January 24, 2023 • 25 mins
It’s our 100th episode! What better way to celebrate than taking y’all behind the poetry of one of my favorite poems, Our Own Potluck. Listen in on how envisioned a living room of Black women led me to write this poem and how much our love the living room we have here on the podcast. Thanks for listening for 100 episodes!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
Everybody, Welcome back to this week's episode of Her with
Amina Brown. And this week's episode is a celebration. This
is the one hundred episode of Her with Amina Brown. Q. Applause,
Q applause, Q. Confetti, que balloons, que celebratory things, pyro
technics if you're into that, que pyro technics right here.
(01:03):
Let me let me be honest with y'all for a second.
I don't know why I said that, as if all
of these podcasts have not been me telling y'all my business.
But let me bring y'all closer, closer into the living
room and tell you one of the hardest things about
having this podcast for me as a stage person is
that I am here in a room myself and my husband,
(01:25):
who was also my producer. He's waving a jaw and
we have recorded a lot of episodes like this, and
every now and then there'll be another one or two
people on a zoom or something. Maybe a few times
I think we've had people do in person interviews, but
for the most part, it has been me and Matt
(01:47):
in here just recording these and I miss the fact
that I can't see you, but I want to say
thank you to each of you, those of you that
are with Amina Brown O g s that we're listening
to what my assistant Lee and I referred to as
her One Point Oh, which was her before it relaunched
(02:09):
as a weekly, and those of you who just joined
us in the living room since Her with Amina Brown
has joined My Heart and the Seneca Women Podcast Network,
just know that I really appreciate you all. Every d
M from you, those of you that are my friends,
friends that text me when you've listened to these episodes,
(02:30):
any tweets I received, All of that is just so
wonderful for me because I started the relaunch of this
podcast in the middle of the pandemic, really, so we
were all at home and we were all sort of
sequestered away from each other, and even though there are
(02:51):
safer ways to gather, um, it still didn't work out
for this one hundredth episode to have a very safe
way to have pulled off the type of live episode
I want to do for y'all. But just know, the
true way that I want to celebrate that Heard with
Amina Brown made it to a hundred episodes is by
(03:14):
having a live recording where I get to meet some
of you, see some of you for the first time,
reconnect with some of you that I may have met
at events or in other aspects of life, and have
a guest have conversation where we all get to be
in the room together. So just know that is on
(03:35):
my radar and that is a plan. However, today's episode
is a behind the Poetry episode that also is befitting
as a way to celebrate this podcast making it to
a hundred episodes. So those of you who are new
to the podcast or are new to the behind the
(03:58):
Poetry episode, for whenever I do an episode that is
behind the poetry here and you know what I just
thought about, y'all. I thought about how all of these
current behind the Poetry episodes have been me taking you
all behind the poetry that I've written. But you know
what I've never done. I have never done an episode
(04:21):
where I took y'all behind the poetry with a poem
that has been really important to me or was life
changing for me in some way. So I've got all
sorts of ideas when I'm in here talking to you. Also,
I'm gonna take that back to the team and see
what we can work out there. But for today, we're
doing what is the usual behind the poetry episode, and
(04:43):
that starts out with me either uh, letting y'all listen
to a recording of the poem or me doing a
reading of the poem, which today will be a reading,
so you get to hear the poem, and then I
take you through what made me write the poem, what
is the real life story behind how the poem was written,
what is the real life story behind performing the piece
for the first time, and how do I feel about
(05:06):
the poem now. So I'm really excited to share this
piece with you all because there's a lot about this
poem that really exemplifies what I think of when I
think about the living room that I am referring to
all the time, the living room that we are in,
that no matter where you are listening to this podcast,
(05:27):
you are always in the living room with me and
with the other people that are in the community of
us listening here. So let's start off with the reading
of this episode's poem, our own pot luck, Black women,
Let's gather I love for each other and find a
(05:49):
meeting place the table, the kitchen, the porch, the Warren
couch in the living room, the flesh underneath our arms,
the curls at the nape of our next let us
bring our souls and hips to our own pot luck.
I will bring my ability to find humor in just
about everything. And you you will bring your shyness, your softness.
