Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South,1865-1960

Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens

Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens

DOMESTIC WORKERS IN THE SOUTH, 1865–1960

The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture Waldo E. Martin Jr. and Patricia Sullivan, editors

Rebecca Sharpless

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS CHAPEL HILL

© 2010 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Designed by Kimberly

Bryant and set in Miller by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. The paper in this book meets the

guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for

Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press

has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sharpless, Rebecca.

Cooking in other women's kitchens : domestic workers in the South, 1865–1960 /

Rebecca Sharpless.

p. cm. — (The John Hope Franklin series in African American history and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3432-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. African American women household employees—Southern States—History. 2. Women

cooks—Southern States—Social conditions 3. African American women—Southern States—

Social conditions 4. Southern States—Race relations—History. I. Title.

HD6072.2.U52S574 2010

331.4'816415—dc22

2010015805

cloth 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

for Tom

Siempre juntos

Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

{1} I Done Decided I'd Get Me a Cook Job

Becoming a Cook

{2} From Collards to Puff Pastry

The Food

{3} Long Hours and Little Pay

Compensation and Workers’ Resistance

{4} Creating a Homeplace

Shelter, Food, Clothing, and a Little Fun

{5} Mama Leaps off the Pancake Box

Cooks and Their Families

{6} Gendering Jim Crow

Relationships with Employers

{7} If I Ever Catch You in a White Woman's Kitchen, I'll Kill You

Expanding Opportunities and the Decline of Domestic Work

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Cook's Wages, 1901–1960

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

The cook at Refuge plantation, Camden County, Georgia 6

An unidentified cook and a market delivery truck driver, Washington, D.C. 57

Easter, the cook for the C. A. Moers family, Fort Bend County, Texas 76

Domestic workers waiting for the streetcar, Mitchell Street, Atlanta 94

Mati, the cook for the W. W. Wilkes family, Waco, Texas 126

An unidentified cook with her employer's daughter, San Augustine, Texas 168

Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima 181

Preface

Twenty-two-year-old Cleora Thomas was not happy. Smart, pretty, energetic, with first-rate culinary training, she had more in mind for herself than being the second-floor custodian at Central High School in Muskogee, Oklahoma. When opportunity came to her, she jumped at it. Sixty-two years later, she wrote: Early in the summer of 1923, my Aunt Minnie came home for a weekend visit with the news that her employer's neighbor needed someone to take over their kitchen. My heart leapt to hear that she had recommended me; and it leapt again when Dad finally gave his consent for me to go.¹ Thomas (later Butler) was on her way to a distinguished career as a cook in the wealthiest homes in Tulsa. To Butler, cooking for rich white people in the big city was better than sweeping floors at a school, the best job she could find in Muskogee.

For centuries, women like Cleora Butler have used domestic work as a means of leaving their old lives and starting new ones. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, domestic work frequently served as a method for women to move from the countryside to the city. In the twenty-first century, it is a way for women to move from developing countries to wealthier nations.² For African American women in the United States, the process of going from where they were to where they wanted to be took several generations, as domestic work served as a middle ground between slavery and an open economy.³ Between emancipation in 1865 and the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, African American women did domestic work, including cooking, to earn wages and support their families, biding their time until better opportunities opened. When those chances came, most of them took other types of jobs as quickly as possible.

The first purpose of this book is to look at the way that African American women such as Cleora Thomas Butler used domestic work, particularly cooking, to bridge the old ways and the new, from slavery to employment of their own choosing. Just as Butler moved from Muskogee to Tulsa and from custodial work to cooking, between the Civil War and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of African American women went, first, from being slaves to becoming free women. They next migrated from farms, plantations, and small towns to cities, and they shifted their paid labor from field work to domestic work (including cooking), and then from domestic work to manufacturing, clerical, and professional positions. Until better employment opportunities became available, African American women cooked in other people's homes to make a way out of no way.⁴

I concentrate specifically on cooks rather than domestic workers in general for several reasons. This study began as a part of a larger work on southern women who used cooking to push the boundaries of women's so-called spheres. While I remain interested in boardinghouse keepers, tearoom proprietors, caterers, and cookbook writers, the situations of African American domestic cooks differed substantially from those of the white women who worked in food services. And so this study took on a life of its own, defined by race and place. Like domestic workers in general in the American South, the women in this study were African American, hired almost exclusively by white housewives, and race shaped their labors significantly. They worked, not in the public, but in the private homes of their employers, largely isolated from their peers and nurturing work cultures.

