-[water rustling] -[bird chirping]
[soft music playing]
This water is so grounding.
Absolutely.
We are here at the Atlantic, and it's so much more grounding
when we look out towards the East, toward Africa
because this water was the birth canal of African Americans.
This water sustained us.
This water brought us here.
This water kept us alive.
[man] On our last voyage,
Dr. Jessica Harris and I explored the coast of Benin.
[Jessica] We've got black-eyed peas.
We've got okra. We've got watermelon.
It made the voyage with us.
[man] Tracing the ingredients and flavors at the core of our history.
Delicious.
[man 2] Everything you have here is before the slave ship.
[man] And in America,
we explored the perseverance and innovation of Black cuisine.
-We've got some rice. -[man 3] That's the number one ingredient.
[man] Through our arrival, enslavement,
and emancipation.
[man 4] Emancipation Proclamation was read on January 1, 1863.
That's when we were legally free.
[man] Now we're setting on a new voyage
and making our first stop.
New Orleans.
The best part is the last three words of this recipe.
"Pass the hot sauce."
I'm Stephen Satterfield.
As a food writer who trained as a chef
and worked as a sommelier for over a decade…
-Cheers. -Cheers.
…I spend a lot of time telling the story of food.
She could feed and fuel the Civil Rights Movement.
[Stephen] Post-emancipation to the present,
Dr. J and I are continuing our journey
to uncover the stories of African Americans
through the food we grow, prepare, and commune over.
[laughing]
Blessings.
[Stephen] The food that transformed America.
[theme song playing]
[music ends]
[folk music playing]
[Stephen] The waters of New Orleans have brought in new people,
new languages, new ingredients,
creating a new blended culture,
born in a new world.
A Creole culture,
although influenced by many different countries,
in Louisiana, the seeds of Creole are undeniably Black.
-No powdered sugar. -No powdered sugar. Look at that!
[woman] Mmm.
[Stephen] I arrive in New Orleans with my mentor,
Dr. J, who has spent decades
studying the world through food.
Jessica Harris. She's come out with her first book
entitled Hot Stuff, right? What dish is this you've brought?
This is Chicken Yassa, Poulet Yassa, from Senegal in West Africa.
Now, you consider yourself a culinary anthropologist.
-What's that mean? -I go to different countries.
I'm interested in not only the food and how it tastes
but also how it relates to the culture of the country,
what it grows out of, what the particular traditions are.
[Stephen] So there's no better person to explore New Orleans with
and what made its cuisine so special.
New Orleans is an incredible place
because right after emancipation, and even before emancipation,
there was a political system
under the French and the Spanish and the French again
that allowed for a population of thousands of free people of color.
-And many of them were Creole. -Mm-hmm.
[Jessica] And so they created another kind of world.
Newspapers, music, salons.
We also begin to get political control.
During Reconstruction,
2,000 Black folks
working in government positions.
You've got people who are beginning to build Black wealth.
Wealth that, in some ways, becomes even generational wealth.
We also find women very much involved in things,
and they would sell calas, a rice fritter that comes straight out of Western Africa.
And they would cook 'em to order, and then they'd sell 'em.
"Calas, calas. Beautiful calas, nice and hot. I've got calas!"
So, we have a convergence of cultures,
of French influences, of Spanish influences.
-Free people… African. -And African.
[Jessica] All of those things made for a very different place.
[chill out music playing]
[Stephen] The unique blend of cultures that made New Orleans so special
is still echoing through its cuisine today.
Dr. J and I go visit Senegalese American Chef
Serigne Mbaye of restaurant Dakar Nola,
where his menu showcases the deep cultural connection
between West Africa and New Orleans.
Joining us is eighth-generation Creole native Michelle Joan Papillion.
When I say "Nanga def," you guys say, "Maa'ngi fi."
-Okay. -You're saying "hello."
[speaking in foreign language]
Now say it like you mean it.
[in foreign language]
All right, that sounds like a Louisiana Creole word.
-Maa'ngi fi. -Yeah.
-Maa'ngi fi. I'm right here. -That's what we were saying.
-Love it. -Nice.
I hope you enjoy it.
-Thank you. -Thanks, Chef.
Thank you, Chef.
