Part I.
I lay in the water face up, floating on my back, letting the viscous, salt water of the Caribbean Sea buoy me. I could hear the sounds of my children and others around me as I drifted between the present and some other time. The sea had never been this delicious, this wonderful. I let myself be on my own. Closed my eyes even though I feared the waves might crash over me and go up my nose. I resisted the urge to raise my head and closed my eyes. The sun was hot on my face. I could feel the heat in my lips and inhaled the sea's aura all around me. I started to time travel. My ancestors who passed through Barbados on their way to the Carolinas stood closer to shore. I sensed the bleed of their garments swirling around me. In my mind's eye I saw their head wraps and skirts, watched them wipe their hands on their clothes, peeped them sneaking bits of mango into the mouths of their own children. I recalled a time when visiting Jamaica as a young girl sucking the juice from a sugar cane stalk and wishing we could take this sweetness with us forever. I remembered that the cane was the cotton of the Caribbean. I remembered the gnarled hands of my great-grandfather, Jesse Ben, and his clean, well-shaped fingernails. He was old when I was a girl and lived long into my adulthood.
I closed my eyes as waves rocked me and saw stars when I opened them to the turquoise and azure hues of the sky and sea. I thought, as I often do when I find myself alone in nature, how did the people of long ago experience this? I thought of Africans coming ashore in what looks like paradise, only to become slaves to someone else's heaven. I thought of poor black people washing themselves in the sea, rubbing the fine sand on their faces and knees and elbows and feet as I'd seen many locals do when we lived here. I recalled the old man who passed me going down the aisle on the airplane to find his way to the bathroom who looked like an older version of my father and wondered if my family tree, were I able to trace it, would find some of our people in Barbados. I concluded that it was possible. Maybe that was why we'd relocated there to begin with. That I might find my way to myself somehow.
The sun was high and bright and the water's undulation hypnotic and the number of rum punches consumed had me outside of my control and into a space more nebulous and open. Breathing in the air, feeling the water lap against my ears, I opened my eyes to consider how this place suddenly felt like home after all of the promises broken and kept, after the punishing loneliness, after I'd called her my heart of darkness. But my heart of darkness still pumps life blood through me, shows me connection, and gives me direction. She has been patient with me and has allowed me to love and be loved, no matter my fear of it.
Part II.
I was as afraid of Barbados as I was of myself. She was dark and hot and humid and fecund and feral, shiny, damp, throbbing, and deep. She wore her colonialism like a necklace or a yoke depending on what circle you traveled and she was beautiful. She was in your face heavenly at times, then seedy and broken. I'd come to Barbados like a white American tourist. I don't say that with pride. But I'd prepared, as did my Euro-centered, patriarchy-card carrying, rigidly gendered French husband, for a life in paradise. A two year break from the grind. We'd dreamt of sun and sea and sand and tropical drinks and "maybe even someone to help you care for the children; it's really cheap there, you know?" I was still pregnant when we began the conversation about the move that would take us from New York City, my home, what I'd thought was my true north, to the Caribbean.
I'd only marginally considered how I'd relate or connect to the people of Barbados and was reassured that I'd meet the "wives of other employees" and would be part of an expatriate community which I presumed correctly would be mostly white. In Barbados I was black but a different black. I'd no Caribbean roots (that I knew of) and moved through space like a New Yorker. I was efficient, abrupt, focused. I acted with precision and purpose. I was frustrated by the slower gaits, imprecise schedules, and indirect responses. Expats marveled at the locals' disinterest in their companies' priorities, called them incapable, demonized their behavior and infantilized them in their minds. My husband regaled me and anyone who would listen about the unsophisticated ways in which they worked, how uncouth, how unprofessional, how inelegant, and I was struck by the overtones.
I'd spent my life, as instructed, proving these beliefs untrue. I knew that whites' impressions of me could determine my opportunities. That being likeable, malleable, complacent, unchallenging would allow me access to spaces forbidden to other black people. Before I could be called lazy, I worked harder and more efficiently than anyone else. Before I could be called messy or sloppy, I was well turned out and presented. Before I could be called unintelligent, uneducated, unprepared for the tasks at hand, I'd worked and considered every angle. There were rewards for this good behavior and the rewards quieted my restlessness for a time. I believed they were what I wanted, gifts, treats. I'd been a dear pet, a cultivated, curated, well-edited example of how to do it right, only revealed to be the sham that it was when the developing nation of Barbados showed me myself.
