South to America : A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry. - 2022 - 410 pages

 South to America : A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry. - 2022 - 410 pages 

National Book Award Winner for Non-Fiction -2022

 

New York Times Best Seller

"An meditation on the complexities of the American South—and thus of America—by an esteemed daughter of the South and one of the great intellectuals of our time. An inspiration.”

— Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

My ancestors first arrived in the American South long before anyone thought to use use that expression to refer to the region, my estimate is maybe 1650. Some how some of my maternal ancestors moved to then Florida about 1790, settling near what is now Orlando. Family records document that they founded the first library in central Florida. Like everyone else they were farmers. I would acknowledge some ownded slaves.. They fought for the Confederates in the Civil War. In junior high school, maybe 1960, students sang "Dixie Land", said the Lord's Prayer, all things unthinkable now.

I learned to love the staples of southern cuisine. I was also brought up to view racism as an aborent shameful way of thought. I was among the last of students in Florida to attend legally segregated schools in 1965 when I graduated from high school.

In her marvelous book Perry talks about how white American students were taught to view the "War Between the States" as a "lost cause". Little mention was ever made in the classes I took the early 1960s about slavery. Students never learned that iconic American presidents like Washington and Jefferson owned slaves.

Try to think back to what you might have learned in college or high school about how enslaved persons were to be counted. Here is the truth:

"The enslaved, it explains, were property and people both. The logic that followed was insincere: as people they must have some form of representation. But of course the three-fifths clause was not representation of the enslaved at all. This is what it doesn’t say: we believe in amplifying the representation of those who have dominion over other souls, and this is why those individuals must count for more in our government. It is not the case, as some argue, that the clause was a term of art meaning that Black people people counted for three-fifths of a person. They did not count at all. Rather slaveholders were made larger people by virtue of holding others as slaves. Sven Beckert described the impact as follows: “Southern slaveholders had enshrined the basis of their power into the Constitution with its three-fifths clause. A whole series of slaveholding presidents, Supreme Court judges, and strong representation in both houses of Congress guaranteed seemingly never ending political support for the institution of slavery.” "

Perry is an African American woman, descended 

from enslaved peoples, who grew up in Alabama, went to college initially in an historically Black college. Part of this marvelous book is a memoir of her return to the south, she grew up partially in Birmingham, Alabama, and the emotions and thoughts this journey through out the South invoked in her. It is also a very valuable source of historical insight.

Perry deals with the divide in American society. It is no coincidence that almost all the states of the South, but for Georgia, went for trump. The central political theme of Going South is that the blame for the abominations exemplified by the support by around half of White Americsns is claimed to belong totally on the American South is a false and pernicious idea used as an excuse 

Perry devotes a lot of space to talking about Queer culture, particularly Drag personalities (and the Governor of Florida seems obsessed with Drag Shows). I knew nothing of the history Perry reveals:

"Here is another contradiction. The South is home to some of the richest queer culture in the world, and some of the deepest intolerance to any order other than patriarchy. I suppose that is why the Lady Chablis was wont to say, “Two tears in a bucket, motherfuck it.” Every cruelty is also an acknowledgment that the thing or people reviled are there, and ain’t going nowhere. I think this was Flannery O’Connor’s point when she said, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.” Lest that sound too glib or cruel, she also said, “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

As Perry documents through the published letters of Flannery O'Connor, she made use of racist expressions. I was saddened by this.

Perry talks about now revered African American writers like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison (both Gay and both moved to Paris once they could) and Toni Morrison dealt with their Southern heritage. She goes in depth into Zora Neale Hurston’s treatment of the experiences of African Americans in central Florida. 