This is like a homecoming. When people ask, "Why New Orleans?"
My standard answer is, "Because my soul sings there."
Because this is a place that is
one of the hemisphere's major food cities.
Yeah. The history of New Orleans is astonishing,
and I feel that it's still palpable in the people,
not just from New Orleans but Louisiana more broadly.
Yes.
So you are from Southern Louisiana near Lafayette?
Deep in the country.
I call it Bayou Country because the bayou runs through our property.
Part of the land is cleared, and that's where the home is.
And then the backyard is the woods.
Then you walk through the woods, and you're at the bayou.
[Stephen] At the bayou.
And our family lineage is connected to Marguerite,
one of the ancestors that established my family.
Her story in the 1700s,
being promised her freedom from the person who enslaved her,
Gregoire Guillory,
she believed that she would be free on his death.
His children contested that.
So she fled to New Orleans to the Spanish courts
and sued, and she won.
So her and her children basically came back to Southern Louisiana
and retreated to the woods.
And that's where we have been since that time.
Well, I'll drink to Marguerite.
[Stephen] Yeah, shout-out to Marguerite.
Shout-out to Marguerite for that. Yeah.
I wanna ask you about Creole as a means of your own identity,
if you identify that way, and how you grew up
in relationship to that word and identity.
[Michelle] Yeah, I do identify that way. I always have.
And I think what Creole means to us
is this mixture of the African, the French, and the native,
and how that all sort of, like, comes together.
And this blended history
is part of the "Creole" tradition.
First of all, it comes from the Spanish word "crear,"
-which is to create, to be born almost. -Mm-hmm.
And so, at its origin, it may have meant
the children of the Africans
who were born in the New World…
[Stephen] Mm-hmm.
…were Creole.
I think the most defining thing, though,
about when I think of what is Creole culture,
is the food that we eat because it's the things that we grow.
So rice is a staple, okra is a staple,
black-eyed peas were things that we would farm.
[Jessica] Those are all three things that have origin on the African continent.
They came with us.
[Michelle] Mm-hmm.
Okay, Chef.
[Serigne] So this is soupou kanja, which essentially
soupou means soup, kanja means okra,
which essentially is what New Orleans is known for, for gumbo.
-[Stephen] Okay. -I hope you guys enjoy it. Bon appétit.
-Bon appétit. -[Michelle] Thank you.
Have some rice.
[Stephen] Mmm. Thank you.
[Jessica] Mmm.
Mmm.
[Stephen] Wow. Delicious, Chef.
[Michelle] Mm-hmm.
One of the things that strikes me
in this journey from West Africa to Louisiana
is the role of French people.
Is there something in the techniques of these dishes
which comes from the French culinary influence?
[Serigne] I mean, honestly, I truly believe that
Senegal really inspired New Orleans cooking in many different ways,
and when I talk about Senegambian,
I'm also including all those countries throughout West Africa.
And yet, we don't get the credit
because the French were the ones that colonized us.
Many folks believe that…
uh, Gumbo is inspired by bouillabaisse.
It's not. If you look at any known dish in New Orleans,
the obvious one is rice.
If you look at Senegal, most of our dishes are rice-based.
-Jollof rice, just rice and meat. -Mm-hmm.
So you can see the route between the two cultures.
Absolutely.
Jollof rice, that's jambalaya.
When you're talking about the African hand in the pot
and how that African hand in the pot
is the thing that ultimately defined the pot in a very different way.
[Stephen] We're not actually talking about French techniques.
We're talking about, really, the ingredient
being the thing that translates and defines the foods.
[Jessica] The whole idea of watching Senegal and New Orleans
-connect on a plate is so crucial. -Right.
[Jessica] And it's very interesting that it's Senegal
-because Stephen and I were last in Benin. -[Stephen] Mm-hmm.
Senegal and Benin, they both have points
that became points of departure
for hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans.
[Serigne] Voilà.
Black-eyed peas fritters.
Oh wow.
[Serigne] And then, I have some sauce, onion.
[Jessica] Mmm.
Yes. Merci.
[Serigne] So this sauce is the key to the fritters.
Onions are one of those vegetables that,
if you cook them long enough, their sweetness comes out.