Cooking differs from cleaning, laundry, and child care, the other types of domestic labor that African American women did, and it provides an excellent medium for telling the intertwined stories of African American women and the American South. Food preparation carries a great deal of weight in human society at large, in the postbellum South as in the present. Food is a significant cultural symbol, and women's involvement in its production indicates a great deal about the way a society functions. Historian Donna Gabaccia observed, Psychologists tell us that food and language are the cultural traits humans learn first and the ones that they change with the greatest reluctance. Humans cannot easily lose their accents after the age of about twelve; similarly, the food they ate as children forever defines familiarity and comfort.⁵ As individuals become imprinted with their food preferences, so too do entire societies. Food delineates a culture, demonstrating who is and is not a part of that culture and expressing status and prestige.⁶ What humans eat at home and what they offer guests are general markers for their society.⁷ As cooks, African American women profoundly shaped the foodways of the South and, hence, its overall culture.⁸

Defining who was and was not a cook proved to be difficult, for job descriptions were notoriously unpredictable and ill-defined. The U.S. Census Bureau struggled with the classification of domestic work for decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and eventually gave up.⁹ I have basically taken nomenclature at face value: if a woman called herself a cook, if someone else called her a cook, or if she cooked as a significant part of her daily chores, I included her in this study. Sometimes I refer to domestic workers with the assumption that cooks are included in this group. Not all domestic workers were cooks, but all cooks in this study were domestic workers.¹⁰

THE LABOR OF DOMESTIC COOKS remained in some ways unaltered between the Civil War and the 1960s, and in other ways it changed significantly, in large part because of active contestation by the cooks themselves. Cooking was never easy, however, and women found themselves fighting powerful odds to create satisfactory work situations. Hence, the second purpose of the book is to discover how African American cooks successfully functioned within a world of extremely hard work, low wages, and omnipresent racial strife. They made homes for their families with enormous effort, and they comprised the largest group of African American women who left their own homes to go to white people's houses every day. As a group, they gained the most benefit and suffered most keenly from being sequestered in white homes on a daily basis. While many African Americans dealt with the indignities of Jim Crow by avoiding contact with white people as much as possible, cooks lacked that option. Rather, by being in close contact with white people all day, every day, these women had to come up with coping mechanisms of their own.¹¹ Cooks, therefore, created a vanguard of resistance to the iniquities of segregation, as they found myriad ways to maintain their dignity and sense of self-worth.¹²

A THIRD, ORIGINALLY UNINTENDED purpose of this book is to refute the widespread popular stereotypes about African American cooks. I did not begin this project with that outcome in mind, but racist clichés surfaced at every turn and had to be dealt with. Other scholars have expertly parsed the Mammy and Aunt Jemima tropes,¹³ and I am chiefly interested in seeing through those images to the real lives beneath them. The stereotypes have been so pervasive, however, that I have constantly found myself working in opposition to them. And so they warrant brief discussion here.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the figure of the African American woman as a cook has been a mainstay in white American popular culture. In books, movies, cookbooks, and advertising, a rotund, head-ragged figure has been made to grin broadly, speak in crude dialect, comfort white children, and always put the needs of other people before her own.¹⁴ These so-called Mammy cooks were the creations of white people's imaginations, awash in longing for a golden age that never existed.¹⁵ Doris Witt, in her brilliant study Black Hunger, remarks that such nostalgia vividly expressed individual and collective fears about threats to white patriarchal power in a volatile social order.¹⁶ The memories hark back to slavery, when a cook almost always lived on the premises of her owner's home, was on call twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, and could not quit.