(06:12):
And you you will bring your takestone nonsense attitude. And
you you will bring your singing voice that pierces through
the air like the first morning light of the sun.
And you you will bring greetings and say a prayer
of blessing, of lament, of love, of grace. We will
spend time saying their names, the black women and black trends,
(06:35):
women who were taken from us. We will hold their
names close to our collar bones. We will let their
names rest in the silence of our breath, and we
will fight for them. We will then speak our own
names to each other, to the flowers as they remind
us we still bloom, to our bellies, as they remind
us our bodies are worthy. We will bump hips trying
(06:58):
to set the table. We will gather ourselves to heal,
to remember. We will touch shoulders and find ourselves and
each other smiles. Pass me a plate past the piece. Okay,
let's start with what made me write this poem and
(07:20):
what is the real life story behind writing the poem? Okay,
so I sort of have to tell you a story
and a story and a story to get to what
made me write this poem. And I think that story
begins with Chef Edna Lewis. And I'm pretty sure that
I've spoken about Chef and the Lewis here on the podcast,
but if I haven't, Chef and the Lewis is one
(07:41):
of the four mothers of what we know as Southern
food as well as soul food. She was an amazing
black woman chef and I encountered her work originally when
I was recovering from a very intent fibroid surgery many
years ago. I said many years ago, Like I guess
(08:05):
it was a few years ago, but a few years ago.
It feels like many years ago now though, right. And
during the time of my recovery, I had a very
difficult surgery, and so during the time of my recovery,
I chose some books that I felt would be healing
books for me to read. I read Dr Schanique Walker
(08:27):
Barnes book Too Heavy a Yoke. I read Sisters of
the Yam by Bell Hooks, and I read the Taste
of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. And The Taste of
Country Cooking is a cookbook, but it's almost like a
cookbook and a memoir together. And a friend of mine
(08:48):
had come over. I'm shout out to my friend Andy.
She had come over to kind of help me get
some things prepped at the house before I went into
the hospital. And one of the things that I, for
some reason cared very much about was having biscuits in
the freezer. Like I was it's very very crucial to
(09:09):
me to have fresh made biscuits, but put them in
the freezer so that if I wanted a biscuit and
I could not stand at the oven and do this
whole thing myself, that I could then kind of do
what you would normally do with what we would use
when we use Grands biscuits back in the day, right,
(09:31):
is that the brand? I think it's Grands where it's
like the can and it pops open, right. So I
really wanted that that ease of when you would use
Grands biscuits, you didn't have to think too hard about
the fact that you wanted some biscuits. So my friend
Andy came over and I had started making some biscuits
before she got there, and she looked at my little
(09:51):
pole pitiful biscuits and she was like, hey, let's use
Edna Lewis's recipe, And so she came in and did
and it was his recipe, and I talked to her
for a few for what felt like a few minutes anyways,
and she just ended up making all the biscuits, and
then we froze just the dough like before you make
(10:12):
the biscuits, so that way you could sort of take
them out of the freezer. I'm just gonna give you
all a little game right here. You do these biscuits,
you put them on a cookie sheet, and then you
put them in the freezer and then they're frozen kind
of like more individually, so you can put them all
in a zip black bag or whatever container from there.
And that was how we did it. And that was
(10:35):
the first time I'd ever heard of Edna Lewis, and
I decided to get her book. And what's really wonderful
to me about her book is that the memoir portions
are based the memoir portions and the recipes are based
on this season, right, So she's taking you through her
experience as a little girl growing up in Freetown, Virginia,
(10:58):
which was a town of freed black folks post emancipation.
And she's talking about how these are black folks in
her community, her her parents, her family, you know, friends
of her family, and these memories she had as a
child of how they were eating seasonal foods and the
ways that they, you know, took these fruits and vegetables
(11:22):
from the land, how they canned certain things at certain
times of the year to be ready at other times
of the year. And I got really involved in reading
the book, and one of the things that was hardest
for me when I was recovering from surgeries, I had
I had like an eight to ten week recovery time,
so I had a long time before I was physically
(11:43):
able to stand up in the kitchen and cook like
I would have. So it was kind of great reading
her book, but it was also really tempting because you know,
you're reading all these amazing recipes. Of course I wanted
to go and cook right away. So once I got
better and had healed up from surgery, I thought about
(12:04):
the movie Julie and Julia, which some of you may
be familiar with. This film and it's a blogger who
decides to cook her way through all of Julia Child's
recipes in a particular book. And it's based on a
true story because this blog actually did happen that then
was turned into a book that then was turned into
(12:26):
this film. And I wanted to do something similar to
what she had done with Julie and Julia, but basically
make it a mean and Edna. I didn't see myself
(12:46):
being someone that could start a blog. I didn't see
myself being that, but I thought maybe if I could
sort of do like a seasonal capsule in a way.
