage of the more coveted positions of foremen and overseers (4.5 percent), inspectors (3.7 percent), and managers and officials (1.2 percent).² Economist William A. Sundstrom, studying unemployment percentages during the Depression, found that in the south blacks and whites had similar unemployment rates but blacks earned much less than whites performing the same kind of work. Moreover, in both the south and the north, females had lower unemployment rates than did males. Most notable is Sundstrom’s finding that “within the North, unemployment rates were 80 percent higher for blacks than whites” and “in [northern] cities black men averaged 50 percent higher unemployment rates than whites.”³

Many struggling migrants from the South and the Caribbean had to eat almost like vegetarians, surviving on produce grown in expanded family gardens. By 1930 most North Americans turned to public and private sources of relief. In New York alone, over fifty breadlines distributed food to the destitute. All over the country, private institutions such as the Salvation Army provided food relief. Organizations less known for altruism also provided relief during the Depression. For instance, Chicago mob boss Al Capone operated a storefront relief kitchen that provided free soup, coffee, and doughnuts to long lines of unemployed men of various ethnicities.⁴ New York–based evangelist Father Divine, perhaps an equally controversial figure, also fed the poor. The lion’s share of food relief, however, came from local, state, and federal institutions.

Most migrants from the South who arrived in the North before the Depression had experienced noticeable improvements in their access to food luxuries, such as better cuts of meat and more sugar, poultry, and pasta. In contrast, friends and relatives who never left the South had been doing without such items for so long that many claimed to notice little change after the Depression hit. This was especially true in those regions of the South where people fished, maintained vegetable gardens, and kept dairy cows, hogs, and chickens. For southerners, the Depression generally meant the traditional southern African American diet. That diet, however, varied widely across the South and even within each region.

Malcolm J. Miller, the South Carolina administrator for the Federal Civil Works Administration (FCWA), summed up conditions in the South in the era of the Depression: “For sixty-five years the South has been the sweatshop of the nation. That’s because we were afraid of the Negro. We wanted to keep him down—and did. But we dragged ourselves down, too.” In turpentine-producing regions of Georgia, for instance, the FCWA’s Lorena Hickok, a white Midwesterner, observed, “Half-starved Whites and Blacks struggle in competition for less to eat than my dog gets at home, for the privilege of living in huts that are infinitely less comfortable than his kennel.”⁵

In general, the Depression dried up the economies of many communities. Many turned to the New Deal relief programs started after Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in 1932. Federal food relief came in many forms: emergency food stations, surplus food distribution programs, soup kitchens, breadlines, and relief gardens. Vegetables from a relief garden near Greensboro, North Carolina, went toward the mass production of canned soup distributed as relief. New Deal administrators established emergency food stations in communities facing imminent starvation. For instance, in 1938 the staff of an emergency food station in Cleveland, Ohio, passed out oranges, apples, and a pound of rice to starving residents.⁶ According to African American singer and composer Nina Simone, the arrival of New Deal relief programs saved her tourism-dependent hometown of Tyron, North Carolina, from becoming a ghost town.⁷

In 1933 the Federal National Relief Agency (NRA) chose Tyron for one of its surplus food distribution program area depots. According to Lorena Hickok, the federal government ran into problems with its surplus food distribution program. States with an abundance of an item would often continue to receive shipments of it while having difficulties getting what they lacked. This was the case with oranges in South Carolina and pork in Daytona Beach, Florida, where residents already ate too much of these foods.⁸ Problems notwithstanding, however, many survived the Depression on government relief rolls and jobs with the NRA. Nina Simone’s father and other men in Tyron received NRA truck-driving jobs. “Not only did the men at the depot get given a little extra food to take home, but the drivers built up a network of people who would trade food among themselves,” Simone recalls. Families would trade what they raised in excess in their gardens as well as surplus food they received on the job. Drivers traded spare “collard greens, string beans, tomatoes and sometimes eggs” with drivers who had “more sugar or flour, say, than they needed.”⁹

Some individuals depended on a combination of government relief and their own efforts. For example, many African American women worked as domestics, earning shamefully low wages. As one historian describes, “it was not at all unusual for them to ‘tote,’ that is, to bring leftovers from their employer’s house home with them. When these women planned the meals, as they often did, the leftovers might be of good quality and considerable quantity.”¹⁰ In Savannah, Hickok observed, “if you hire a cook down here, that means you take on the job of feeding, not only the cook, but her whole family,” because, before they go home, they “clean out your ice box every night.” White patrons became so accustomed to this that they did their shopping and “marketing with that in mind. It’s considered just as regular as tipping a waitress in Childs’ [restaurant] in New York.”¹¹

During the Depression, Nora Burns White grew up on a farm, spending mealtimes sitting around the table with five siblings, the children of her oldest sister, and “somebody that just happened to be there at dinner time. . . and if any body came down at dinner time they sat down and ate.”¹² As the child of a tenant farmer in South Carolina, White procured at least one big meal a week by wandering over to the landlord’s door about a block away at mealtime on Sundays to take advantage of his southern hospitality.

