"Your Mama's Kitchen" transcript: Episode 22

Your Mama's Kitchen Episode 22: Tayari Jones

Audible Originals presents Your Mama's Kitchen, hosted by Michele Norris.

Tayari Jones: When I went to Spelman, it was the first time I had seen women's lives really valued, Black women's lives valued for things that were not traditional. And I developed just an incredible appetite for unconventional, different ways to live. I felt like someone pulled back a curtain and said, “Young lady, this whole world could be yours.” And when I looked through that curtain, I didn't see any pots or pans. 

Michele: Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how we’re shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids—I’m Michele Norris. 

And we are going to spend some time today with Tayari Jones. She is a writer and a novelist and she is a Georgia gal through and through. She was raised in Atlanta. She went to college in Atlanta and since she still lives there, that’s where we caught up with her. Tayari is a writer and accomplished novelist. She was a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow for creative arts and her novel An American Marriage won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and an NAACP Image Award, and it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. Tayari can really throw down in the kitchen. She’s a confident and creative cook, but as you will hear in this episode, she took her own sweet time finding her path in life… and her path to cooking.

You see, early in life Tayari declared that she would never cook a thing. But she has turned into someone who is always bringing food to the people around her…her neighbors her friends, her LANDLORD. And remember what I said about her being a confident cook—she’ll tell you that her red velvet cake recipe is as good as it gets.

We’ll hear about her childhood growing up in the midst of the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and the Atlanta child murders that terrorized her hometown… and how all of that shaped who she is today. 

Michele Norris: Tayari, it's so good to actually be with you in the studio again. We've talked to each other in the studio from Washington, D.C., but now I'm on your home turf here in Atlanta City, known for fantastic food. There's no really no reason to have a bad meal when you're in Atlanta because there's so much good food throughout the city. So thank you for coming into the studio to be with us.

Tayari Jones: Oh, it is my pleasure. And thank you for coming to Atlanta. I've always wanted to show you my hometown.

Michele Norris: Yes so you know I have to come back ’cause I would like to see more of Atlanta with you.So tell me about your mama's kitchen. 

Tayari Jones: My mama's kitchen is orderly and very functional. My mother is not a person who enjoys flourishes of any type. So she has, you know, lazy Susans so she can spin and find her spices. Her pots and pans are underneath. She also has in there her everyday plates and saucers, those dishes, but also her wedding china is in a cabinet, very hard to reach. We only use it on special occasions. She doesn't love her wedding china, because her mother changed her pattern. She said that when she was getting married she opened one box at her wedding shower or maybe it was after the wedding and it was a wrong pattern. And she thought, Oh, you know, Mrs. So-and-so made a mistake. But she kept opening more and more. It's a floral pattern and she had wanted a plain white china with a gold rim, but her mother decided that wasn't enough and ordered a floral pattern. So that is my mother's wedding china. We eat on it on special occasions, but she doesn't take pleasure in it, so it's stored high away.

Michele Norris: So she didn't even have control over her, she didn't have agency over something like that.

Tayari Jones: I think about that. And for me, it breaks my heart. But she doesn't seem, it's not something that she keeps bringing up. She doesn't, you know, keep chewing on that. But I often think of it as a metaphor. But I'm a writer. I see a metaphor everywhere.

Michele Norris: So tell me about your mother's culinary world. Did she cook every week? Did she cook every night?

Tayari Jones:] My mother cooked every night when I was growing up. She learned how to cook Louisiana food because my dad is from Louisiana, my mother is from Oklahoma, and she learned how to cook when she got married my grandmother's sister, my Aunt Edna taught my mother how to make gumbo and other things. And so my mother cooked every night. She still cooks. My mother is going on 80 and she cooks pretty much every day. And I actually think this is why I resisted cooking for so long. I associate cooking with catering to other people's appetites because it occurred to me that I don't know my mother's favorite foods; she cooked what other people may want to eat. And I was thinking, that will never be me. That well, I imagined myself to be kind of like, What's her name on Sex and the City? Carrie, I think, is the character's name, how she stores magazines in her oven. I was that person for a long time because I was just like, That will not be me. I won't. You can't make me. I'll starve to death first.