And so before the pandemic, probably uh, I think in
twenty nineteen, I approached my friend Leric Lewin, who is
(13:08):
a fantastic photojournalist, and asked her would she be willing
to come in and collaborate with me and come to
my house while I was making these recipes and could
we get some really good photographs of the food and stuff.
And so we did this a couple of seasons, and
I remember one of the seasons, I feel like the
(13:30):
summertime maybe of nineteen my grandmother and my mother they
came over and I told them like, hey, I'm cooking
through these recipes, I would kind of look at the
different section for that season and choose maybe four or
five dishes to make, and invited my mom and grandma
to come over to kind of help me taste the food,
(13:52):
which of course they were very happy to do. And
Lyric and I worked on this together, hoping that our
goal could be to pitch it to a publication to
see if we could get the story behind what I
was doing and the photograph that she had been taking published,
And it ended up being a much longer journey to
(14:15):
actually get this published than we thought. We sent out,
you know, different pitches and things and talked with different folks,
and some of those things would fall through or sometimes
people wouldn't respond back, and we would just keep on,
you know, trying updating the photos and different things, and
finally in we're able to get a taker. And I
(14:37):
want to give a big shout out to what Stone
Magazine for being the publication that ended up taking the story.
But once I had written kind of like the essay portion,
it still seems like it needed something and I kind
of felt like maybe a poem was supposed to go there,
and I was kind of afraid to say that to
(14:58):
Lyric because my po don't come to me quickly, and
we had already waited so long trying to get this
thing published that I was almost afraid to be like, oh, Lyric,
I think, I think there's supposed to be a poem here,
and what if it takes another year for the poem
to get done. And interestingly, by the time I was
(15:19):
finishing the article, it was around June tenth, and you know,
many of us remember what that time of June was like.
There were a lot of protests going on. I think,
you know, Juneteenth, which had been very much a Texas thing,
(15:42):
or for some folks in Louisiana think it was very
sort of localized and regional the black folks that celebrated Juneteenth.
Juneteenth became not not just in the sentiment becoming a
national holiday, even though that is what happened, but I
think also it just became a part of more of
like a national consciousness, especially for a lot of black
folks that may not have been exposed to juntine. That's
(16:03):
a holiday, right, And I remember that Juneteenth coming up,
and I remember it feeling really weird for me because
I wanted to gather with other black folks around that time,
and it just wasn't yet really safe to do that.
(16:24):
So I kind of thought to myself, you know, what's
the gathering. I can imagine if there were a figurative
gathering in a way of black women, what what does
our cook out look like? What does what does our
pot luck look like? What would that be? And that
(16:46):
was sort of the beginning germination of our own pot
luck that came to my mind. I was I was
writing thinking about Juneteenth. I was writing thinking about of
the ways I have gathered with other black people, what
has felt the most life giving to me? And I
(17:07):
thought about my times as a little girl being in
the kitchen with the black women in my family. I
thought about the times I have gathered black women at
my house. I remember one Easter on Good Friday. Actually
I had a lemonade party, eliminade themed party. But I'm
(17:29):
actually thinking to myself that it was lemonade themed. But
I think we watched Homecoming. I don't think we watched Lemonade,
actually the film. I think we watched the Homecoming film
from Beyonce. And and then after we finished watching Homecoming,
we played music and sang and oh it was just wonderful,
(17:50):
and so I thought, you know, how can I sort
of bring in a poem this way that I would
love to be coming together with a lot of black
women I love. How could I put that in a poem?
