"I'm giving energy to the wood I'm cooking with and starting the day the way my ancestors started their own --singing despite the drudgery. Before I started cooking this way, I didn't know that you had to sing, and that it wasn't a pastime. Every tool you touch becomes a scepter, and the way you start and finish the task opens the door of time. Visitors to the South before the Civil War spoke of enslaved men talking to their farming tools and axes and finishing the work with a part yodel, part cry -- part prayer. ... The songs are like clocks with spells. Some enslaved cooks timed the cooking by the stanzas of the hymns and spirituals, or little folk songs that began across the Atlantic and melted into plantation Creole, melting Africa with Europe and beginnings and endings were muddled.
"When I started going to plantations, you would often hear tour guides ... and docents talk -- actually they joke -- about the 'whistling walk,' a path often covered, leading from the outdoor kitchen to the Big House, the plantation house. Supposedly this was the space where 'the slaves' had to whistle when they brought the food in, to prove they were not eating. It was actually just an old architectural convention, though, that prevented rain and bird droppings from getting in the food, but the old white men chuckle, the white ladies guffaw, and I feel my inner Nat Turner raging. ... In all of my days, I have been asked to prove everything I have ever said, but I have never heard a single one of these docents challenged for using racist folk history as fact."
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