I know how I looked and I know what I sounded like and it fills me with shame. In trying to right myself when postpartum depression and anxiety turned me upside down, I lashed out. Self-loathing and internalized racism made me angry that Barbados hadn't easily opened herself to me. Wasn't I her kin? I had no friends. Locals looked at me suspiciously, tried to suss me out, make heads or tails of this black American girl and her French husband and multicultural babies. I was indignant for my husband, wished the cooks in his kitchen could make his life easier for him so that he could, in turn, make my life easier. I willed them to be better, to act better, to give a damn about the shitty hotel company that couldn't have given a damn about them, to show up for their low wage in the hot kitchen to work tirelessly and thanklessly for spoiled tourists so my husband could be praised and exalted. I hated what I believed they were doing to my family. The cultural divide between my husband and I broadened and I saw for the first time the weight of his self-importance and privilege and my deference to it.
I said silent prayers to Barbados to get her shit together. (Wasn't I trying to muffle my cries each night as I found my thoughts turn more and more psychotic? Why couldn't she? Why did she always have to show her contempt? Her wounds? Her pain?) I asked her not to be as she was. (I'd been stuffing myself down my throat my entire life! My parents had hung up on my while I wailed in fear at the monkeys coming to the screen-less windows and I tried to act casual about it.) I asked her to make it easier for the tourists visiting our landscape. (Let them feel special and important. Let them focus on your blue waters and have their hair braided and tell you that now they looked just like you. Let them tell you how much they love you and your food and your dress and your style and then return to the air-conditioned luxury hotels and villas whilst you tell them they are pretty and return to your modest dwelling.) I asked her to keep her skeletons in her closet. (It can't be colonialism, racism, class structure, and history preventing your rise and your success. Barbados is not ready for prime time, can't get it right.)
In a class about the Barbadian character, my husband and other white expats were taught to expect a passive-aggressive position from the Bajans/Barbadians. It was explained that because, unlike slave masters and traders on other islands of the Caribbean and in the United States, the slavers of Barbados had allowed families to stay together, had not separated them through sale, and had therefore made its black population more complacent, docile. The terrain, unlike other islands, did not provide much place to escape. There were no mountain ranges or protected landmasses in which to hide. That this modified history was meant to explain to expat workers the resistance they might meet when dealing with locals making pennies to their dollars infuriated me. That they believed it made it worse. When my parents came to visit the island, my father said that Barbados "wasn't ready for prime time" and I knew that she still had more to prove. We both did.
In New York City, I could disappear into the melting pot. I could ride the subway, walk down the sidewalks, go to work, restaurants, parks with people from all walks of life. Sure, there were pockets of complete WASPy whiteness and areas where black and brown communities set up "Little" versions of their homeland, but for the most part I was amongst the world's population every day. The blackness of Barbados hit me like the wall of humidity that sweated my hair, all coiffed and presented for my reunion with my husband, when I walked down the stairs at the back of the plane the evening of our arrival to the island. It curled my hair, glossed my cheekbones, and parted my lips. She gave my swinging hips and the jiggle my ass made when I walked permission. She showed me all the black ladies and men doing all the things. She gave me eye contact and I was at first afraid to meet her gaze.
I got lost in Barbados. Walking through the mansion's ruins deep in the forest of mahogany trees at Farley Hill overlooking the island's Atlantic Coast, I discovered her lush, soft heart, and mine for her. I fell in love with this place and then the east coast. My first foray into the island, going deeper to her core, no longer flitting on her edges where tourists and expats teased her and hedonistically played with her, I discovered another type of paradise. It was morose and melancholy. There was a Victorian sadness to this place. Ghosts, secrets, and whispers. It was here that I made my first friends on a class trip with my oldest girl. They resuscitated me. They shared their secrets and let me tell mine. This included my shame and my pride and my confusion. I was able to admit that the paradise promised had not been what I'd expected. That the sun was too bright and too hot for this exhausted mother, that our house was uncomfortable, that I'd been so lonely, that my husband didn't and couldn't meet my needs, that being a black, African-American expatriate in a country of black Caribbean people was more challenging than I'd expected.
