Valerie Stivers Cooks With Langston Hughes

At the Paris Review, for her series called Eat Your Words, Valerie Stivers invites readers to think about what Langston Hughes might have eaten when he wrote Not Without Laughter. Hughes's 1931 novel documents life for the story's protagonist, Sandy, a "light-skinned black youth in a small, mixed-race Kansas town in the 1910s," Stivers explains. In her column, Stivers recalls the recipes of her own Southern family, like "Buttermilk Biscuits from the Kitchen of Winnie Carrie Inez Riley Reid." Explaining the connection between Hughes's words and cuisine, Stivers begins: "Sandy’s mother is a cook for a white family. She feeds her own family on scraps from her employer’s table, bringing home things like 'a large piece of fresh lemon pie,' 'two chocolate eclairs in her pocket, mashed together,' or 'a small bucket of oyster soup.'" From there: 

Sandy’s grandmother, Aunt Hagar, cleans laundry for whites. She works herself to the bone for pennies with the belief that a quiet respectability will, in the end, save black people. Sandy’s father, Jimboy, and Sandy’s aunt embrace the blues and enjoy what they have, though Hughes does not sugarcoat the reality that what they have is too little.

There are well-meaning whites in this book, like the ones who send wreaths to Aunt Hagar’s funeral (ouch), but their contribution only underscores their uselessness. I feel fairly useless, too, but I was inspired by the wealth of folk detail on small-town black country food from a hundred years ago. Annjee, Sandy’s mother, often cooks for her white employer in the spirit of resistance. At one point, she makes biscuits, remarking, “The white folks ain’t asked for ’em, but they like ’em too, so they can serve for both … Jimboy’s crazy about biscuits … ” She serves them with a fussy steak-and-onion dish. The food the characters consume when they have a choice is different. At Thanksgiving, Annjee makes a bland-sounding “turkey with chestnut dressing” for the whites, but at Aunt Hagar’s they have “a nice juicy possum … parboiled and baked sweet and brown with yams in the pan.”

Read more at the Paris Review.