Real Cooking

Some said she was a rainbow girl, others that she was a gypsy. Maybe she was a poet, they thought, or a dancer. Most at the Manhattan loft party didn’t even recognize the woman from out of town, but on that night in 1977, the room’s center of gravity tilted in her direction.

That’s how Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor saw it anyway. Smart-Grosvenor, author of the landmark cookbook-memoir Vibration Cooking: or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970), was struck by the energy of this mysterious woman and sensed she’d found a kindred spirit.

Rainbow girl, gypsy, poet, dancer: Ntozake Shange was all of those, as Americans soon learned. It was odd that some of those partygoers didn’t know her already. She first announced herself in 1974 with for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Brilliant in its disorder, for colored girls vibrates with poetry, music, and dance. Shange called it a “choreopoem,” inventing her own classification. Refusing allegiance to a particular genre, its very form—a mix of lyrics, stage directions, and live performance—questions why categorical distinctions exist. It catapulted Shange to stratospheric heights in New York’s theater establishment when it was staged at the Public Theater in June 1976, followed by Broadway’s Booth Theatre in the following months, when she was just 27.

The figures instrumental in bringing for colored girls to audiences in New York, such as husband-and-wife producers Joseph and Gail Papp, initially struggled to understand it. When the play arrived on her desk, Gail sighed in confusion upon glancing at its title, which was as perplexing as Hair and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel had been a few years earlier. “I couldn't comprehend it,” she later remembered. “Then I looked at it and I saw it was all poetry, so I was all the more puzzled.”

Indeed, Shange tested the boundaries of language. She admired “the idea that letters dance” when they meet the page, and she found capitalization “boring.” American English was the language of violence, the one “[I] waz taught to hate myself in,” she once said. Homogenization—of language, of poetry, of food—was her lifelong enemy.

Then there was Shange herself, whose appearance could strike fear and fascination in white folks. Joseph Papp later recalled perceiving her as “this funny little girl—an earring in her nose, a red bandanna on her head, who didn't even look me in the eye.”

The choreopoem quickly found fierce critical champions. In his rapturous review, Phillip Hamburger of the New Yorker noted that this “unclassifiable creation” was “playing to somewhat stunned audiences” upon opening at the Public. Awards followed, including an Obie and a Tony.

The early success of for colored girls was tough on Shange: three weeks into the show’s Broadway run, she got strep throat and briefly decamped to Europe. Sudden fame also took a toll on her psyche. “I was just stunned by the press and applause, and I just wanted to get away from it,” she later confessed.

Still, she kept writing. Formal disobedience thrums through her subsequent work. Her first novel, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), makes recipes a focal point of the plot, which centers on the bond between the three titular sisters and their mother. There are recipes for catfish tumbled in a cornmeal-flour mix and fried, for curried crabmeat, for nighttime potato salad “’Cuz There’s No Time to Cool” the potatoes mashed in a hurry. To Shange, these recipes were as integral to the novel’s rhythm as the prose itself. “I didn't want readers to skip over the recipes,” she told the New York Times. “I wanted those recipes to create a place to be.”

A recipe, Shange acknowledged, allowed her characters to exist in full. She made food the organizing principle of If I Can Cook / You Know God Can, her cookbook-memoir published in 1998. The book toys with convention. Shange borrows cues from Smart-Grosvenor’s Vibration Cooking to craft a similarly winding, genre-resistant reflection on Black foodways. “Many people were surprised that the ‘colored girl who was all that’ was writing a cookbook,” Smart-Grosvenor wrote in the foreword to Shange’s book. “I wasn’t.”

Perhaps anyone who raised eyebrows at Shange’s decision to write a cookbook wasn’t paying attention to food’s recurrence in her work. A cookbook, Smart-Grosvenor noted, had probably been gestating in Shange since Sassafrass. The Afro-Atlantic foodways Shange wrote of were clouded by shame and misunderstanding and vulnerable to distortion when framed by whiteness. But Shange didn’t flinch in the face of that history. Instead, she uncovered the beauty in coconuts and cassava, papaya and persimmons, sugarcane and starfruit.

Shange died in 2018, at age 70, two decades after her cookbook’s publication. Though the cultural tributes weren’t sufficient for an artist of her stature—Broadway’s lights did not dim, for example—her death prompted renewed inquiry into her work. For colored girls still looms large in American culture—Tyler Perry made a film adaptation in 2010, and the play was revived at the Public Theater last fall—but Shange wrote prolifically: collections of essays and poetry, plays, novels, even children’s books.

It’s inaccurate to posit that Shange’s cookbook is a lost artifact in her oeuvre, but it is certainly one of her lesser-known titles and unmentioned in most obituaries. The culinary world, meanwhile, seemed reluctant to claim Shange as one of their own. The lack of eulogies was particularly curious given her well-documented bond with Smart-Grosvenor.

