“A heaping helping of fried chicken
Macaroni and cheese and collard greens
Too big for my jeans
Smoke steams from under the lid that’s on the pot
Ain’t never had a lot, but thankful for
The little that I got” — Soul Food by Goodie Mob

My parents grew up in what we would consider abject poverty. However, because everyone around my parents was in the same financial straits, their perception of their own poverty was non-existent. My father explained to my daughter that his cherished and only Christmas presents were an assortment of nuts, apples, and oranges. There were no toys or gadgets, just nuts and fresh fruits. Not even candy. I remember him telling me this as a child, and I had the same reaction my daughter had: a cocktail of disappointment, sorrow, disbelief, and disgust.

I tell you about my father’s spartan Christmases to prepare you for the tasks my paternal grandmother would disseminate to my father, aunts, and uncles. She would hand my father and his siblings a bag and a butter knife, turning them loose upon a field with wild dandelions growing. They could only return home when each bag was teaming with the tender dandelion leaves she would later trim, soak in salt water, rinse, pat dry, and finally season with some leftover salt pork and transform into a hearty batch of greens they would subside on for the coming evenings. She would serve some cornbread with the greens to stretch the meal out further.

The idea of eating dandelions was unfathomable to me as a child. I grew up in a community with emerald-colored yards. Only one or two of the mothers’ nails in the community could rival the manicured nature of these lawns. Every man took the utmost pride in their yard. Being the only black family, we took even more pride than the rest of the neighborhood. This reverence for the condition of our yard created a cold war in the neighborhood. No one could have a yard worse than the black family. So specious theories and dubious technologies were engaged to generate a more verdant patch of grass. The latest and best lawnmowers were invested in. With this being the early 80s, a man in the neighborhood who hired another man to cut his yard was disavowed. This was grounds for expulsion from the fatherly fraternity; my dad was not a member of this conclave. To be banished meant you were on the same plain as Bob, my father, and the only black man in the community. The shame of being cast out and having to throw your lot in with a black man was all the social pressure needed to tend to your own yard. Only sons and, in a few exceptions, daughters were allowed to mow the yard. In the rarest cases, the wife might command the lawnmower to keep the lawn from becoming worse than the McFaddens.

Every spring and after the summer tempests that would deluge the ground in torrents of rainwater, the dandelions would make their appearance. The neighborhood mothers would receive varying bouquets and arrangments of these bright yellow weeds. As I got older and understood that my mother feigned glee when presented with these invasive annoyances that existed to make our yard look worse than our white neighbors did, I garner a hatred for them that caused me to root them out wherever I found them.

Imagining my dad, aunts, and uncles all armed with bags and butter knives sent a sense of revolt through me until I learned to embrace soul food.

A food that was born of love and ingenuity.

Our simple and rustic fare was first birthed out of survival. Those who had been enslaved needed to supplement the meager scraps that the slavers provided to them. Men, women, and children forced to do back-breaking labor from before the sun rose until after it went down needed more than the paltry allowance these greedy slavers afforded them. They needed soul food.

Common staples were transformed into delicious concoctions that the world had never seen. Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved person created macaroni and cheese, a cornerstone of soul food. Offal that was deemed unedible by white people found its way into the hands of black alchemists. Tongues, feet, tails, and intestines were transmuted into savory dishes that restored the soul and filled the belly. Wild greens, unripened fruit, and ignored vegetables were converted into nourishing meals that could feed families and lift spirits.

Despite all of this, I frowned at soul food. My family was the only family in the neighborhood that ate these delicacies. I lusted after my friend’s bland, dull, and unseasoned food. I marveled and yearned for my mother to make the omnipresent tater-tot casserole with its cheesy top and dull grayish inside. I wanted the tuna noodle casserole that sustained the kids in the neighborhoods instead of the hard-fried fish prepared in cornmeal with hot sauce, a Saturday staple in my house during fishing season.

I was ashamed of the soul food my mother and father prepared; it was not something we ate every day. It was usually reserved for Sunday dinners after church.

Soul food had been deemed lesser than other cuisines. Our food was declared to lack sophistication. Critiques would compare it to the French food prized at the best restaurants in the world. bite, I knew that the fear and ignorance I had about soul food was internalized anti-black sentiment pervasive in America. Even black people harbor anti-blackness. Some are more overt than others.

“Didn’t come for no beef cause I don’t eat steak
I got a plate of soul food chicken, rice and gravy
Not covered in too much” — Soul Fodd by Goodie Mob

My older brother, nine years my senior, explained what the New Year's Day delicacy of chitlins was when I was in elementary school. Every Christmas vacation, my father would retreat to the garage, which served as a giant refrigerator during the cruel and harsh Minnesota winters. He was still subjected to freezing temperatures despite being sheltered from the wind. He would set up a card table and start his yearly ritual of cleaning 20-pound buckets of chitlins. He would watch one of the many bowl games that filled the airways and get to work. It was hard work, and my father is a jovial, light-hearted gentleman. The only thing that perturbed him was when 50 or 60 people would come to the house. He had no qualms with anyone eating as much as they could; his anger was noticeable as he watched people make plates with heaping piles of his chitlins to bring home to eat later.

While my father was in the garage, my mother was in the kitchen cleaning and trimming all types of greens: collard, turnip, and mustard. The perfume of smoked pork neck bones and ham hocks wafted through the air as she prepared the lacquer to cook her greens. Black-eye peas were cleaned and left to soak so they would be pliable and amendable to the flavors she would soon impart into them. Always pork, sometimes okra, and never fail they were delicious.