After emancipation, the economic relationships were laid bare, as much of the old paternalism began to die. Cooks no longer automatically prepared meals for their white families day in and day out; rather, they expected to receive money to use for their own families in exchange for their labors. African American women strove to rationalize their tasks, to limit the number of hours that they would be expected to work, and to receive compensation commensurate with their considerable exertions. Although many white women chose to believe that the relationships between them and their employees remained affective, African American women knew that the arrangements were in fact material. To be sure, many worked out of love. But the love was not for their employers but for their own families.¹⁷

Historians have documented well the reactions of southern whites after emancipation to African Americans’ desires for what they had seen whites enjoy—the vote, schools, churches, legal marriages, judicial equity, and the chance . . . to retain the rewards of their labor.¹⁸ After 1865, white southerners created dramatic systems of segregation and racial violence to command black lives and black labor by any means necessary.¹⁹ African Americans, male and female, knew what it was to live in constant fear—for one's dignity, for one's livelihood, for one's very life. Stereotypes were among the means that white southerners developed and expanded in the hope of controlling African Americans. Powerful white people created images of African American women as subservient and jolly, images designed to persuade both whites and Africans Americans of the truth of such a description.²⁰

Ascribing the role of cook to African American women well suited the purposes of white southern racists. To many white southerners, cook meant African American, and in fact African Americans represented an ever-growing percentage of domestic workers in the post–Civil War South as white women found other employment opportunities. Social commentator Orra Lang-horne, writing in 1901, observed that Negroes and servants were synonymous terms in the average [white] Southerner's vocabulary.²¹ Sentimental writers, longing for the lost fantasy of closeness between African Americans and whites, remarked on the use of wet nurses during slavery, in which African American women suckled white infants with the breast milk that they produced for their own babies.²² Associating African American women with food, furthermore, branded them as being closer to nature, wilder, less refined than their white employers.

Into the mix of racism and power also came corporate capitalism, powerfully shaping the conceptions of white Americans, North and South, about African American female cooks. The mythical figure of the African American cook became entrenched in the white American imagination in 1893, when Missouri businessman R. T. Davis hired former slave Nancy Green to cook pancakes from his company's mix at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Green proved hugely popular, and with sharp marketing by the Davis Milling Company, her portrayal of a fictitious former slave named Aunt Jemima became a nationally recognized icon.²³ Throughout the twentieth century the figure of Aunt Jemima appeared on an array of goods, from cookie jars to flour scoops, rag dolls, mixing bowls, pancake spatulas, toy stoves, and of course, the boxes of the pancake mix itself.²⁴ The image of Aunt Jemima rooted itself deeply into the white American consciousness, representing a reassuring tie with the Old South in which cooks worked happily for whatever reward came their way.

Although African American women strove to control their own lives, not merely to exist in reaction to white people's imaginations, the continuing effects of both racial slavery and popular historical memory shaped twentieth-century domestic work.²⁵ Art historian Michael Harris argues that the stereotype of Mammy terribly affected African Americans.²⁶ Certainly the images had real consequences for real people's lives. When Cleora Butler took that first cooking job in 1923, she was young and slender. Working for the Robertson family of Tulsa, she replaced an older cook, a large woman named Hattie, who was moving north, likely as part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the southern United States to the urban North. Butler's initial wage was fourteen dollars a week, considered very good money even in oil-rich Tulsa. After a year, Mrs. Robertson raised Butler's pay to $17.50 a week, the level that Hattie had been receiving when she departed. Robertson explained that, when she hired Butler, she couldn't conceive that one so young and tiny, (especially compared to Hattie), could be as qualified. In Robertson's mind, a competent cook had to be middle-aged and fat—to look like Aunt Jemima. From the very beginning of her lengthy career, Butler found herself struggling against an imaginary nemesis: the widespread, popular stereotype of the African American cook held by white southerners.²⁷

Realizing that the exterior experiences did not match what they felt on the inside, African Americans knew full well that Mammy did not represent what African Americans thought, felt, or believed black women to be.²⁸ Like Cleora Butler, most of the African American women who worked as cooks in white people's homes were not fat. They did not all wear bandannas. They did not smile all the time, and they did not automatically adore white children. Some were skillful cooks, and others were merely adequate. None of them was born simply knowing how to cook. Across the South through the early twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of African American women strove to maintain their personhood in the face of pervasive fantastic expectations by their employers and the public at large.²⁹