So that's how the poem got written. And interestingly, the
poem came together much more quickly than I thought it would,
and I was really happy with it. I was happy
(18:13):
with the combination of having essay and poetry and lyrics
beautiful photographs as well. So the initial iteration of this
poem ended up in Whetstone Magazines online site, and it
ended up going live I think in August. Okay, what
(18:37):
is the real life story behind performing this poem for
the first time? And here's what's interesting the more I
think about this, I don't think I have performed this
poem anywhere in person that I can think of. I
had one or two virtual events that were specifically for
black women. There's one in particular I can remember right
(18:59):
now that I read this poem, and this poem is
always beautiful to me, but having the opportunity to read
this poem to an audience of black women is amazing.
Chef's Kiss Chef Edna kiss like so great. So I
feel like I haven't had a chance to see what
(19:20):
this poem would do yet on stage. And I'm sure
there are other writers and and performance poets like myself
who have had some of that experience. You have pieces
now that you've written in this very isolated time where
we were finding ways to be in community together, but
(19:42):
not in the ways we were used to. And now
here's this poem that I haven't had a chance to
really take it out there and let it get its wings.
So I don't know now that I'm telling y'all that
I'm thinking, I gotta find someplace to take this poem
out there, you know, see what its rhythm is. And
(20:05):
the last question is how do I feel about the
poem now? It's really beautiful and tender feelings that I
feel about this poem because I remember what that that
time in history was like, what it was like in
America to be in the middle of an uprising, to
(20:27):
be in the middle of a deadly pandemic as well
um to be thinking about the ways that we wished
we could have gathered together and couldn't, and to be
thinking about the ways we have gathered in the past
and will gather in the future. And I love I
love the idea of black women having our own pot
(20:50):
luck and that the things that we bring to the
pot luck are not necessarily food. Um. In this poem,
the things that each black woman is bringing there is
not her candy yams, or her mac and cheese, or
her greens or her pound cake, whatever her signature dishes.
(21:13):
But for me, when I think of the community of
black women that I have around me, there are things
that they bring to the plot. Look, that is life,
you know. Some of them bring this great sense of
spiritual groundedness. You know, those are the black women that
you look to to say a prayer or lead a meditation.
(21:34):
And the black women who are like me that are
always there to try to think of something to make
people laugh, or to say something you know, inappropriate, sometimes
depending on who's there, if it's really deemed inappropriate or not.
You know, the people who want to help us hold
space for those that we've lost. In this poem, it
(21:55):
was really important to me this idea of uh we
say their names and as a Spellman graduate, shout out
to all of my Spellman knights listening. As a Spellman graduate,
we had this exercise, and I believe first to your
students at Spellman still do this. But there's some of
(22:16):
this I don't know. It might be in the in
the lore of Spellman, so I won't tell all the details.
But there's a certain kind of ceremony that first year
students at Spellman do, and a part of it is
you are in this sacred space with all of the
women that are in your class, and each of you
(22:37):
have an individual moment to stand up and say your name.
And at the time, I don't know that it hit
me as powerful as it does now, but that's always
been resonating with me ever since. And it was important
to me that when we are together as black women,
(22:58):
I believe we are always honoring those people who are
no longer with us, um, those who have passed on,
those who were stolen from us as well, And it
was important to me too, UM also make sure that
we are saying the names of black trans women and
black trans women are black women, right, But I specifically
(23:23):
wanted to make sure the line said black trans women
because so many of our black trans women in community
with us have been taken away from us far too soon,
and I felt that moment was important, and the moment
of saying our own names to each other and finding
(23:43):
each other in our smiles, bumping hips, you know, all
of the physicality that really does happen when you're sharing
kitchen and living room and dining room and porch space
with other black women. So this poem will always have
of tender feelings for me because it will be very
(24:03):
hard for me to forget the era of time in
which the poem was written. But also the poem itself
still stands to be so true. You know. I want
black women to have our own pot luck. I want
us to be able to be in spaces that nourish us,
(24:25):
and be in spaces together and with each other and
nourish ourselves and nourish each other. That's just a beautiful,
beautiful image to me. So that's the story behind our
own pot luck, and I hope I get to have
my own pot luck with some of the black women
in my community really soon. Thanks for joining me in
the living room. You'll season Are with Amina Brown is
(25:01):
produced by Matt Owen for Solgraphy Productions as a part
of the Seneca Women Podcast Network and partnership with I
Heart Radio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe,
rate and review the podcast.
