Finally I'm coming out the closet. Yes I eat Chitlins, and I'm Proud!

A few days ago, October 11th, marked "International Coming Out Day", celebrating brave individuals who publicly identify as either Lesbian, Transgendered, Bisexual or Gay.  I'm happy for them.

 I am especially proud of those in the Black community who participated or embraced a friend or loved one who came out. 
Still, too many Down-Low Brothers are spreading the AIDS Virus because of cowardliness, but also due to the Black Community's ramped and childish homophobia. I continue to make amends for my previous acts of stupid homophobia, by aggressively denouncing any homophobic word or actions on the spot.  

But tonight, Im gonna do a little "coming out" of my own. 

I eat Chitterlings. 

Black folk call them chitlins and I'm cooking up a pot ( to be served with grits) as I type this confession. 

"Chitlins" have always had a dual relationship in America, especially Black America,  yet animal innards remain a delicacy world wide, from Asia to Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe. Haggis is the national dish of Scotland, which is innards stuffed with sheep heart, liver and lungs. The finest French restaurants serve tripe, (andouillettes), which is also their name in New Orleans. The name Chitterlings is itself a middle high German word.

 In America, chitlins were relegated to Blacks during chattel slavery, and like the blues, we made something positive of it. Black captives preformed every act of hard labor for white society,  including killing hogs. In the cooler weather around the holidays, the removal and preparations of chitlins became both ritual and a delicacy of the Black captives.  One of the endless horrors of chattel slavery was the miserly food rations provided to the Black captives.   To survive, after toiling from sun up to sun down in the fields, they had to grow their own gardens, fish, and trap wild game, or starve. After killing the hog, they could take only the chitlins. After the rest of the meat was delivered to the white captors, the chitlins were cooked in a large kettle over fire and eaten out doors. The cleaning took hours, so stories were told, along with singing and dancing.

After emancipation, chitlins became problematic. More Blacks were against eating them, especially those who moved north.  Chitlins became a symbol of the humiliations, horrors, and suffering of chattel slavery, and poverty afterwords.  But during the Great Depression, rural white southerners began to eat them. Some openly, enjoying them in groups at barns and gas station garages. The smell haunts houses long after the savories are gone. They even formed clubs, like the Royal Order of Chitlin Eaters of Nashville and The Happy Chitlin Eaters of Raleigh. In some places, they took on names like Southern Oysters.

  Black people,  however continued to use the term pejoratively.  During Jim Crow segregation, Black northern musicians and comics toured "The Chitlin Circuit", which were southern predominantly Black owned clubs and juke joints that generally were little more than shacks in tin can alley communities, that sold rock gut spirits, beer, and soul food, including chitlins. Traveling the Chitlin Circuit was perilous. Most hotels, motels, and restaurants refused service to Blacks. Whites were also particularly hostile to Black outsiders, branding them as part of the civil rights movement. The goal of these artists was to work the Chitlin Circuit long enough to be discovered by some of the bigger clubs in Harlem that had all Black musicians, but were also segregated.   

When I was a kid my Aunt Mert cooked chitlins at her home in the Englewood neighborhood. My mother who grow up at the end of the very same block, joined in the preperation. My Grandfather who loved chitlins still lived there, along with my uncle, who did not.  And all of the Drakes, Aunt Mert, Uncle Mike, their one daughter and three boys, loved my Grandfather who they called Mr. Palmer. But none of them, except my Aunt, ate chitlins so they had to put up with the smell for food they didn't like. They all therefore left the house for the day.

Red bucket white top that required 5 hours of cleaning

In those days, chitlins came mostly uncleaned in a standard white top red buck, took around three hours to cook, and five to clean. They had be cut into pieces and the waste scrubbed off each piece least germs unleash a plethora of sicknesses. I loved being at my aunts house. As a baby, while my mother worked, she use to watch over me along with her youngest son/my cousin Markus, who died all to young before she passed, years ago.

As my Aunt Mert and my Mom cleaned and cooked the chitlins, I would listen to my aunt- who did most of the talking- gossip and reminisces  about "down south". My Aunt would laugh, play music, sing and dance. I remember her crooning to my mother, "Baby I Need Your Loving" by the Four Tops. Mert was a stout and tall women with a marvelous voice who could light up the dance floor, as she did that fall day on the linoleum kitchen floor.

As they cooked I would also walk down the street to explore my Grandfathers, old, dark, junkie, cigar smoke filled, and mysterious house, that my mother, other aunt, and uncles grew up in.  My Grandfather did not like a lot of people including members of his own family, but he loved and doted on me. He always had candy at the ready, although some might be stale, but I never minded. And he loved chitlins

Although I only had them once a year, my father tried hard to stop me from eating chitlins. One year, after a long lecture about how bad they were, he offered me twenty dollars if I never ate them again. I asked If I didn't eat them next year, could I have the twenty dollars?  He said,  I might eat them the year after, so I had to wait till I was twenty-one. I wasn't even thirteen so I refused. When my mother and I left him, she still never made chitlins.

Chitlins are still a stigma. I never admitted liking them, until now. Yet when I graduated from college, I made them. I was dating a women from a Black Muslim background and knew not to ask her to join me. So one Saturday, I brought the red bucket and frankly almost gave up after the first four hours. I knew at that time that my Aunt's preparation of chitlins for us was a labor of love and probably related to her growing up in Alabama.