Michele Norris: Well, this is interesting to me because I've gotten to know you over the years and you're always bringing people food. Someone moved in across the street and you were baking for him. You were bringing food to the guys that worked at the pawn shop across the street. You had a neighbor? Yes. Mrs. Jenkins, your, your-

Tayari Jones: My landlady.

Michele Norris: Your landlady. And you were baking for her all the time. Did that come from your mother?

Tayari Jones: Well, what? I got into that because I had a friend. I told my friend how I wasn't going to cook because I wasn't going to make my life around other people's desires. And my friend asked me, she said, Well, what do you like to eat? She bought me a cookbook and she said, Look through this cookbook and see what looks like something you would like to have, and we'll make it together. And through that, that was kind of one of the first times when I felt I started associating cooking with my own appetites instead of looking at it as a kind of obligatory act of service. Yeah. Now I'm a cooking fool. I cook all the time. I now cook sometimes with my mother. I now come to see it as an act of love. And so I do enjoy cooking for other people, but I also really enjoy cooking for myself. And so it just became a way the cooking became a way of satisfying my desire for frills like my mom is in. My mom is no frills kind of person. And I never met a frill I didn't like. And so now my kitchen is a very frilly place.

Michele Norris: In contrast to your mother's kitchen?

Tayari Jones: Yes.

Michele Norris: So what's your kitchen like?

Tayari Jones: I have. What is it? The Le Creuset, cast iron.

Michele Norris: What color?

Tayari Jones: I have the blue because the first piece was given to me by my one of my professors from Spelman. And everything we do is blue. So I have the blue and I have also gadgets. I love a gadget. The more specific, the better.

Michele Norris: And so your mom was not a gadget person? No, she chapter garlic. She wouldn't use a garlic press.

Tayari Jones: My mother chopped everything. My mother doesn't like to spend money. She has a PHD in economics and she just doesn't believe that you should spend money on things that you could do yourself. She likes to do things herself. And that's also really reflected in her in her kitchen. She doesn't like shortcuts, like she'll read about starter dough starters. She's going to want to start some sour dough or she can mimic anything. My mother can go to a restaurant, eat the soup, come home and figure out how to make that soup. She likes the project of it. I think that this thing that she always disguised as I don't want to spend money was really she wanted to make a project to do these things, but she never she's not the type of person to say, I delight in hacking in hacking recipes. I delight in sewing my own curtains. This is how I satisfy my artistic impulse because I believe it is an artistic impulse. So instead of that, because I think that sounds selfish, she'll say, I'm saving the family money by making these curtains myself. I'm saving money by instead of us going to a restaurant. I will make the soup myself. But I have come to understand that some women, particularly of a different generation, are unable to admit to their pleasure in their own creation.

Michele Norris: For many of us, kitchens are very gendered spaces. Was that true in your household?

Tayari Jones: Yes. My daddy cooks his own breakfast. He is 86 and he always says, I cook my breakfast every day. It's a point of pride from him. And Daddy also washes dishes because my daddy cannot stand anything to be dirty. But he's not the kind of person to tell other people to clean it for him. He will wash the dishes. One of my earliest memories is my dad standing in front of the sink with the dish towel over his shoulder washing the dishes. But my mother does all the cooking and it is her place and it's her domain.

Michele Norris: So it's her place and it's her domain. It's her place because that's expected of her. But is this a place where maybe she had control over her life, over her life in ways that she didn't in other spaces?

Tayari Jones: I think definitely she had a control of the meals and choosing the menus. And she enjoyed cooking when I was a child. I don't know how much she enjoys it now. I think after 60 years she might have had enough. But when I was a child, I would remember her delighting in trying new things. And I always loved her food. Her first name is Barbara, and she had this strange meal she would make called Barbara special. It was like ground beef and vegetables and something. And we would have it like when my dad was at home. And as a child, I was like, This is delicious. You know, there's food that you like as a child that grown people may not. But she would make anything she once she made donuts. Nobody else's mom could make donuts. She would try anything cinnamon rolls that she would, you know, make from scratch. And it was fun. She used to let me help before I decided that I wasn't going to cook anything, ever. She would let me help with that kind of thing. And I thought it was like a fun mommy and me kind of thing.

