Documenting, studying, and celebrating the diverse food cultures of the changing American South.

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INTERVIEWS

Marliou Awiaka
Ben Barker
Karen Barker
Leah Chase
Norma Jean Darden
John Egerton
Jessica B. Harris
Ronni Lundy
Louis & Marlene Osteen
Marie Rudisill
Dori Sanders
Frank & Pardis Stitt

SFA Founding Members
Ann Abadie
Kaye Adams
Jim Auchmutey
Marilou Awiakta
Ben Barker
Karen Barker
Ella Brennan
Ann Brewer
Karen Cathey
Leah Chase
Al Clayton
Mary Ann Clayton
Shirley Corriher
Norma Jean Darden
Crescent Dragonwagon
Nathalie Dupree
John T. Edge
John Egerton
Lolis Eric Elie
John Folse
Terry Ford
Psyche Williams-Forson
Damon Lee Fowler
Vertamae Grosvenor
Jessica B. Harris
Cynthia Hizer
Portia James
Martha Johnston
Sally Belk King
Sarah Labensky
Edna Lewis
Rudy Lombard
Ronni Lundy
Louis Osteen
Marlene Osteen
Timothy W. Patridge
Paul Prudhomme
Joe Randall
Marie Rudisill
Dori Sanders
Richard Schweid
Ned Shank
Kathy Starr
Frank Stitt
Pardis Stitt
Marion Sullivan
Van Sykes
John Martin Taylor
Toni Tipton-Martin
Jeanne Voltz
Charles Reagan Wilson

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Interviews by SFA Members and Friends.

Project sponsored by Jim 'N Nick's Bar-B-Q.

Jessica B. Harris

I think part if the history of food in the South is undeniably connected to race. After all, for much of the history of the food of the South, African Americans planted it, grew it, harvested it, cooked it, served it, washed up after it, and then cleaned the chamber pots. So we were intimately involved with it…[I]t’s a part of the food of the South, and it’s a part of the SFA, and it’s a part of who we all are. And I think part of the wonderful thing, if you will, of the organization is [that] it’s an elephant under a rug, but everyone knows there’s an elephant under the rug. We just put a table on top of his back and eat. – Jessica B. Harris

Jessica B. Harris is the author of eight books documenting the foods and foodways of the African Diaspora. In addition to her cookbook, Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim, her previous works include The Africa Cookbook, The Welcome Table, Sky Juice and Flying Fish, A Kwanzaa Keepsake, Tasting Brazil, and Iron Pots & Wooden Spoons.

She has lectured on African American foodways at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and at numerous institutions and colleges throughout the United States and abroad. She teaches at Queens College in New York City and—hopefully—at the University of Mississippi.

In 2004, Harris was awarded the Jack Daniel’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Listen to this 3-minute audio clip of Jessica B. Harris talking the women in her family and some of the food she experienced growing up. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.] What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

edited transcript

SUBJECT: Jessica B. Harris, SFA Founder
DATE: December 28, 2005
LOCATION: Ms. Harris’ Home – Brooklyn, NY
INTERVIEWER: Damian Mosley, Friend of SFA & Glory Foods Scholarship Winner

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Damian Mosley: [H]ow did you come to be involved with SFA?

Jessica Harris: I'm a founding member; it’s as simple as that. I had—actually, it goes back a little bit further than that. I had done—as a consultant, as an editor—a book with the National Council of Negro Women in conjunction with a lady named Ellen Ross, and at some point around the time of the Atlanta Olympics I was invited to Macon, Georgia. And at that point, Ellen said, Oh there's a graduate student at the Center of Southern Culture whose name is John T. Edge. He's from Macon; ya'll need to meet each other. And at some point we met each other and, you know, we both were involved in food and that was, you know, fine and dandy; and [we] liked each other and talked. And John T. called a while after that and was getting ready to try to do a conference and, you know, we talked about the conference and I--you know, made some suggestions. He obviously talked to a lot of other people who made some suggestions and wanted to do this conference on Southern food out of the Center for Southern Culture at Ole Miss and asked me if I would come and speak. And I said, Yeah, sure. And so I went down. The conference was wonderful. I believe Betty Fussell gave the keynote [speech] and spoke about corn, and I spoke about African food, particularly in the South, not necessarily in the Diaspora. And a variety of other folks spoke; John Martin Taylor spoke, I believe John Egerton spoke. You know, it was the--the dinosaurs or the gray beards, whichever you prefer. It was such a great conference that out of that conference grew the SFA…[A]that was--so I was, you know, there from--I think I--now that John Egerton has missed a conference or two because, I believe, his wife was ill for one of them. I have the dubious honor of having been to all of them.

