The Kitchen Goddess is
watching me as I rinse the collard greens to put them into the large pot to
begin cooking for Thanksgiving dinner. The greens will join the chunked
potatoes, onions, garlic and tri-colored bell peppers already simmering in
butter, garlic and Portabello mushrooms at the bottom of the pot. Soon they
will be joined by three ham hocks boiling in a couple of cups of chardonnay to
create the stock for the greens.
The kitchen smells wonderful.
The Kitchen Goddess smiles
approvingly.
Everything I know about
cooking I learned from the two most important women in my life. One was the
Kitchen Goddess, Henrietta Hadley, our beloved Nanny. The other was St. Marge,
my beloved Mother.
I think she’d be proud…
The shrine to our Nanny turned
Kitchen Goddess is actually a large cookie jar which stands on the shelves on
which we keep our pots and pans against the far wall of the kitchen. I bought
the cookie jar years ago at an African-American Heritage event at Hannibal Square. It’s
the heart of the historically black section of Winter Park complete with an
arts center and municipal auditorium. It’s also the part of Winter Park where
African-Americans are struggling with forces of “gentrification,” a
condescending description which masks the reality of a minority population
being displaced by wealthier, and largely white, developers.
The arts center is where the
Equal Justice Initiative Task Force of which I am a member meets monthly. Our
goal is to commemorate a massacre of up to 60 African-Americans in nearby Ocoee
as a result of their attempts to vote in the 1920 presidential election. The
task force is also charged with erecting a marker to commemorate the lynching
of July Perry in Orlando consequent to that massacre.
I think Henrietta would be
proud. She was the one who made me aware of why it was dangerous for her
grandchildren to be out of the house on nights when white men wreaking of Budweiser
and Jim Beam would careen through the Lincoln Terrace section of Bushnell,
Confederate flags fluttering from the back of pickup trucks without mufflers.
Her’s was the face that made
it impossible for me to buy into the sea of racism in which my childhood
occurred. She was the example that proved the living refutation of all the
dehumanizing things that passed for conventional “wisdom” about black people in a small town in
Central Florida on the edge of the Bible Belt during the conflict-ridden days
of desegregation in the 1960s.
She was simultaneously the
source of my most painful ongoing cognitive dissonance as well as the object of my
deepest loving gratitude.
And I will always be in her
debt.
Smiling approval and that knowing look….
I feel her eyes on me as I
sauté the yellow and zucchini squash for the casserole. I don’t use nearly as
much black pepper as she did in her squash, a spicy soul food dish cooked in
bacon grease that to this day still brings back happy memories from the kitchen
in our home. No doubt my own ongoing love of soul food finds its roots in her cooking. But I can hear her directions as I mix in the bell peppers, onions,
mushrooms and garlic (Don’t let it burn, Harry) and get ready to add the egg
and cheese mixture before going into the oven.
There are smaller
representations of black nannies around my kitchen that came from our home in
Bushnell. Henrietta worked for my family about 20 years from before my sister’s
birth in 1963 until after her graduation from high school, just after Henrietta's own grand-daughter graduated. Long after she no
longer worked for us, we continued to go to her home in Lincoln Terrace, which
my Mother had helped refurbish through her work at the Farmer’s Home Administration.
It was the highlight of our Christmas Day to take her presents and a few dishes
from our Christmas dinner.
Some might see these small
statuettes as racist. And perhaps for some they are, sold as they are in truck
stops at the exits of interstate highways across the Bible Belt and in souvenir
shops in more charming venues like Charleston and New Orleans.
But I always smile when I see
the small statues of black nannies around my kitchen. For me, they convey the almost
palpable presence of a woman I deeply loved who changed my life forever.
I hear her voice freely giving
expert advice - when asked - on everything from my love life to folk remedies for rashes
from stinging nettles to who would win the high school football game Friday
night. I see her holding my sister – her
baby, she told people – on the front seat of Daddy’s pickup truck as I would
drive her home in the afternoons once I finally got my driver’s license. And I remember
her standing in line to vote with my Father after work down at the Bushnell
Woman’s Club where the poll was located. It would be many years before I
figured out that my Dad stood there silently with her to make sure Henrietta was
not denied the right to vote.
I also see the face of her
oldest daughter nodding at me with that same knowing look. It was she who came
in Henrietta’s place to my Mother’s funeral years after Henrietta herself had
died, the only person of color in the First United Methodist Church in Bushnell that day.
“Stolen plants grow the best…”
The smells in the kitchen are
wonderful. Dinner time is drawing near. The Kitchen Goddess nods approvingly.
I look through my kitchen
window to the jungle in my back yard. The angel trumpets are gorgeous right now
with their foot long blossoms that begin white, turn yellow and finally orange,
their perfume pervading the damp night air.
I can hear her voice saying, “You
know, stolen plants always grow better.” And, truth be told, that’s how a lot
of plants from the golden cassia tree to the glossy leaved Morea irises came to
be in our yard in Bushnell and now populate my jungle in Orlando. “Just take
you a little piece of this and stick in the dirt and water it. It’ll grow,” she
said.
And she was right, as she almost
always was.
Christmas Day, 1982
There is something wonderful
about feeling the presence of those you love who have gone before you. That’s
particularly true in the context of a Thanksgiving meal being prepared for a
crowd of 17 loved ones, family of birth and family of choice. There is a positively
sacramental aspect in seeing the symbols of loved ones, envisioning their faces
and hearing the echo of their long-gone voices, reminders of a grace-filled
life that was full of loving relationship.
The Kitchen Goddess is
absolutely beaming as the last dish is pulled from the oven.
I call everyone together to the dining room. We
circle around the recently refinished dining room table, the table on which we
all grew up eating family dinners, now covered with my Mother’s table cloth,
glowing with candles. We join hands and silently give thanks for all the many
blessings of this life. I conclude with a short prayer from the Book of Common
Prayer: “For these and all thy other many
blessings, may G-d’s holy name be praised through Jesus the Christ our Lord.”
Now it’s time to eat.
Buried Chests of Family Treasures
Before the night is over, my
Brother will have brought in from his car two huge boxes of family photos that
he found in our house in Bushnell. When he and Ruthie, his wife, picked up the
bed from my sister’s old room to move it to the van to bring back to Winter
Park, the two long, shallow boxes suddenly revealed themselves, bearing decades
of family history.
Once the pies are all cleared away, David deposits them on
the dining table and opens them up.
We pick through the photos
together, telling family stories and trying to remember names of relatives and
friends long gone. There are photos of the three of us as children. My brother
and I rag my sister on her first Easter photo in 1964. “You have no have no
idea how hard we had to work to get that bunny hat on you and to get you to
hold still long enough to take the photo.”
There were photos of my
Brother and I in our hippie days, long hair and sideburns. And there were
photos of our parents in the days of their courtship and marriage when they
were students at the University of Florida in the late 1940s.
Perhaps it was no accident
that the first photo my fingers touched bore the image of Henrietta Hadley. From
the next room, I could feel the smile of the Kitchen Goddess, that knowing look
on her face.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do
not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
© Harry Coverston 2017
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