From the time of its appearance, the figures of Aunt Jemima and the Mammy cook provoked sharp reaction by African Americans. In the early 1920s, the National Association of Colored Women fought against a proposed Black Mammy Memorial Monument. Hallie Q. Brown, president of the NACW in 1923, criticized the proposed monument as a stone to a class of dead saints for faithfulness.³⁰ Scholar Carter G. Woodson, writing in 1930, remarked, The Negroes of this country keenly resent any such thing as the mention of the Plantation Black Mammy, so dear to the hearts of those who believe in the traditions of the Old South. Such a reminder of that low status of the race in the social order of the slave régime is considered a gross insult.³¹ The recoil against the image of the black Mammy has continued unabated, which is unmistakable evidence of its negative power. In the 1980s, author Alice Walker declared that Al Jolson's singing about Mammy was as if he's murdered our true grandmothers . . . before our very eyes.³²

Late-twentieth-century poet Kate Rushin uses a teasing children's insult from the game known as the dozens to express the historic tensions in the lives of African American cooks:

Aunt Jemima

Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box

Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box?

AuntJemimaonthepancakebox?

Auntjemimaonthepancakebox?

Ainchamamaonthepancakebox?

Ain't chure Mama on the pancake box?

Mama Mama

Get off that box

And come home to me³³

Through her recasting of Aunt Jemima, the ultimate symbol and personification of the black cook, servant, and mammy,³⁴ Rushin shows that African American domestic workers were more than an image. Each was some-one's mother—someone's daughter, sister, wife—and, somewhere, people were waiting on her to finish her daily work, leave the employer's space, and come home. Despite American society's attempts to commodify the African American cook and her work, the women themselves resisted stereotyping and lived their lives according to their own dictates to the greatest extent that they could.

RATHER THAN WORKING WITHIN the filters of the media and white people's sentiments and prejudices, I have strived to use the women's own words and ideas throughout this study—as historian Psyche Williams-Forson's says, to read African American lives from the perspective of the people and not from the imagery that tried to define them.³⁵ To render this task faithfully, one must listen to the voices of the African American women themselves, and not only to those of the white people who would represent them to their own ends.

As historian Mia Bay has noted, for most of America's history, most African Americans were neither literate nor in any position to be at all candid in expressing their views of white character.³⁶ But while few African American women wrote or published before 1900, after emancipation their voices were never completely silent. The remarkable nineteenth-century women who did put their words into print, such as Anna Julia Cooper and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, numbered among the elite who earned their livings by teaching, writing, and speaking, not by cooking or scrubbing. But they did evince concern about the plight of working women in publications such as Cooper's Colored Women as Wage-Earners (1899). In 1912, a woman with the pen name Negro Nurse wrote eloquently and forcefully about her life in an article titled More Slavery at the South in the progressive periodical The Independent, which featured life stories of ordinary Americans.

After World War I, ordinary women began expressing themselves in writing through their letters. Dozens of women wrote to the Chicago Defender, requesting positions as cooks in the North. While the letters are generally quite short, they reveal women's poor living and working conditions, passionate desires to leave the South and improve their lives, and wishes to use their culinary skills to do so. Written as they were by people living on farms owned by white people, working in white people's houses, these letters were bold cries for social change.³⁷ Equally daring were the letters written during the 1930s to New Deal agencies. As they thought about the New Deal, domestic workers came to believe that President Franklin Roosevelt, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins cared personally about them. Hundreds of African American women poured out their woes in letters that eventually found their way to the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor. The letters provide rare glimpses into the lives of women who hoped that the people who brought about the New Deal would bring benefits to them. The women discuss wages, working conditions, and their wishes and dreams in their correspondence.