I didn't recognize the New Yorker who'd just begun making a career for herself, who'd finally found a real place to call home, who'd confronted assaults and deep old wounds only to see the post traumatic stress pull any sense of safety out from under her. I couldn't believe how bad I was at living abroad. I'd dreamed since I was a girl of being a "woman of the world" and then couldn't hack it. I thought, I can't even hang on this little island with black people and I thought I was going to be a world traveler? I'd been fed and made complacent on the spoils of the first world. I wanted my rules, my food, temperature control, my media, fast internet, VOGUE magazine, sidewalks and clean streets. I wanted businesses and companies that thought I was always right. I wanted antiseptic correctness. I feared real connection and contact and Barbados wanted to touch me. Touch me with her warm fingers, take me into her beating heart, get mango juice and soursop, sugarcane, coconut, lime, breadfruit and flying fish fry in my hands and my hair. I thought I could move there, live there, raise my children there and remain untouched, unchanged but she revealed herself to me and me to myself.
Though I was angry with Barbados and my time spent there, I kept coming back. I kept up with dear friends and the weekly news. I followed different organizations on the island and got excited about the island's successes. I met people living in the United States from Barbados with pride and told them of my time spent there. I tattooed a flying fish, the nation's symbol, on my right forearm underneath the Eye of Horus. I still regaled people with my tales of monkeys and cultural confusion, long days spent at the immigration office, and word for word play by play of conversations I'd had with customer service at varying businesses, but I kept going back. When I told white people I'd met about my years in Barbados they'd say, "See! I knew you were from the islands!" To which I'd always reply, "I'm actually an American born black person. My parents and their parents are from here too. We've no Caribbean roots that I know of." They'd always meet my response with suspicious eyes. They understood why they visit the Caribbean, for the sun and the sea, but couldn't imagine that I'd somehow have been there for the same reasons, suspected that I was keeping my roots a secret. There is no secret.
My father and mother both went in search of their roots using ancestry.com and found what they'd pretty much suspected. Many US narratives begin in West Africa, and theirs was no exception. There are various European attributes that can more than likely be traced to the rape of my slave ancestors. That's no secret. They've also worked diligently with their siblings on their family trees to see how far back they can trace our family. We are at the mercy of the slave masters' records. What I know is that Barbados and the Carolinas have a very deep connection for both white slavers/forefathers and the slaves they transported with them for trade. My people are from the Carolinas and the surrounding areas.
As the daughter of black Southerners, I have made the connection to my slave ancestors, seen the soil where they toiled, been inside the modest homes where they lived. I have been inside the churches and listened at my grandparents' and my great-grandparents' knees of stories that brought dimension and depth and value to the lives of the people who came before me. I loved their character, their strength, and their dignity. I despised that they were made to bend to the whims of white people, that their lives were not fully realized because of what racism and poverty inflicted upon them, and that the crosses they were made to bear were never acknowledged by the good, white people who'd unloaded them onto their backs. These warm brown, beautiful people never believed how glorious they were. That their lush, dark, soft hearts, sweated brows, and sinewed arms, strong hands, and wooly hair deserved to be loved.
It is with that love that I return to Barbados. To tell her that I love her, and myself, in her imperfection. That is she a baby, a young one, and that I am sorry for having been unforgiving. I have been that way for myself. Because I didn't learn that my blackness, my heat, my desire, my need, my gifts, my treasures, my heart, my humanity was enough. That I could allow myself a moment to float aimlessly or rest. That I didn't have to prove that I was other than I was. Than I am. When I next visit Barbados, I am going to spend Foreday Morning with my friends native and adopted. I am going to follow the steps of the man who looks like my father and let myself be painted in mud and colors. I am going to wash myself off in the sea and trace the color stained sweat down my face. I am going to rise and fall with other black people into the night and let Barbados finally, actually fill up the cracks in my story. I may jump at the Grand Kadooment or find other Cropover events in which to participate and I will come to the sea and float on my back, careful not to let the water go up my nose. I will let the water come to my ears and listen for my heartbeat. I will catch the heartbeat of those who came before me and I will let the sun brown my body to a deep mahogany.
Barbados nearly broke me. She did crack me open. And is now filling those cracks with moon dust. What I'd wanted was a picture, a two dimensional postcard of my life. Instead I found that I must put my hands in, dig in deep, pull from myself the lies and deceits embedded in me to make me easier, less than I am. I have learned to love being this black woman. I have loved having a deep, wounded, melancholy heart because she has shown me how to be compassionate. I know the chemtrails of slavery weave themselves across my soul's starry sky and that I have carried that dark secret as it were my own. It isn't only mine to bear. What is my own is the light. What is mine is my heartbeat in my ears as I float in the water. What is mine is the undulating rhythm of the waves. What is mine are the things revealed to me living in Barbados.