Everybody, Welcome back to this week's episode of Her with
Amina Brown. And this week's episode is a celebration. This
is the one hundred episode of Her with Amina Brown. Q. Applause,
Q applause, Q. Confetti, que balloons, que celebratory things, pyro
technics if you're into that, que pyro technics right here.
(01:03):
Let me let me be honest with y'all for a second.
I don't know why I said that, as if all
of these podcasts have not been me telling y'all my business.
But let me bring y'all closer, closer into the living
room and tell you one of the hardest things about
having this podcast for me as a stage person is
that I am here in a room myself and my husband,
(01:25):
who was also my producer. He's waving a jaw and
we have recorded a lot of episodes like this, and
every now and then there'll be another one or two
people on a zoom or something. Maybe a few times
I think we've had people do in person interviews, but
for the most part, it has been me and Matt
(01:47):
in here just recording these and I miss the fact
that I can't see you, but I want to say
thank you to each of you, those of you that
are with Amina Brown O g s that we're listening
to what my assistant Lee and I referred to as
her One Point Oh, which was her before it relaunched
(02:09):
as a weekly, and those of you who just joined
us in the living room since Her with Amina Brown
has joined My Heart and the Seneca Women Podcast Network,
just know that I really appreciate you all. Every d
M from you, those of you that are my friends,
friends that text me when you've listened to these episodes,
(02:30):
any tweets I received, All of that is just so
wonderful for me because I started the relaunch of this
podcast in the middle of the pandemic, really, so we
were all at home and we were all sort of
sequestered away from each other, and even though there are
(02:51):
safer ways to gather, um, it still didn't work out
for this one hundredth episode to have a very safe
way to have pulled off the type of live episode
I want to do for y'all. But just know, the
true way that I want to celebrate that Heard with
Amina Brown made it to a hundred episodes is by
(03:14):
having a live recording where I get to meet some
of you, see some of you for the first time,
reconnect with some of you that I may have met
at events or in other aspects of life, and have
a guest have conversation where we all get to be
in the room together. So just know that is on
(03:35):
my radar and that is a plan. However, today's episode
is a behind the Poetry episode that also is befitting
as a way to celebrate this podcast making it to
a hundred episodes. So those of you who are new
to the podcast or are new to the behind the
(03:58):
Poetry episode, for whenever I do an episode that is
behind the poetry here and you know what I just
thought about, y'all. I thought about how all of these
current behind the Poetry episodes have been me taking you
all behind the poetry that I've written. But you know
what I've never done. I have never done an episode
(04:21):
where I took y'all behind the poetry with a poem
that has been really important to me or was life
changing for me in some way. So I've got all
sorts of ideas when I'm in here talking to you. Also,
I'm gonna take that back to the team and see
what we can work out there. But for today, we're
doing what is the usual behind the poetry episode, and
(04:43):
that starts out with me either uh, letting y'all listen
to a recording of the poem or me doing a
reading of the poem, which today will be a reading,
so you get to hear the poem, and then I
take you through what made me write the poem, what
is the real life story behind how the poem was written,
what is the real life story behind performing the piece
for the first time, and how do I feel about
(05:06):
the poem now. So I'm really excited to share this
piece with you all because there's a lot about this
poem that really exemplifies what I think of when I
think about the living room that I am referring to
all the time, the living room that we are in,
that no matter where you are listening to this podcast,
(05:27):
you are always in the living room with me and
with the other people that are in the community of
us listening here. So let's start off with the reading
of this episode's poem, our own pot luck, Black women,
Let's gather I love for each other and find a
(05:49):
meeting place the table, the kitchen, the porch, the Warren
couch in the living room, the flesh underneath our arms,
the curls at the nape of our next let us
bring our souls and hips to our own pot luck.
I will bring my ability to find humor in just
about everything. And you you will bring your shyness, your softness.
(06:12):
And you you will bring your takestone nonsense attitude. And
you you will bring your singing voice that pierces through
the air like the first morning light of the sun.