[Michelle] Yeah.
It looks like the onions have almost dissolved completely into the sauce.
-[Michelle] Yeah. -It's been cooking for eight hours plus.
-[Michelle] Ooh. -Incredible.
The onion sauce tastes like Senegal to me.
Yeah, for sure.
-[Stephen] Delicious. -[Michelle] Mmm.
I have an interesting story about black-eyed peas
that I just learned recently.
My last trip to Gorée Island,
where many of our ancestors saw it for the last time,
there was a guy telling me some of these stories,
and then I asked him,
"What do you know of some of the food that they ate?"
And he told me our ancestors had to be 60 kilos in order to
get into, make it to that boat, to cross.
And one of the things that they fed them to fatten them up,
and every time I talk about this, I just…
but one of the things that they fed them was black-eyed peas and palm oil.
So we have an akara,
black-eyed peas with onions that has palm oil into it.
-[Jessica] Wow. -[Stephen] That is a beautiful tribute.
[Michelle] Creole people are all connected to their ancestors in Africa.
The flavor palette and the things that we grow,
-it is in the DNA. -[Jessica] Part of our DNA.
The ancestors were brought to Louisiana as enslaved people.
So in their heads and in their hearts and in their hands,
they also brought their food.
[Stephen] To better understand the origins of Creole cooking,
I travel with Michelle Joan Papillion to Edgard, Louisiana,
on a canal that has been owned by Matthew Rousseve's family
since the late 1850s.
The grasslands and bayous of Louisiana
have fed families for generations.
[Michelle] For many, many, many generations,
we have been farming and cultivating the land,
ranching, pretty much everything you need to be sufficient.
My grandmother, she learned how to fish when she was a little girl
and her job kind of became
the one of going out and gathering the fish for the family.
They were farmers. They were growing things in the garden,
they had their crops, and she would go to the lake
in order to sustain the family and feed the family.
And that was a daily practice.
The water for her was just as much second nature as being on the farm.
Mm-hmm.
And we had old-school bamboo sticks, like,
for our fishing poles.
What kind of fish were you catching?
We caught snapper, buffalo, perch.
We had trout.
Um. We had bass.
[Stephen] Being a city kid and growing up in Atlanta,
I didn't have to think about where our groceries came from.
For Michelle and Matt's families,
they had to rely on the bayou as their source for what fed them.
[Matthew] The name of this canal is Stump Canal.
I see why they call it Stump Canal.
Yeah, they got stumps in here.
In the wintertime, you catch a lot of sacalait.
Right now, you catch a lot of perch in here. A lot of perch.
[Stephen] Living off the Louisiana coast
seems to be an important aspect of Creole culture.
I got some docile-looking crickets for you.
[Matthew] That's what we're talking about.
[Stephen] Matt and his family still live off these waters today,
fishing in them weekly for dinner.
I've been fishing this canal over 30 years or longer.
-Incredible. -Oh wow.
I know where the fish are at every time of the year.
Now let's see. See right here. It looks like they got something…
-You're casting that line right there. -Right here by this stump.
-By that stump. -Watch this.
-I can see the fish underneath the water. -Watch.
We're gonna find him. He's somewhere here.
-There he is. Look. -There he go. Right there.
-There he is. Nice one. Look. -[Stephen] Oh!
-Yeah. Perch outta the water. -Just like that!
-[Michelle] Whoa! That's a beautiful one. -Yeah.
Perch outta the water. We got one here.
[Stephen] Being on these waters with the locals
who are still living and feeding off the land is humbling.
It's a reminder for me that owning land can provide food, shelter, and stability
for many generations to come.
As I continue to explore the land that gave us Creole food…
I cannot escape the complicated history
of Black labor buried in the soil.
Even after emancipation and reconstruction,
in the late 1800s and early 1900s,
many Black families were bound to the plantation still,
working as farmers, doing 100% of the labor,
but paid for only a portion of the profits.
An unbalanced work exchange known as sharecropping,
a system that wasn't fully phased out
until the 1960s.
I travel to a Louisiana plantation to meet with Mr. Elvin Shields,
a retired mechanical engineer who grew up as a sharecropper.
-How are you doing, Mr. Shields? -Super.