"The pride Hurston took in being from Eatonville was due to how she saw it. It provided a much different origin story than Jacksonville could give. Eatonville was the first incorporated Black town in the United States. It was established in 1887 by freedpeople who, through collective purchases, established and advertised their town as a place of possibility for African Americans. They built wood-frame houses, schools, and a municipal government. It provided a refuge from the violence just outside their borders. Orange County, in which it sits, was once the center of racial violence in the South. Florida had the highest per capita rate of lynching in the South, and Orange County had the highest number of lynchings in the state between 1877 and 1950. You can understand why Eatonville was precious to its daughter. Hurston set her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in Eatonville. The town still exists. It is small and overwhelmingly Black to this day, but isn’t defined by a story of racial violence in the way many of the other incorporated Black towns during Jim Crow were."

I have quoted more than I normally do from a book. I want to share the beautiful prose of Perry with my readers.

From The National Book Foundation 

"Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Perry is the New York Times bestselling author of South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. She is also the author of Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; Breathe: A Letter to My Sons; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. Perry, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, who grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago, lives outside Philadelphia with her two"

I offer my thanks to Imani Perry for this wonderful book.

Mel Ulm

This Torrent of Indians War on the Southern Frontier 1715–1728 by Larry E. Ivers - 2016 -292 Pages

 A post in honour of the birth anniversary of my our Mother- No finer Floridian ever lived. She was born in High Springs, Florida on January 3, 1916.

Florida Timeline

8000 BC - First Native American settlement, near Sarasota

1000 AD - there are nine distinct tribes 

1500 - estimated population of the state was 375,000- 150,000 speak Timuca

April 2, 1513 - Ponce de Leon lands somewhere between Melbourne and Jacksonville. In time the indigenous population will be reduced to near zero, from disease and warfare. 

1521 - first colony, from Spain, near St. Augustine

1579 - The cultivation of oranges, introduced from Spain begins. By 1835 millions of oranges were being shipped north and to Europe, for the next hundred years oranges, cattle and timber were the major sources of cash

1624 - First African American born in Florida, in St. Augustine

1763 to 1765- England Owns west Florida panhandle area

Based on research my research as well as by others in the family and history, I conjecture my maternal ancestors first entered Florida, coming from. Georgia where they arrived around 1650, about 1800

1808 - importation of slaves into USA is banned, a very large trade in slaves smuggled in from Cuba begins 

1821 - USA acquired Florida from Spain.  

1822 - Tallahassee is chosen as the territory capital, being half way between the then major population centers of St. Augustine and Pensacola

1835 Second Seminole War begins, by 1842 most Seminoles were shipped west but some escaped into the Everglades.  

The make up of the Seminoles was largely not Native originally to Florida but a mixture of escaped slaves and Creeks from Georgia and South Carolina.

March 3, 1845 - Florida becomes a state, slavery legal.

1859 - by the end of the third Seminole War the around four hundred survivors retreat to the Everglades

Population of Florida 1861. - 154,494 - 92,741 Free, 61,75 enslaved

January 10, 1861 Florida suceeds from The Union. Per capita, Florida sent The most men into war, 15000. It was then the least populated southern state.

In January 2019, in consultation with Max u, it was decided every January there would be a post about a book in tribute to our Mother. Our mother was born in a very small town in northern Florida, High Springs on January 3, 1920

An ancestor started the first public library in the central Florida era in 1820.. I speculate our ancestors probably entered Florida about 1790.A knowledge of history indicates our prior maternal ancestors came to the USA from the UK in the 1600s,possibly in part as bound servants. Somehow they wound up in South Georgia. After the American Revolution people from that area began to enter then Spanish Florida, which the USA acquired on February 22, 1819 from Spain.

The colonies of East Florida and West Florida remained loyal to the British during the war for American independence, but by the Treaty of Paris in 1783 they returned to Spanish control. After 1783, Americans immigrants moved into West Florida.

