Wandering in Strange Lands

A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots

Morgan Jerkins

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780062873064
• eBook ISBN: 9780063212442
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Social Sciences

The bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing journeys to understand her roots, the Great Migration & the displacement of black people across America.

One of TIME 's one hundred Must Read Books of 2020 and one of Good Housekeeping's Best Books of the Year

"Required reading, accurately widening the lens of American history." — Booklist (starred review)

Between 1916 and 1970, six million black Americans left their rural homes in the South for jobs in cities in the North, West, and Midwest in a movement known as the Great Migration. But while this event transformed the complexion of America and provided black people with new economic opportunities, it also disconnected them from their roots, their land, and their sense of identity, argues Morgan Jerkins. In this fascinating and deeply personal exploration, she recreates her ancestors' journeys across America, following the migratory routes they took from Georgia and South Carolina to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and California.

Following in their footsteps, Jerkins seeks to understand not only her own past, but the lineage of an entire group of people who have been displaced, disenfranchised, and disrespected throughout our history. Through interviews, photos, and hundreds of pages of transcription, Jerkins braids the loose threads of her family's oral histories, which she was able to trace back 300 years, with the insights and recollections of black people she met along the way—the tissue of black myths, customs, and blood that connect the bones of American history.

Incisive and illuminating, Wandering in Strange Lands is a timely and enthralling look at America's past and present, one family's legacy, and a young black woman's life, filtered through her sharp and curious eyes.

Featuring a new afterword from the author

"A quintessentially American story. . . . By exploring the truth o that past with such integrity, this memoir enriches our future." — New York Times Book Review

"Her desire to understand both her personal and cultural origins will inspire you to do the same." — Elle

Part I

Lowcountry, Georgia, and South Carolina

1

IF I WERE to travel through the migratory routes, like the Southeast to the North in reverse, I first had to nail down the purpose. I had the desire to reconnect with what I felt had been lost, once my families moved away from the South. But I shifted from asking myself, “What has been lost?” to rather, “What has not been fully explained but maintained whenever my family came together?” What were some of the traditions, anxieties, and sayings that were worth investigating? I had never been where my families came from in America, and arguably neither had my parents and their siblings, so these cultural aspects—albeit persistent—were full of gaps. I hoped that by returning to the South I could recover some of the reasons underlying why we black people do what we do that may had been lost or altered with the movement up North.

One of the most fascinating parts of my upbringing was how cautious my family could be about certain things. We stayed away from the water, and I knew that there had to be a deeper reason than that it would “damage” my hair. The contradictions tied to such cautions were intriguing. My elders despised rootwork and magic and yet believed they worked. Could there be a place where I could find people still connected to their ancestors enough to help me fill in the pieces as to how water and magic functioned in my ancestors’ lives?

I wanted to begin with my mother’s side, because her family’s story had fewer details than my father’s. Her father, my maternal grandfather, was born in Georgia, and that’s all I knew before I started planning my trip to the South. During the Great Migration, African Americans moved from all the states of the South but mainly from Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Georgia. Between 1910 and 1930, Georgia was the state with the largest emigration of black people—over 195,000.¹ Comparing 1950 and 1920, Georgia was the only state of the top five sendoff states aforementioned to have a net decrease in its African American population—over 140,000.² There was also a geographical pattern to the migration. If your family was from Mississippi, chances are they wound up in Chicago. If your family was from Georgia, chances are your ancestors wound up in Philadelphia, as mine did at first.³

Georgia was where I wanted to begin my journey. I wanted to know about people who chose to stay connected to the land and all its abundance. I wanted to find out more about water, magic, and kinship networks before we distanced ourselves from our ancestral lands. But, before I could discover the unknown, I decided to start with what I did know—the only cultural component that did not change, from my experience, no matter which black home I visited in America: food. And it was through food that I was led not to all of Georgia but to a particular region, not to black people as a whole but to a specific ethnic group to which all African Americans are undoubtedly indebted.

