Circumcising the Grape

When I was 16, I was madly in love with a graffiti-artist slash rapper from Queens. With Hip-Hop making its way to the mainstream, I snubbed my Luke Skywalker-Me-So-Horney roots for Tribe Called Quest’s “Midnight Marauders” as I was obsessed with all things New York. My mother and I recently discussed that whimsical season over a couple glasses of Manischewitz Grape Concord wine, the season when her daughter added hundreds of gray hairs to her precious, Pentecostal head. Queens and I broke up during my spring break visit from Howard University. It was a dramatic ending complete with a bonfire of all the artistic pieces he had given me. “He circumcised me from his life,” I cried to my mother, weeping and wailing, Jamaican-style, my singed, teenage heart leaning on the biblical words I wanted so much to abandon. I remember my mother, who was dually mortified and impressed, sitting with me as I waded through the miry clay of my first heartbreak. She pulled out her holy oil (Pompeian olive oil) from her nightstand drawer, poured a little on her fingers and made the sign of the cross on my forehead. I had de-Pentecostalized myself after I left home, but I still loved when my mother prayed for me. With my forehead cupped in her slick hand, she prayed that the pain would subside and that I would I finish college. Both prayers were answered (eventually lol).

Cooking for the Jam-American Sadists



A black pepper dry salami mixed green salad precedes this year's gluttony showdown



In my family, I’m considered “The Black American.” If I do anything distinctly un-Jamaican, my mother, an old-school, Jamaican kitchen-magician is quick to explain my peculiar behavior: She was born in this country. You know how dem stay. I’m a first generation Miamian, and so for my pre-dominantly Jamaican-born family, I’m usually the go-to reference for all things black American. My mother loves to hear the southern, ghetto, black American idiosyncrasies that drip from my mixed Jamaican-Brooklyn-Miami-white-girl twang. She loves when I precede our now adult conversations with: Girl, she said this or he said that. That said, Thanksgiving is considered my holiday. I took the cooking-torch from my mother back in 2000, vowing to bring black America to our Kingstonian table that usually begat dishes like curry goat, rice and gungo peas and jerk turkey. As a child, I secretly envied my friends whose Thanksgiving tables boasted macaroni-n-cheese, honeymoon salad, homemade buttermilk biscuits, peach cobbler, sweet potato pie, and those turkeys that looked like the ones in the Crisco commercials. I hated our desserts which consisted mainly of “puddin’ ”—a dense sweet potato dessert that I’m still not crazy about. But there’s a lot of pressure to please these Jamaican flagged palates that can season meats blindfolded and transform the blandest dish into a boisterous score of rhythmic flavor. My mother and aunts are amazing cooks, and if you don’t meet their expectations, they’ll growl in disapproval. A few years ago, a very dear friend joined us for Thanksgiving and had a full-on, face-buried-in-my-sheets panic attack when presenting her crab stuffing to the flavor sadists. It was a hit, though they complained about having to wait so long for its completion. My cooking reviews have been good though my mother would never entrust her beloved rice and gungu peas to me.