In 1810 American settlers in West Florida rebelled, declaring independence from Spain. President James Madison and Congress used the incident to claim the region, knowing full well that the Spanish government was seriously weakened by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. The United States asserted that the portion of West Florida from the Mississippi to the Perdido rivers was part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Negotiations over Florida began in earnest with the mission of Don Luis de Onís to Washington in 1815 to meet Secretary of State James Monroe. The issue was not resolved until Monroe was president and John Quincy Adams his Secretary of State. Although U.S. Spanish relations were strained over suspicions of American support for the independence struggles of Spanish-American colonies, the situation became critical when General Andrew Jackson seized the Spanish forts at Pensacola and St. Marks in his 1818 authorized raid against Seminoles and escaped slaves who were viewed as a threat to Georgia. Jackson executed two British citizens on charges of inciting the Indians and runaways. Monroe’s government seriously considered denouncing Jackson’s actions, but Adams defended the Jackson citing the necessity to restrain the Indians and escaped slaves since the Spanish failed to do so. Adams also sensed that Jackson’s Seminole campaign was popular with Americans and it strengthened his diplomatic hand with Spain.

Adams used the Jackson’s military action to present Spain with a demand to either control the inhabitants of East Florida or cede it to the United States. Minister Onís and Secretary Adams reached an agreement whereby Spain ceded East Florida to the United States and renounced all claim to West Florida. Spain received no compensation, but the United States agreed to assume liability for $5 million in damage done by American citizens who rebelled against Spain. Under the Onís-Adams Treaty of 1819 (also called the Transcontinental Treaty and ratified in 1821) the United States and Spain defined the western limits of the Louisiana Purchase and Spain surrendered its claim.s to the Pacific Northwest. In return, the United States recognized Spanish sovereignty over Texas.

This post is a continuous tradition began in January of 2019 when, in consultation with Max u, it was decided every January there would be a post in her honor 

Today's book is a detailed military history of the Yamasee War, the drawn-out conflict between South Carolina colonists and a number of southeastern Native American groups including the Yamasees, Creeks, and Catawbas in the years 1715–1728. The focus is on the geography and physical tactics of the war, including troop movements, battle locations, and settlements.. 

Ivers takes the reader immediately into the war; his first chapter describes the cross-country ride made by two South Carolina Indian traders to warn Charles Town of the arising conflict. The chapter sets the tone for Ivers’s study. After three background chapters that provide the colonial and Native American contexts leading up to the war, the remainder of Ivers’s seventeen chapters take the reader through the conflict month by month, and sometimes even day by day. Drawing on the South Carolina Commons House Journals and a variety of other colonially produced documents, Ivers teases out South Carolina and Native American tactical responses during the ongoing conflict.

Ivers’s attention to location is a great strength of his work. Using wills, journals, acts of the South Carolina assembly, and over fifty maps, as well as his own personal reconnaissance, Ivers reconstructs the exact locations of forts, plantations, towns (both South Carolinian and Native American), and battles whose locations have been obscured over time. Ivers transparently explains how he determined each location in his text and in detailed end-notes. Along with a number of useful maps, Ivers describes all locations in relation to current-day landmarks such as highways and cities, so that readers can trace the movements of the war on a map of present-day South Carolina.

Ivers aims to produce a “detailed narrative and an analysis of military operations” and, within his method, to “avoid showing favoritism or allegiance” to any group involved in the war (pp. vii, viii). On the first, Ivers is entirely successful, but on the second, elements of organization and habits of [End Page 147] phrasing work to align his writing with South Carolina’s perspective on the conflict. Ivers relies on a documentary record that was principally produced by South Carolina colonists; his chapters’ contents reflect his sources. In other small ways, Ivers positions his narrative in the South Carolinian stance. For example, the chapters are dated according to colonial time markers, such as chapter 5, “Easter Weekend.” Phrasing that includes the term warrior to refer to all Native American men and describing Native American motivations as a lust for war mirror the colonists’ opinion of their Native American opponents (p. 39). Nevertheless, Ivers mitigates this slant elsewhere in the text; for example, when listing the South Carolina traders killed in the first wave of the war, he notes each trader’s alleged or confirmed abuses, such as beating, killing, or cheating Native Americans.