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
It's been a tough few weeks in our two towns. A number of extraordinary curricular missteps regarding slavery (a mock slave auction and runaway slave posters presented in two separate schools' 5th grades) and pathetic racist and anti-Semitic scrawls and scratches on the walls of some of the elementary, middle, and high schools in the area have risen from the ground like a septic spill and gotten everyone all up in their feelings. Myself included. As the black mother of two black girls of mixed heritage, I have become both the sounding board and the rubber wall off of which white friends and acquaintances can bounce their feelings, their fears, and their embarrassment. I have read posts on a town Facebook page and gone down the dangerous, thorny hole of defensiveness, divisiveness made more infuriating by a focus on semantics and description rather than on empathy, connection, and apology.
In navigating my anger and my hurt and the confusion and fear of my girls, I have struggled with what has always been my belief, my truth, and with the hope I have wanted to instill in the hearts of my children. We have paid lip service to the idea of community in these two towns. We have congratulated ourselves for our openness and inclusion, and with a bit of side eye and tongue planted firmly in cheek, I have allowed it, but the truth is, no matter that I am married to a white, French man, I have not ever believed that the collective "white people" are my community. I have always felt that my otherness would never allow me space in "their" communities. That sucks and I hate to admit it. But I have always been prepared to be disappointed by even my allies. I have been prepared to lose them, to let go, to be assaulted, humiliated, abandoned by my white friends and colleagues. I have steeled myself for their indifference, their insensitivity, and their ignorance. The events of these past weeks have triggered that sense.
My otherness, my black, my skin/culture/race has placed me outside for much of my life because I grew up in the mostly white township of a mixed town in which most of the people of color lived in the borough circling the town. Defining and defending my otherness within this community became my job, and one that I was not particularly good at because I was a child and because my parents had grown up with only black people and really had no idea what these white people were getting into. They may have known in theory but had no practical application of growing up and living amongst the very people they'd always expected would not include them. We'd been given no tools other than "do unto others" and watching and studying their white moves on TV and in real life.
Though surrounded for much of my young life by pink and tan little girls and boys, I always marveled at my brown skin. It was coppery and gold when the sun hit it and shiny with oils and lotions after a bath. It amazed me that my mother all butter cream and café au lait could blend with my father's coffee bean and chocolate to make the different browns that covered my siblings and me. My grandparents, save my dad's father, were all fair-complexioned black folks. My mom's mother was often mistaken for white for those not in the know (white people). The skin we were in made us black people, all of us because one drop made it so*, but there was not shame in that, not instinctually. Only one thing could make it immediately so to young me, could blush the brownest cheeks mauve and purple. And that was the dreaded slavery section of American history in social studies.
All the lessons and stories told by our families, the reunions, the family trees, old photos, black church, roof-raising hallelujahs could not inoculate me from the burning eyes of my peers and my teachers who needed me to feel some kind of way, show some kind of reaction to their gaze when they told me that it all began here. With someone with the same coppery skin as mine or dark coffee bean of my father or buttercream meringue of my mother or white coconut of my grandmother sold into or born into slave to toil and suffer abuses named but not discussed, certainly not felt. We'd move past fast enough to keep the pain and the anguish at bay. I'd burn and blush, feeling my cells vibrate with that truth in my body and my classmates would consider it for as long as it took, usually the slowest reader, to get through those two paragraphs.
That the enslavement of my ancestors is abhorrent is not and was not questioned. That my family tree and the stories of my past are filled with tales of horror, rape, assault, abuse, beatings, degrading humiliation, division and separation of families and names never to be traced again (and further receding as each older member of my family, those who kept the stories and the secrets alive, pass on) isn't either. But it is not quite understood either. So hideous is this reality to all of us in these United States, the modern world really, that we refuse to sit longer than a few paragraphs with it. Refuse to share the reality of our foundation, of the roots of this nation with our future. Allow our children to interpret what we as parents can barely discuss with one another.
I asked my girls last night to consider this. We are sitting together in a room, spending time after a long day when we are brought outside to the yard and told by our master, the person who owns us and uses us for his will, who keeps us in this cold house in these horribly tattered clothes, that tomorrow, he will send my oldest daughter to another family where she will work and toil for the rest of her life, and that we will more than likely, never see one another again. I tell the youngest that years later, the same will be done to her. I tell them that we suffer and that we cannot read or write, have no comforts, and cannot escape this truth as our lives, as what we will live and endure as long as we are on the earth. I tell them that the same would have been true for those who came before us and those who came after.
