James Baldwin's South, Part 8 Grits
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
James Baldwin was a critically-acclaimed African American author and activist. Much of his writing focused on racial disparity and intersectionality in the United States of America. This is the eighth installment of this series that focuses on Baldwin’s personal experience with discrimination in America.
Black-owned restaurants remained popular places among African Americans in the South and progressive whites who viewed them as equal because of the hostility and violence one experienced in white-owned eateries. As Baldwin shows, entering the front door of a white restaurant was to illegally enter a hostile white country. Black-owned restaurants were places for food but also important meeting spaces for subversive activities such as a black man eating a meal with white girl, “blond” haired girl type whose purity the creators of Jim Crow segregation laws had targeted for special protection. As a northerner, Baldwin found the food in such black-owned and -operated southern institutions uneatable. He writes, you cannot “get a meal anywhere in the South without being confronted with “grits”—a pale, lumpy, tasteless kind of porridge which the southerner insists is a delicacy but which I” dislike. Speaking of a black-owned restaurant and a black waitress, he recalls a classic northern-southern culinary confrontation: “What? You don’t want no grits?” asks the wide-eyed waitress; not hostile yet, merely baffled. She moves away and spreads the word all over the region: “You see that man there? Well, he don’t eat no grits”—and you are, suddenly, a marked man.
Southerners grew up eating grits and considered it a delicious inexpensive savory staple. But northerners like James Baldwin found them repulsive and unpalatable. Baldwin called them a form of culinary “punishment for [one’s] sins.”[1] In 1963 The Chicago Daily Defender published an article entitled Four Served Grits In Alabama Jail. In Birmingham Alabama, city and county officials arrested and jailed more than 2,200 protesters (most of them African-American) since the start of demonstrations began in April 1963. The city jail population overflowed into the other jails in temporary quarters at the state fairgrounds. The jails became so jammed with protesters that it took more than four hours to serve them a breakfast of “grits and gravy, applesauce and bacon.” One racist city official claimed that the prison staff had fed and bedded the African American protestors “as well or better than most of them have at home.”
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