Sine amore, nihil est vita—(Without love life is pointless.)
Love! Do we find love with our ears, our eyes, our heart?
Love! Is it a destination or a journey or both?
Love! Touch and smell, are they two keys to unlock heart’s door?
Love! At heart’s door is passion needed to find the strength to turn the keys?
This month I had the pleasure to read Hot, Hot, Chicken A Nashville Story, written by Rachel Louise Martin. Her story dissipates time’s fog that obscured clarity of just why and how Nashville’s signature dish stayed hidden for decades in the city’s Black communities—and then became a global obsession. (Vanderbilt University Press)
Carla Hall, chef and author of Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration, summarizes Hot, Hot Chicken as follows: Focusing on a single dish and the branches of the Prince family who created it, Rachel Louise Martin uses Nashville’s signature , world famous hot chicken to guide us through the history of a quintessential Southern American town. This book serves as comprehensive guide to a great city and to the people who were positively influenced by the African American culture it sought, so often, to undermine. The delicacy of hot chicken is a thread between two cultures and gives historical perspective to this culinary craze.
Reading Martin’s story delivered Carla Hall’s written promise and much more. I won’t share the details of why the first “recipe” was created over 130 years ago in Nashville. I will leave one clue; passion was an inspiration. You will have to read Hot Hot Chicken to find the details of that inspiration! I was surprised to learn how it wasn’t only Jim Crow laws and practices that shaped and pressured African American neighborhoods. The early twentieth century zoning regulations, the 1930’s New Deal, the 1950’s federal interstate building program, federal grants followed by civil rights legislation and public housing projects also pressured and moved many Nashville neighborhoods around.
My quick summary here does not do justice to the author’s written details about Individual persons, families, businesses, and institutions that were built on the corpses of residents and their neighborhoods. Hot chicken joints, along with country music are still staples of Nashville life however, these older cultures are being courted by new dancing partners, foreign immigrants. That fact surprised me.
Why should I be surprised? Why not. I’ve just lived through America First policies and the mega-phonic fear mongering from our tin hat leaders of the past four plus years. (Our southern boarders are being attacked by rapists and murderers and on and on!)
Martin enlightened me in her conclusion on page 158 , “Nashville entered the last decade of the twentieth century a black-and- white city whose place on the map of international migration was questionable at best,” wrote immigration scholar Jamie Winders. By 2010, 10 percent of the city’s population were immigrants and they accounted for almost 60 percent of the people who moved to the city. And it isn’t just about the influx of Latinx immigrants. Nashville has more Kurdish immigrants than any other city in the nation, about sixty thousand Bhutanese and seventeen thousand Egyptians. (Further on Martin writes.) But as happened over the past one hundred fifty years as the new residents moved in, the original residents fled.
This month Hot, Hot Chicken A Nashville Story was my main course. For my literary dessert I read Vermont Afternoons with Robert Frost by Vrest Orton. My family and I love Vermont and I love Robert Frost. It is a shame that this small book has never crossed my path until now. (It was published in 1979.) This book includes “extracts from letters from Robert Frost to Vrest Orton, never before published.” Mr. Orton had a friendship with Frost that started in New York City in the 1920’s and lasted there and in Vermont for decades thereafter. Orton recounts many afternoons they spent together as neighbors in Shaftsbury Vermont. I will highlight one paragraph that Orton shared in this book. It resonates with me as I reflect on immigration. On page 13 chapter IV he writes the following; After the stock market crash in 1929, when I was living in New York and seeing Frost once in a while, he precipitated a decision one day by asking me, in his inimitable fashion, why I didn’t “ease off on New York.” He declared that what you are escaping to is more important than what you are escaping from. That coming from one of the greatest American poets is a philosophical point that supersedes poetical form and meter for me.
In effect, Frost and Orton were immigrants traveling from the city culture of New York to the country culture of Vermont. The crash of ’29 and the societal fracture that followed was part of their stimuli that precipitated their flight. In Nashville, African American cultures newly born from slavery emigrated to new neighborhoods and created new lives only to be caught up in the human tsunami of fear and hate. For decades immigrants from Central and South America have attempted to escape their fears and hurts only to find walls of more fear and distrust at our southern borders. Today, we attempt to help Afghan citizens fleeing their fears, hurts, and tortures. My prayers are with them but I am wary that they too will find more walls of exclusion thrust up before them in the days ahead. As Robert Frost so pointedly stated almost 100 years ago, what you are escaping to is more important than what you are escaping from.
As I emigrate to my metaphorical lighthouse this month and reflect, I realize I am part of the new minority of our Country. The latest census shows that all the former minorities living in the USA together are the new majority. And as one of the colonial neighbors of my Ellsworth ancestors, Samuel Adams, once proclaimed, It does not take a majority to prevail….. but rather an irate minority keen on setting brush fires of freedom in the minds of men. I believe freedom has always been born from a spark. This country has sparked fires of freedom since our Revolution. One freedom fire actually lends me to add two words at the end of Adams thoughtful quote; and women.
We are still evolving as a country of freedoms. Our newest minorities will be manifesting their own “brush fires” of freedom. Long after the wild fires smoke clear from our skies their freedom fires will smoke out those in our country and those around the world that attempt to build walls blocking change. Walls built with bricks of fear (of change) and hate.
Joan Acocella ends her New Yorker article ( August 23, 2021) Aftershocks with this sentiment. American literature is not finished with the subject of immigration, and won’t be, as long as we have immigrants, and consider their experience important—-indeed, consider it our experience. How do we consider it our experience? I will try with empathy and unconditional love for what I intuit is the truth, their truth!
Be in peace and joy.
Thank you for reading,
Mark