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Now did you go to the organizational meeting in Birmingham in the summer of 1999?

No, I wasn't able to attend that.

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What was your vision for SFA when it began?

I don't know that it had--I had a vision, and I probably was a naysayer. I--I didn't know that there was a need for another culinary organization. I thought the conference was fabulous. I thought that the commensality and communality of the conference was wonderful, but I'm not a real big organization person. I find that they sometimes get cumbersome and, you know, unless they're very clear about their stated goals, you know, they're just a once-a-year conference, so why go to all the rest of the trouble? [Laughs]…So I probably wasn't, you know--wasn't the real gung-ho one…As I recall, it was really John Egerton who sort of said, You know, this needs to be an organization, and this needs to come around, you know, the table and we need to start, you know, thinking about that. So I said, Oh, okay. Sure.

Now, has your take evolved?

I think that it is probably--not probably--it is certainly the only food conference I go to annually, and I make a point of going to it annually. I think that it is vital and important in that sense. I still, you know, remain skeptical about organizations and particularly organizations as they get larger and larger. I miss, certainly, much of the intimacy of the original conferences, which were limited by number to 100 people because they were held in Barnard Observatory. And, you know, I see that sooner or later we're going to maybe even have those concurrent sessions. I mean, I hate that because then you always have--you know, [you are] torn. I went to the Modern Language Association Conference once and promised God and whoever else was listening that I would never go back. I mean I don't ever want to see a conference bulletin that looks like a--a phone book.

Right.

The nice thing about the early conferences was everybody was in one room. You smiled at everybody. You knew everybody by face, if not by name. We could fit in varying places to eat together. Granted, there was always a cliquish sort of set of folks that hung out together, but that's going to happen any place, particularly in this day and age where you--you know, see your friends so rarely, so when you see them, you like to spend time with them. But the bottom line is the way that the SFA has evolved given all of those things has been pretty extraordinary. I mean it still retains that sense of community. I mean I think that there is a real sense of membership and of--of--of Southern-ness, if you will. I mean there's--there's a way that it becomes welcoming and there's a sense of hospitality to it and about it that I think make--make it function even in its new size.

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[A]re there any particular moments from [past symposia] that stand out in your mind?

Oh, there have been--there have been all sorts of moments. Some of them--some of them precious and some of them really sort of rather strange. I remember—well, I mean I suspect my major conference moment was calling Damon Fowler to task about the British origin of Southern fried chicken. It ended up being a front-page cartoon in the Food Section of the New York Times--two people dueling with chicken legs. It was not the SFA's finest moment, I might say [Laughs] because, you know, it was one of those things that was based in--in race and that it, you know, opened an ugly kettle of fish that probably had best been tamped down. I think part of the value of the SFA and part of the redeeming sort of quality of--of the SFA and of its membership is we weathered that storm and moved on. Damon and I are friends; we've known--we knew what we were talking about. We--you know, one of the things about good friends is you somehow or other know how to fuss. Everybody else doesn't know that you know how to fuss, and so sometimes it may be perceived of as other things. But food and--food--particularly food in the South, given the history of the South, is inevitably tied to race. When the SFA was in its inception and there were founding members, if you looked down the list of the founding members, it's almost what I call a Chinese takeout list. You know, one from Column-A and one from Column-B--almost matched, you know, twenty-five of this color and twenty-five of that color and fifteen with brown eyes and four with blue, you know. I don't necessarily subscribe to that as a concept or as a reality. I think that one of the things that has happened with the SFA is because it is in the South and because we meet at Ole Miss in Mississippi, there are some things that for African American members are more a fleur de peau [French phrase, meaning thin-skinned], you know, that are more right there just under the skin than they might be, you know, if we met in Wisconsin. But if we met in Wisconsin, it wouldn't be the Southern Foodways Alliance.

Right.