White recalled, “I had a thing on Sundays. . . when the family would come to eat and I would be outside at our house I would be watching for the cars to come.” Jokingly, she says, “I was always a greedy person.” The water pump for both houses was naturally next to the landlord’s house. So she would time her trip to the water pump based on when the landlord’s family, the Rosses, were seated to eat their Sunday meal. “I would sit my pail down at the pump and go on up to the kitchen and open the door and say ‘good evening.’ Mrs. Carrie Ross would say, ‘come on in Nora, sit over here.’” Nora would sit down to a typical Sunday meal in South Carolina: collard greens seasoned with salt pork, peas and rice, corn bread, ham, and fried chicken. “I’d get up when I was finished and say ‘thank you ma’am,’ get the pail of water, and go on home.” This went on for years during the Depression before her mother figured out what was going on. “It seemed like their food was better. . . the best corn bread.”¹³

In addition to feeding the children of their tenants, some southern planters provided meals for their black laborers. For example, Monday through Saturday Carrie Ross distributed freshly baked corn bread and coffee to the black farmhands that worked for the family in Blaney, South Carolina. As a result, Ms. Carrie became an expert at baking large batches of mouth-watering corn bread.¹⁴ Similarly, in Alabama, the parents of Jim Warren, born in 1925, regularly fed black hands on the family’s cotton farm near Birmingham. “They would sometimes come in for dinner on Sundays. They would always ask mom to cook black-eyed peas.”¹⁵ During the Depression, it seems, southern hospitality prevailed over jim crow in the lives of some southern whites who cooked for and ate with the African Americans they knew intimately.

During the Depression, families also adapted their cooking to both lean times and the short periods of feasting that followed the arrival of state aid, bartered items, the harvest from a garden, or a hog killing. Nina Simone recalled that her family transformed a big garden into “a huge garden and finally a little farm. We had hogs, chickens, and a cow. Rows and rows of string beans, collard greens, tomatoes, corn and squash.” During extremely hard times, her mother made vinegar pies out of apple cider vinegar and dough. She also prepared a lot of dumplings, an occasional chicken, and a “ton of beans.” After a winter hog killing, the family gorged on salted, smoked, and roasted pork, served with dishes such as rice pudding, brown betty (baked pudding), and plenty of canned vegetables. “For the next few days the kitchen was filled with sausages, sweetbreads and hanging roasts and there was pork crackling with every meal.”¹⁶

Those fortunate enough to have a subsistence farm carried on business as usual, and a handful of southerners even went through the Depression without the need for government relief. One was civil rights leader Ralph David Abernathy, who recalled his childhood as the son of an independent black farmer in Marengo County, Alabama, about ninety miles southwest of Montgomery. During the Depression, Abernathy’s father took care of his family’s food demands first, raising cattle, hogs, chickens, corn, and other produce; in addition, he raised 100 to 150 bales of cotton, which he sold at market. He killed thirty to forty hogs a year, maintaining a smokehouse filled with curing hams, and his farmhands preferred receiving pay in “hams rather than in cash because the hams were better than any you could buy.” In addition to hams, the Abernathys went through the Depression regularly consuming beef, poultry, and milk, all of which were rare for most U.S. citizens. They also bartered eggs to the owner of the community country store in exchange for other food supplies like salt, flour, and sugar.¹⁷

Similar to Nina Simone’s mother, Abernathy’s mother furnished the family table with produce in season from the truck garden along with the meat and poultry the family raised. She spent hours canning corn, beets, tomatoes, black-eyed peas, beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, okra, collard greens, turnips, and mustard greens. She also canned peaches, plums, pears, figs, and apples from the family orchard. The laborious job ensured that “we had enough to eat in the winter, when most of the fruits and vegetables had to come out of a jar.” Abernathy recalls, “On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we would have ordinary meals—one meat, three or four vegetables, corn bread, butter, maybe some preserves, plenty of milk. And Saturday—well, that was a day when everyone was busy with special tasks. . . on Saturday we were lucky to get leftovers.” Subsistence farming, money earned from cash crops, and frugality permitted the Abernathys to meet the basic necessities of a family with twelve children. Consequently, Ralph Abernathy recalls, “Everything I learned about the Great Depression was from a college textbook.” ¹⁸

