After reading the excerpts from Michael W. Twittys’ The Cooking Gene, I felt truly engulfed into the culture that was created in the American south surrounded by the plantation lifestyle. Although these people were viewed as property without alienable rights, their rich culture devised from people all over the world has manifested the south into what it is today. Southern culture cannot be discussed without discussing black culture, and black culture in the south was formed on the plantations that blacks were first brought to America to work on. It was formed in the kitchen, on the fields, in the slave quarters, and in the big house where the house slaves worked. It hails from all over the world, the first true melting pot culture as the people themselves hailed from different parts of the continent. They brought their traditions with them from their homelands and blended it with others to make it their own. As we learned in No More Whistling Walk for me, It was also formed in Europe, when slaves like James Hemings got the chance to learn to cook from the best french slaves in the world and bring it back to the plantations. However, it is not about where and how their culture was formed. The why is the most important part of this equation. having a distinct culture they could call their own gave the slaves hope that they were in fact humans like everyone else and not property. It willed them to keep waking up every day despite the hatred and abuse they would face from their masters who viewed them as cattle. The slaves were given the worst image of themselves. Every day they were constantly told how ugly and useless they were by their masters. The culture they had gave them joy when they were depressed and hope when they felt hopeless.
As our author tells us, so much of the slave culture was passed down orally because of the lack of literacy. The stories were told through songs, riddles, and prayers that were always being recited and sung around the plantation. Twitty, being a direct descendant of slaves, has many oral stories to share with us. Food is the main course, but there are many side dishes to this culture that these people take such pride in. Their culture was truly their own, and it was the one thing that couldn’t be stripped away from them.
I appreciated the way your highlighted that fact that making food gave southern slaves a sense of their own culture. One quote from Twitty especially stuck out to me when I read your argument that Southern culture was built by blacks on the plantations they were brought to. Twitty writes that “European dishes were made of Native American ingredients and were cooked by black hands”. This quote really highlights the meaning behind why modern black families with ties to the southern slave trade want to keep this food in their lives and find comfort and connection in its presence.
For me, the most interesting moment in this chapter was when Twiddy reflected on learning about the racial divide in America. This first occurs when the “slave song” that his grandmother teaches him forces Twiddy to question what a slave is. At a young age, Twiddy must come to terms with the trauma caused by slavery. He feels a similar pain when struggling to understand the term “segregation” when learning about his father’s life in Jim Crow south. These two events teach Twiddy that others do not necessarily view him as equal, a concept that creates pain and trauma.