Psyche Williams-Forson will close out UNC Asheville’s lecture series, Diverse Roots at the Common Table: Culinary Conversations in the American South on Wednesday, Feb. 26. But Williams-Forson — author, professor and chair of the department of American studies at the University of Maryland College Park — promises not to lecture. Instead, she intends to host an interactive conversation about how women have always managed to use food to procure everything from pin money to houses.
Williams-Forson’s discussion, “When We Go Meet the Trains: Black Women, Food and Power in the American South,” grew from her doctoral thesis, which became her first book, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs. She later penned Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America, which won a 2023 James Beard Media Award.
She became interested in food as a category of analysis as a graduate research assistant at the University of Maryland for Jewish scholar Hasia Diner, author of Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration. “I was beginning my graduate studies and wasn’t familiar with the term ‘foodways,’” Williams-Forson recalls.
Curiosity piqued, she looked it up and was directed to a listing of cookbooks by three noted Black women — Jessica Harris, Vertamae Smart-Grosvener and Edna Lewis. “The cookbooks tell what Black people eat, but not why,” Williams-Forson says. “That started me in my graduate career trying to understand Black food culture.”
Three public incidents connecting famous Black men — Tiger Woods, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama — with fried chicken inspired her to study how racist stereotypes around that food came to be. While poring over archives at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, she discovered an article that changed the direction of her study.
“It was the story of a group of Black women in Gordonsville, Va., in the late 1880s who fried chicken, took it to the train station and sold it to passengers through the windows of the cars,” Williams-Forson explains. “It was a very organized and multigenerational enterprise that allowed these women to put their children through school, buy property and open businesses.”
The title of Williams-Forson’s first book comes from a quote by a chicken vendor interviewed for Gordonsville’s sesquicentennial. “This woman said, ‘My mother built our house out of chicken legs; the first one burned down, and she rebuilt it,’” the author says.
“These particular cultural moments are unparalleled,” she continues. “You see an intersection of labor, enterprise, artistry and culinary expertise. It is important to remember there was a time when this is how these women made a living. We have to be able to hold those memories for posterity.”
WHAT: “When We Go Meet the Trains: Black Women, Food and Power in the American South”
WHEN: Wednesday, Feb. 26, 6-7:30 p.m.
WHERE: Blue Ridge Room at Highsmith Student Union; preregister at avl.mx/ejc
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