Michele Norris: I'm imagining you cooking together. I'm also imagining the moment where you told her, Mommy, I'm never going to cook anything, ever. What did you how did she react to that? Did she try to talk you out of that or did she do that thing that mother sometimes do? Mm hmm. Okay. We'll see.

Tayari Jones: Yeah. She didn't even say we'll see. I can't even remember when. I don't think I announced it because I think I probably didn't want to hurt her feelings and say I'll never be in the kitchen all the time like you are. I didn't want to say that. So I think I just kind of eased away. Also, I went to college very young. I was 16 when I went to college. And I think that when when you go to college, especially in my generation, that's kind of the end of getting parents it in a way. So when I went to college at 16, it was almost like I had gone to boarding school really more than what you think about and going to college sometimes. I think I went to college and I never really came home.

Michele Norris: And you went just across town.

Tayari Jones: I did. But my parents.

Michele Norris: You went to Spelman?

Tayari Jones: Yes, I went to Spelman College. I'm very proud alumna but my parents moved to Texas on the day that I went to college, so they didn't even take me to college. I went to college by myself. Yeah. So.

Michele Norris: Timing didn't work out?

Tayari Jones: Timing didn't work out. They had something else to do, something else to do. And so that began my really my independent adult life. When I went to Spelman, it was the first time I had seen women's lives really valued black women's lives valued for things that were not traditional. And I developed just an incredible appetite for unconventional, different ways to live. I felt like someone pulled back a curtain and said, Young lady, this whole world could be yours. And when I looked through that curtain, I didn't see any pots or pans.

Michele Norris: I want to go back to your mother in her kitchen. She's still alive? 

Tayari Jones: Yes, she's still here. 

Michele Norris: You still?

Tayari Jones: We play Wordle.

Michele Norris: As I do with my mother every day. You cook together sometimes. But when you kind of miss your mama's kitchen, like the kitchen of your childhood, is there something that you yearn for?

Tayari Jones: It's so funny. I miss my childhood home. My parents moved out of my childhood home. And I know the woman who lives here, and I really want to ask her if I could come inside. But I'm just embarrassed. I don't know. It seems like it's her house is not appropriate for me to go in there. And also, our furniture isn't there anymore. Glass table isn't there. But one thing I really miss from my mother's kitchen is she used to do my hair. You know, she was straight in my hair with a hot comb. And I would sit in the kitchen and we would just have that time. And she never burned me and never got burned with a hot comb. I would hold my ear.

Michele Norris: You know, you're part of a small percentage of black girls that never got burned.

Tayari Jones: My mama is a very careful person, a very careful person.

Michele Norris: Because when you mention the hot comb, some people present company not excluded, will just kind of.

Tayari Jones: Yes. And I was just I was.

Michele Norris: Shiver a little bit just thinking about that.

Tayari Jones: Mama is careful and I was obedient on that front. But I miss that in my mother's kitchen more than any cooking or whatever, because that was something the boys was like. No boys aloud. No boys were interested and it would be on a Saturday night so we could roll it up, you know, it'd be cute on Sunday. And that that's the thing that I remember. I love the smell of the hair, oil, all of it. I just. And I just.

Michele Norris: Bergamot and…

Tayari Jones: Yes, and I felt so clean, but I just, you know, had a bath and my hair. Anyway, that's the thing that I would love. And I would love to see that chair again that I would sit in. I'm sure that chair is long gone, but it was kind of a stool with a high back. I was aware that when she was doing my hair that it was something nice she was doing for me because she didn't believe in straightening hair that was against their ideology or esthetic. But I wanted to be like other girls and they allowed me that. And I would love to just see that chair again. I have the comb. I have the hot comb, but I would like to see that chair again.

Michele Norris: It's funny. I still have a hot comb too I still keep it. It's in a top drawer.

Tayari Jones: Me too. Same. Same. And I never use it. I will never use it.

Michele Norris: No no, those days are gone. 

Tayari Jones: No, no. 

Michele Norris: And I didn't use it on my own child, but I still hold on to it because it's such a strong memory.

ACT 2 MIDROLL

Michele Norris: I want to take you back to your childhood home. How many siblings and what was the dynamic, the family dynamic among your parents and your siblings?

Tayari Jones: Well, I would say it's so funny when people say to me, how many siblings do you have? I kind of pause because when my parents met, my father already had two daughters, Maxine and Marcia, and they have two different mothers, but they grew up in the town where my daddy grew up.