When I sit down to eat with my family, I call the food we eat soul food, but that name in and of itself indicates movement. As Adrian E. Miller, author of Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, puts it, “‘soul food’ . . . [is] . . . the food of that area [interior South] that has been transported across the United States by African-American migrants who left during the Great Migration. . . . As people left the South, they did what any other immigrant group does: They tried to re-create home.” The word soul began to mean “emotional fervor” in the 1940s when black jazz artists, disillusioned because their white counterparts were getting better-paying gigs, infused their music with black church styles from the rural South to make their music something the whites couldn’t imitate.⁴ With the advent of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and ’70s, black Americans, especially those who were products of the Great Migration, pushed for more autonomy and group similarities through music, literature, and food. There was an outpouring of creativity. This period produced such literary luminaries as Audre Lorde and Nikki Giovanni and music greats like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield. As for food, the famed Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem and Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles in Los Angeles were established in the 1960s and ’70s, respectively.

I’ve come across some black people who won’t touch any soul food unless the cook has been vetted by an old auntie or other well-respected relative. Potato salad, for example, is one of the biggest responsibilities for many black barbecues, and it’s an honor not to be taken lightly. Aside from potato salad, there are many other popular soul food dishes that one might see on a Sunday or holiday table, such as macaroni and cheese, collard greens, chitlins, yams, sweet potato pie, or peach cobbler. These dishes originated down South, and Northerners continued to prepare them after the Great Migration. I’d never learned how to properly cook any of these foods, because I didn’t think it was that important. I thought that standing over a hot stove for hours to feed a whole family, then cleaning up afterward was directly opposed to my burgeoning feminist ideals. Because the women in my family coaxed me to cook and fix people’s plates more than they did my male cousins, all I wanted to do was set the table or watch TV like the rest of the guys as an act of defiance. I had to humble myself once I moved farther north to Manhattan and was living on my own.

I had finally been living in an actual apartment by myself after three years of rooming with two men from 2015 to 2016 and then squeezing into a cramped studio from 2016 to 2018. New Year’s Eve was approaching, and I had a full kitchen all to myself. I always eschewed the Sunday dinner tradition due to having no family and not many friends in Harlem, but there was one ritual that I wanted to perpetuate in my home as a kind of christening: New Year’s Eve dinner.

Every New Year’s Eve, I could feel the heat surging in my mother’s house. We’d go to a watchnight service^* at church and return home. Hours later, I would be sequestered in my room upstairs, but the smell of something heavenly would slip through the cracks in the door. I closed my eyes and envisioned the boiling yams or the black-eyed peas marinating in a large, black Crock-Pot on the counter. The black-eyed peas require the most attention for this meal. They have to soak in a pot of water overnight. A quick hot-water rinse will not do. Then the peas are drained in a colander before being placed in the Crock-Pot with bacon or smoked turkey legs, where they would soften for hours.

Unlike girls in my mother’s generation, I was not forced to stand in the kitchen beside the women and watch them cook so that I’d be able to feed a family someday. The kitchen was the biggest indication of the generational divide. While my mother cracked eggs, grated cheese, and peeled potatoes, I was upstairs filling out scholarship applications, studying for exams, writing. I wanted to prioritize academic and professional success rather than the culinary arts. Food would have to wait. Until I finally did achieve that success and made a home and realized I had no idea how to nourish myself.

On New Year’s Eve, I stood in my kitchen and knew that something was amiss. I knew what I had to do to begin this year right: I had to cook the collard greens for money and the black-eyed peas for good luck. I had to make the rice in chicken stock and bake the corn bread just right. I needed the butter, the sugar, the salt, and the pepper. I needed to use my hands for more than writing. My mother was delighted when I told her what I set out to do. She and I hopped on a six-a.m. phone call to talk measurements, textures, and tastes for when things went as planned or had gone awry. Toward the end of the call, I asked my mother why we ate these foods for superstitious reasons. Collard greens were green like money and black eyed peas with their dots did look like dice. She paused. “It’s just something that we done. It’s something black people do.”