-Good deal. -Super.
I wanted to ask you about your own personal story,
where you grew up, and how you grew up.
I grew up on Cane River Plantation.
In a sharecropping family.
[Stephen] Can you tell me a little bit more about what it meant
to be a sharecropper
growing up in the '40s and '50s?
You were given five/six hundred square feet slave cabin.
And you were given
about another half an acre to plant your personal crops,
raise some chickens, raise a couple of pigs.
It was basically hand-to-mouth. You had no money.
We had nothing but labor.
What kind of labor were your family participating in?
-Of course, you were picking cotton. -Mm-hmm.
And that means sunup to sundown,
and you're basically agreeing on half.
Half of the profit was for you,
and other half was for the landowner.
However, if you didn't have mews,
you didn't have plows,
you didn't have wagons,
you have to rent that from the plantation owner.
So, as soon as that happened,
your half became a third.
-You see what happened? -Mm-hmm.
And so, at the end of the year, you broke even.
Maybe.
[Stephen] What Mr. Shields is describing doesn't feel like actual freedom,
at least not to me.
Sharecroppers, despite the unjust contract with landowners,
clearly had to find a way to feed themselves and their family.
Every plantation had their own store.
During the year, you didn't have any cash until the crop come in.
[Stephen] Mm-hmm.
So they would give you credit,
and they would sell you stuff out of the store.
And so you would buy flour,
you would buy meal, sugar,
and it would make up something called cornbread kush.
Cornbread kush.
Yeah, you would take some oil, lard,
-which is from your hog. -Um-hmm.
When you made the crackling, you took the grease off,
and you would put in a pan, and you would take the meal,
and you'd put some water in and whip it up like you're gonna make a cake.
But then, when the grease gets hot, you dump it in the pan,
your black skillet, and you stir it all up.
Either put some sugar on top, a little molasses on top,
and pour some milk, and that was your cereal.
Okay. That was the kind of thing you ate. A lot of that. But that is what we got.
Whatever they found at the cheapest price,
they put it on the shelf for the sharecroppers.
[Stephen] Common staples of a slave diet included cornmeal, pork, and molasses,
which is pretty close to the diet
that Mr. Shields ate almost 100 years later.
What were the differences between the period of slavery
and this reconstruction period of sharecropping?
The difference in the period was that you didn't have gang labor.
You were an independent contractor.
You now could have some kind of… pride.
This cotton, I raised it.
The profits from it… is part mine,
no matter how small.
And you thought sharecropping was going to last forever.
Until mechanization came.
And what happened then?
They didn't need us anymore.
This cotton machine came
to pick the cotton, and then people were asked to leave.
[Stephen] Mm. Mm-hmm.
And you're waiting your turn to get the knock on the door.
"Can you be out Wednesday?"
After hundreds of years, you were asked to leave.
"And no, you can't borrow my wagon to haul your stuff."
Mm-hmm.
"And I don't have anywhere to put you."
To me, that seems cruel,
and to me, that seems like actually
these plantation owners, because again,
we're talking about decades after slavery is over,
so what they're also holding on to
is the power to be able to say,
"You need to be out on Wednesday."
They have… There's no humanity still.
There's no respect.
We were working the land,
and we were living on the land.
That's all we knew.
And you were forced off the land.
-Where are you going? -Mm-hmm.
Yeah, we lost so much.
We lost so much there.
So as families moved to the city,
then the government come along and say,
"We're gonna build a bunch of government houses to put you in."
Then the government are going into the worst part of town,
building a whole lot of government projects.
[Stephen] Mm-hmm.
And creating… a ghetto.
That's why when I drive through Plantation Country,
I see my home.
This is what we created as a Black people,
even though we don't own it and nobody's gonna share it with us.
But it's ours.
As a Black person, we're on a plantation.
When I hear the word plantation,
it makes me uncomfortable
because how I grew up with this word
is that it was a thing to not be talked about.
It was a source of… of shame.
[clicks teeth] Plantation is ours.
Don't make it a bad word
because your ancestors were slaves on it.
So much of the Black American experience
has to do with suppression.
We suppressed our plantation origin story.
So much so that now Black folks are saying
"I don't wanna work the land anymore
because it's too much like this other thing."
