“Okra” by Tsehaye Hebert
“I didn’t know Black people ate okra!”
Friday after work shoppers toss Greek and Spanish back and forth across the meat counter. We reach over cassava tubers and sugar cane stalks for ropes ofdried peppers and garlic. We say “Excuse me, mon,” in thick Jamaican patois and Polish as we maneuver our shopping carts through the family owned mainstay on Chicago’s north side. Roger’s Park Fruit Market is the world.
Looking up from the mountain of furry pods that my siblings and I affectionately called snot and buggers, I see an earnest looking round-faced Asian woman fingering pods, just like me.
“Do Black people eat okra?” She repeats without the malice or judgment that I have come to expect from such questions.
“I’m Filipino and we eat okra. I didn’t know Black people ate okra.”
The granddaughter of a Louisiana farmer, I am a proud member of a snobby culinary elite that practically defines itself by food. My late very Catholic and very Creole mama who loved everybody said that our Cajun cousins burned food, threw pepper on it, called it blackened and convinced everybody that it was cuisine. Theirs was simple country food to our elaborate sauces. You couldn’t get me to eat cereal as a child, because I thought it was junk food. Breakfast was bacon, eggs and grits and homemade biscuits. Though humble, dinner was sacred: it happened as a family at a set table with my dad at the head.
I spent my childhood hating okra and taking nearly as much time as my mother did cooking it as I did picking out the tiny balls of goo from the gumbo and stewed shrimp, okra and tomatoes that she lovingly prepared for her unappreciative brood.
When I wasn’t picking okra out of food or hiding it in my napkin, I either peeled the snotty pods off my face or stuck them on, the slime holding them there for hours. It’s a country thing – you wouldn’t understand. That is unless you were seven years old in Pointe Coupée, Louisiana with no TV, having left your book in the car which is with your dad and you’re stuck hanging out in the kitchen with the whir of females who are fixing dinner. To keep you quiet, one of them scoots you out the way and distracts your non-stop questions by sticking the cast-off ends onto your face until it is completely covered. I moved my cheeks side to side and they undulated. I couldn’t wait to go scare everybody.
“We use these for blemishes and pimples,” one said as I slammed the screen door on my way out and put that one in the bin with tobacco for bee stings and vinegar for arthritis, along with the other remedies peculiar to my family.
“Okra, yuck!” I said when a colleague offered some of his gumbo for lunch. “Oh, I’m sorry. No thanks. I hate okra,” I tried to recover as his face hit the floor.
“You don’t like okra? Do you know how okra got here? You can’t be from Louisiana if you don’t appreciate you some okra gumbo.” He pronounced it the Louisiana French Creole way, okrEE not okra.
“Child…lemme tell you….”
Our African ancestors were mostly farmers and agrarian people save seeds; they never throw them away. My own grandfather never threw a seed away. Forced into a trans-Atlantic horror, those who were lucky enough to survive the Middle Passage to the New World that enslaved them, carried seeds. They hid them in their nappy hair. They tucked them in folds of ragged clothes. They held onto that little piece of the Motherland until they arrived here.
I had never put together the link between my slave ancestors’ from the Senegambian and the food that was indigenous to our Afro-Creole-Louisiana culture. But, my boss had and he wrote about it in his dissertation.
When I met a childhood friend from the airport upon his return from Ghana, he told me he had eaten gumbo there.
“Gumbo!?”
“Yep, they make it with okra!”
Gumbo, I later I learned means okra in a West African language. I couldn’t wait to tell my mother when I got back home for the holidays,
“There’re still a connection. We’ve been telling y’all that the there.”
Not only did I discover that I liked okra gumbo, I actually loved it. Brought by ancestors, grown by grandfather and cooked by mama, okra was food of the gods. With every bite of history, I tasted my ancestors’ sorrow and hope; with each mouthful their labor, love and folklore. Each swallow brought me closer to The Motherland they were forced to leave behind; their will to survive in the dear dear seeds, – the gift they planted in such a bleak landscape.
My African ancestors left a culinary and cultural map as savory and rich as gumbo itself.
“Do Black people eat okra?
Girrrrrrrllll, let me tell you….
