Friendship Cake (4 page)

I know they probably just think I'm being cantankerous or, worse, that I'm illiterate, but I don't have any recipe cards except what I got spinning around in my Rolodex brain. And I'm sure that if I did ever take the time to write down all that I know, I could fill up a book by myself. But black women never learn to cook from recipes.

Before my mama taught me to cook, she taught me to focus. So that when she started calling out the ingredients for whatever it was she was cooking, I was to call them back to her. “One cup of sugar,” she'd say. And like a parrot, I'd repeat, “One cup of sugar.” It was the way of learning back then. And even though we were calling out the spices in a pie or the number of teaspoons to dip from the canisters, it became like a prayer to us. A call and response like a song in the fields or a litany at Easter.

I grew up in a house full of women. Grandmothers, aunts, sister-in-laws, and mother. And they all could cook as well as they could tell a story. And those women could tell a story.

Unfortunately, we didn't have the luxury of writing things down. Not the stories and not the recipes. Most of the women I
grew up around knew how to sign their names, and how to spell most words, but taking the time to put things to paper was too costly in matters of time and vision.

Grandmama taught me the alphabet when I was five, but she never learned how to put the letters together to spell a word. Mama was real smart, read the Bible through fifty-seven times, drew pictures, and quilted beautiful quilts. She could recite poetry and psalms, but she never wrote down a memory or a recipe. Maybe it was because she and the other women were never sure they would find what was needed for the recipe or because they knew that a person's memory on a page could never bring somebody else happiness.

Black women, in the early days, learned to cook by using whatever it was they happened to find growing in their backyards or whatever it was that the white women threw outside to rot. They never measured for taste. They spooned or folded or stirred whatever it was they had to spare. And if they didn't have sugar, they wrestled honey from bees. If they didn't have collards or turnips, they dug up poke leaves and dandelion roots.

Black women have always learned to improvise, and we never cooked directly for pleasure, only for survival. We never had the luxury to try something new or invent a dish for fun. Our women knew that if we messed up the stew, burnt the corn bread, or took too much skin off the bird, our family would go without a meal that day. So there wasn't any room for misreading the recipe card or not paying attention to what we were doing. We focused when we learned, and we were serious about how we cooked.

Don't get me wrong, though. I don't mean to say that meal
time wasn't joyful. In fact, it was the happiest time for our families. I suppose any time you're surviving, there's pleasure to be had. The men were pleased that they didn't have to watch their children go hungry, and the women were pleased because, just like Jesus, they had managed another food miracle for the family.

You ever notice how black women act when they hear that story about Jesus feeding the five thousand? They'll nod their heads and smile because they've seen it done. Every Friday in fact. Their man would come in with a couple of skinny little fish he had managed to catch with a worm and a string, and that woman would take those fish, batter them in leftover cornmeal, fry them up, squeeze a dozen biscuits from an inch of dough, make slaw from an old head of cabbage, and feed the whole neighborhood. Yeah, we know them Jesus stories like they were ours.

But you try to explain black women's cooking to white women and they look at you like you're speaking a different language. “No recipe? How can you cook this whole meal without a recipe?”

I just roll my eyes and walk away. There are some things that separate white women from black women. Cooking is only one of those things. The others have to do with emotional expression and how we like to sing in church. Black women are not afraid to wail from sorrow or holler out in joy. And when we worship, we expect to be just as moved by the choir as we are by the preacher. White women seem to value stillness and silence. Black women are going to make some noise.

I know it's strange that I'm going to an all-white church. I hear that it isn't so odd in the city, but out in the country, we're
real clear about one another's places. It's like that caste system in India. You know where you're going to end up by the family into which you're born. It's clear and settled by the color of your skin. Like a sentence of life or death. And there ain't no amount of money, no amount of land or property going to change your destiny.

I remember crying about it when I was a little girl. Crying that I didn't have the pretty pink dresses that I had seen the little white girls wearing or crying that I couldn't go into the buildings and diners that they paraded into, and I wondered how things could be so separate for little girls. But Mama would rub my neck and wipe my face and say, “Jessie, that's just how it is. You ain't never going to have what those children have, but you've got to remember that what you do have is just as good and you are just as special.”

Then she'd remind me of how I got to watch her make my dresses from her own or how I got to play with my brothers in the creek or in the tops of trees. That I was free to go into the black-owned businesses, the church, and everybody's houses that I loved. And before I knew it I was feeling good about my place, and I even found myself feeling a little sorry for the white girls, who couldn't run in their dress clothes or would never know the words to our jump rope songs. But feeling sad or feeling happy, I was always clear about our places. And even though over fifty years have passed, not much has changed in this part of the world.

I've seen white men spend more time working on a black folks' church than on their own just to make sure that our places remain separate. Oh, the women try to act like their menfolk are
doing the deed out of love, but I know better. They're doing it to keep sticky black children from dirtying up their velvet pews. They're doing it so they won't have to say out loud what they know in their hearts. White people and black people aren't supposed to sit side by side and pray. White people and black people aren't supposed to eat the same body and drink the same blood.

In their minds it's real clear. And they can say what they want about rebuilding and fixing up the AME church down the road; they can go ahead and say they're giving God the glory until they're red in the face, but they aren't fooling anyone, least of all the black folk.

