Faith & Democracy #4: Mary’s Table
How my grandmother used Sunday dinner to teach her family about the nature of both the Beloved Community and democracy.
My grandmother, the subject of Me and Mary, was, despite the limitations society placed upon her, an extraordinary person. It was she, the woman who raised me, who taught me pretty much everything of any real importance I know about the nature of life. In the preface of This Land Is Your Land, I describe how it was my effort to learn to see America as she did, both its beauty and its flaws, that led to that book.
Another Mary from Birmingham, she was born fifty years after Mary Anderson, whose story I also tell in This Land Is Your Land in a section titled, The Differentiators: An Ex-Slave [George Washington Carver], an Epileptic [Nikola Tesla], and a Woman [Mary Anderson]. And she was amazing — a successful real estate developer in Birmingham, viticulturist in California, inventor of the windshield wiper, an idea she came up with while riding a New York City trolley and, due, in part, to the fact that she was never known publicly to have had a romantic relationship, many historians believe she was LGBTQ.
That said, there were differences. Though both were women born in a time and place where it was particularly tough to be a woman, Mary Anderson had opportunities my grandmother did not, and she would, simply because of her ancestry, be denied so much of what the other Mary was afforded. For instance, had Mary Anderson been on a bus in Birmingham instead of a trolley in NY, she’d still have been seated close enough to see the driver, and thus come up with her windshield wiper invention. Whereas my Mary would’ve been somewhere back behind the color bar.
And that’s just one small window into life in her world. I describe in Me and Mary how she grew up “female and colored, poor and Southern, the daughter of sharecroppers and orphaned,” how she came of age in a time dominated by the likes of the Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind; and that’s before accounting for the devastating impact of the Great Depression. Yet, despite these burdens of unimaginable weight, in a million small ways, she’d make the lives of everyone around her better, and ensure that our home was a wonderfully warm and happy one.
In her and my grandfather’s house, like most Southern families, Sunday dinner was the big meal of the week. It was the only time that most everyone was home, instead of out working, or otherwise coming and going. Mary taught all her children to cook and half of them cooked professionally. Robert, her and my grandfather’s oldest son, was the head chef at Parliament House, Birmingham’s preeminent hotel, and Naomi, her oldest daughter, was one of the city’s most sought-after wedding cake makers.
If you were a Belle who wanted her cake to be so spectacular that it ended up being mentioned in the society pages, Naomi was who you commissioned. But Sunday dinner was Mary’s affair, though everyone pitched in; spending time together as we did. During the week, she made dinner for the family she worked for, then, came home and did the same for us, so those meals were simple; liver on Mondays, spaghetti on Wednesdays, fish on Fridays.
Sundays, however, were another thing altogether. The table was piled high with dishes, each more amazing than the others. There were heaping greens and pot liquor, hot cornbread, her to-die-for buttermilk biscuits and homemade jam, fried chicken and glazed ham, corn on the cob, oven cooked root vegetables, string beans seasoned with onions, black-eyed peas and neck bones, fried green tomatoes and okra, and always two desserts — homemade cake or fresh fruit cobbler, banana pudding or sweet potato pie. Much of this came either from her garden or the gardens of friends; trades of her abundance of tomatoes and peaches for corn and beans.
Looking back, I’m astounded by how many people Mary could feed with so little money. But that was common for folk of her era. Southern food has come of age as of late, but back then, like most innovations, it was born of necessity. I remember being completely surprised when, a few years ago, I saw actual collard greens for sale in the Whole Foods produce section.
Though today, touted for their nutritional value, ten years ago, hardly anyone outside the South had even heard of them. But in my childhood, it wasn’t Sunday dinner without collards and cornbread. Originating near Greece, collards were long an African delicacy, then became part of regional American cuisine at Jamestown. And like the people who brought them here, they can survive and thrive in the most difficult of conditions. That’s likely how they became such a staple so quickly.
Then, there’s cornbread. It was Native Americans who taught the rest of us how to grind corn into meal for baking, as well as how to infuse it with an alkali to make hominy, which, in turn, became grits, the porridge that pretty much every southerner has for breakfast. Over the years, I’d think about the many influences that made that one meal possible; the traditions and heritages, advances and innovations; the tapestry of American culture on display every Sunday afternoon.
My grandmother had two rules; all are welcome and everyone eats their fill. As such, I’m not sure that a table exists that could’ve seated our sprawling assemblage of family, both born and found. So instead, we all crowded into the kitchen for grace, then filled our plates, and sat in groupings spanning from the front porch to the back yard. My grandfather Olden would tune all the radios to the same station so that everyone was listening to the same thing wherever we were, and people would flow, like water, from one conversation to another.
One of the highlights of my grandmother’s life was seeing an African American win the Democratic nomination. (It’s easy for us to forget what an unprecedented moment that was. But just ten years prior, Morgan Freeman had played the president in the disaster film Deep Impact, and even that made news across the nation. So seeing this happen for real seemed almost unimaginable.)
I remember, early on in the campaign, making my monthly call on Sunday afternoon, as had long been my habit, which gave me the chance to catch up with almost everyone. It really was the next best thing to being there. At the time, I was organizing minority ministers and speaking at historically white churches around the country, just as I’d done for Richard Arrington 30 years prior. I could tell by her voice that my grandmother’s health was failing, and I wanted to come home, but she wouldn’t have it. “This is God’s plan for you,” she said, “The work he has for you to do.”
She ended that call the same way she always did; “I’m so proud of you.” In Barack Obama’s Democratic nomination acceptance speech, she’d get to witness what was for her a miracle, including his description of the promise of America as “the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise and fall as one nation, the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper.” Mary, like Madeline, the grandmother who raised Barack, would pass away before the historic election, but so much of her lives on in so many ways.
And not a Sunday goes by when I don’t think of her, and how she turned something as simple as a meal into an anchor point for family. I recall the laughter and love, and how she was feeding so much more than our bodies. I think of those lyrics from Jimmy Webb’s If These Walls Could Speak: “They would tell you that I owe you, more than I can ever pay. Here’s someone who really loves you; don’t ever go away — that’s what these walls would say.”
And instantly, I’m transported back to those old walls in a working-class home in central Birmingham. I’m reminded both of all that I’ve been given and of what, together, we should be striving for; to be a place where all are welcome and everyone eats their fill. Because in the end, these are the things that hold us together, and are the only ones that truly matter.
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Faith and Democracy is an open series of articles that explore this pivotal point in our nation’s history, the longstanding role that faith and spirituality, both for better and worse, have played in shaping the society we’ve become and are becoming. Mary’s Table, adapted from This Land Is Your Land, is the fourth article in the series.
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RD Moore is an artist, minister, lifelong social activist, emancipationist and founder of the Mary Moore Institute for Diversity, Humanity & Social Justice (MMI). He credits the people who crossed his path starting in his formative years in post-Civil Rights-era Birmingham for the person he’d become and for his unyielding faith in who we can be together. Known for his intimate storytelling and insightful understanding, his work continues to explore that fertile space where diversity, spirituality and humanity all intersect. His blog, Letters from a Birmingham Boy, can be found here.