by Tre’vell Anderson

When I think of home, I think of a place where shrimp and grits overflow. I think of a place where red rice and collard greens is not only a dinner deal but a love language and cultural legacy. 

When I think of home, I think of The Other Cousin Church Event Catering. It was my granny’s restaurant in North Charleston, South Carolina, in which I served many a plate as a preteen. I can smell the Rogerwood sausage and salmon patties now.

I get lost in my too-few memories of The Other Cousin—because of how warm and joyous and vibrant it all was, from Granny’s welcoming smile to a trio of old friends carryin’ on over a slice of sweet potato pie. Only as an adult have I realized it was also revolutionary. Because we weren’t just feeding people. We were preserving history. 

My grandmother, Dorothy Montgomery Holmes, was born in Charleston in 1943 to Janie Simmons Montgomery, a maid and cook, and her husband, Moses Montgomery Sr., a carpenter and cab driver. Granny had twelve siblings with nicknames like Neddie and Biggie and Ducky. As adults, they sang gospel with groups including the Harmonizing Sisters and the Voices of Thunder and ministered throughout the Lowcountry.

Granny eventually answered the call to preach but had to leave her home church to do so, as women weren’t allowed in the pulpit. By the time I was born in 1991, she was the pastor of God’s Tabernacle of Prayer Church of Deliverance, a sanctuary, literally and figuratively, that she conceived in her living room. It was a community safe haven where everybody and they mama could find support, no matter their life circumstances.

And to reach more souls than she could during Sunday service or Wednesday night Bible study, she opened Two Cousins Catering and Soul Food. 

As the name implies, my granny’s business partner was a cousin. Some in the family say “sticky fingers” came between them, with one accusing the other of theft. Others cite a series of petty disagreements. It’s hard to say definitively what went down, but by 2001, Two Cousins was down to one and renamed The Other Cousin.

For four years until 2005, The Other Cousin served the community at 3249 Meeting Street. I was a waiter there, most often during the summers, starting at around ten years old. I loved fluttering between tables refilling sweet tea that I made that morning, collecting my tips to spend with the neighborhood candy lady on chilly bears and Big Mama Pickled Sausages.

On any given day, customers would enter our wooden, glass-paned front door and be greeted at once by the smell of fresh cornbread and the most familiar “Hey there!” from me behind the counter. As they self-selected a plastic-covered table already set with a lace placemat and a maroon cloth napkin–wrapped set of utensils, 106.3 WJNI would be on the radio. The station has been proclaiming “With Jesus Nothing’s Impossible” since I was seven years old, and that was the soundtrack to the consistent hum of business that included everyone from construction workers to local church bishops. We had customers who came for breakfast and lunch, multiple days a week, to see what specials were scribbled across the chalkboard menu above the register.

The kitchen clattered between gospel songs and usually pleasant conversation until I was summoned by a bell to pick up orders from the service window. My great Aunt Peachy would saunter to the front of house, her brow wet and apron grease-stained, to bear witness to our customers’ satisfaction. She’d take smoke breaks out the back side door of the restaurant in between orders. I could sometimes smell her moments of reprieve—Benson & Hedges menthol cigarettes—wafting through the black-barred windows in the front as I wiped down tables or swept the floor.

I remember the okra soup the most, though. The slurp-off-the-bone smoked pork neck bone. The chunks of tangy, stewed tomato. Shrimp so fresh you could taste the local waters in every bite. Served with a scoop or two of white rice, it’s my favorite culinary hug to this day. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I realized the meals we cooked and served at The Other Cousin—and that I ate at home every night—were heritage foods. Our cultural inheritance was quite literally on those plates, and prepared in one of the most significant cities in African American history.

Take okra, for example. The vegetable, which can be traced both to the African continent and parts of South Asia, was brought to the United States alongside my enslaved ancestors. As culinary historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris has noted, “No plant more than this small green pod tells the history of Africans in diaspora.” Stews and gumbos made with okra both represented one’s African identity and subtly resisted the assimilation that enslavers tried to enforce.

Sometimes I feel like Dorothy in The Wiz, wishing I was “back there with the things I’ve been knowing,” longing for the home The Other Cousin gave to me and my history. Unfortunately, my last memory of the restaurant is one of scorched walls; a tenant’s upstairs apartment caught fire and destroyed the kitchen and dining room.

While Granny could’ve rebuilt, my mom recalls her thinking the fire was an omen, like God was working in a mysterious way to turn her attention inward, as Granny’s health, and my grandaddy Roosevelt’s, was in slow, largely secret decline. In retrospect, I can’t blame her—even if I wish that I could still throw on an apron and help with table service when I go home to visit. 

On a recent trip to Charleston, I realized that I carry home with me. It was during a visit to the International African American Museum, which opened last year on the site of Gadsden’s Wharf—where, alongside other ports in the Charleston Harbor, more than 40 percent of our enslaved African ancestors disembarked. Two exhibits fascinated me most. One highlighted the cultural impact of the Lowcountry’s Gullah Geechee, from on-screen depictions, such as Julie Dash’s canonical film Daughters of the Dust and Nickelodeon’s Gullah Gullah Island, to culinary contributions that shaped Southern cuisine. The second zeroed in on Carolina Gold and other types of rice, and showed how central the cash crop was (and is) to everyday Black life, from enslavement to small businesses in the early 2000s.

In an instant, I saw The Other Cousin quite differently: It was a revolutionary site of cultural preservation, even if unconsciously done. From the righteous rebellion inherent in Black woman entrepreneurship to the audacity of crafting a menu rooted in home-cooked, heritage foods, every dish—made from recipes learned by heart from Granny’s mother, who had memorized them from hers—held a piece of our history. And with every bite, that history lived on. It lives on. 

After all, our story as a people has always been an embodied one. One fixed in our palates rather than any one place. One passed from person to person through tongue and plate.

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