Macon Magazine

60 maconmagazine.com | OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2022 generations and throughout the New World. "We can really credit Jessica," Davis explained, "because she has pioneered the study of African American foodways. Her work is primary, archival, historical work, and she does it in a way that is accessible to popular audiences." Davis met Harris shortly after he arrived in Macon 15 years ago to teach southern literature at Mercer University and decided he would use southern foodways to engage his students. He met Harris at a conference in New Orleans at the time when she served as the inaugural scholar in the Ray Charles Chair in African American Material Culture at New Orleans' Dillard University. Following a roundtable discussion on food in southern literature, Davis said Harris encouraged him and his friend Tara Powell to edit a collection on food in southern literature. They eventually published that collection as Writing in the Kitchen: Essays on Southern Literature and Foodways, with Harris writing the foreword for the book. Davis said Harris deserves the recognition she is receiving for a lifetime of work on a topic that been undervalued. "It's a recovery mission in a way…a really crucial recovery…. We all share equally. We all have eaten from the same pot," he said. If southern cooking, culture, and, yes, even the guilty pleasure of binging Netflix make it onto your list of favorite pastimes, then you might add attending this year's Jordan Massee Lecture Series on Southern History and Culture to your list as well. When Harris speaks at the Hay House on Nov. 16, the audience will learn much about the history and influences of the African diaspora in the Americas. Satterfield provided some additional advice for attendees: "Listen intently. Her name and her work belong in the pantheon of great Black intellectuals of the 20th century with people like James Baldwin and Maya Angelou." Those are familiar names to Harris. In her memoir, My Soul Looks Back, she writes of her younger days in New York and her relationships with both Baldwin and Angelou. In fact, Angelou composed the foreword to High on the Hog, and if you listen intently, you might just learn the history behind that phrase. But Satterfield and others contend that there's more to learn from Harris beyond food and the universal shared human need and appreciation for it. "We are who we are today because of the African foodways," Pickard expressed. When Harris speaks at the Hay House next month, she will undoubtedly talk about the lecture series' namesake as a friend but also as an example of the power and impact that food has on all of us beyond mere physical sustenance. "That we never got a chance to really deepen our friendship is certainly a regret, but I very much savor, to use a culinary term, the time that we spent together," she said. "That was…an example of...the ability of food to connect people, and I think it does." The 2022 Jordan Massee Lecture on Southern History and Culture presents Dr. Jessica B. Harris. Nov. 16. 6 - 8 p.m. Hay House. Admission is complimentary.

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