Writer and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs makes greens almost every day: chard, kale and — this time of the year — heaping pots of vegan collard greens.
Gumbs, author of the recent Audre Lorde biography Survival is a Promise and a thinker who delights in the natural world, finds something meditative about “the process of finding the right green — cooked but not overcooked, not too chewy but not too mushy. [That’s] the same practice for me of achieving balance in every other area of life.”
In her 2016 book Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, she wrote:
the same crunch the same stem the same sweet green wetness again
her heart is a pot full of greens to chew and swallow all the nourishment she knows
The collard, a humble vegetable with origins in Eurasia (not Africa as often assumed), may seem an unlikely poetic subject. But it’s the James Brown of vegetables, one of the hardest-working foods around: It thrives in the cold, provides an alphabet soup of vitamins, and arguably serves as the de facto national vegetable of Southern African America. As Charleston-based chef WiBi Ashley puts it, “Collard greens are more than just a staple in Southern kitchens. They’re a symbol of resilience, nourishment and tradition. Their deep, earthy flavor carries the magic of generations, connecting us to the land and the wisdom of our ancestors.” She calls its potlikker — the leftover broth often used as medicine or a base for other foods— “liquid gold.”
Small wonder that Black poets have heralded it. Gumbs is part of a lineage of Black writers — particularly Black feminist writers — moved by this leafy green.
Green is the color of women’s work
In 1974, the late Lucille Clifton published “cutting greens” in her collection, An Ordinary Woman. It represents the most common depiction of collards in verse: a way of discussing women’s labor. The first-person narrator chops collards and kale. She’s automatically preparing the leaves; she’s done it enough that this mundane culinary act allows her to think of “everything but kinship” and, perhaps, caring for others. Her kitchen is a space for imagining.
More contemporary writers have also explored gender dynamics and maternity through the collard. In “Harriette Winslow and Aunt Rachel Clean Collard Greens on Prime Time Television,” Alabama poet Ashley Jones observes the matriarch on 1990s sitcom Family Matters and her own mother cooking the greens:
… a kitchen
is sweetened when collards are cooking, the air a
swelling porkfat perfume, the onion’s pungent terror
nulled by the ribboned greens — I loved to watch my mother cut them,
roll the piles of flat foliage up like a cigar, the kitchen
knife shining against a tight army of collards.
We needed no superheroes when we had her …
In “Lessons,” Jacqueline Woodson’s “Mama” recalls her own mother’s attempt to teach her and a sister how to make collards and potato salad while male siblings were left to frolic. The girls stage a quiet household revolution to be as free as the boys, who purloined buckets of peaches from a neighbor’s tree and refused to share.
The peculiar rise of the “collard crime”
Before these women poets, collard references also appeared in racist limericks and doggerel. Just as the watermelon became a vehicle for stereotype, the collard green and its association with Black Southerners inspired racist creativity. The vegetable was conscripted to become an agricultural accessory to the national and Jim Crow project: the denigration and subjugation of Black Americans.
Circumstance, season, age and race made all the difference. For some people, collards were abundance; for others, subsistence food. It was the 1890s, and not everyone could go to the fair — or the same one. As Jim Crow laws swept the South, many states hosted separate “Colored State Fairs” or opted for a single fair that was theoretically for all but hosted a “colored day” when only African Americans could attend. And not everyone could sing the praises of fried chicken and collard greens without facing jeers.
Black collard love, “collardphilia” if you will, was supposedly so strong, that those in its sway would pilfer gorgeous greens from others’ gardens. Media accounts suggested that collard spats frequently disrupted civil order, like when Atlantan Clara Mitchell’s “vengeful lawlessness” started a brawl when she cut down Bob Pounds’ winter collards in October 1897. But newspapers also contradicted themselves about the prevalence of collard crime: The Clarion-Ledger railed about a 1930 overnight collard theft in Jackson, Mississippi, saying “This hideous act is without precedent in this city!” It shook its editorial head at the presence of a “perverted and malicious vandal” in its midst. One can guess what a perverted and malicious vandal looked like in the Southern white imagination.
Such accounts of alleged collard crime often came with disdainful ditties. The Atlanta Constitution excelled at this kind of reportage in the early 20th century. An October 1900 roundup of police news recounted the appearance of one Mary James — “a dark brown tub queen,” likely a laundress — before a court recorder.
Mary had tossed rocks at her neighbors’ windows in the wee hours, aggravated that their chickens had razed her greens. The judge bemusedly noted that good fences make good neighbors and better crop protection. But before reporter Gordon Noel Hurtel described Mary James’ case in his “Police Roundup Pen Shots” column, there was this adaptation of another nursery rhyme: “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow?”
“Mary” responds: De chickens scratch the collard patch
And the taters in de row.
The judge and newspaper writer shared a peculiarly condescending kind of Jim Crow jocularity. They snickered at a laundress, even as they likely employed one to iron their pants. Mary was fined $3.75 and admonished to “live up to the golden rule, and when other folks’ chickens eat your collards, rejoice in that your neighbor’s fowl are fat.”
Ridicule is all the more memorable when couched in rhyme. The message was clear: Mary was uncouth, uneducated, and incapable of pursuing more rational conflict resolution, characteristics that whites associated with Blackness. This was rhetorical violence at its best — via vegetable and verse.
Hurtel, the writer who mocked Mary, grew in influence, and ridiculous collard theft stories featuring Black Atlantans surfaced in his work again. Two years later, an October 1902 newspaper tidbit described a young man who worked at “one thing and den anudder” and was caught green-handed removing collards from a garden:
Hunter hungered for a mess
Of collards green and sweet.
A copper collared him and said
No cabbage on my beat.
Despite Hunter’s insistence that a friend promised he could pick the vegetables, his lack of stable employment counted against him. The judge told him that he’d get a steady diet of greens and steady work, too, during his 30-day stay at the county lockup.