But we don't even have a relationship with the other thing, right?
The land itself.
My ancestors lived and died here.
[Stephen] Hmm.
And we created the first Black community
in this country on a plantation.
[Stephen] Hmm.
And we lived there for two or three hundred years together.
And so now, all of a sudden…
we should fear it or hate it or scorn it.
No! It's our word. We own it.
We made it, and we own it.
Wow. That's very powerful, Mr. Shields.
-I know that's not something-- -I hear you. I hear that.
[woman vocalizing]
[Stephen] While Elvin's family was forced away by landowners,
many others were fleeing racist mobs,
restrictive Jim Crow laws,
and just looking for better job opportunities.
They left behind land that they had cultivated
for hundreds of years,
and the place they called home.
During the Great Migration, starting in 1910,
nearly six million African Americans left the plantations of the South
and headed north for places like Chicago, Illinois.
It wasn't just about going north for new opportunity.
It was also about saying goodbye to the South.
[cheerful music playing]
[Stephen] And gathering for a meal as a community before you left
was one way to pay homage
to the life and loved ones you were leaving behind.
And in this tradition, a proper New Orleans church supper
prepared by the legendary Dooky Chase restaurant
and hosted by Stella Chase Reese,
daughter of the late queen of Creole cuisine, Leah Chase,
seemed appropriate.
[Michelle] I've been eyeballing the cornbread.
Thank you.
[Stephen] Joining Dr. J, Michelle Papillion and I
is the Louisiana native and private chef Lashonda Cross.
So, this is a little bit of everything.
[Jessica] A little bit of everything,
including red beans and jambalaya. That's pretty good.
-[Jessica] A nice church supper. -[Lashonda] Yes, yes.
I grew up in a Baptist church, and one thing
I can remember from my childhood,
it's after church.
-The food. -[chuckle]
Yes, lined up on the tables just in rows and rows.
[Stephen] Wow.
[Jessica] But it's so fitting that we're in this church
'cause we're really sort of celebrating.
And in a small way replicating what people did
when they migrated from all over the South,
not just Louisiana.
The whole idea of coming together
at a place of worship…
Yes.
…for a final farewell supper.
This was their time to come together, to, of course,
ask God's blessing at the house of worship
and then to come together as a family to do what we know how to do best.
Enjoy each other over a great meal.
-There you go. -Absolutely.
Your mom was able to
make a way for herself as a Black woman entrepreneur.
[Stella] That's right.
What was the role of the, specifically,
Black women elders and ancestors?
I know my mother used to say,
"You know, I don't know what I do."
"I can't do anything but do what I do best."
Which was cooking this.
And it made her feel good.
She made people happy through her food.
And not only did she make people happy through her food,
but she did fundraisers cooking for the churches,
but that was through the culinary talents that she had.
[Michelle] Yeah.
Women, and particularly women of color, particularly Creole women,
had more agency to use culinary abilities to create wealth
from people like Rose Nicaud,
from people like Rosette Rochon.
We don't even know the names of some of the pralinières,
the ladies who sold pralines.
-[Stella] That's right. -You know.
A lot of women who could almost be a litany of success,
of success brought through the culinary,
-got it done. And that's right. -[Stella] That's true.
And it's very important to, you know,
to kind of hats off and acknowledge that because that is something
that has kept us going as a thread here
and then in places that people went.
Um-hmm.
On their way North, on their way West.
And you know, they knew the importance of coming to the table.
My mother would always say, "Come back to the table."
You have to have a meal with your family before going away
because it's a place where we could find
that comfort and spirituality.
So we came together, and we had church suppers.
People of African descent are very spiritual.
-Um-hmm -[Stephen] Mm-hmm.
And so we are a people who understand…
the need for ceremony.
I mean, it's the meals like this that is part of how it all comes together.
Ceremony is the punctuation
that rhythms and rhymes
and defines our lives
and equally on the table.
And so the need to have ceremonies
when leaving is important
because it's about making a transition.
Because it took courage to head out into the unknown,
to set, a term that Maya Angelou used to use, to set foot in path.
Because that's what they did. They set foot in path.
They set their face against the wind,
and they moved into the unknown, and that was The Great Migration.