I think part of the history of food in the South is undeniably connected to race. After all, for much of the history of the food of the South, African Americans planted it, grew it, harvested it, cooked it, served it, washed up after it, and then cleaned the chamber pots; so we were intimately involved with it. [Laughs] In many of our heads and hearts it gives us an ownership [Laughs] that we give up unwillingly or at least you know sort of un--undemocratically shall we say for that. But the whole thing is it's--it's a part of the food of the South and it's a part of the SFA and it's a part of who we all are, and I think part of the wonderful thing if you will of the organization is it's an elephant under a rug, but everybody knows there's an elephant under the rug. We just put a table on top of his back and eat.

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Can you--can you say a little bit about--about your role in defining the mission of the SFA and maybe your role in its--its vision and its--and its programming, its planning?

I--at some point in its early, early inception it was clear that the SFA had--you know, any fledgling organization has a group of things that need to happen. They need to find officers, establish a Board, so on and so forth. At one of the early meetings, I think it was either the first or the second post-formation meeting, Daphne Derven, John Martin Taylor, and myself volunteered to become a planning committee, speaking from a variety of different points of view…So it was a very sort of eclectic group, and we did a variety of things, and we were always kind of on phone availability for John T. who did and still does much of the organization and the kind of fielding of things. Out of that--at some point--became a programming committee…But at some point the planning committee morphed into the programming committee, and I was Chair of that. And as Chair of the Programming Committee I came up with what is basically a paradigm that I think the SFA is still following, which is sort of tri-partheid. Once a conference or--a conference on an ingredient or a particular food--dish in a way--a conference on a region, a conference on a topic. So we've had barbecue, we've had Appalachia, we've had food and race; we've now had sugar, there will be a region, and then possibly food and gender.

Okay. What--I mean what led you to, I guess, develop that tri-partheid system?..And the reason I ask is because there are a lot of things that I feel like could be, you know, both an ingredient and a topic.

Well it--it--certainly they--they--they all inter-weave. I mean for example, barbecue; it's a noun, it's a verb, it's an adjective. You know, it could be anything. It could certainly be a region, but within that whole notion of umbrella, if you wanted to have conferences that were on a specific focus, equally you could have picked time periods…But I think time periods would have then allowed for so much leeway. If you say the colonial period, you know—what, 1620s through 1770? Well that's too much time.

Certainly.

Okay, and are you talking about what's going on in St. Augustine, Florida, which was colonial--it was just Spanish colonial--or what was going on in, you know, Virginia? So that-- because the South is so very regional within its region, regions seemed appropriate. Among other things, it also enabled me to learn more. I mean, I am not a Southerner. Food, because I think that there are specific ingredients that are totemic to the South. Certainly sugar--it doesn't grow anywhere else….Rice. Arguably, hog…You know, which certainly is eaten in other parts of the country, but there is a certain Southern identification with it. And then there--you know, we may run out of foods, but then there are totemic dishes. I mean, it may be--I don't know--gumbo, because there is certainly Louisiana gumbo; there is a Charleston gumbo; there are probably other Southern gumbos as--not as important as barbecue, which is--I mean there are barbecue organizations all by themselves. I mean, there may be a revisiting of barbecue. Southern drinks, Southern confits, as in Southern candies—divinity, ambrosia, all of those. All of those things that are specifically Southern, you know, come under that heading. And then topics--because I think that there are just some big over-arching topics that may not be specific to food at--or the food of the South, but that can certainly be applied to the food of the South. Race being one of them, although I don't think that was our most successful conference by far. Gender, food and music, you know food and the literature of--I mean, you know you can read these things off and quite honestly, how did it happen? I jotted it on the back of a piece of paper when I was bored listening to somebody who was doing a presentation on something I wasn't interested in. And when I brought it up, everybody said, Oh that's great, and there it is. So it didn't involve a great deal of [Laughs] scratching of head or, for that matter, consulting with others.

Right. You know, since we're talking about a region, one thing I--I find to be interesting about the South is--you know, as a region--it seems to--it really seems to be delineated and has some boundaries, whereas there are other regions like the Caribbean where--or a specific diaspora, where other people have created that region. That region is somehow an intellectual region, a conceptual region. How much of the South--?

I think the South is the ultimate conceptual—well, let me--maybe not so much the South as a conceptual region but the North is a conceptual region in the South. I'm not a Northerner or Yankee anywhere except in the South…You know, I think the South is perhaps not a conceptual region in the sense that it has--it has agreed to and, if you will, clung to that identity. I think it is a distinct region, but I think that within the region there are regionalisms. New Orleanians and Virginians are as different as chalk and cheese…So, I mean, I think that this whole notion of trying to codify anything is really something that, you know, is bound to be flawed simply because of the nature of humans, you know. We're all constantly in diaspora.

