The Pain of Erasure

     Nell Graydon's Cookbook, From My House to Your House, 1968 edition, contained this photograph. 

     The photograph and references to Fannie and the Watsons were removed in the 1985 revision. This is erasure.  It erases Ms. Graydon's debt to Victoria, Alice, and Johnny Watson, as well as her mother-in-law's cook, Fannie.

     I wrote about Cokesbury, South Carolina in a previous blog, "My Two Souths." Nell Graydon published a cookbook, From My House to Your House, to benefit the restoration of the Cokesbury Methodist Conference School, with which my grandmother's family, the Connors, were associated. 

     Her forward describes some of the recipes as ones she wrote down in 1914, while visiting her husband's home in Greenwood, South Carolina.  She writes "In the kitchen, old Fannie prepared the most marvelous food on an iron range. Her waffles, golden brown broiled chicken and tender biscuits were the most delicious I had ever tasted."  

     I think we can assume she was not referring to her mother-in-law when she speaks of "Old Fannie."  Into the kitchen Ms. Graydon went, pencil and paper in hand, to pepper Fannie with questions.  She was frustrated that Fannie wouldn't specify exact quantities, telling her "If you don't know that you'll never learn to cook." Graydon admired Fannie's skills, but labeled her "what the old people called 'a natural born cook.' "

     Fannie's Beaten Biscuit recipe is the first in the volume. Graydon allowed that try as she would, she was never able to make perfect beaten biscuits.  She augments what she learned from Fannie with this stanza:

Of course I'll gladly give de rule

I mek beat biscuits by

Dough I ain's sure dat you will mek

Dat bread the same as I

'Case cookin's like religion is---

Some's 'lected, and some ain't

An rules don't more mek a cook

Den sermons mek a Saint

---Wheeten

     As I learned from Googling the first line, this is excerpted from "Beaten Biscuits," published around 1899 in Bandanna Ballads by Maria Howard Weeden of Huntsville, Alabama. Her work was praised by none other than Joel Chandler Harris. Weeden's poems captured stories she'd heard from the freedpeople she painted with great skill.

     Ms. Graydon's cookbook also includes Alice's Bread. Alice and Johnny Watson, pictured above, had spent seven years preparing and serving the food in the Graydon home. Johnny's mother, Victoria, had done this before them, from 1942 to 1961.

     A few years ago, I met Ms. Graydon's son while collecting a piece of Connor furniture.  He gave me a copy of the 1985 revision of the cookbook, and allowed as how the photograph and references to Fannie and the Watsons had been removed.

     This is erasure.  It erased Ms. Graydon's debt to Fannie, to Victoria, Alice, and Johnny Watson. In effect, it returns the fruit of their labor to their white mistress, in perpetuity.

     How tragic that even in the 100 years since Ms. Graydon encountered her, we cannot freely accept, indeed celebrate, the claims of chefs and cooks in Fannie's lineage, for a stake in the creation and skilled maintenance of Southern cuisine.

Two of Maria Howard Weeden's Watercolors of freedpeople.