High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [79]
I’ve been back to Chicago many times since then. On one memorable occasion my friend Marvin Jones, who is a chef, took me on a Chicago barbecue crawl. We made our way into corners where I’d have never dared to venture alone. I can still recall waiting in a line of folks in a narrow corridor, smelling the mix of smoke and char and the sweet pungency of the cooking meat in the air. We’d managed to get in line before the small joint ran out of barbecue and closed for the night. We feasted: sucking on the bone tips of the ribs and scarfing down the chopped pork barbecue off paper plates. The taste of the ‘cue was sweet-tart with the red sauce that I’d had in some of my favorite Memphis spots. Memphis was a stop on the way north to Chicago, and some of the people simply settled there; others stayed only long enough to make more money and continue the journey north to Chicago. Connections between the two cities and the Mississippi Delta still run deep.
Chicago had long been a beacon for blacks leaving the South. Its big-shoulder ethos appealed to those who had little more than the strength of their backs and the acuity of their wit. Founded by black trading-post owner Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, Chicago has always been a town of black entrepreneurs. None was more successful than John H. Johnson, who founded the Johnson Publishing Company there in 1942. Johnson migrated from Arkansas, and his success was the larger-than-life version of the smaller stories of entrepreneurial success that played out in the first half of the twentieth century. The tale of how he began publishing Negro Digest and then Ebony and founded his empire, which became the largest black-owned publishing firm in the world, is the stuff of legend. No trip to Chicago for me is complete without a visit to the offices of Johnson Publishing, where my friend Charlotte Lyons has been food editor of Ebony magazine for more than three decades, following in the steps of the first black food editor, Frieda DeKnight.
When first built, the headquarters of Ebony were not only the pride of the Johnson family who had founded the publishing giant but also a testimonial of accomplishment for African Americans all over the country. As recently as 2008, I was tickled to note some church ladies—hats firmly planted on heads and hands snuggly in gloves—had made Johnson Publishing headquarters a stop on their Chicago tour and come just to visit the building and see where the magazine that had been so much a part of their lives was produced. The building is pure 1960s top of the line—exotic woods, art-hung corridors, executive offices with vast views of Grant Park across the street, its own archives and library. It reflects a pride in ownership that is part of the entrepreneurial feeling among African Americans, nowhere more so than in Chicago.
It is not without reason that the first black president of the United States was based in Chicago, for the city and the opportunity that it has traditionally offered African Americans embodies an ongoing African American quest for acceptance and equal success even in the twenty-first century. In the late years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, Chicago and other Northern cities must have glowed like beacons of possibility and opportunity for African Americans. Those, like John Johnson, who left the South to establish themselves in the North brought with them more than their dreams of a better life; they brought their willingness to work, their sense of family and community, and the resourcefulness and the resilience that would transform the food of their Southern homes into businesses large and small.
Escaping slaves had followed the drinking gourd, located the north star, and made their way north to freedom for centuries. In