Such disregard is unfair to Shange’s greater creative project. Although If I Can Cook is a slender volume, it casts Shange’s body of work in a more vibrant light. “You have to read the entire recipes—ingredients and procedures—because if you don't, you don't really know what's going on with those girls,” she once said of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. Likewise, to ignore this cookbook is to deny how central food was to Shange’s vision of a hospitable world for Black women. Think of it this way: If you don’t read Shange’s recipes, you’ll never know what was going on with her.

***

“This book is literally filled with recipes. Are they real recipes?” Jane Pauley of NBC asked Shange in 1982, shortly after Sassafrass Cypress, & Indigo appeared.

“Yes. They’re real recipes,” Shange responded, “you can really cook them, yes.”

“Now did you concoct that recipe because as a poet because [sic] the ingredients sounded good?” Pauley pressed, asking in particular about the Kwanzaa duck with mixed oyster stuffing. “Or is that real cooking?”

This was real cooking, Shange insisted, as real as any you could find in other cookbooks. The ingredients for the Kwanzaa duck were right there, the instructions lucid: Wet the cornbread, crumble it into bits, fry it in butter with chopped celery and onion. Then season the mix with paprika, a ground red pepper pod, and as much salt and fine black pepper as you like. Dump in a dozen medium oysters and a cup of chopped pecans once the bread begins to crisp. Finally, cram the jumble into the cavity of the duck and bake it until the bird’s skin turns firewood brown.

Embedding recipes in a narrative was daring for the era. Readers hadn’t yet encountered Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, a bestseller published a year later, with its instructions for sour cream peach pies and sorrel soups tucked into the story of a woman’s dissolving marriage. Few critics questioned the veracity of Ephron’s recipes. But Shange’s inventive ingredient constructions—codfish pounded with chives, onion, and black pepper and beat into a batter, spooned into smoking oil, and fried into tiny cakes called accra, among others—may have struck more unimaginative white readers as make-believe, passages to be glazed over or consumed passively.

The recipes emerged from Shange’s own story. She was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1948, the daughter of an Air Force surgeon and a social worker and the eldest of four girls. Her mother, Eloise, cooked well and often, Shange said, until Americans became hip to frozen dinners, inventions that “hit my house like Hurricane David,” Shange later joked. The family enjoyed the material comforts of domestic help, maintaining a circle of friends that included Black luminaries such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson.

Life wasn’t easy for young Paulette, though. She came of age in the shadow of Brown v. Board of Education and was bussed to a once all-white school in St. Louis, where she spent part of her adolescence. In that school, she became the target of racist taunts. “I was not prepared for it,” she told Ebony in 1977. “I was rich and somewhat protected. Now I was being harassed and chased around by these White kids.” She read often, discovering the works of James Baldwin and Richard Wright. When she was a high schooler in New Jersey in 1965, the year Malcolm X was killed, she wrote through his death to cope. Those essays rankled teachers who couldn’t understand her fixation on the man, she later told Hilton Als of the New Yorker.

College wasn’t much simpler. She became aware of the tension between her financial privilege and the reality of her racial identity, and she began to distance herself from the Black bourgeois politics of her past. She was only 18 when she married a law student during her first year at Barnard, where she majored in American studies. The marriage didn’t last long. The couple’s subsequent divorce left her deeply depressed; she attempted suicide many times, in many ways.

A series of gradual metamorphoses in the following decade lifted her out of despair and brought her closer to poetry: she attended graduate school for American studies at the University of Southern California. She moved to Oakland to teach and found a community of like-minded creative women. In 1971, she killed off Paulette Williams, hating how the name bound her to a man, and instead adopted the Zulu name Ntozake Shange: she who comes with her own things. She who walks like a lion.

For colored girls sprouted from the pain and resilience of this period. The way she later told the story of the play’s genesis, Shange saw a vision of a parallel rainbow while driving down a highway in Northern California. “I had a feeling of near death or near catastrophe,” she said. “Then I drove through the rainbow and I went away.” The experience reminded her she needed to live and convinced her she had artistic value to offer the world: namely, a statement on how she and other “colored girls” who looked like her navigated their turmoil.

She conceived the choreopoem as an opportunity “to explore the realities of seven different kinds of women. They were numbered pieces: The women were to be nameless & assume hegemony as dictated by the fullness of their lives.” These women, each dressed in a different color, speak or sing poetry that reveals their experiences surviving sexual abuse from men they trust, of the cruel exposure they feel when undergoing abortions, of being unable to move on from the men they love. They are not isolated in their miseries, though. Shange closes with the women chanting, “i found god in myself / & i loved her” before communing in a small circle.