Beginning in the 1930s, African American women spoke with interviewers, articulating their ideas, hopes, and fears. The first substantial body of interviews came through the Federal Writers’ Project during the New Deal, included in both the Former Slave Narratives project and the Folklore project. While the FWP interviews are far from perfect as historical evidence, they remain among the richest sources of information on African American lives between 1850 and 1930.³⁸ In 1958, Elizabeth Kytle, who was white, wrote a first-person biography of Atlanta cook Willie Mae Wright,³⁹ published by Alfred A. Knopf. Although Kytle concealed Wright's name during the initial publication, the idiomatic speech and the apparent lack of interposition by Kytle render Willie Mae a plausible and useful study of one woman's life.⁴⁰ During the last third of the twentieth century, the explosion of interest in social history, African American history, and women's history led to a number of significant, extremely valuable oral history projects. In 1979–80, public radio station WRFG in Atlanta created the Living Atlanta oral history project, documenting the lives of working people in the city, and some of the interviews were published in 1990 in a book with the same name. Telling Memories among Southern Women, Susan Tucker's foundational study of domestic workers in New Orleans and Mobile, appeared in 1988 as the product of an oral history project at Tulane University's Newcomb College Center for Research on Women. And in the late 1980s, Duke University began its project titled Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South. The resulting book, Remembering Jim Crow: AfricanAmericans Tell about Life in the Segregated South, appeared in 2001. Dozens of interviews with African American women in smaller projects across the South augmented these large projects.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, at least two autobiographies by African American cooks appeared. Cleora Butler published her memoir, Cleora's Kitchens: The Memoir of a Cook and Eight Decades of Great American Food, in 1985.⁴¹ Idella Parker brought out her story in two volumes, Idella: Marjorie Rawlings’ Perfect Maid and Idella Parker: From Reddick to Cross Creek, in 1992 and 1999, respectively. Butler's and Parker's books contrast strongly in style and tone. Butler's upbeat book focuses on her mostly positive experiences and features a wealth of recipes. Parker's two volumes concentrate on her relationship with her employer, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and the circumstances of her life in Florida, and there are no recipes. Along with Willie Mae Wright's first-person biography, Butler's and Parker's accounts clearly express African American cooks’ thoughts and feelings in their own words.⁴² Although Butler and Parker both wrote with the help of others, they plainly are the authors, and the books depict as no others the experiences of two intelligent, thoughtful, reflective African American women who worked in other women's kitchens.

Cookbooks are documents of the time and place in which they are produced, and they can be useful, if sometimes maddening, sources for researching the lives and work of African American women.⁴³ Cookbooks written by African American women remained rare until the 1960s. Of the twenty-five cookbooks that Doris Witt has identified as written by African Americans between 1800 and 1960, it appears that none was written by a cook in a private home. Two were written by women formerly from the South who had left the region and crafted celebrated careers by cooking for the public. The earliest cookbook attributed to an African American woman is What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc., published in San Francisco in 1881. Abby Fisher moved from Mobile to California by the 1870s and, although illiterate, became a caterer of high regard. In her book, Fisher reveals little about herself or her past. She refers only once in a recipe to her own life experience; in Pap for Infant Diet, Fisher comments, I have given birth to eleven children and raised them all, and nursed them with this diet. It is a Southern plantation preparation.⁴⁴ About Blackberry syrup—For dysentery in children she notes, This recipe is an old Southern plantation remedy among colored people.⁴⁵ Many of the recipes are unmistakably southern: fried chicken, oyster gumbo soup, ochra gumbo, sweet potato pie, chowchow and Creole chowchow, sweet pickle recipes for peaches, pears, prunes, and watermelon rind, Jumberlie—a Creole Dish (resembling present-day jambalaya), and peach cobbler, to cite only a few. Abby Fisher left Alabama, headed west, and proceeded to win acclaim and awards for the cookery that she had learned in the South. Her recipes represent the work of African Americans in their diaspora across the United States.

In 1959, New York restaurateur Lessie Bowers published Plantation Recipes. Like Abby Fisher seventy years earlier, she moved from her native South and found commercial success. The granddaughter of a South Carolina slave noted for her cooking ability, Bowers grew up on her family's land and learned to cook as a child, taking over the Sunday cooking duties for the family at age twelve. She attended Claflin College, then moved to New York in 1932, where she completed a degree in dietetics. After working at a New York restaurant, Bowers opened her own restaurant, The Virginian, in Bronxville, New York, during World War II.⁴⁶ Bowers gives no autobiographical narrative, speaking only through her recipes, and a slight handful of them relate overtly to her life: Grandmother Mary's Spicy Pear Pie, My Grand-mother's Jelly Pie, and a recipe for corned beef in which she notes, This is a recipe long treasured in the family.⁴⁷ The recipes in Plantation Recipes really have nothing to do directly with the plantation and cannot be traced to the kitchens in private homes. Bowers and her handlers may have been attempting to connect with the continuing sentimental evocation of the Old South that was so widespread in the United States at the beginning of the civil rights movement.