The--as you know, the SFA focuses on food as culture. What does that mean to you both intellectually and personally?

It means you are what you eat. And it means you are what you eat in very profound ways. I mean, this is about a Southern Foodways Alliance. Why am I, a Northerner, with no familial ties to the South, an active and involved member of the SFA? And that comes down to the fact that I'm an African American, and that comes down to the fact that I probably know--culinarily--the old South of African Americans better than many folks your age, who maybe died-in-the-very-marrow-of-the-bone Southerners, because my grandmother grew peanuts, made lye soap and cooked collard greens; she just did it in the North. So, you know, culture is who you are and it's--it's also where you are, but it equally is where you're from.

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So your place and date of birth?

Oh, it's on a piece of paper--March 18, 1948…Queens General Hospital[.]

So what about the foods of your--your childhood? Who prepared it and what were some typical meals? Could you describe the ceremony of those meals?

Oh, Lord. I'm a child of a nuclear family. I'm an only child—mommy, daddy, baby, absolute paradigm. I'm also the child of older parents. My mother worked, and until I went to school, I was either at my grandmother's house or with my mother. My mother was a trained dietician, which is why I'm getting up. [Stands from her chair and walks across room.] I'm going to read you a letter, and then you'll understand several things, not the least of which is why I said that my Lifetime Achievement Award was really my mother's. My mother--my mother was a trained dietician and got a degree in Dietetics from Pratt Institute in the '30s--early '30s like 1935. And at that point attended all sorts of strange classes. Like there was a class in How to Keep Black People Out of Your Restaurant and stuff like that. She was apparently very good at it, and she wanted to be a food demonstrator, as in, you know, the equivalent of a Sarah Moulton and a Rachel Ray or whatever--whatever the 1935 equivalent was. And [she] was good enough at it to have attained the notice of someone from Brooklyn Union Gas and--who thought enough about her to write to the Washington Gas Light Company in Washington, DC--and it was a Miss Ruth Soule, S-o-u-l-e. Interesting. And this is the letter that was sent to Miss Soule on the 24th of July, 1935. I have no idea why this letter has survived, and I have absolutely every idea why this letter has survived.
When you came in, you noticed that I frame my book covers, and I'm finishing my tenth cookbook, and they're all framed on the wall of my kitchen. And this letter lives with them and I'll read it to you:

I was very glad to hear from you and appreciate getting the information about Rhoda Jones. That was my mother. We make follow-up calls for the negro customers just the same as for White. Negro, small "n" and this was when people were beginning to go from the coal stoves to the gas stoves. I doubt the practicality of having a negro home services girl because the negroes' homes are sandwiched into White neighborhoods and frankly, we don't know their color until someone answers the door, and even then it may be a puzzle. Our city directory does not designate negroes as they do down South. We usually conduct one negro cooking school each year, but of course that wouldn't afford a livelihood, and we have never used negro women for it. I shall be glad to keep her in mind, and I would suggest that she write the Afro-American Newspaper; they conduct several negro cooking schools each year and claim a wide circulation.

Okay. Ultimately, that's probably the bedrock of why I do what I do. My proudest moment was actually the Mother's Day before my mother died, and my mother died Mother's Day the following year or shortly thereafter. She was on Miss Sarah Moulton’s television show, and I have a tape of it. And, you know, she's my mom, but there was one moment there when she stood up to her grand height of five [feet] one [inch], and she was baking biscuits, and she started talking about Well you know when you do this the gluten does that or something or other, and I just remember my spine straightening, and I had this sort of wrap-around grin on my face because she got to do that which she had dreamed of doing. And she was fantastic. In terms of my home, in terms of my eating as I grew up, she was incredible. I grew up eating extraordinary food. I only now realize how extraordinary it was. My grandmother who couldn't cook, cooked; what she did, she did extremely well. My grandmother made beaten biscuits--sat there whacking on a table to make these wonderful silken beaten biscuits. I had another grandmother who put up preserves and did all kinds of, you know, pickled speckled pears and watermelon pickles, and food was always just another way to show love. And I think it still is.

To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.