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Blessings Are Due
Remembrances of Thanksgiving
Then & Now
By Ayodele Nzinga
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Smoked Turkey
Oyster dressing
Cranberries
Mashed potatoes/gravy
Shells & 7 cheeses
Sweet potato pie
Mustard Greens W smoked Turkey tails
Home Made Ice Cream
Roast and Butter Potatoes
Tossed Prawn Green
Salad |
I started the day with prayer over
John Coltrane, read an essay or two from Marvin X’s new
joint, between finishing up the feast. The house is full
of the smells of oyster dressing. It is early in the
morning. I have been up since 5:00. As time ticks along
I move into a little Harold Melvin, The Ojays, James
Brown, and some Gil Scott Herron. This early play list
is the best of my mother’s music, the stuff that to this
day moves me and speaks to the struggle still being
waged in the Nation in the Nation. Tell em James, still
black, still proud. There is a roast as tender as
butter. The smoked turkey is still steaming form the
oven. The greens were done last night. The candied yams
are just ready and you are right Harold Melvin there
ain’t no stopping me now. Best believe in a minute or
two we gonna Wake up Everybody.
I remember Thanksgiving at my
mother’s house. I remember it in musical clips. Certain
songs bring back certain years. There was always the
music. These select memories are mostly good memories
and they continue to improve with age. These memories
are for the most part from before the days I realized
the glittery grit American holidays rise from. This was
before it dawned on me why Natives, most likely don’t
celebrate Thanksgiving, at least not with the same
sentiment as Middle America. Wherever that is.
I grew up in the so-called margins in
the Nation in the Nation. It was the sixties. The world
was changing and we were hopeful and on the edge of
something. I was months away from discovering the
“movement,” growing in the hothouses of urban centers, I
had never thought of. Even Mother was expanding her
horizons she had discovered the necessity of politics.
She became an A. Phillip Randolph Society member. The
music in our house reinforced this time of expansion and
recreation in our house and in our conscious awareness.
I was in the space before the tipping point. I was just
discovering Langston and Baraka. I was just beginning to
understand that the world was bigger than Mother’s house
and the school library. Tradition was being discovered
and created. Dysfunctionality or perceptions of it can
be considered a tradition. And so it is we came to the
tradition of Thanksgiving in my Mother’s house.
The assembling of the groceries was a
primary task that would be started at least a week
before the actual preparation. The supplies for the
mammoth meal came from a variety of stores my mother was
guided by the specialties of particular markets. A
turkey ordered at a quality meat market, live shellfish
from the Chinese grocer, the newest 45s from the black
record store and so forth.
Thanksgiving started the night before
fueled by large amounts of Cutty Sark my mother
directed her kitchen crew of children with me being the
eldest. I picked bunch after bunch of fresh greens,
snapped and shelled peas and beans. I was the DJ
spinning stacks of 45s or selecting LPs from the huge
stack. Music was one of the few things my mother and I
shared. We loved it. I drank her music in. She had
great taste. She liked a wide variety and a lot of it
was what I would have bought myself. Music made the
task melodious as well. I remember being the chief
chopper—onions,
celery, bell peppers were minced within an inch of their
lives under a sharp knife. The fragrant piles went from
chopping board to bowls for mother’s use as the most
succulent meal began to take shape. Chopping completed
I would move on to peel things that need to be peeled.
After my peeling duties were over I was a masher and
occasionally a mixer. I guess it all comes under food
prep and I was our food processor.
There was a rhythm in that kitchen
that I have learned to appreciate. Mother’s kitchen
hummed. She was everywhere. One minute her hands in
soapy bleach water washing every dish as it was dirtied.
The next she was checking a bird stuffed with oranges,
apples, celery, and onions. From there to the pot of
greens picked fresh from the garden that morning. Even
the garden cooperated with Mother’s rhythm. Peppers and
onions ripened on cue. I succumbed to exhaustion only at
a point when my help no longer mattered. It would have
never occurred to me to fall sooner or to complain.
Mother’s rule was law. As I recall the later the hour
the older the music Mother played. I would wake in the
morning to the sounds of her moving in the kitchen with
B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, or Jimmy Reid, twanging in
the speakers.
I have learned to appreciate the ease
of that time with my mother. She taught me to cook
without ever writing down a recipe. I still measure my
prowess in the kitchen by my mother's. We talked about
things we never talked about at any other time. She let
me read poetry to her. She asked questions about the
authors and what I thought the poems meant. We did
theater improvs with characters that suited our whimsy
at the moment. We sang over Aretha Franklin. We were
known to argue over the lyrics and dissolve into
laughter when we discovered we were both wrong. This was
the only time any of these things ever existed between
us. The only time I ever remember my mother telling me I
was beautiful and that she loved me was in a holiday
kitchen. She was relaxed peacefully committed to being
in this space for hours doing one of the things she did
well and had a passion for. I have noticed that when
they are happy in the work of their hands even the most
irascible people are approachable.
Mother was known in our neighborhood
for the table she set. Her salmon croquettes were
legendary. My father was never at a lost for a fishing
buddy. Mother’s croquettes sealed the deal. She made
jams, jellies, canned fruit, and homemade ice cream.