Ivers offers a wealth of detail regarding South Carolina’s military operations during the Yamasee War, from the Commons House’s efforts to supply the war to methods of fort construction. For students and readers unfamiliar with the particulars of eighteenth-century warfare, details such as the precise methods of loading a flintlock musket may be particularly helpful. For scholars of this period of South Carolina history, Ivers’s careful reconstruction of the locations of the war will be 

Florida was the property of Spain in this period. Ingenious Americans retreated into Florida. Troops from South Carolina followed them. Tribal groups fought each other, captive women and children were sold into slavery and opposing warriors were tortured to death as were captured South Carolinians. No mercy was shown on either side. The various tribal groups tried to present a unified front but never really achieved this. Indians, Ivers uses this term, wanted trade goods, rifles, and alcohol.  

The Spanish tried to coop Indians as allies to protect their claim to Florida. Some Creeks did settle in North Florida.

This Torrent of Indians: War on the Southern Frontiers by Larry Ivers gave me further insights into the tumultuous and dangerous lives of our ancestors.

Larry E. Ivers, a retired attorney, served in the U.S. Army as a paratrooper with the 11th Airborne Division, as an instructor in the Army Ranger School. He is the author of three books on Early American history 

Mel Ulm

The House of Morgan: an American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow - 1990 - 1232 Pages

WINNER OF THE 1990 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NON-FICTION

  The House  of Morgan: an American Banking Dynasty  and the Rise of Modern Finance is  fourth of the six works by Ron Chernow I have so far read.  

Prior to today I have read three other works his of biographically centered histories:

1. Alexander Hamilton 
2. George Washington
3. The Warburgs: The Twentieth-century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family

Julius Pierpont Morgan

Born: April 17, 1837, Hartford, Conneticut, USA

Died: March 31, 1913, Rome, Italy

Founded J.P. Morgan -1895

Co-founded General Electric, U. S. Steel, and International Harvester

Controlled 21 Railroads

Last month I read A People’s History of The United States by Howard Zinn.  Zinn’s central thesis is that all the events in American history from The Revolution up to The Vietnam War were only for the purpose of enriching  a small elite..  He suggests patriotism was used to delude ordinary Americans to die for the rich.  Julius Pierpont Morgan and the companies he was involved with are among those most vilified as causing great harm while pretending to be acting in the public interest.

Chernow presents a very detailed account of the very important role J.P. Morgan had in the Development of the modern American financial system.  The book is of tremendous value to all interested in 20th century American history.  My reaction in regards to the claims of Zinn is that Morgan did in many cases try to do what he thought was best for the country but he expected to profit from his actions

Chernow goes into a lot of details about the interlocking connections of banks to American corporations.  We learn a lot about the personal lives of those involved.

Ronald Chernow is an American writer, journalist and biographer. He has written bestselling historical non-fiction biographies. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the 2011 American History Book Prize for his 2010 book Washington: A Life. Wikipedia

 

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson - 2020- 477 pages

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson - 2020- 477 pages

An autodidactic corner work 

Website of Isabel Wilkerson (including a detailed biography)

I offer my great thanks to Alan u for the provision of an Amazon Gift Card that made it possible for me to read this wonderful book.

In August I read The Warmth of Other Suns- The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson which told the story of the migration of millions of African Americans from the southern states to the big cities of the north and California.  I loved this book and knew I needed  to read her Pulitzer Prize winning Caste:  The Origins of Our Discontent soon.  