As I talked, we were all in tears. I was choking them back as I described to them this horrific scene. This one horrible moment that does not include epic cruelty, rape, maiming, whipping, torture, starvation, actual breeding of human beings like chattel. I cried into their hair as I hugged them and said, "This is not the story of where black people began. We are and have been so much more. This is how the story of us begins for so many white people. This is slavery and it's not all that we are."
When I heard about the mock slave auction that was to be included in the presentation of a child in my 5th grader's switch class, I at first tried to logically connect the dots that would lead a child to this place. How in the teaching of slavery did going on the auction block seem like a schoolyard game or play? How did kids end up dancing and dabbing while singing Negro spirituals learned during Black History Month while pretending to be slaves? How did children feel compelled to participate in this charade? What had they missed? My daughter was doing a report on the Southern colonies and while she mentioned slavery as it is not possible not to, she and her partner met the topic with the gravity one would expect. To be honest, I could feel their fear around talking about it together. And that's the problem.
It's fear. It is always fear. Looking at one's self directly in the mirror, facing the truth about one's nature, one's motivations, one's soul is incredibly hard work. When it doesn't look pretty, we don't want to be who we are. When I look in the mirror, I cannot deny my brown skin and the history it tells. I can no much cover the blemish of the world's slave trade with concealer and powders as I can the truth of our history that predates that scarring and the advances and re-centering of ourselves in our own narrative rather than in peripheral characters in a white story. I'm looking and I see myself. I see our brown and black and meringue and cocoa and peach and tan skin. I see our tales told on my body, feel them run through my veins, taste their breath in my soul. I stare into my tired, knowing eyes and I refuse to meet this moment with shame. The shame is not mine to claim.
My purple blush at my family's history, my people's story relegated to a 1/2 centimeter on the world's timeline. The story of the soul-crushing, body-breaking, psyche-wounding, intentionally cruel, inhumane centuries of torture on the people of the diaspora told as a Disney tale with singing and dancing and runaway slave posters drawn by 5th graders and then defended as childhood innocence, has knocked the wind from me. That forty years after I was taught this hideous tale as my truth, my children and their white counterparts are learning it as though history lives outside of our bodies, outside of the bodies and lives of real people is a travesty.
Perhaps my anger is getting the better of me. Perhaps it is about time. I have sat idly, quietly, cautiously, listening to mostly white people, but also other minorities, with a different story to tell. I have seen various groups "become" white, claim white, be deemed "model minorities" and turn their heads from the mirror, no longer seeing their otherness in the reflection but a clear, unblemished patina of respectability one foundation shade lighter and rouged lips telling the same stories about black people and the lies of our brown skin. I hear them all describe and define and explain anything and everything but the privilege their white skin, their acceptable otherness has allowed them. I hear them demand that I, that we, promise that we are greater than the story of us that starts with slavery, that their othering of me/us is not my/our fault, that their othering of me/us is not THEIR fault, that we can discuss the man in the mirror but that they cannot be made uncomfortable and even more, that THEIR children cannot be made uncomfortable. So my children look in the mirror and have to ask and I have to tell them every time and yours, only when they get in trouble and we can hope they "learn from it."
And so we sit again discussing slavery, the very root of the systemic racism in the United States of America that has and does threaten our role on the world stage with the rise of Donald Trump and his white throngs terrified of looking in the mirror and seeing themselves clearly. To see that there are many shades of foundation to cover their pain, their blemishes, their scars, their hate, their privilege, their lies, their denial but that we know they are wearing makeup and that the emperor has no clothes. You are too scared to look deeply past your white cheeks, your furrowed brows, your clenched fists, your pursed lips to see that you cannot blur the reflections of the people standing next to you, that no matter how you try to fade us from view, we are still standing next to you.
There were meetings of a coalition on race and there was a town hall meeting. There were "teachable" moments and recordings of bias attacks and petty crimes that were dissected on the towns' Facebook page. There were cries of "not me" and pleas not to "see us as just white people" and reminders that "no one living now was/is a slave owner." And I begin to burn in my own skin, to itch, and to fidget. I am hot, heated, but not from my own shame. It is because I must ask again that you look at your folded hands, bite your tongue ready to lash out with explanation, stare into your eyes in the mirror or those of your children and tell me, again, that we can all learn from standing on the auction block, that white children participated too, that the runaway slave posters really had a purpose, that you have more to say and still no time to listen because your discomfort of confronting our hideous past is worth more than our sustained and repeatedly opened wound. It is because I blush purple with hurt while you do all you can to avoid seeing your cheeks flushed by your complicity in this racist system. It is because we are teaching our children what we learned and what we learned was not good enough. It cannot be that I know this just because of the skin I'm in.