Michele Norris: In Louisiana.

Tayari Jones: In Louisiana, and then me and my older brother. My parents are like a few, three years apart. And then I have a younger brother that's ten years younger than me. But we had a round glass table and pedestal table in the kitchen and there was a television on top of the freezer. And from where I sat as a child, I could crane my neck up and see the television, but I didn't have a good seat. Everyone else had a seat where they could see the TV. I couldn't, I think, because I was the youngest.

Michele Norris: This is before your younger brother came along.

Tayari Jones: Yes. There was a yellow telephone mounted on the wall with that long curly cord.

Michele Norris: The one that always got twisted up.

Tayari Jones: Yes. And on the other side there was a swinging door. And through that swinging door was a formal dining room that we never used. And we ate there all the time and did all that Our homework on that glass table and that glass table had to be cleaned with Windex. Very exotic. And that's what we did. I think I just kind of took that space for granted. Atlanta, you know, black Atlanta southwest, Atlanta ranch house, unbeknownst.

Michele Norris: And the Swats.

Tayari Jones: Yes.

Michele Norris: A neighborhood now called the Swats. So what was it called back then?

Tayari Jones: You know, it wasn't really called anything because and when I was grew up in Atlanta, Atlanta was hyper segregated. So if you said you grew up in Swats, it just meant you were Black. Like there was something that was no reason to talk about. But the area where I grew up was called Cascade in the Cascade area, although a friend of mine who's older than me said when she was coming up, this kind of southwest Atlanta educated class of Black people were known as swans, which were south west Atlanta Negroes. So she says, we were swans. I did not know that I was a swan, but I suppose that I was. And it was all Black. Most of my teachers lived around the area of where I lived. It was just like our world was like a five mile square, but it never felt small.

Michele Norris: You know, it's one of the things that we forget about integration is that it tore apart communities where doctors and ditch diggers sent their kids to the same schools where, yes, your doctor was Black. The person who ran the hardware store was Black, the insurance agent was Black. There was this robust community where no matter what your station was in life, you were rubbing up against people who were strivers.

Tayari Jones: Yes. And there was nothing I could imagine anyone doing that I couldn't imagine a Black person doing, because if it was to be done, well, who else was going to do it?

Michele Norris: Because that was your world.

Tayari Jones: Yeah.

Michele Norris: And in your household, the civil rights movement is going on. Was that something that was discussed? Your parents were involved in this. Your mother had helped organized sit-ins, lunch counter sit-ins in Oklahoma. Your father was part of a group of 16 young students who, because of their activism, were banned from state colleges.

Tayari Jones: Yes. I mean, the civil rights movement is in the water in Atlanta also, because, you know, we are the home of Martin Luther King. And there is a sense I have a novel where every time the children misbehave, the mother sighs and says, this is not what Dr. King died for. And that's how it was.

Michele Norris: Your mother say that?

Tayari Jones: No, I had a teacher that did like, you know, if you wore a miniskirt, she would say, “This is not what Dr. King died for” all the time. So you always lived, though, understanding that someone died for every little thing you do.

Michele Norris: Kind of heavy when you're young. I just want to wear a miniskirt.

Tayari Jones: Yeah. No, that's not what, Dr. King did not die for you to go out the house looking like that someone died for you. You need to put on some clothes. But there was a sense that, you know, lifting as we climb the kind of, you know, the uplift kind of mentality, I think it was very important that because we were in Southwest, Atlanta, you know, you are not better than anyone else. You have had the blessing of, you know, being born at a time when there were opportunities. But there are many people who were born just ten years older than you who didn't have opportunities. You are no better than anyone else. You have been fortunate. But that is not the same as being better than anyone else. And you have to think about how are you going to spend your life to make the world better for someone else to come behind you because there is still work to be done.

Michele Norris: Well, there's a phrase in household home training.

Tayari Jones: Yes.

Michele Norris: And that clearly reflects your home training, the expectations that your parents had, the stories that they shared, the life that they led as civil rights warriors. What's interesting and knowing a little bit about your story, though, is that for all of the effort that they put into fighting for equality, it sounds like they didn't always practice that at home when it came time to laying out the path forward for young boys and young girls.