I knew that my mother wasn’t aware of the origins, but that was enough motivation for me. If soul food, like my ancestors, came from the South, then perhaps that’s where my journey had to begin. Eating collard greens and black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day connects black people from the North and South. As African Americans migrated north, they had to decide whether to keep eating their Southern food culture, such as hog or hominy, or assimilate to a middle-class, “respectable” menu, beef and wheat replacing pork and corn?⁵ Soul food is much richer in flavor and seasoning than middle-class white food, but it’s also saltier and extremely high in fat. Because of soul food’s health risks, criticism was rampant.

In 1920, Dr. A. Wilberforce Williams, a physician and the health editor of the Chicago Defender, wrote a column in which he criticized Southern food for its liver- and digestive-system-damaging condiments, such as hot sauce, “heavy meats,” and “excessive carbohydrates.” Because the Chicago Defender was the most influential newspaper among African Americans at that time (more than two-thirds of its readership was outside of Chicago⁶), Dr. Williams’s words had an impact and bolstered stereotypes that new migrants were dirty, stuck in the past, and in need of refinement.⁷ These migrants’ loyalties to class and region were at odds with each other, and food was at the nexus of these struggles. If they were striving for a better life, did their plates have to change too?

In a place like Chicago, locals prided themselves on the integration of restaurants, but when migrants arrived with their out-of-place behavior, the city’s elite establishments began to ban black people, new and local alike. In my personal life, I have both seen and passed judgment on certain foods for being too Southern or reminiscent of slavery, like the way bacon is exalted but pig’s feet causes one’s face to contort, how ham is desirable but chitlins, or pig intestines, are seen as evidence of backwardness. Growing up, it was not uncommon for me to hear a joke that watermelon was “slave food.” These tensions illustrate the divide between black people of a particular class in the North, those who are the descendants of migrants, versus those who live in the South. As black people moved north, certain foods were forsaken so that we could adopt a modern and progressive identity. Foods themselves don’t have meaning, but we impose meaning on them. The various kinds of meanings and associations that we have with foods all come from our conditioning, that being our background and social standing. Nevertheless, food symbolizes much of who we are as African Americans.

Much of the food that has sustained us for centuries came from West Africa through the plantations. Cured pork was one of the biggest staples on a plantation. The American sweet potato is reminiscent of, though not identical to, the African yam. Other foods that were imported from Africa and grown on American soil include peanuts, okra, and of course, watermelon. The fusion of African and Anglo-American cultures brought new foods to our cuisine: fried chicken, fish, collard greens, corn bread, corn fritters, grits, beans, and rice, to name a few. The community or family cohesion fostered by eating soul food at a particular time or day isn’t something we “just do.” All my life I thought that Sunday dinners had become a tradition because Sunday was a day of rest, the last few hours of freedom before the workweek began again. Then I learned that slaves would eat a large breakfast, remnants of it for lunch, and a one-pot meal for dinner. On larger plantations, a staff prepared the meals for the day. On Sundays and holidays, however, slaves would gather for a communal meal. The need for communal eating persisted throughout the centuries due to enslavement and then the economic constraints of segregation. Sharecroppers often came up short because of the boll weevil or soil exhaustion growing tobacco and cotton without crop rotation. Compounding these stressors, white landlords refused to allow black tenants to farm their portions of the land for food. No free man or woman of color wanted to buy a single product and risk careening the family further into debt. Communal eating benefited all, and black people maintained this connection with one another and with their ancestors.⁸

Despite all the research I did, I could not figure out why the superstition was attached to these foods. Why did collard greens and black-eyed peas have to be eaten on New Year’s Day and why for money or good luck specifically? Where did that come from?

