Welcome to the SFA

Welcome to the Southern Foodways Alliance -- an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with headquarters at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.

The Southern Foodways Alliance documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor -- all who gather-- may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.

Food for thought and alliances

By Trudier Harris
The Chapel Hill News
Wednesday, October 27, 2004

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I recently attended the seventh annual meeting of the Southern Foodways Alliance held in Oxford, Miss.

One of the intentions of the founders of the organization was to bring about racial reconciliation through food. They felt that, over fried catfish, barbecue or some good ol' Southern fried chicken, black and white folks in the South would be so busy enjoying the food that they couldn't possibly say anything mean or spiteful to each other (at least that's my take on the plan).

Instead, we would use food occasions to begin to converse about what still separates us and how we can work harder to bridge those gaps. After all, it's difficult to use a racial slur with someone when you're all sitting there with barbecue sauce sliding down your shirts and blouses.

I was invited to deliver a paper at the conference and eagerly looked forward to attending. I arrived in time for the Friday afternoon sessions and the catfish fry on Friday night. It was held at a renovated grocery store several miles from the conference site, down a two-lane, country, un-lighted highway. In Mississippi, that alone is enough to scare you into some kind of reconciliation. One of the strategies must have been that, if people of different races have to ride long enough with each other on an open-air, chilly, double decker bus, then they're going to find something in common. Of course the Jack Daniels helped once they arrived at the catfish fry.

Over the next couple of days, I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner in a variety of venues. In all of them, I brushed elbows with folks unlike myself. And indeed I participated in lots of conversations about race. Since my conference presentation had been on the mistress/maid relationship historically and literarily, particularly as it related to the preparation of food, several white people came up to me to discuss their relationships with the black women who essentially raised them.

Most of them, I had asserted in my paper, knew very little about those black women. For example, could they recall simple things such as the black woman's favorite colors, how she got her hair done, how many children she left at home to take care of them, or even what she did after they grew up and no longer needed her nurturing.

I wanted, in other words, for the white recipients of black women's largesse to be a little less romantic in their notions of what such women had done for them.

I, after all, was the child of a black woman who left her own children very early in the mornings to go off to white women's houses, prepare breakfast, take care of their children, and prepare dinner for them before she returned home to us. Did the white people who romanticized such black women ever truly consider -- or appreciate -- the sacrifices they made?

A couple of people wanted me to know -- as I expected they would -- that they truly loved the black women who took care of them as children and that those women loved them in return. But there were some rawer reflections.

One young man who had romanticized his relationship with the black woman who raised him admitted that he ultimately knew very little about her, had not been sufficiently curious about her lifestyle, had indeed only cared about the fact that she took care of him. He did not know what had happened to her after he became an adult. He was now much more reflective about the sacrifices she must have made and what his demands upon her time must have done to her family.

As various folks approached me over meals to discuss such relationships, the tone of our conversations was always quietly serious, with a genuine intent to use the occasion to raise some of the questions and contemplate some of the issues that we might not contemplate everyday.

I wouldn't be so bold as to say that anybody was converted wholeheartedly to a new way of thinking about race, but the settings and the context at least made it possible for us to have frank, honest discussions that we might not otherwise have had.

Careful to ensure that folks attending the conference would continue discussions about race over food when they returned home, the organizers passed out a flier of suggestions. The one I found especially appealing is simple to execute and could be potentially rewarding. They suggested that any one of us might gather neighbors across races and cultures for a dinner party. We would ask each attendee to bring one of the most distinctive foods identified with his/her race.

Then, as we all sat down to share in the communal meal, each person would spend a few minutes explaining to the other diners the history of that particular food. Thus the historical, social, and cultural functions of food could serve to bridge small gaps in understanding other people.

While I can't think of any white people who are quite ready for chitlins, I think I will nonetheless take the cross-racial dinner suggestion to heart. I could at least explain why so many black people grew up eating chicken feet.

Trudier Harris is the J. Carlyle Sitterson professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill. Messages for her can be sent to eloise@nando.com or left at 919-932-2019.

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