[horn blaring]
[Stephen] I follow the path of my ancestors,
heading north towards Chicago.
Like the nearly half a million Black Americans
that traveled here during The Great Migration.
I can only imagine how jarring this transition must have been for them.
Black folks traveled themselves by whatever means available.
Bus, wagon, by train.
At the same time, some also worked on trains heading north
in luxury sleeper cars designed
by inventor George Pullman
who capitalized on the expectation of Black workers
to serve white patrons
and hired an almost entirely Black staff.
Those African American men
would come to be known as the Pullman porters.
The wages, tips, and a Black-funded
and led labor union created a unique opportunity
for some African Americans to step up into the working class.
These Black porters and chefs
worked in narrow hallways and cramped kitchens
but created the elevated luxury experience
that catered to passengers paying top dollar.
It was the quality cuisine and excellent service
that made the Pullman experience legendary.
And my grandfather, Vernon Satterfield Sr.,
who died before I was born, was a Pullman porter too.
I know very little of his story.
But I hope to get a glimpse of my grandfather's life today,
sitting with the son of a train car waiter,
Mr. Michael McGoings,
and a 99-year-old former Pullman Porter,
Mr. Benjamin Gaines Sr.
Mr. Gaines, you are almost 100 years old.
So salute to you.
Tell us what was the role of a porter
and what was your experience.
The way I got started
was there was a man that worked on the mail car.
He told me, he said, "Get a job with the railroad."
And he told me about the union and all this,
and he said that it's good pay.
So I left Kentucky and came to Chicago
and started working for the Pullman Company.
You received passengers. You took them to their room.
You made them comfortable.
And the Pullman cars, they had top end of everything.
The restaurant cars had the best food
because during the war, people used to ride the train
just to eat good.
They'd almost fight to get on the train, if they had to,
to get a good meal, you know.
Place us if you can.
What year or what era are you speaking of?
-It was in the '40s. -In the '40s.
Okay. That's when my grandfather
started working for the Chicago Railway as well.
-And Mr. McGoings. -Yes.
You actually grew up traveling on the railways.
So what was that like for you?
As soon as I was old enough,
I would ride up with my father, sometimes for the day, and come back.
Because he loved to shop.
He had acquired a very elaborate taste in clothes.
You know, with working the Capitol Limited, you got politicians,
you got business people dressed in suits and what have you,
and he absorbed a lot from them,
especially how they dressed.
Every suit he owned, and he owned a lot of them,
were custom-made,
and he brought that curiosity home to us,
and we absorbed that.
And that's what access to the trains did for us.
It exposed us, and that increased our vision and our minds.
That's a beautiful legacy to pass on,
and I don't think that I actually made that connection.
I just thought I love to travel. I was born this way.
But now I'm realizing that I'm actually connected
to this lineage of movement and travel and curiosity.
This meal is excellent.
[Gaines] Mm.
[McGoings] You lick your chops, man. It's so good.
[Gaines] It's a very fine meal. Lamb is one of my favorite dishes.
Obviously, there weren't too many Black folks
who were enjoying this food as patrons on the train.
But do either of you have any specific memories about
high-end food that maybe was served?
[McGoings] I think what I remembered most was the turkey.
It was cooked right there, excellently.
And I'm curious about you too, Mr. Gaines.
[Gaines] The Black chefs, and they were excellent cooks,
they were out of the South.
And they used to put crew food on that was for us.
It was always very good.
They had a touch that they put in the food
that just made it very palatable.
We enjoyed the cooking there.
Yes. And so you're working as a porter in the 1940s,
so what was that like for you?
You have to recognize that during this time,
segregation was, uh, really rampant.
And, uh, you had people
who didn't respect you as a person.
They would call you George.
What is the meaning of that word?
George Pullman.
So it was a way
of putting you in your place, so to speak.
-[Stephen] Um-hmm. -Uh…
You are not a human being.
You are not an adult, you know.
-You still a boy. [chuckles] -[Stephen] Um-hmm.
To pick up on what Mr. Gaines said, if I may right now.
My father, he had quite a few issues with the name George.
And his response was, you know,
"My name isn't George."
"If you want someone to call George,
you should make yourself a baby and name him George."