What I didn't know was, a chitlin revolution had occurred. The red bucket of chitlins are about six bucks. Now machine cleaned chitlins are available for eight dollars, requiring minimal cleaning.  Hand cleaned chitlins sale for  thirteen dollars, requiring no cleaning. The Red Bucket Option has far more chitlins, but for safety and connivence, I go with the hand cleaned. Just to be safe I still go over them twice.

Only My mother knew of my secrete.

In Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, published in 1952, there is a potent scene about the complexity of chitlins in Black America. After being unfairly dismissed from an all Black southern agricultural college by the haughty but influential school principal Dr. Bledsoe ( modeled after Booker T. Washington),  the novels protagonist, fantasizes about getting revenge by exposing a secrete chitlin passion,

"I saw myself advancing upon Bledsoe . . . and suddenly whipping out a foot or two of chitterlings, raw, uncleaned, and dripping sticky circles on the floor as I shake them in his face, shouting: "Bledsoe, you're a shameless chitterling eater! I accuse you of relishing hog bowels! Ha! And not only do you eat them, you sneak and eat them in private when you think you're unobserved! You're a sneaking chitterling lover!"

My chitlins are ready now, and the grits will take another few minutes. Once again I am now publicly coming out.

 I. Love. Chitlins.

  

I also love them because eating them connects me to my ancestors   who endured the unspeakable acts of chattel slavery and as a race struggled through it. I am proud to eat what they ate. I am proud that my Aunt Mertha demonstrated her deep love for me and my Grandfather by cooking them when they required eight hours of labor, and included my Mother in this ritual. I am proud that I could feel how deeply my Grandfather, who grew up desperately poor, loved me and was proud that I shared his love for chitlins.

 My Aunt Mert and Grandfalther are no longer in physical form. But by partaking in this ritual, I can feel strongly connected to them. 

I am blessed in this way. 

Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, Sam Hose, Why No Body Wants to be the Talented Tenth

On this day August 27, 1963 in Accra Ghana, Dr.W.E.B. DuBois passed on, he had grown tired of the United States and lived out the rest of his days in Africa.

Cornel West, described as the heir of DuBois’s legacy, wrote  DuBois is the "brook of fire through which we all must pass in order to gain access to the intellectual and political weaponry needed to sustain the radical democratic tradition in our time”

Today the Black community as a whole still exists in a  white supremacist world wind of physical and economic violence, and dehumanization. But when DuBois walked this earth, legal protection didn't exist for Black people. Total segregation was the law and violating local customs often got Black folks lynched. And Black inferiority was considered a scientific fact.  

DuBois, because of his privilege as a Harvard trained sociologist, proclaimed himself a member of the “talented tenth” and changed America by teaching, giving speeches, publishing news papers like, The Crisis, authoring twenty-one books, including the "Souls of Black Folks"  "Black Reconstruction in America", and  (the first scientific sociological study in America), "The Philadelphia Negro", plays, poems, novels, and essays. He also founded "The Niagara Movement" that birthed The Civil Rights Movement.

 DuBois also had to supersede Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Machine based out of Tuskegee University that he founded. Washington proffered a strategy of obsequious behavior toward whites and accepting segregating. He also only supported education in farming and trades. His beliefs were so popular that both liberal and conservative white leaders gave generously to his causes. And every President of that era visited the campus and sought his advice. Washington's influence made and broke break careers of Blacks according to their loyalty. This including getting DuBois fired from the Fisk University( another all Black institution) for supporting anti lynching legislation. 

I wonder what Dr. DuBois would say about the the Black on Black violence this summer, including the shootings of eight young Black men last Thursday on a street corner in a south side neighborhood called "Terror Town". 

I kept thinking  about how after two blurbs in both local papers, it's no longer news. Yet if a group of eight young white males were shot similarly, the country would pause to take notice.  

I'm reminded of DuBois's attempt to cover the trial of a Black farm laborer named Sam Hose who killed his much larger employer in self defense. While on the run for ten days, the major newspapers competed by making up increasingly lurid and violent details. They same Mr. Hose raped a white women and killed her baby. When Mr. Hose was captured, he immediately went to trial and was convicted in twenty minutes and sentence to death the next day. Railroad trains  were hired to transport hundreds of whites from larger towns like Georgia to attend the murder of Mr. Hose. On Sunday, April 23, 1899. Mr. Hose was brought to the town square before a crowd of over 2,000. There he was stripped, and his ears, fingers, and genitals were sliced off, his face skinned, and finally he was burned on a pyre. Children and other souvenir hunters fought over organs and bones.

DuBois arrived a day later asked a porter if the trial had begun. The porter told him that he missed the trial but that Mr. Hose's knuckles were on display in the window at the town grocery store if he wanted to see them.  

DuBois looked about the town and wondered how the large population of Black citizens 

could walk by that window and cross the town square where such a atrocity against on of their own had happened, yet they went on with their lives as if nothing happened.

I hope one day, some one asks the same thing about us. I hope things are better then for Black people. And I hope some kid says how could things get that bad in a city that has more Black elected officials than any other city and a Black President who was from that city. And while they're no knuckles in the window, they're are plenty of side walk memorials plastic flows, teddy bears, candles, balloons and half bottles of forty ounces and on 78th and Essex I hope the rain washed away the blood because it was still there as of Saturday night, or so I was told.

Funny, today the Black intelligentsia calls DuBois's idea of the Talented Tenth arrogant, so I stopped using it because such is the popular thinking. Although I always considered it truth. And how can you deny the source? I think why the term has gone out of favor is because to speak it creates a duty to actually dedicate your life to help other Black people in a genuine way of empowerment and I think too many of my people just don't want to do that.

We Miss You Doctor DuBois.