The answer to my persistent questions should have been a no-brainer. Once when I opened a bag of black-eyed peas—Goya, the brand my mother told me to buy—I noticed on the back a recipe for something called hoppin’ John. Hoppin’ John called for black-eyed peas, bacon, celery, bay leaves, thyme, scallions, bell peppers, onions, and a few other ingredients. I wondered if the name was a nod to Southern dialect or some element of black Southern cuisine. As it turns out, the answer was the latter. Hoppin’ John and its associated superstitions originated from the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry and its people known as the Gullah, Geechee, or Gullah Geechee. The origins of the names are undetermined. Some say that Gullah derived from Angola or the Gola people, who live in parts of Liberia and Sierra Leone. As for Geechee, the origin could be the Ogeechee River, which flows for close to three hundred miles through the state of Georgia, or the Kissi people, who reside in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.

Hoppin’ John for good luck and collard greens for prosperity is a tradition found in the Gullah Geechee culture. Every time African Americans adhere to this custom on New Years’ Day, their plates link those at the table with over three hundred years of African American history. The Lowcountry is a two-hundred-mile stretch of land that spans the Georgia and South Carolina coasts, along with the Sea Islands.⁹ It is believed that over half of the 388,000 Africans brought to the lands that became the United States first arrived in the Lowcountry.¹⁰ According to the International African American Museum, 80 percent of African Americans can trace an ancestor who set foot onto a Charleston dock first.¹¹ Despite this rich history, I had heard of Gullah people only twice in my life—on Nickelodeon’s 1990s children’s television show Gullah Gullah Island and from a close friend whose late grandmother was Gullah. The Gullah Geechee people are the oldest sub-ethnic group of African Americans.

Three crucial elements explain how the Gullah Geechee people were able to retain so much of their African-ness, including their cooking: the landscape, their immunity to diseases, and the conditions of slave labor on plantations. The Lowcountry was distinguished not only by its formidable heat, ubiquitous palmetto trees, and Spanish moss, but also by the crops that could be grown there. In the eighteenth century, tobacco ruled the Chesapeake region, and cotton dominated the South, but for the Lowcountry, nothing compared to the rice cultivation.¹² White settlers knew how to profit from rice but not necessarily how to cultivate it and that’s why Africans from the aforementioned countries were captured and used as labor. In 1839, Georgia harvested 12.2 million pounds of rice,¹³ but South Carolina was the foremost producer, averaging sixty-six million pounds a year before the Revolutionary War and becoming one of the richest colonies.¹⁴ Africans enslaved in the Lowcountry retained not only their farming methods, but also their West African foods, such as watermelon, peas, okra, rice, collard greens, and sweet potatoes. In addition, their nearness to water added plentiful seafood to their diet.¹⁵

The wetland environment is a hotbed for diseases, but enslaved Africans were more resistant to them than white people, so whites were vastly outnumbered in the Lowcountry. Unlike other plantations, where slaves were not done working on their particular duties until the entire crew was finished, on rice plantations, if slaves were done early, they could assist others, till their own plots of land, or engage in cultural activities. Therefore enslaved Africans were able to foster community within a rather isolated region, and anthropologists and historians have argued that these preconditions have made Gullah Geechees a distinct people who were able to keep West African traditions alive in spite of their oppression.¹⁶

If the Gullah Geechee people had been able to protect unadulterated customs from the motherland, then I would go to them. I would start in Georgia and then move on to South Carolina, where I would conduct research in the Sea Islands of both states. But I couldn’t venture into either territory blindly. I made sure to make contact with someone from each of the places I planned to visit ahead of my trip. Alt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Prologue: The Milkman’s Baby
• Part I: Lowcountry, Georgia, and South Carolina
• Part II: Louisiana Creole
• Part III: Oklahoma
• Part IV: Los Angeles
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Praise
• Also by Morgan Jerkins
• Copyright
• About the Publisher