TO AUGMENT THE WORDS of African American women, I have also used— cautiously—cookbooks written by white authors. Cookbooks published about and in the South since the Civil War number in the hundreds, possibly thousands. Many of these cookbooks and the recipes contained in them can give important insights into the lives of African American women, but because many of these recipes were written down and reported by white women with particular cultural attitudes and tones, each one must be evaluated carefully. While the authors sometimes write with a type of affection, they often perpetuate a hierarchical and marginalizing relationship between themselves and African American culture.⁴⁸

To a large extent, I have ignored the prose that white women wrote to frame the recipes, instead looking mostly at the recipes that are clearly attributed to African American women, usually designated as Aunt or Mammy. Much superb work continually appears on southern and African American foodways, but because this is designed to be a book about the women and not the food per se, I have used recipes only when they demonstrate something pertinent about the cook—her tastes, her preferences, her skills.

Examining recipes codified by white women can be problematic. African Americans have long been wary about the expropriation of their cooking knowledge. Throughout her distinguished career, food historian Karen Hess pointed out the theft of African American women's creations by their employers. In her afterword to the reprint of What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking, Hess declares: "I should note that most of the recipes in all Southern cookbooks are, in fact, largely recipes gleaned by the writers from African American cooks, their own and others."⁴⁹ Author Alice Walker commented on such hijacking: I believe that the worst part of being in an oppressed culture is that the oppressive culture—primarily because it controls the production and dispersal of images in the media—can so easily make us feel ashamed of ourselves, of our saying, our doings, and our ways. And it doesn't matter whether these sayings, doings, or ways are good or bad. What is bad about them, and therefore, worthy of shame, is that they belong to us. Even our folklore has been ridiculed and tampered with.⁵⁰

White women mishandled African American women's recipes in several ways. First, African American women may not have wanted to share their culinary knowledge and may have been pressed to do so. Critic Doris Smith points to Ntozake Shange's novel Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo, which embeds recipes in the text as gifts of love handed down from mother to daughter.⁵¹ Smith contends, Knowledge of a recipe, and the power to withhold that knowledge, perhaps has been one of the ways in which African-American slaves and servants have exerted control (albeit limited) over mistresses and employers. And this knowledge was not to be given away.⁵² Cooks who did not wish to give away their recipes might give incorrect proportions or directions to people who pushed them. White cookbook writer Marion Flexner told of a family cook named Molly, whom Flexner's aunt tried to beg for the recipe for her famous Shredded Apple Pie. Molly gave her a recipe with ingredients left out and incorrect proportions. Flexner asked Molly why she didn't give away the recipe and reported Molly's response in dialect: ‘Lissen chile,’ she said seriously, shaking her finger at me, ‘dat pie is ma specialty—see? Effen Ah gives my receipts to everybody what axes for ’em, what Ah gwine ter hafe lef ’ ter surprise ’em wid?’ She put her hand kindly on my arm. ‘Ah'll give you a piece of advice from an ol’ woman—always keep sumpin’ in reserve what you kin do better'n ennybody else, and don’ share dat secret wid no one.’⁵³ Molly realized that she had created a very special dish, and she wanted to continue to use that creation for her own advantage.

Cleora Butler, longtime cook for the elite white families of Tulsa, confirmed the power to give or withhold as she recalled the pleasure she felt in sharing a recipe with a wealthy white woman who had benefited the city's African American community: Following dinner, Mrs. Phillips came into the kitchen, not only to congratulate the staff on the boned squab stuffed with wild rice, but also to secure my recipe for the torte (with her promise never to pass it on to anyone). I told her she was most welcome to pass it on to anyone she wished, explaining I felt it was little enough in return for the many wonderful things the Phillips family had done for the citizens of North Tulsa.⁵⁴ Butler firmly believed that a recipe could be a suitable gift to a generous benefactor. African American women freely shared advice and skills with one another. Their understandable reticence seems to have been mainly toward white women.