Despite knowing what chitlins were from an early age, I still craved and devoured them every New Year’s Day. Today, my parents, in their advanced age, no longer make chitlins on New Year’s Day. Instead, they now make seafood gumbo. Another dish that takes the best techniques of French cuisine and marries it with the food that black folks used to sustain themselves. Making a roux is an advanced French cooking technique. Mix flour and fat to cook a paste until it reaches the desired color. My parents’ gumbo includes sausage, crab legs, shrimp, celery, bell peppers, onions, chicken or turkey, and sometimes okra, tomato, or both. Always served with rice.

Soul food is the product of black ingenuity who had to make offal, oxtails, hogs feet, plants that were considered weeds, and other scraps and disregarded items that the slavers did not want into something that was not only hearty that could sustain men and women forced to commit arduous labor. The slave narratives that we have hold one universal truth: a slaver could do many foul things: rape, separating families, beatings, whippings, and all other inhumane, cruel things. However, not properly feeding your slaves drew the loudest and most universal condemnation.

My wife’s mother lives in Jacksonville, Florida. Duval County is what I like to say. Despite my mother-in-law’s compromised health and my mother's failing health, they had a love of God and their shared granddaughter. My mother is a year older. One Christmas, my mother had me procure a copy of Bishop Jakes’s latest book, in large print format, to give my mother-in-law as a Christmas gift from her. With Bishop Jakes fresh on my mind and while looking for places to eat where I could generate some United Airlines miles, I used the app and found Potter House Soul Food Bistro by my hotel. I was intrigued, hungry, and wanted to do something special so that I would have a story to tell my parents.

While my wife and daughter went to my wife’s family, I hired an Uber and made what I would later discern as a pilgrimage to this Soul Food Bistro. Later I would learn that this was the same restaurant that comedian Kat Williams lifted up in one of his comedy specials. He said the food there was so good you would not be surprised to see a slave chained up in the back making the cornbread. This joke received a burst of rapturous laughter from the audience, but after one bite of this delectable treat, I must sternly warn you: the Soul Food Bistro’s cornbread is no laughing matter. I hate cornbread. My whole life, I was forced to dine on the product created from that omnipresent white box with the neon blue lettering spelled out Jiffy. My parents would greedily feast on these dense and flavorless muffins while my brother and I looked on with disgust. Our disillusion with these bland muffins meant more for my mom and dad, which pleased them.

It was in the sweltering heat of Jacksonville, where my skin dewed because I had escaped the arid desert and now basked in the humid environment that was Jacksonville. Beads of sweat glistened on my face as I steadied my hand and took my first bite of this cornbread. A revelation of what cornbread can be and what it should be was shared with me that day. Something I had vehemently hated for since I could remember was now one of the most delicious things I had ever eaten.

I had traveled around the world taking cooking classes. I have eaten in the best restaurants in the world. I have not tasted a better pastry than the cornbread at this soul food restaurant. Even more remarkable is that no chefs with their fine whites are working in the back of the restaurant. You will not find a resume that lists El Buli, The French Laundry, or Per Se as a previous employer for any of the employees at the Soul Food Bistro. You will find improvements made over time to enhance the soul food into something divine. The cooks — because rarely do people who work at soul food restaurants get the venerable title of chef — will not be able to do a stint at this restaurant and then have investors stalk them and beg them to open a restaurant for them to invest in. They will be treated as disposable instead of the culinary giants they are because they cook soul food and not some trendy fusion food.

The year was 1995, and I had just gone to mass at the Vatican. I was lucky enough to have Pope John Paul II perform it. I am not Catholic, but this was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I was on a high. Sweeny, now a crazed MAGA conspiracy-believing middle-aged white man, left the confines of the Vatican, and we made our way to escape the tourist trap surrounding the Vatican. We marched five or six blocks away before stumbling into a quaint Italian bistro. We were weary and famished. A waiter gave us a menu that was in Italian. We did our best to order. I ordered three things. I do not remember the two dishes, but I recall them being delicious. It was the third dish that was strangely familiar and still haunts me. Served in a mound of marinara sauce and shredded parmesan cheese were chitlins. Not the way that I had ever had it before or since, but the texture, the snap, and the chewiness were instantly recognizable. I had crossed an ocean and found myself on a different continent eating chitlins while thinking of my father in the garage with his chitlins.

Today, these memories conjure up all that I have learned since 1995. I realize that the flood of Italians to Ellis Island was not the rich Italians or those from noble bloodlines but the Italians that lived in abject poverty. The Italians of the lowest caste in Italy made the arduous journey to the new world. It was those who could not afford the ribeye, porterhouse, or sirloin. Those who came in droves from Italy could only afford chitlins and had to do their best to conceal the fact they were eating intestines.

Those used to surviving can identify the tell-tell signs in any culture.

Currently, the traditional food of American Descendants of Slaves has slowly been appropriated by white chefs and home cooks alike. White people are driving up the cost of our formerly inexpensive staples of soul food to levels never seen before. Oxtails you used to be able to get for a pittance now cost the same per pound as a Choice grade ribeye steak. Collard greens are now appearing in restaurants served with raisins. Real talk, if I go to your house and you try to serve me some collards with raisins, the whole family is catching these hands—the humanity.

Everyone wants the black experience; they prefer that no black folks be involved while they sample the Culture.