What's Your Culinary Birthmark?
Selling yams, Courtesy of the Florida Memory Project
Here is another contribution to our series food in the African-American Canon. In Ralph Ellison novel Invisible Man, the narrator, a young black migrates from the South to Harlem, New York in the 1940s. While walking streets of Harlem one night he’s hit with the delicious smell of baked yams that an old street vendor is selling. The encounter causes him to become nostalgic about home. The protagonist says, “to hell with being ashamed of what you like. No more of that for me. I am what I am! I wolfed down the yam and ran back to the old man and handed him twenty cents, ‘Give me two more.’” Sure he said, “‘I can see you one of these old-fashioned yam eaters.’ ‘They’re my birthmark’, I said. ‘I yam what I am!’”
Guest blogger Jack Shalom was a student in Professor Opie’s course Food and the African American Canon
