I don’t begin my food writing course until next term, but my reading this weekend—as sometimes happens, I’m nearly a month late to this—relates very well to the conversations we’ve been having in my religion class about race and justice and history. Francis Lam writes with grace and power, about a woman of grace and power, in his essay “Edna Lewis and the Black Roots of American Cooking.” One special moment from Lam’s essay notes a piece from Lewis’s The Taste of Country Cooking that we read in my food writing course. She describes hog butchering in these terms:

The following morning my brothers and sisters and I would rush out before breakfast to see the hogs hanging from the scaffolds like giant statues. The hogs looked beautiful. They were glistening white inside with their lining of fat, and their skin was almost translucent.

Lam proceeds from this moment to narrate the story of Allie Thompson, who was lynched in Culpepper, Virginia, two years after Lewis was born. Thompson had been seen asking a white woman for help with the butchering at hog-killing time. “A mob,” Lam writes, “hung him from a tree after claims that he raped a white woman.” Lam then makes a key claim:

Whether Lewis intended to imbue her hog-killing scene with such references, it became impossible for me to read ‘‘The Taste of Country Cooking’’ without a sense of the wider setting of her story and how she chose to tell it without terror, how she refused to let the past, her past, be defined by anyone else but her.

This sort of writing—by Lam, and especially by Lewis—does the hard work James Baldwin advises “to accept one’s past—one’s history.” This, Baldwin continues, “is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”

Photo credit: John T. Hill