Michael W. Twitty Quotes

So much was lost - names, faces, ages, ethnic identities - that African Americans must do what no other ethnic group writ large must do: take a completely shattered vessel and piece it together, knowing that some pieces will never be recovered. This is not quite as harrowing or hopeless as it might sound I liken it to the Japanese art of kintsugi, repairing broken vessels using gold. The scars of the object are not concealed, but highlighted and embraced, thus giving them their own dignity and power. The brokenness and its subsequent repair are a recognized part of the story of the journey of the vessel, not to be obscured, and change, transition, and transformation are seen as important as honoring the original structure and its traditional meaning and beauty.

We have come to this strange cultural moment where food is both tool and weapon. I am grateful for it. My enter life I knew, and many others knew, that our daily bread was itself a kind of scripture of our origins, a taste track of our lives. It is a lie that food is just fuel. It has always had layers of meaning, and humans for the most part despise meaningless food. In America, and especially the American South, 'race' endures alongside the sociopolitics of food; it is not a stretch to say that that race is both on and at the Southern table. But if it is on the table alone we have learned nothing; we continue to reduce each other to stereotypical essences.

It is not enough to be white at the table. It is not enough to be black at the table. It is not enough to be 'just human' at the table. Complexity must come with us - in fact it will invite itself to the feast whether we like it or not. We can choose to acknowledge the presence of history, economics, class, cultural forces, and the idea of race in shaping our experience, or we can languish in circuitous arguments over what it all means and get nowhere. I present my journey to you as a means out of the whirlwind, an attempt to tell as much truth as time will allow.

When I got back home I told my grandmother everything, detail by detail, and she savored it. I had been to the old country. 'I used to love the crepe myrtles and camellias. You don't see those anywhere like Alabama.' She didn't cry, she didn't look wistful; she turned her head and changed the subject. Once she left Alabama, she never went back. The heart of Dixie was her Poland.

The body count alone marks the plantation as a sacred place, and yet that's not what hallows the grounds to most. Traditionally, the plantation is a place where architecture and windows and wallpaper are lauded but the bodies who put them up are not. It is still marketed as the crux of the Old South, a place of manners, gentility, custom, and tradition; the South's cultural apogee. It is where much of Southern culture was born, and that includes much of Southern food, and it is the place where, by and large, black America was born - and that's precisely why I use the plantation as a place of reclamation.