Wilkerson focuses on those at the bottom and those in dominant castes in three societies, America, Nazi Germany and India.  In Nazi Germany Jews were in the bottom caste, those of so called Aryan roots, at the top.  The whole of German society came to revolve around an attempt to totally destroy those in the lower caste. Six million were killed.  In India, the caste system was very ancient, complex with thousands of caste and was sanctified by religion.  At the bottom were the “Untouchables”.  They were allowed only to do the lowest kind of jobs.  If even their shadow touched a higher class member, they polluted them.  In America Wilkerson breaks down a society with two classes, black and white.  After the end of slavery and the Reconstruction period in the Confederate States, “Jim Crow” laws were passed designed to keep formerly enslaved persons and their descendants “in their place”.  In this system a white man with no job and a long prison record living on public assistance could see himself as by caste  superior to a black Harvard scholar serving as President of the United States.  Wilkerson elaborates on the many lynchings of black men for “being uppity”.  Countless black men died from false accusations of rape by white women.  Just speaking to a white woman got many black men brutally murdered in unlawful public executions.

I was I admit shocked to learn that Nazi Germany modeled the laws designed to oppress Jews on American laws meant to keep African Americans from, this was their worst fear, from having children with white women.   Wilkerson goes deeply into how the belief in the American Caste system brought about the election in 2016 of Donald Trump.  In the poorest states like West Virginia and Kentucky white voters wanted in office a man who cared only about other super rich Americans.  She sees this as a backlash from much of white American’s  horror toward President Obama. They voted against a woman whose policies would have significantly helped them and their children because their only source of self pride was in being white.

Wilkerson, an African American, details her own experiences.  When she was working as a  reporter a powerful business man she was sent to interview refused to believe she was really Isabel Wilkerson of The New York Times.  In India people of Dalit ancestry told her she was an “American Dalit”.  Martin Luther King was told the same thing.  

Wilkerson makes use of details about the lives of African Americans, Dalits and Jews in Nazi Germany as well as a great depth of scholarship to make her case.  She shows how the concept of “race” originated to Justify European exploitation and enslavement of people from Africa.

Wilkerson closes the book with an epilogue on steps to a caste free America.

This might well be the best work of narrative non-fiction so far written in this century.

All teachers of American history should read this book.  I wish all American politicians should be required to read.

This is narrative non-fiction as high art.

Mel Ulm

 

Adventurism and Empire The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803 By David Narrett

 In December of 2018, in consultation with Max u, it was decided that there should be an annual post in observation of our Father's December 2, 1914 birthday.

Our Father served four years in the United States Army during World War Two.  He was a junior officer serving under General Douglas MacArthur.  He was stationed in New Guinea and shortly after the war in the Philippines.  For the initial observation  I posted on a wonderful book, Rampage MacArthur, Yamashita and The Battle of Manila by James M. Scott .  Shortly after I posted, the author, a great speaker, did a book tour in Manila.  My wife and I attended one of his talks. Afterwards we had a lovely conversation with Mr. Scott.

In 2019 I came upon a perfect book for the second annual birthday observation, War at the End of the World: Douglas MacArthur and the Forgotten Fight For New Guinea, 1942-1945 Book by James P Duffy

Our father was born in Georgia, in the southern part of the state just north of Florida.  Our ancestry goes way back before the American Revolution so in December of 2020

I posted upon a biography of a pre-Revolution governor of the then colony of Georgia, James Edward Oglethorpe by Joyce Blackburn.  Our father, with our grandparents, moved to Florida around 1921.

This year I was happy to find a very interesting book on Florida history.   Adventurism and Empire The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762-1803  By David Narrett 

Narrett begins his study in 1763 with the close of the Seven Year War to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  Narrett details how a rivalry deveoped with Spain in the Mississippi Valley and on borderlands between Georgia and Florida.  He tells us the stories of traders and schemers involved in cross border trade including slavery.  He details numerous military conflicts.  We see the impact of the American Revolution as well as the French Revolution.  He expanded my understanding of how these matters impacted greater Atlantic area.

David Narrett is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he has taught since 1984. He received his B.A. at Columbia University in 1973—and his Ph. D. at Cornell in 1981.

 

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twity - 2017

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty. 2017 -464 Pages - narrative non-fiction.