And you you will bring greetings and say a prayer
of blessing, of lament, of love, of grace. We will
spend time saying their names, the black women and black trends,
(06:35):
women who were taken from us. We will hold their
names close to our collar bones. We will let their
names rest in the silence of our breath, and we
will fight for them. We will then speak our own
names to each other, to the flowers as they remind
us we still bloom, to our bellies, as they remind
us our bodies are worthy. We will bump hips trying
(06:58):
to set the table. We will gather ourselves to heal,
to remember. We will touch shoulders and find ourselves and
each other smiles. Pass me a plate past the piece. Okay,
let's start with what made me write this poem and
(07:20):
what is the real life story behind writing the poem? Okay,
so I sort of have to tell you a story
and a story and a story to get to what
made me write this poem. And I think that story
begins with Chef Edna Lewis. And I'm pretty sure that
I've spoken about Chef and the Lewis here on the podcast,
but if I haven't, Chef and the Lewis is one
(07:41):
of the four mothers of what we know as Southern
food as well as soul food. She was an amazing
black woman chef and I encountered her work originally when
I was recovering from a very intent fibroid surgery many
years ago. I said many years ago, Like I guess
(08:05):
it was a few years ago, but a few years ago.
It feels like many years ago now though, right. And
during the time of my recovery, I had a very
difficult surgery, and so during the time of my recovery,
I chose some books that I felt would be healing
books for me to read. I read Dr Schanique Walker
(08:27):
Barnes book Too Heavy a Yoke. I read Sisters of
the Yam by Bell Hooks, and I read the Taste
of Country Cooking by Edna Lewis. And The Taste of
Country Cooking is a cookbook, but it's almost like a
cookbook and a memoir together. And a friend of mine
(08:48):
had come over. I'm shout out to my friend Andy.
She had come over to kind of help me get
some things prepped at the house before I went into
the hospital. And one of the things that I, for
some reason cared very much about was having biscuits in
the freezer. Like I was it's very very crucial to
(09:09):
me to have fresh made biscuits, but put them in
the freezer so that if I wanted a biscuit and
I could not stand at the oven and do this
whole thing myself, that I could then kind of do
what you would normally do with what we would use
when we use Grands biscuits back in the day, right,
(09:31):
is that the brand? I think it's Grands where it's
like the can and it pops open, right. So I
really wanted that that ease of when you would use
Grands biscuits, you didn't have to think too hard about
the fact that you wanted some biscuits. So my friend
Andy came over and I had started making some biscuits
before she got there, and she looked at my little
(09:51):
pole pitiful biscuits and she was like, hey, let's use
Edna Lewis's recipe, And so she came in and did
and it was his recipe, and I talked to her
for a few for what felt like a few minutes anyways,
and she just ended up making all the biscuits, and
then we froze just the dough like before you make
(10:12):
the biscuits, so that way you could sort of take
them out of the freezer. I'm just gonna give you
all a little game right here. You do these biscuits,
you put them on a cookie sheet, and then you
put them in the freezer and then they're frozen kind
of like more individually, so you can put them all
in a zip black bag or whatever container from there.
And that was how we did it. And that was
(10:35):
the first time I'd ever heard of Edna Lewis, and
I decided to get her book. And what's really wonderful
to me about her book is that the memoir portions
are based the memoir portions and the recipes are based
on this season, right, So she's taking you through her
experience as a little girl growing up in Freetown, Virginia,
(10:58):
which was a town of freed black folks post emancipation.
And she's talking about how these are black folks in
her community, her her parents, her family, you know, friends
of her family, and these memories she had as a
child of how they were eating seasonal foods and the
ways that they, you know, took these fruits and vegetables
(11:22):
from the land, how they canned certain things at certain
times of the year to be ready at other times
of the year. And I got really involved in reading
the book, and one of the things that was hardest
for me when I was recovering from surgeries, I had
I had like an eight to ten week recovery time,
so I had a long time before I was physically
(11:43):
able to stand up in the kitchen and cook like
I would have. So it was kind of great reading
her book, but it was also really tempting because you know,
you're reading all these amazing recipes. Of course I wanted
to go and cook right away. So once I got
better and had healed up from surgery, I thought about
(12:04):
the movie Julie and Julia, which some of you may
be familiar with. This film and it's a blogger who
decides to cook her way through all of Julia Child's
recipes in a particular book. And it's based on a
true story because this blog actually did happen that then
was turned into a book that then was turned into
(12:26):
this film. And I wanted to do something similar to
what she had done with Julie and Julia, but basically
make it a mean and Edna. I didn't see myself
(12:46):
being someone that could start a blog. I didn't see
myself being that, but I thought maybe if I could
sort of do like a seasonal capsule in a way.