Shange wrote for colored girls as she noticed a shift in how Americans talked about women’s interior lives, which she described as “the discovery of women’s heartfelt perceptions of reality.” Second-wave feminism was in full swing, though she told Als she didn’t find much in common with figureheads such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. They were white, and she wasn’t. Still, the country had a newfound interest in women’s stories: readers were starting to grasp the physical and psychological torture Sylvia Plath endured during her marriage to Ted Hughes, for example, and they were rediscovering Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Once Shange’s play reached New York, she played the lady in orange. “i cdnt stand bein sorry & colored at the same time / it’s so redundant in the modern world,” the lady laments in a bracing monologue.

As Shange’s career progressed, she continued to treat genre as pliable, and food increasingly became a thematic concern. In 1981, she performed a dramatic work called “Mouths” at The Kitchen, an arts space in Manhattan. “Mouths” involved Black women named Okra and Black men named Greens falling in love; she later titled this series of poems “from okra to greens / a different kinda love story” (1985), adapting it more fully for performances later that year. She writes of wanting to overdose on greens:

greens overdose might not ever be reported
/ feels too good / most victims smile
without knowing why / but i know i gotta
o.d. of greens / i'm sufferin so
my pods are gleamin/ ready to jump out
the vertical/ into the greens diagonal oh

In Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, Shange infuses food with a sense of wonder, and her characters use food to actualize a world otherwise unavailable to them. This narrative predisposition is clear from the start, when a young girl stuffs socks with red beans, raw rice, sawdust, and palm leaves, tying them with strings to make dolls. Later, she dreams of making the white folks in grocery stores vanish so the Black folk can have all the fresh collards and okra to themselves.

Like these characters, Shange began to ponder what stories food contained. She begins If I Can Cook by recalling a memory from the summer of 1987, when she came across an outdoor installation by the artist Candace Hill-Montgomery. (Contemporaneous news reports describe a similar installation by Hill-Montgomery consisting of 26 refrigerator doors in Battery Park City in 1981, as part of Art on the Beach. It’s unclear if Shange misremembered the details.) Hill-Montgomery planted doorless refrigerators on a beach near the Hudson River. They contained only collard greens and nothing else—no “[f]atback, hog maws, bacon, or smoked turkey wings” to accompany them. Shange’s stomach swirled in discomfort at this sight; she nearly began to cry. The fact that these fridges sat so exposed—without the dignity of privacy, without even stoves to cook the greens on—sparked a painful recognition in her. “I'm drawn to visions of Africans, like me, during the Middle Passage,” Shange wrote. “I want to know what we yearned for, dreamt of, talked about, if we could manage.”

Shange recognized that food and language were tightly bound: Forced migration could bludgeon disparate linguistic traditions into a shared pidgin. She understood that food could easily fall victim to the same violent homogenization. Her cookbook was a recovery project, spanning the African diaspora to examine the concept of hunger, literal and spiritual, and how those within the diaspora kept themselves full.

Considered today, If I Can Cook reads like Shange’s rebuke to readers who doubted the truth of her recipes. She applies her sly, knowing voice to history lessons, which she repackages as anecdotes of her trips around the world. When she travels to London and finds paratha in the neighborhood of Brixton, populated with West Indians, she uses the discovery to unlock a history of indentured servitude in the West Indies, which, she observes, teems with East Indians. “Guess why this is the case in Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad,” she writes of the East Indian blood coursing through the populations of these countries. “Right! Somebody had to work those rice paddies.” Recounting her visits to the South African cities of Durban and Cape Town, she concludes that South Africa “is a land with a future others might envy” for its “commingling of races and cultures,” synopsizing her time in the country with a recipe for coconut milk fish curry over rice.

Shange encourages readers to grow their own watermelons, a task she attempted herself as a stubborn young girl frustrated with the fruit’s symbolic racial associations. She recalls “being instructed not to order watermelon in restaurants or to eat watermelon in any public places because it makes white people think poorly of us,” which didn’t make sense to her at first; weren’t white folks primed to do that anyway? Still, she harnessed that adolescent anger into trying to grow a watermelon in her front porch’s flower box in Missouri. (The harvest didn’t yield much.) Later, she pleads with readers to “free the okra, the way we freed the watermelon,” noting how okra's critics malign it as too “sticky, stringy, slimy, bitter, and so on, the complaints go.”

She writes matter-of-factly of labor and its attendant ugliness. “How'd all these hardworking—cutting cane is torturous labor—Africans get fed and what'd they eat?” she asks when recalling a visit to Cuba as an adult (she does not specify the year). They could not store perishables in the compounds where they lived, so they had to salt cure whatever they could. She follows this account with a recipe, written as a continuous paragraph, for apporeado de tasajo, a stew of salt-dried shredded beef. “Serve over white rice or, for a real kick, over vermicelli,” she writes. “Not just ’cause I like him, but ’cause if it’s true, now is the time to paraphrase Joe Cuba himself: “You'll like it like that.”

