Eat the City(19)

In the waves of migration that followed World War I, the South, too, seemed to empty itself into high-rent Harlem. A new culture was taking shape. Just as writers came north to tell the tales of the southern plantations, and musicians came north to remake juke joints and Saturday-night stomps into blues clubs and jazz parties, ordinary people who came north would also re-create southern cooking, and eventually help improvise a new kind of agriculture in American cities.


EVERY human being is a museum piece. Along with DNA, we inherit the language, knowledge, and values of the people who raised us, and those who raised them. Among the most profound and unshakable parts of our inheritance is food. Recipes from the Old Country often last generations, longer than language, sometimes longer even than ritual and religion. In fact, brain researchers now believe that our tastes in food are formed at a very young age—before four or five—and they tend to stick for life. When you look at bits of land where people plant vegetables in the city, as often as not, you’re looking at a story of the past.

Willie Morgan was growing produce long before he started doling it out to Harlem gamblers. He spent his earliest years in southern Georgia, in the wood home of his grandparents, who farmed cotton and peanuts on a plantation and taught him to raise, trap, fish, and shoot all kinds of edibles. They were sharecroppers who knew that whatever the outputs, whatever the inputs, the owner’s arithmetic would leave them broke. So they grew their own vegetables, kept curly-tailed, grunting pigs, and hung their own fatty pork and sausages in the smokehouse. Willlie learned that okra was itchy on the skin. He found out how to fertilize with ashes and manure, and he investigated the particularities of nurturing sweet potatoes and sugarcane. He drew drinking water from a well filled with fish.

Willie was the first child of young parents—his mother was only seventeen when he was born—who soon moved to New York City seeking higher-paying factory jobs, leaving him in his grandparents’ care. His parents would come down to Georgia to visit two or three times a year, bearing northern gifts, like clothes in the up-to-date city styles, and a real baseball uniform, with a glove and high socks. But Willie didn’t really know his mother and father, and he was dismayed when they “snatched” him away to live with them in the city when he was nine. There had been no time for Willie to harvest his own small plot of land before leaving, so his grandmother gathered his produce, canned it, and mailed the Mason jars north to Harlem. That December of 1947, Willie, who had never seen snow, encountered a sudden twenty-five inches of it, the biggest snowstorm in New York history. In that first bewildering, frigid, impossibly snowy winter, he ate the products of his own faraway fertile land. That was the beginning.


UNDER slavery, black people were deprived of control over almost all aspects of their lives—but they had to eat. On any little spot of naked dirt—provision grounds, they were called—people managed to raise their own okra, black-eyed peas, watermelons, and certain beans and yams, all of which had traveled with their ancestors on slave ships from Africa. That food created a new southern cuisine. And that cuisine migrated, along with the people, to Harlem.

“Dear Charlie,” the southern leader Booker T. Washington wrote to a New York friend in 1907, “the chitterlings went forward to you last week.” By the 1930s, a trucker would drive up from Georgia or North Carolina to his particular corner in Harlem, open the back doors, and turn his truck into a storefront that sold watermelon, pecans, hog’s head cheese, chow-chow, cane patch syrup, and smoked hams—before turning around and heading south to restock. One Grady C. Houston built his business up to nine food trucks, shuttled by nephews, cousins, and brothers. Some of Harlem’s greatest success stories involved southern food, like that of Pig Foot Mary, née Lillian Harris, a teenager from the Mississippi Delta who bought a three-dollar washbasin, an old baby carriage, and two dollars’ worth of pigs’ feet, and set up a business selling chitterlings on wheels. She eventually saved enough to open a Harlem shop and invest in local real estate, becoming one of the wealthiest women of color in the city.

Some onetime farmers simply continued to plant. Plenty of sharecroppers found themselves scrubbing or assembling or sweeping or serving, coming home at night to a Harlem tenement whose air shaft windows showed only slats of sky. Of course they craved country food, and some grew their own fresh collards to wilt with salt pork, tomatoes and tender okra to simmer in stew, and new potatoes to mash with cream.

A woman named Nora Mair saved cheese and butter buckets, filled them with earth, and set them on the fire escape full of potato plants, which her sister would fertilize with horse manure she swept up in the street. Caledonia Jones’s family planted beans and black-eyed peas in long wooden cheese boxes on the windowsills of their third-floor apartment—level with the Eighth Avenue elevated train that passed by the open window. Cal and his cousins would tear out neat little peas from their pods and pelt the passengers on the El. In fact, all over the city, the El trains were level with windowbox gardens, and the New York Times observed that passengers passed by close enough to “snare a carrot.”


WILLIE lived with his parents and his younger sister and brother in a four-bedroom apartment with a breeze from Morningside Park. From his third-floor window, Willie would watch girls amble along the park’s pathways, and then run downstairs to chase the one he liked. In winter, he would jump his aluminum sled down the steep, rocky hill of the park till his ten-o’clock curfew. Nearby, the Chaplains, the Royal Knights, the Mutineers, and the Commanches fought with daggers, ice picks, and zip guns. There were reefer pads and card sharks, gangsters, crapshooters and numbers runners, and white storeowners who were rude and overcharged. Yet there was security, too. Willie’s father, Leroy, worked in a belt factory, and his mother, Mary, was a seamstress in a garment factory, and both kept the same jobs for decades. Willie’s family knew neighbors for blocks around whose stories echoed theirs.