And so before the pandemic, probably uh, I think in
twenty nineteen, I approached my friend Leric Lewin, who is
(13:08):
a fantastic photojournalist, and asked her would she be willing
to come in and collaborate with me and come to
my house while I was making these recipes and could
we get some really good photographs of the food and stuff.
And so we did this a couple of seasons, and
I remember one of the seasons, I feel like the
(13:30):
summertime maybe of nineteen my grandmother and my mother they
came over and I told them like, hey, I'm cooking
through these recipes, I would kind of look at the
different section for that season and choose maybe four or
five dishes to make, and invited my mom and grandma
to come over to kind of help me taste the food,
(13:52):
which of course they were very happy to do. And
Lyric and I worked on this together, hoping that our
goal could be to pitch it to a publication to
see if we could get the story behind what I
was doing and the photograph that she had been taking published,
And it ended up being a much longer journey to
(14:15):
actually get this published than we thought. We sent out,
you know, different pitches and things and talked with different folks,
and some of those things would fall through or sometimes
people wouldn't respond back, and we would just keep on,
you know, trying updating the photos and different things, and
finally in we're able to get a taker. And I
(14:37):
want to give a big shout out to what Stone
Magazine for being the publication that ended up taking the story.
But once I had written kind of like the essay portion,
it still seems like it needed something and I kind
of felt like maybe a poem was supposed to go there,
and I was kind of afraid to say that to
(14:58):
Lyric because my po don't come to me quickly, and
we had already waited so long trying to get this
thing published that I was almost afraid to be like, oh, Lyric,
I think, I think there's supposed to be a poem here,
and what if it takes another year for the poem
to get done. And interestingly, by the time I was
(15:19):
finishing the article, it was around June tenth, and you know,
many of us remember what that time of June was like.
There were a lot of protests going on. I think,
you know, Juneteenth, which had been very much a Texas thing,
(15:42):
or for some folks in Louisiana think it was very
sort of localized and regional the black folks that celebrated Juneteenth.
Juneteenth became not not just in the sentiment becoming a
national holiday, even though that is what happened, but I
think also it just became a part of more of
like a national consciousness, especially for a lot of black
folks that may not have been exposed to juntine. That's
(16:03):
a holiday, right, And I remember that Juneteenth coming up,
and I remember it feeling really weird for me because
I wanted to gather with other black folks around that time,
and it just wasn't yet really safe to do that.
(16:24):
So I kind of thought to myself, you know, what's
the gathering. I can imagine if there were a figurative
gathering in a way of black women, what what does
our cook out look like? What does what does our
pot luck look like? What would that be? And that
(16:46):
was sort of the beginning germination of our own pot
luck that came to my mind. I was I was
writing thinking about Juneteenth. I was writing thinking about of
the ways I have gathered with other black people, what
has felt the most life giving to me? And I
(17:07):
thought about my times as a little girl being in
the kitchen with the black women in my family. I
thought about the times I have gathered black women at
my house. I remember one Easter on Good Friday. Actually
I had a lemonade party, eliminade themed party. But I'm
(17:29):
actually thinking to myself that it was lemonade themed. But
I think we watched Homecoming. I don't think we watched Lemonade,
actually the film. I think we watched the Homecoming film
from Beyonce. And and then after we finished watching Homecoming,
we played music and sang and oh it was just wonderful,
(17:50):
and so I thought, you know, how can I sort
of bring in a poem this way that I would
love to be coming together with a lot of black
women I love. How could I put that in a poem?