Like Butler, African American women, either willingly or through coercion, did give their recipes to their employers and others. The white appropriation of the African American voice and her work through recipes appears throughout cookbooks beginning about 1900, and it continues today.⁵⁵ As critic Sylvia Wynter has pointed out, whites marginalized and contained African American creative cultural activity as black culture . . . became an original source of raw material to be exploited.⁵⁶

Much is made in white-authored cookery books of African American women's either unwillingness or inability to write down recipes. With a long legacy of illiteracy, African American women did cook by feel much of the time rather than by the codified recipes of domestic science writers.⁵⁷ Negro Nurse, writing in 1912, coolly appraised the matter of cooking by instinct: We do not cook according to scientific principles because we do not know anything about scientific principles. Most of our cooking is done by guesswork or by memory. We cook well when our ‘hand’ is in, as we say, and when anything about the dinner goes wrong, we simply say, ‘I lost my hand today!’⁵⁸ Idella Parker recalled the beginning of the cookbook titled Cross Creek Cookery, which Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings assembled in the early 1940s: As I have said before, my recipes were in my hands and head. I never wrote them down until Mrs. Rawlings started on that cookbook. When I cooked, I put in a pinch of this and pinch of that, but I couldn't say just how much of anything I used. I tasted and added like all good cooks.⁵⁹ Parker claimed for herself the right of an experienced cook to make adjustments rather than being dominated or intimidated by a printed recipe.

Parker's style of cooking and the written culture of the cookbook clashed in Rawlings's kitchen. Parker wrote that Rawlings would have none of that. . . . We were months and months together in that tiny kitchen, because she was determined that every recipe would have just the right ingredients, in just the right amounts.⁶⁰ Rawlings and Parker set up a common trope, in which the supposedly exotic, other African American woman cooked by innate ability and the supposedly more intelligent, rational white woman empiricized her work. The contrast between the primitive, natural state of African American cookery and the relatively more ordered white world appears over and over in white-authored cookbooks as African American women thus became mediators between nature and culture.⁶¹

White cookbook writers congratulated themselves for capturing their booty. In recording the recipe for Cleo's Chopped Oysters, cookbook author Betty Patterson used the editorial we, writing, The evolution of this recipe is a story in itself. With rare tact we obtained rather definite proportions, though Cleo spurned measuring anything. For Mam Jude's Battercakes, she remarked, We claim credit for evolving a definite measure for this recipe.⁶²

Such situations establish the African American cook as exotic and other. In the world of the southern cookbook, African American women's cooking skill is magical and innate.⁶³ The cooks’ work may be depicted, if not as magic, then as haphazard. As Doris Smith observed, White people have denigrated the intelligence of black cooks by calling their work improvisatory.⁶⁴ Doris Witt finds ample evidence of cookbook writers’ contrasting attitudes in Mary Stuart Smith's 1885 Virginia Cookery. Mary Stuart Smith contradicts herself in her discussion of intelligence versus intuition in bread making. Witt writes, When African American cooks succeed in bread-making, they are ‘stupid people’ who have ‘magic in the touch’; when white cooks want to ‘learn’ bread-making, they need have only a ‘willing mind.’⁶⁵

Frequently, white authors printed recipes of African American cooks with absolutely no credit or attribution. In the 1940s, white cookbook writer Marion Brown asked Mrs. William H. Clinkscales of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, for her clam chowder recipe. Brown observed, Mrs. Clinkscales promised that she would let me have it, if she could persuade her Negro cook to give exact proportions. After a long period of waiting, the recipe arrived with the notation, ‘This is as near it as possible.’ Yet, apparently without irony, Brown titled the recipe Mrs. Clinkscales’ Clam Chowder.⁶⁶ In Brown's mind, the question of ownership seemed to come down on the side of the person who paid the creator, and the creator received no acknowledgment.

Clinkscales's cook was never able to claim her creation, but Idella Parker, longtime cook for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, commented almost fifty years later on recipes for which she received no credit in Cross Creek Cookery: Many of the recipes in the book were mine, but she only gave me credit for three of them, including ‘Idella's Biscuits.’ There were several others that were mine, too, such as the chocolate pie, and of course it was me who did most of the cooking when we were trying all the recipes out. All I ever got from the cookbook was an autographed copy, but in those days I was grateful for any little crumb that white people let fall, so I kept my thoughts about the cookbook strictly to myself.⁶⁷

IN THINKING ABOUT white people telling the stories of African Americans, critic Lorne Fienberg