I think I started going to Hope Springs on a dare. It was about 1960. I was in my late twenties, home from graduate school, radical and inspired. I didn't even believe in God anymore, but I did believe in equal rights for everyone, equal access, equal opportunities. I was sitting at the table at my parents' home, spewing on about how different things were going to be, how there were so many changes happening. And I think it was my older brother, Ervin, who said something like “If you're so sure things are moving so quickly, why don't you visit the church down the road? Why don't you hightail it right on up to that white church, sit on the front row, and just see how far those fancy speeches are going to get you in this community?”

So I did. Much to my family's surprise and fear, I went right by myself and sat on the first row. It was the most defiant thing I have ever done. And I was scared, looking all bad on the outside with my Afro and my beads, but inside I was afraid. Nervous as a cat.

Funny thing was that it turned out that the pastor was a
decent man. He was probably in his seventies, had been there more than twenty years, and had a lot of respect from the congregation. So that when he visited me at my parents' home, asked me to teach youth Sunday School, and went with me to my grandmother's funeral, the white church people paid attention and carried on likewise.

I never heard a harsh thing from or about the man. And, better, I never experienced anything ugly or spiteful from the membership. Now I'm quite sure that behind the doors there was plenty of talk, but in my presence I never experienced anything but loving-kindness. His goodness rubbed off on them, made them a better people. And I believe that's the greatest thing to say about a minister.

He wasn't a very good preacher. The services were lifeless, and his sermons were dry. But after the reasons of protest wore off and I was forced to look again at why I went there, I discovered I needed to hear the way he talked to God. His prayers walked me back to faith, and, praise the Lord, I've never turned away.

That's been more than thirty years ago now. I got married in that church, baptized my babies in that church, even buried my parents in the side cemetery, something the funeral director in the black community said would never happen. I know that it's been a stretch for most of those folks to have me there, but I've found my place. I belong. So I stay.

We've probably been through nine or ten preachers since then. Some good. Some not so good. But we've managed to stay together and, for the most part, not let issues of race cloud our worship. The Wilmington Ten incident cost us some members,
was hard on everybody, but, like good friends, we managed through. I'd say it's been a blessing, for all of us. It has not, of course, been without its struggles, but, then again, most real blessings require some wrestling.

Rev. Stewart is the first woman preacher we've had. She's young, same age as my Janice, inexperienced, grew up just a few miles up the road. We can't pay her much, but we have a nice parsonage and we keep her fed. She worries a lot, and I expect has more mothers than she needs, but we're pushing along. She seems glad to have me there. Like my presence somehow eases her liberal tendencies. Like I'm the balance for everything else bigoted and unjust in the community. She can say to her peers that Hope Springs isn't all-white, and that because of my family she can claim to have an integrated congregation. I think I help ease some of her white guilt. I know that I've done that for more than one minister here.

Most of my children are close by. Everyone except Annie. She moved up to Washington with her husband. She gets homesick a lot, but I've told her what my mother told me: “When you marry, you go with your husband. His people become your people. Give it five years, and if it still doesn't work, you can come home.”

James Junior lives next door. He works nights and tries to make a go of it farming. He's a good son, married to a girl he met in high school. She takes him and the family over to the Baptist church near Burlington, where she grew up.

Robert is in Greensboro; he teaches school and has never married. And Janice, having lived out the five-year contract, moved home, changed her name back to ours, and lives at home
with me and her son, Wallace. She changed his name too. He's sixteen and acts older than his mother. He's also the only one who will go to church with me.

James Senior, who claims he married me for my pies, left home when the girls started high school. He made it sound like it was finishing up military duty or schooling, talking about how he had “put in his time” and that now he was going to enjoy life. Guess a pie isn't enough to hold a marriage together. I think I probably knew that he was leaving by the time our second child was born, but I kept hoping.

That's one thing I learned isn't different between white women and black. We are always hoping. Hoping it won't rain on our washing. Hoping our children will get home safe from school. Hoping the lump in our breast is just dried up milk, and hoping our husbands will love us when we're old. That last hope for me withered up and blew away more than fifteen years ago. That's when James Senior left.

We've yet to get officially divorced, and from time to time I hear from him. A postcard, a phone call. He sends a check regularly. The children know he loves them. But he's never come home, and I've never asked him to. I managed a good living keeping the books at the mill in town. I've always been good with numbers. “A gift,” my mama would say. So I worked my way up from the weaving line to the front office and from angry protester to union president.

With or without a husband, I've done better than most of the women in my family. And even though the nights are long and lonely, I'd rather be without him than worrying that he's going to leave me. At least I don't have that unsettled sense about me
like the other women my age whose husbands keep coming home a little later every night with that distant look in their eyes.

At least I know where I stand, and I stand there just fine. At least I have that. And I don't have to wonder anymore whether or not this time he won't come back. Like somebody who's been figuring on getting cancer all their life and finally hears the diagnosis, at least I know. I do have that. But there's nothing more, and sometimes I feel as cold as a stone inside. Cold as a stone.

Unfortunately, I do still think of him every time I bake a pie. When I'm pressing down the edges with my thumbs, it all comes back. Like calling on the old memory of how to cook a meal, I wander into the forgotten places of desperation. Hope. Thinking with the heart of a woman, that maybe, just maybe, this one will do the trick.

It's a mindless journey, I know. But still I go. And because I let myself wander this way, pie recipes turn out to be the only recipes I will write down.