So that's how the poem got written. And interestingly, the
poem came together much more quickly than I thought it would,
and I was really happy with it. I was happy
(18:13):
with the combination of having essay and poetry and lyrics
beautiful photographs as well. So the initial iteration of this
poem ended up in Whetstone Magazines online site, and it
ended up going live I think in August. Okay, what
(18:37):
is the real life story behind performing this poem for
the first time? And here's what's interesting the more I
think about this, I don't think I have performed this
poem anywhere in person that I can think of. I
had one or two virtual events that were specifically for
black women. There's one in particular I can remember right
(18:59):
now that I read this poem, and this poem is
always beautiful to me, but having the opportunity to read
this poem to an audience of black women is amazing.
Chef's Kiss Chef Edna kiss like so great. So I
feel like I haven't had a chance to see what
(19:20):
this poem would do yet on stage. And I'm sure
there are other writers and and performance poets like myself
who have had some of that experience. You have pieces
now that you've written in this very isolated time where
we were finding ways to be in community together, but
(19:42):
not in the ways we were used to. And now
here's this poem that I haven't had a chance to
really take it out there and let it get its wings.
So I don't know now that I'm telling y'all that
I'm thinking, I gotta find someplace to take this poem
out there, you know, see what its rhythm is. And
(20:05):
the last question is how do I feel about the
poem now? It's really beautiful and tender feelings that I
feel about this poem because I remember what that that
time in history was like, what it was like in
America to be in the middle of an uprising, to
(20:27):
be in the middle of a deadly pandemic as well
um to be thinking about the ways that we wished
we could have gathered together and couldn't, and to be
thinking about the ways we have gathered in the past
and will gather in the future. And I love I
love the idea of black women having our own pot
(20:50):
luck and that the things that we bring to the
pot luck are not necessarily food. Um. In this poem,
the things that each black woman is bringing there is
not her candy yams, or her mac and cheese, or
her greens or her pound cake, whatever her signature dishes.
(21:13):
But for me, when I think of the community of
black women that I have around me, there are things
that they bring to the plot. Look, that is life,
you know. Some of them bring this great sense of
spiritual groundedness. You know, those are the black women that
you look to to say a prayer or lead a meditation.
(21:34):
And the black women who are like me that are
always there to try to think of something to make
people laugh, or to say something you know, inappropriate, sometimes
depending on who's there, if it's really deemed inappropriate or not.
You know, the people who want to help us hold
space for those that we've lost. In this poem, it
(21:55):
was really important to me this idea of uh we
say their names and as a Spellman graduate, shout out
to all of my Spellman knights listening. As a Spellman graduate,
we had this exercise, and I believe first to your
students at Spellman still do this. But there's some of
(22:16):
this I don't know. It might be in the in
the lore of Spellman, so I won't tell all the details.
But there's a certain kind of ceremony that first year
students at Spellman do, and a part of it is
you are in this sacred space with all of the
women that are in your class, and each of you
(22:37):
have an individual moment to stand up and say your name.
And at the time, I don't know that it hit
me as powerful as it does now, but that's always
been resonating with me ever since. And it was important
to me that when we are together as black women,
(22:58):
I believe we are always honoring those people who are
no longer with us, um, those who have passed on,
those who were stolen from us as well, And it
was important to me too, UM also make sure that
we are saying the names of black trans women and
black trans women are black women, right, But I specifically
(23:23):
wanted to make sure the line said black trans women
because so many of our black trans women in community
with us have been taken away from us far too soon,
and I felt that moment was important, and the moment
of saying our own names to each other and finding
(23:43):
each other in our smiles, bumping hips, you know, all
of the physicality that really does happen when you're sharing
kitchen and living room and dining room and porch space
with other black women. So this poem will always have
of tender feelings for me because it will be very
(24:03):
hard for me to forget the era of time in
which the poem was written. But also the poem itself
still stands to be so true. You know. I want
black women to have our own pot luck. I want
us to be able to be in spaces that nourish us,
(24:25):
and be in spaces together and with each other and
nourish ourselves and nourish each other. That's just a beautiful,
beautiful image to me. So that's the story behind our
own pot luck, and I hope I get to have
my own pot luck with some of the black women
in my community really soon. Thanks for joining me in
the living room. You'll season Are with Amina Brown is
(25:01):
produced by Matt Owen for Solgraphy Productions as a part
of the Seneca Women Podcast Network and partnership with I
Heart Radio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe,
rate and review the podcast.
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