She packs poetry into these pages too. “I still wonder how many Chinese laborers' bones lay beneath the route of the first transcontinental railroad,” she writes in one chapter free of recipes, “how many small black towns were built on them, what if any of them remain for us to salute/revere.” Her rumination on the bones of the dead results in “freedom food,” which begins

filadelfia
created some one
kinda freedom for some
one kinda folks what melanin
done left to burn in the sun and
have cancer and bury theyselves 3 deep
in DAR sanctified cemeteries / philadelphia left
us what got melanin to feed them

In another passage, she composes an ode to Puerto Rican salsa singer Héctor Lavoe in which she writes of sucking “the hearts / out of the eggs of / tortugas / anglos die to see float about.” The poem is a prelude to a recipe for the young turtle eggs she ate in Nicaragua, pierced at their tops, their tiny pockets filled with crushed nuts, pico de gallo, peppers, pimiento, chopped olives, and fish roe. “This is a very sexy little dish,” she writes. “Sits well on the tummy, lightly, so to speak, so that dancing and romancing can continue without mitigation. (Please be aware that raw eggs may contain salmonella bacteria.)”

Recipe writing is a tricky art; after all, a recipe’s main function is to instruct readers, which doesn’t always leave room for inspired prose. But Shange’s recipes hum with music and wit and unexpected asides. After regaling readers with recipes for wheat meat (what many now call seitan) with organic brown rice and a salad of greens, she questions the point of vegetarianism, as if negating the recipes that preceded that very passage. She muses that adopting a vegetarian diet is a form of fashioning a metaphorical resistance to the “all-American” standard of meat and potatoes: “We are daring to live, to eat to live in honor of those who decided to waste away as opposed to becoming who we are.”

The logic can be mazelike, but Shange liked to make her readers work. She possessed a basic trust in their patience, knowing they could keep up with her. Still, some critics didn’t have the stamina: the text’s digressive nature was enough for Kirkus Reviews to declare it “[t]oo scattered to be a memoir and too eccentric to serve as a thorough cookbook.”

Shange’s defiance of classifications arguably made her an unlikely fit for the culinary world. Her very existence posed questions: How should a food writer look? How should she behave? A Baltimore Sun profile from 1998 began by declaring she “doesn't look like a cookbook author on a publicity tour” and went on to describe Shange’s “tight jeans and a matching denim jacket; pointy-toed, high-heeled, snakeskin cowboy boots; a belt with a huge silver buckle inscribed with the letter S; and more jewelry than you could shake a stick at, including a nose ring.” Reading this today, it’s easy to detect the same prejudice she faced early in her career when she brought for colored girls to New York, where gatekeepers were eager to label her a misfit before listening to what she had to say. 

One may wonder why this book hasn’t had the staying power its strengths warrant, particularly in a moment when awareness of white cultural neglect toward Black women writers has prompted reappraisals of their work. (Shange’s friend Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor is, thankfully, one of the beneficiaries of such a corrective tide within food.) Writing in the Paris Review, Valerie Stivers posits that Shange’s vision of a “melting pot” now feels archaic. When writing about food, precision about a dish’s provenance on a granular level has now become more desirable than teasing out the connections within a diaspora’s shared history.

Shange’s conception of a melting pot was not anodyne, though. Her vision of the world had more bite than the phrase melting pot may today imply. “Arbitrary violence or premeditated violence conducted by the state was integral to our first experiences in the New World,” she writes when comparing the common histories of Brazil and the United States. “The idea that ‘all that's over with’ is not only naive but dangerous, because we then deny the very connective tissue of our historical realities.”

Shange’s cookbook is fundamentally concerned with Black survival, like so much of her work. She makes clear that when one refuses to eat, as some slaves did as a form of resistance, one refuses to live. Cooking comes from a need to keep living. “But I also know we've done more than survive. We've found bounty in the foods the gods set before us, strength in the souls of black folks,” she writes in her epilogue.

Nearly two years have elapsed since Shange’s passing. Her death leaves us with questions about how and where she summoned the will to survive when circumstances tested her, how creation buoyed her through the misery that tore through her life, how she managed to find beauty while trying to keep herself full. If I Can Cook / You Know God Can—read as a cookbook or as a memoir—may contain some of those answers. Shange’s women pursued quests to feel less alone and found community in their suffering. They defied any demands to assimilate according to the precepts of a world that feels racist and sexist by design. “Cooking is a way of insisting on living,” she writes, as if to say it helped her keep going when she almost could not.