*The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States asserting that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan-African ancestry ("one drop" of black blood)[1][2] is considered black (Negro in historical terms). This concept evolved over the course of the 19th century and became codified into law in the 20th century. It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" and is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status. (Wikipedia, One-drop rule).
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
There is promise and there are promises on the first day.
I'd promised the girls all break long that I would take them roller skating at the rink. Truth is, I love that place and it's not a big deal to go unless I am tired and frankly, a holiday break where I am alone with these two cherubs for the entire time is pretty damn tiring, no matter how cute and sweet they are, so heck yeah, I was tired. Most graciously, my good friend agreed to go with her brood and we wrangled our teams to make it to a 1 o'clock session. I'd left a pot of black eyed peas to soak in cold water on the stove and cut the collard greens the way I like them (in strips and with the large vein at the middle of the leaf removed, too tough for me). I'd prepped just enough for me as no one in the house is going to go to town on them other than me, got everyone's gear in order, and locked us out.
We'd already let the new year's air into the house, saged ourselves and the house, thoroughly cleaned, and put away all of the Christmas. I know my good Catholics and other Western Christians wait until Three Kings Day or Epiphany, the day of the feast that celebrates God's manifestation in human form of his son Jesus Christ, on January 6th, but we ain't doing that. The falling needles and the wilting tree just weren't doing it anymore for me and I had to toss that tree out the window. I awaited Janus, Roman god of dates, doorways, transitions, time, passages, and endings, and new beginnings to greet me and lead us into the new year.
After a good skate, I raced home to get that food on the stove. Black eyed peas were drained and then put back in the pot with a ham hock and some seasoning, while the collard strips were put in a larger pot with some water, a little oil, seasoning, garlic, and a little onion. I know some folks like the hock in that too, but not this year. As everything began to heat up, that familiar fragrance began to rise. I loved that scent. I could hear the laughter of my grandmother and aunties in the kitchen. Or my sister and cousins and friends in her kitchen, the party hovering close to the doorway of the kitchen, and then finally settling right in the center. I vaguely recall our black neighbors coming through on New Year's to get some from my mother's stove or bringing their own to share. Everyone filled with hope and laughter. The year so new and full of promise.
I was always told that the black eyed peas and collards would mean good luck for me in the coming year but also learned from other Southern folks, that they also signified wealth. The black eyed pea journeyed to the Americas with the Africans during slavery and has been connected to my black people and Southern cuisine for centuries. While it hardly looks like a coin, like say, the lentil which is used in Italian good luck cooking, it is meant to signify the coins in the money equation. I always thought they looked like googly eyes or funny cartoon faces.
As with most if not all of traditional Southern cooking, this dish started in the kitchens where slaves and then domestic servants prepped food turning ordinary basics into delicious cuisine. Black eyed peas were a cheap crop that held up well in winter. Originally fed to farm animals, the black eyed pea became a staple for the Southern slaves who were often given cheap, scrap, and less desirable parts for their sustenance. When General Sherman's Union army raided the Confederate food stores, they turned their noses at the black eyed peas and the Confederate troops were able to survive the harsh winter. The peas became a symbol of luck and good fortune.
It is also said that in January, 1863, the newly freed slaves celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation ate black eyed peas, thus making the food a staple at any celebration of luck and prosperity for generations of Black Americans to follow. Adding the collard greens to signify wealth or paper money and a side of pork, a rich, fatty cut of meat, promised blessings to come. You had to eat them all together for the spell to work. These Southern recipes are steeped in both tradition and superstition and I always loved starting off the year with a little magic. There are plenty of Black folks who don't follow this tradition because of its connection to slavery and the images and metaphors of promises unkept from a cruel and blatantly racist, punishing system. I ain't mad at that.
But I personally feel nostalgia for my childhood spent in and out of the kitchen of my Grandma, behind the house, on the farm, out front on the porch, making promises and plans for a future just generations out of slavery. There was, for me, a real connection to my family tree and my ancestors, the pain and hope that coursed through their veins and now my mine, and blushed my cheeks when I was angry or excited or overjoyed. This was connection to them. To us. So I made them for just me after roller skating and gave the girls each one pea and one strip of the greens just to taste. The little bit of luck, the spells from before they knew themselves or me myself. Tradition and superstition. New beginnings.
(c) Copyright 2017. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