Maya Angelou’s grandmother operated a country store in Stamps, Arkansas. Like Mr. and Mrs. Abernathy, Angelou’s grandmother used a combination of store profits, bartering, subsistence farming, and the preparation of nitty-gritty, good-tasting food to survive the Depression with dignity. In Stamps, Angelou writes, “the custom was to can everything that could possibly be preserved. . . . Throughout the year, until the next frost, we took our meals from the smokehouse, the little garden that lay cousin-close to the store, and from the shelves of canned foods.” The family pantry shelves, in her words, “could set a hungry child’s mouth to watering. Green beans, snapped always the right length, collards, cabbage, juicy red tomato preserves that came into their own on steaming buttered biscuits, and sausage, beets, berries and every fruit grown in Arkansas.” During the Depression, her grandmother twice yearly supplemented the preserves and smoked meat with fresh liver purchased from a local white butcher with pennies, nickels, and dimes. “Since the whites had refrigerators, their butchers bought the meat from commercial slaughterhouses in Texarkana and sold it to the wealthy even in the peak of summer.”¹⁹ In contrast, in New York during the Depression most people barely made it, and blacks fared the worst. “There were very difficult times in Harlem during the 1930s,” recalled longtime Harlem resident Rudolph Bradshaw.²⁰

Even before the 1930s, the majority of Harlem’s African American and Latin American residents lived on the margins. This was because white racists in New York City, who owned most of Harlem’s banks and profitable businesses, worked to ensure the underdevelopment of the city’s nonwhite (and non-Protestant) residents. For example, the owners of pharmacies, department stores, and restaurants refused to fill the more prestigious jobs in their businesses with African Americans and Latinos, and landlords and food merchants charged nonwhites higher prices for inferior living spaces and food. During the Depression, then, tough times only got tougher for African Americans in Harlem.²¹

To make ends meet, African Americans turned to strategies like rent parties. On a Saturday night during the Depression, one could always find buffet flats, rent parties, whist parties, and dances, where, for a small fee, one could purchase down-home food and dance to good music. Langston Hughes recalled: “The Saturday night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any night club, in small apartments where God knows who lived—because the guests seldom did—but where the piano would often be augmented by a guitar, or an odd cornet, or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the street. And where awful bootleg whiskey and good fried fish or steaming chitterling were sold at very low prices.”²² The host of a party advertised an event by sticking brightly colored cards into the grilles of apartment house elevators. Some of the announcement cards were quite comical:

Philadelphia rent parties were similar to those in Harlem. The family in need got the word out and then went to work preparing food for the event. Meanwhile, residents in the surrounding area scrounged enough money to buy a plate of food and prevent someone from being evicted. For very little money you could get homemade sweet potato pie, greens, and fried chicken, or fish, or some part of the hog. The type of meat you selected determined the cost of your plate. A bottle of Tabasco sauce and salt and pepper would be available to spice up a plate of food overflowing with warm “pot-likker” (the liquid produced when cooking salt-pork–seasoned greens).²⁴

Every Sunday Father Divine (aka the Reverend General Jealous Divine; aka George Baker) fed starving interracial groups by the hundreds for free in Harlem, while many other black preachers ignored their flocks’ hunger pains. Most African American urban clergy avoided sermons that addressed racism, poverty, and the social conditions of blacks in America. Instead, their sermons focused on life after death and the need for spiritual conversion. Father Divine talked about conversion, but he also denounced racism and the inability of a country blessed with material abundance to feed its citizens.²⁵

Divine was a migrant from the Deep South (possibly the Carolinas or Georgia) with a refined southern accent. He married white women and displayed “undiminished prosperity” during the Depression. Divine became famous for hosting banquets that fostered interracial dining.²⁶ White historian Carleton Maybee, who was a doctoral student in the history department at Columbia University during the Depression, recalled that “whereas other churches had seven sacraments, Father Divine had only one, eating together with other people.” In short, he regarded his interracial banquets as Holy Communion. “Father Divine was extremely well known during the 1930s by the whole country for feeding people for free if they could not afford food.” Opposed to any kind of racial segregation, Divine drew large crowds of blacks to his Harlem locations, “with a sprinkling of whites.” In fact, Columbia University students and faculty quite often went to the banquets, says Maybee.²⁷

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHESS PIE

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

4 oz. butter

½ cup brown sugar, packed

1 cup granulated sugar

3 large eggs

1 tbs. vinegar

2 tsp. vanilla

1 tbs. cornmeal

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

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

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

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

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

Times of scarcity ended with the Allied victory in Europe in 1945. After World War II, returning African American GIs and African American college students would open a new chapter in the cultural and political history of the United States. African American spaces such as churches, restaurants, and bars and grills provided sanctuary from the brutalities and offenses suffered under jim crow.