2018 James Beard Foundation Book of The Year

An Autodidactic Corner Selection

This is an essential book for anyone interested in African American culinary history but there is so much more awaiting readers of Michael W. Twitty’s book.  It is an exciting account of how he employed DNA based ancestral testing to uncover the ethnic background of his ancestors.  He goes into a lot of details on the challenges found in attempting to do ancestral research for persons whose ancestors were slaves in the old south.  He found himself about 25 percent European and 70 percent from various parts of Africa with The rest Native American.   He faces directly the rape of slave women that produced this.  We see How he accepts himself as Gay and converts to Judaism.

Among the many food crops that came from Africa as detailed by Twitty are okra, corn, various types of rice, yams, sweet potatoes, collard greens, kale, turnips, field peas and black eyed peas.  Slave traders brought seeds for these crops to feed the slaves on items they were familiar with.  Enslaved women cooked not just for themselves but their owners.  Thus these crops became the staples of southern whites.  Slaves were commonly allowed vegetable gardens.  Some rich plantation owners sent male cooks to France to be trained.  Slaves skilled in Rice farming were highly priced.

Chickens followed by pigs were a big part of The cuisine.  Through hunting, aligators, possum and deer were part of The diet. Fishing was very important.

Twitty talks about The impact of heavy consumption of so called “Soul Food” on health, leading to high blood pressure diabites.  He explains How greens, peas, sweet potatoes can be very healthy.

I learned a lot about The different African kingdoms from which slaves were taken in The largest forced migration in history.  Using examples from his own Family history he shows us The horror of life as slave.  Most of The book deals with The old south but sugar plantations are covered also.

Twitty includes a number of recipes.  He goes into Gullah culture also, one of my interests.  

There is so much of interest in this book.  It is a history of The culinary history of the old South.

Twitty loves his subject and it shows.  I give this book my complete endorsement.

“Michael W. Twitty is a noted culinary and cultural historian and the creator of Afroculinaria, the first blog devoted to African American historic foodways and their legacies. He has been honored by FirstWeFeast.com as one of the twenty greatest food bloggers of all time, and named one of the “Fifty People Who Are Changing the South” by Southern Living and one of the “Five Cheftavists to Watch” by TakePart.com. Twitty has appeared throughout the media, including on NPR’s The Splendid Table, and has given more than 250 talks in the United States and abroad. His work has appeared in Ebony, the Guardian, and on NPR.org. He is also a Smith fellow with the Southern Foodways Alliance, a TED fellow and speaker, and the first Revolutionary in Residence at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Twitty lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.” From The publisher

Mel u

The Barbizon - The New York Hotel That Set Women Free by Paulina Bren - 2021-

 The Barbizon - The New York Hotel That Set Women Free - by Paulina Bren - 2021- 

My thanks to Buried in Print for this suggestion

I received a review copy of this book about six months ago.  I had intended to read it shortly after obtaining it but things got away from me as they do.  The is is a first  rate work on narrative non-fiction entering on life in a for women only hotel in New York City, The Barbizon.

The Barbizon Hotel, 23 stories, open in 1927 as a residential hotel for women.  Many young women wanted to try a career in the New York City but could get parental assent and support only if they stayed at the Barbizon.  There were several places to eat, a book shop, a lobby to meet dates (no men allowed in the rooms) a venue for preforming, a protective door man and places to socialize.  Many residents saw it as like their college sororities, a place with instant friends.

A lot of the book is taken up with the relationship of the hotel and the highly prestigious Glamour Magazine Guest Editor Program in which from 1000s of applications from College students twenty women were selected to spend the month of June as guest editors. All the guest editors were required to stay at the Barbizon Hotel.  Sylvia Plath is featured in two chapters.  I did not know her novel The Bell Jar was based on her time at the Barbizon.  A number of the characters are based on other guest editors.  Bren tells us there were about fifty suicides at The Barbizon  over the years.  Grace Kelly stayed there a while.  We learned some interesting details on her Life.  