Coconut cake or German chocolate take your choice they
were made from scratch and melted in your mouth. Her
candied yams and sweet potato pie game was sharper than
my grandmother’s and that’s saying something. She made
hogshead cheese form the whole head of a hog with the
glazed eyes staring. She would scramble the brains into
eggs and savor the delicacy that not one of her
disgusted albeit astonished kids showed any curiosity
about. She excelled at holiday meals and she had a
record collection a DJ or beat maker would kill to own.
On holidays we dove into the stack and the music is
forever connected to my holiday memories.
Our dinner table groaned with excess
that did not seem like excess with Ray Charles as a
soundtrack. Two meats and at least six sides above and
beyond the traditional necessities and a choice of at
least three deserts were the foundation of a holiday
feast. There are some differences in Mother’s table and
mine. Both households full of children, debt, and with
an eye on the same struggle but in different points in
time. We are of a line but we are in different
perspectives.
The machinery in the kitchen is and
is not the same. I am still chief chopper and I have not
been able to establish the holiday rapport in the
kitchen my mother invoked. The relationship with my
children is different. There is no pork on my table.
Cutty is not what fuels the party. We collectively have
created for ourselves a different kind of baggage and
out of this baggage arises another kind of tradition.
The music once the oldies walk us though memory has
changed as well. It describes our place in the struggle
as clearly as the music of my mother’s Thanksgiving did.
Hairdoo, Hi-Beats, Dead Prez, Common,
Marley, TuPac, and some Talaam Acey will be a part of
the soundtrack today. A little Ise Lyfe some Amir
Suleman and some of that Boots and the Coup along with
some Askari X balanced against some Franti will set the
tone for our "Blessings are Due Day." This is the mental
food I will serve up along with the macaroni shells and
seven cheeses and my own version of candied yams with
Saigon cinnamon. I am famous in my own way for my
holiday table. There will also be room for some of that
Turf Starz and The Pack, the Hypfy sound, my kids are
recreating themselves to. This ain’t my mother’s
Thanksgiving. But we got here via mothers house. If she
were here I don’t know if she would approve of the music
or the table. But things change and the times have kept
suit.
Led by the music and the times that
make the music we are the same and different. Mother’s
music said the time; it was a product of the place,
politics, and the people’s relationship to these things
that shaped the lyric and the rhythms they rode upon. We
are closer to the bone when we stop to examine place,
politics, the times, and the people’s relationship to
these things. The history in between has taken us at
least in lyric to the grit of the streets. Made us more
graphic in our pathology and in our effort to be free of
it. I submit there has always been sex and violence in
popular music it is the degree and lack of veneer I
believe shocks.
But again I say it relates to how we
live. It is connected to our perceived potential and a
reaction to the American dream’s evolution into crass
commodity that drives commercial/corporate rap. As TuPac
said Rap can do what it has to in order to survive, to
make money, but Hip Hop has a responsibility to the
streets. I’m a hip-hop head, sometimes, as out of step
in my house as my mother would be. I’m not into the
disposable music that will only be a novelty if anything
at all in 10 years. I see a commonality in my taste and
my mother’s. While eclectic our taste runs towards that
which inspires, uplifts.
Today I am happy to be aware there is
still music being created to ignite the consciousness
and reveal us standing in the storm, still black, and
still proud. There is still a counter-dialogue. I’d like
to think if my mother was still alive she might find
some point of recognition in the new dialogues in music,
might find the message familiar. We are in the belly, we
need to be awake and aware, and understand that we are
powerful.
The house is alive as friends come
and go and the children float in and out. The politics
fly as good-natured jabs are traded and sweet potato pie
disappears. Memories are shifted as we stuff our selves
on the food and each others thoughts surrounded by the
soundtrack of the times. Franti says everyone deserves
music and I believe it was June Jordan who said no one
has the right to choose the next generation’s freedom
song.
Years from now this family in some
configuration will meet on the day my mother called
"Thanksgiving" and I call "Blessings are Due Day." They
will feast. I can’t predict the menu or the conversation
but I know it will come from being in this house and
listening to this music. It will be recycled to recreate
my times, and me, my notch on the struggle tree. The
music that lives will remind them of the times in which
it was created and without doubt these will be
remembered as the good times and what is written here
and remembered will be passed on like a fine recipe. I
wonder what the music of those times will sound like.
Living like blessings are due, here
in the belly . . .
Ayodele Nzinga is a dramatist,
arts lecturer and performance poet living in the San
Francisco Bay Area. She is the Artistic Director of The
Lower Bottom Playaz and The Sister Thea Bowman Memorial
Theater in West Oakland. She is a force to be reckoned
with on the West Coast spoken word circuit. Well known
for her take no prisoners style as the WordSlanger she
is loved by vets and admired by young poets. She is
affiliated with Marvin X’s Recovery Theater. She holds
an MA and an MFA in Writing and Consciousness. She is
currently a candidate for PhD at the California
Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco CA. Contact Nzinga at
anzinga@sbcglobal.net
posted 25 November 2006
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A notable historian
of the early republic, Maier devoted a
decade to studying the immense
documentation of the ratification of the
Constitution. Scholars might approach
her book’s footnotes first, but history
fans who delve into her narrative will
meet delegates to the state conventions
whom most history books, absorbed with
the Founders, have relegated to
obscurity. Yet, prominent in their local
counties and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). Ripostes from
proponents, the Federalists, animate the
great detail Maier provides, as does her
recounting how one state convention’s
verdict affected another’s. Displaying
the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier
eruditely yet accessibly revives a
neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 1 August 2008
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