[Stephen chuckling]
[Gaines] Sounds very familiar.
I was on the West Coast,
and I was working as a club car attendant.
So, I'm serving drinks and all of a sudden…
I feel a foot up my butt.
And just reflexes,
I had this, uh, tray.
I brought that tray around,
like this, at his forehead.
God stopped that tray.
'Cause I didn't stop it. If I'd have hit him, I'd have killed him.
I was fume-- just fuming with anger.
[Stephen] Yeah.
So I went to my buffet, and I told people, I said,
"I'm closing the buffet for a while."
So, uh, this guy who did it said,
"You're one of them smart niggers."
And he stepped inside of my buffet,
and I took my hand and shoved him out.
So that was one of the incidents that I had that…
it was very trying and, uh, it…
was something that. uh…
I… I've never forgotten, as you can tell.
I still remember it, you know, very vividly.
[Stephen] A memory like that clearly sticks with you for a lifetime.
I never met my grandfather, but through Mr. Gaines's stories,
I can imagine what his life as a Pullman porter must have been like.
I picture him holding his head up and walking with dignity too.
In Chicago, the legacy of The Great Migration
is best experienced through the culinary gems of the south side.
Places like Lem's Bar-B-Q are descendants of the Great Migration,
taking flavors of the South and adapting it up North.
These Southern flavors are still alive
and reimagined
by James Beard award-winning chef Eric Williams of Virtue restaurant.
Here, I'm joined by Chicago natives
Dario Durham, a local food podcaster,
and Natalie Moore, journalist and author of a book
on the history of the South Side of Chicago.
Thank you, Chef, for hosting us here at Virtue.
Tell us where we are.
Well, you're in Hyde Park. So you're on the South Side of Chicago.
One of the neighborhoods that probably has the highest density
of Black wealth in our city.
You have judges and postal workers and teachers and Corporate America folks.
A very tight-knit community.
[Erick] South Side has a very rich history.
One would say the epicenter of African American ingenuity,
entertainment, arts.
-[Natalie] The Black businesses, banks. -[Erick] Yeah.
-[Natalie] Ebony, Jet, haircare. -[Erick] All of them. All were Black.
We wouldn't even have waves if it wasn't for Chicago.
[Dario] Thank God, Chicago.
-[Natalie] We had ultra sheen, soft sheen. -[Dario] All the sheens.
-[Natalie] And luster. -[Erick] We got Ida B. Wells.
She co-founded NAACP.
Bessie Coleman. First Black woman to fly a plane.
Mahalia Jackson created gospel.
-Thomas Dorsey. -[Dario] Don't forget the blues.
[Erick] You can't forget the blues.
We wouldn't even dance right if it wasn't for Chicago.
[all laugh]
The Great Migration really helped us make a footprint here in Chicago.
For y'all, do you have these kinds of understandings of your own origins
in Chicago as connected to a migration?
Or what do y'all know
about your own sort of family or community history?
I'm the granddaughter of the Great Migration.
My mother's side came from Georgia.
My other grandfather, he came because he was fleeing
racial violence in Nashville.
He had two brothers who had to leave in the middle of the night.
-They were at risk for lynching. -Right.
But he was a Pullman porter.
I'm listening, but it's like holding up a mirror
because I'm from Georgia, and my grandfather is from Tennessee.
He came here as a young man to Chicago
and became a Pullman porter.
And so, I am very much a product of the same history.
2% before the Great Migration was Chicago's Black population.
It was 33% after the Great Migration, and they came from the South.
So, you know, we're deeply rooted, you know what I mean?
We're deeply rooted with Mississippi and Arkansas and all the South.
[Stephen] Chef, this looks incredible.
[Erick] So we have red peas, baby yellow and green zucchini,
a little bit of fried okra, squash blossoms,
Um-hmm.
with hot-sauce-pickled red peppers.
In this particular setting,
we're really channeling the energy around vegetation.
But because we understand the fact
that vegetables grow a lot faster than animals,
and during the years of sharecropping and/or slavery,
we were able to sustain ourselves with vegetables a lot easier
than we would have been with animal product.
Wow, that okra batter is perfect.
[Dario] You said it was hot sauce covered--
Pickled peppers.