The Gibbs Secretarial School students occupied three floors for several years.  Some residents stayed over forty years. Even when The hotel converted to a Condo in 2006( at a million Plus a unit) 14 elderly residents stayed on protected by rent control laws.

In 1981 hotel began to admit men. In 2004 the hotel Under went a $40 million dollar reservation.

I throughly enjoyed this book.  

Paulina Bren alternates her time between the Bronx, Poughkeepsie, and MetroNorth. Born in the former Czechoslovakia, she lived in the U.K. before moving to the United States. Paulina received her B.A. from Wesleyan University, her M.A. from the Jackson School for International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and her Ph.D. in Modern European History from New York University. 

She is the recipient of many grants and fellowships, including the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH), the National Council of East European and Eurasian Research (NCEEER), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the Fulbright-Hays. She has held residencies at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest, and the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches in International Studies, Women’s Studies, and Media Studies at Vassar College

 

Zora Neale Hurston on Florida Food- Recipes, Remedies, and Simple Pleasures by Fred Opie - 2015 - 167 Pages

 Zora Neale Hurston on Florida Food- Recipes, Remedies, and Simple Pleasures by Frederick  Opie - 2015 - 167 Pages 

Zora Neale Hurston 

Born - January 7, 1891. - Natasulag, Alabama 

1937- Their Eyes Were Watching God published 

Dies - January 28, 1960 - Fort Pierce, Florida 

Fred Opie, drawing on the fiction and anthropological studies of Zora Neale Hurston, has produced a very interesting highly informative account of the food heritage of African Americans in Florida.  Both of Hurston’s parents were born enslaved.  Hurston attended on a scholarship the very prestigious Bernard College.  While at Bernard she conducted ethnographic research under the noted anthropologist Franz Boaz. She also worked with Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.  She applied the methods she learned to field studies in Florida and Haiti.  Opie details why he found her an ideal subject to center a study of the African American food heritage of Florida upon.

Opie gives us an elegant intriguing synopsis of his efforts:

“There is enormous variety in American cookery. This book focuses on Florida cooking in Zora Neale Hurston’s early twentieth-century ethnographic research and writing. It emphasizes the essentials of cookery in Florida through simple dishes. It considers foods prepared for everyday meals as well as special occasions and looks at what shaped the eating habits of communities in early twentieth-century Florida. It investigates African, American, European and Asian influences in order to understand what they contributed to Florida’s culinary traditions.”

Opie begins with a chapter on corn bread.  No proper African American meal was complete without corn bread.  It was used to soak up the liquids remaining in pots of various stews.  Called “Pot Liquor” etiquette required it be soaked up with corn bread.  Here is his recipe for Collard Greens

“Collard Green Recipe - Collard greens and Bacon 

Wash collard leaves. They should not be too old and coarse. Cut finely. Boil until extremely tender, a matter of at least an hour, preferably longer—they can scarcely be cooked too long, and are equally good “warmed over”—in enough water barely to cover, with several thin slices of white bacon to each market bunch of the leaves. The water should almost cook away, leaving a delicious broth known to the South as “pot liquor.” Cornbread is always served with collard greens and it is etiquette to dunk the cornbread in the pot liquor.”

Fried chicken was very important in African American traditions.  Cooked by women and raised at home, chicken was the everyday main dish.  Opie devotes a chapter to barbecue as a food and as a social event.  African Americans often could not afford doctors so they drew on traditional food based remedies.  

I found this a fascinating book.  Anyone interested in Florida history will be grateful for the work of Opie.  It belongs in high school libraries in Florida for sure. I learned a lot from it and for sure want to try out several of the recipes.

Biography

Former Syracuse University and US National Lacrosse team player, Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie/AKA Fred Opie, is a Blogger, Podcaster, and Professor of History at Babson College. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter and Facebook: