Black Cool by Rebecca Walker

Author:Rebecca Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593764722
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2018-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

HUNGER

VERONICA CHAMBERS

Appetite, like so many elements of Black cool, is a double-edged sword. Our appetite for the new, delicious, and fresh can bring us great joy: physical, emotional, mental. There are few culinary terms more elegant than “soul food.” Google the terms “soul food” and “yoga,” or “soul food” and “spirituality,” and the four million–plus results for each search are a powerful reminder that when people—Black, white, and everything in between—think of the term “soul food,” they are looking for much more than the hours and directions to Sylvia’s Sunday gospel brunch in Harlem.

And yet as a people, our relationship to appetite, our gut desire to be fed something good, runs the gamut from joyful to painful, unheralded, and complicated. Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, “I been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.” I think it’s telling how often only the first part of that quote is repeated, as if sorrow were the only kitchen that existed—then and now, for us as a people.

I’ve been thinking a lot about food in part because of the unbridled success of Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurant, the Red Rooster. Marcus has been a friend for a long time—and it’s with him that I’ve had some of my most interesting “food conversations”—a term that Marcus uses a lot that references not only the meal, but the cook, the diner, and the setting.

My earliest intellectual knowledge that those four elements could come together in a powerful way was in college, when I read hungrily, greedily, super-size-my-portion-style, about the Harlem Renaissance. I was smitten at once with the story of A’Lelia Bundles, daughter of Madam C. J. Walker. If Madam C. J. Walker was the first American woman to become a self-made millionaire, then A’Lelia Bundles was the first Black socialite (and I mean that in the best sense of the word—encompassing both the gift of being social and the gift of being light in spirit). Langston Hughes called Bundles the “joy goddess” of Harlem; her home on 136th Street was the site of many a legendary meal.

Bundles had a voracious appetite not only for the gatherings that can surround great food, but for the very Harlem Renaissance–era hunger for all that was new. One might even argue that she orchestrated the first culinary mash-up when she invited her white guests to dine on chitlins and bathtub gin in the kitchen while her Black guests feasted on caviar and champagne in the formal dining room.

Another tale about the joy goddess was that one night, the crowds outside her townhouse were so thick that the prince of Sweden couldn’t make his way through. There was no red carpet or velvet rope chez Bundles; the gracious hostess simply sent down her regards to visiting royalty, along with a bottle of champagne. CP time would not do if you wanted to be part of the food conversations at Mademoiselle Bundles’ swanky salons.

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