[Dario] Mmm.
Jeez.
Wow, that is delicious.
[Dario] You know, we came from the South.
We farmed, you know what I mean. In Chicago, the South Side of Chicago,
I'm talking early to mid-19th century, this was all swampland.
It was a lot of farms, and we had the farm, you know what I mean,
because that's what we knew.
-And a lot of these traditions continue. -[Erick] Absolutely.
As long as I can remember,
there was a garden, um, in my grandmother's backyard.
There was turn soil, rows, and tomatoes.
Greens and cabbage.
And that was… that was part of my experience.
In my family, my daddy grew up in Gary
with their garden to make… My grandparents used to garden together.
They grew tomatoes. They had chickens. They killed rabbits.
So, like, I'm very familiar with these stories in my own family.
And yet, I really have always felt, um,
earlier in my life, a kind of discomfort around,
you know, hands in the dirt.
And also, "working" for other people,
even growing up in the restaurant industry
as a young sommelier, part of the reason that I got out of the space
is because I didn't feel that my expertise was being valued.
I felt that y'all just want me to serve you.
So I'm wondering if that's resonating for y'all at all,
that as a people, as Black Americans,
we are really far away from being able
to take care of ourselves off of the land because of that servitude line.
[Natalie] Well, there's a huge urban agriculture movement here.
And also, there is an awareness of "Don't make this urban sharecropping."
Right.
So the food justice advocates
who are in this space and have the knowledge
are looking out for that,
that you're not just working land
in a different environment.
That you could do this here on the southwest side
-and not getting that living wage. -Right.
I'm heartened to know that, yes,
there are people at the head of food justice movements
who are helping us reengage in this relationship to the land
in a way that is healthy and accounts for some of the trauma
that we might be bringing into those experiences.
Because the land has the capacity to heal us too.
Like, we've talked a lot about the agency that we had
in having these plots of land and feeding ourselves.
That is part of our inheritance too.
[Stephen] Wow.
[Dario] Chef's trying to put us to sleep. [chuckles]
Okay, so this is a dish that's pretty apropos.
The Midwest is coined as a steak-and-potato town.
-[Stephen] Yes. -We have braised short ribs
with crushed Yukon Gold potatoes
and some crispy onion rings on top.
You can't go wrong. This falls off the bone.
It's very tender. I don't actually need the knife.
-[Natalie] No, you don't. -[Dario] This is good.
Mmm.
I don't even need my teeth, it turns out, either.
[Dario] Or gums.
[chuckle]
[Stephen] Meat and potatoes may be a Midwestern staple,
but the flavors of the South are undeniable.
They take me back to my childhood in Georgia,
where my father grilled most weekends.
Chef Erick continues to pay tribute to the Great Migration
and how the South shows up on the plate in his last course.
[Erick] Got a little pound cake with some lemon curd
and some deliciousness.
-It's in a beautiful literal package. -[Dario] Yeah.
So, what's the significance of this dish?
This is a playful homage
to the shoebox meals.
The railcars, as they transported us North,
were segregated.
So there wasn't space for us to dine properly.
And so the way that we carried food,
and often times those meals were fried chicken,
because it inherently traveled very well,
it would be in a shoebox.
Not a shoebox the way that we think of it now.
They were ornate shoeboxes
because grandparents and great-grandparents
went to great detail to make that experience
what it needed to be for the children.
I really love the packaging is connected to this larger food
as a "migration" story.
Our elders and our ancestors had the ingenuity…
-Right. -…to create an experience
at a time when people didn't want us
to have something as simple as a shared meal.
[Stephen] This is who we are.
Even through land loss,
forced into debt, and racial violence,
we found a way.
We always find a way,
whether it's feeding our families as sharecroppers,
or making the brave move to the North
without any promise of what we would find.
Our fundamental creativity
led to the rise of a Black middle class.
The city of Chicago holds this history
like a badge of honor.
The migration that brought
and inspired the flavors and stylings
that the Windy City is still known for to this day.
And that creativity also journeyed from the South
to my next stop, New York City,
where African Americans
living within a three-mile radius
ignited an explosion of culinary creativity
and cultural expression.
A renaissance.
[closing theme music playing]
[music ends]