Tayari Jones:I think that they had really not considered gender as significant, which is, I think, not uncommon in this kind of, you know, if you just if you remember the March on Washington, the women were not allowed on the stage.

Michele Norris: They marched on a different street.

Tayari Jones: Yes. Right.

Michele Norris: They literally marched on different streets on their way to the Lincoln Memorial.

Tayari Jones: And so when I went to Spelman College, I discovered feminism and I learned the word gender. I had never heard the word gender. I hope I came home. I thought I was spreading the good news. But the thing about gender equality is that when you start revamping your life around new ideas about gender, you have to really be prepared to tear that house down to the foundation to rebuild it. 

Michele Norris: What did your mother think of that? Was she a feminist? Did she? What did she think of the feminist movement?

Tayari Jones: She told me that she thought that feminism was just something that white women thought about or did. And I was like, No, actually, it pertains to us. And I think. She was like, not so much. I mean, feminism is a very radical thing to think about. I mean, so much of our lives are built on this foundation of gender in so much in terms of the African-American community. Is this idea that racism has deprived us of our of our patriarchy, our rightful patriarchy, and that we have to almost like we want to enjoy a patriarchal fantasy for a while before we go on to these other things. And that was the space where I found myself. And I just think it's really generational. And I also think I'm not married I don't children and so my thinking about what my life looks like and is going is so unprecedented. Like unmarried women who don't have children really have no role models. And you're trying to figure out what life looks like without any without a guide.

Michele Norris: Do you still feel that way?

Tayari Jones: Well, yes, because I would have to be. I think I'm a guide for others. But when I look at the generation ahead of me, because, I mean, if you even just think about my age, I am born in 1970. The birth control pill came into wide usage right around the time I was born. So I am of the generation of women who basically didn't get pregnant in their teens and early twenties. That is also unprecedented. So there all these women who had control of their fertility. That is unprecedented in human history. And so when you are living your life in an unprecedented moment in human history, you have to figure it out for yourself and hope that you're making decisions that people who are younger than you will then find helpful. And I do find when I talk to young women, they are on a whole different page. I mean, they think I'm uptight and I am delighted that they think I'm uptight.

Michele Norris: Because that's progress.

Tayari Jones: That's progress.

Michele Norris: That's moving. That's moving on.But for our mothers, progress must have produced a certain kind of vertigo because the world shifted under their feet and feminism and progress in some ways looking back at their lives and it must have felt like some of what they believed in, some of what they did and the norms that they lived in embrace just because that's what people did somehow felt suddenly invalidated.

Tayari Jones: Absolutely. An envelope needs pushing. And we pushed the envelope in our way. And I think that my mother pushed the envelope, too, for her generation. My mother has a Ph.D. in economics. That was a bold thing. That's not what her mother imagined for her life. So I think we all take these steps forward. I mean, different people take different kinds of steps. I was blessed with a mentor, Pearl Clegg, who is such a radical woman, and she took me up under that wing when I was about 17 years old. And she always asked me, what can you do to make your life more free? And that is such a radical question to ask someone at 17. How can you make your life more free? And that is always in my mind when I'm at a crossroads and it helps me to be brave.

Michele Norris: That's going to live inside me for a while. You know, to think about what can you do to make your life more free, and free on your own terms. Because people will define that in different ways.

Tayari Jones: And what's very helpful to me when I would try to figure out I want to be a writer, nobody was that into me being a writer. I don't know if people didn't think I could be one, if I should be one. I don't know what the thought was, but no one ever said you can't. But I was not raised to be like, Yes, you should do that. You should be an artist. But Pearl always encouraged me to write and to she said to me, she sent me a postcard once when I was dropping out of a Ph.D. program. And I was very I was stressed out because I felt like I was going to let the whole race down. I felt like I was going to let my parents down. And she sent me a postcard. It said, Your life is just that, yours.

Michele Norris: Oh, do you still have that? Is it framed?

Tayari Jones: No, it’s in a box.

Michele Norris: But girl, take that out of the box, frame that, mount that.

Tayari Jones: But no one had ever said anything like that to me. Like no one had ever said to me, You can be your own free person. Your life is yours, and you can do something amazing. I think as a girl, I think I was probably meant to marry someone amazing. I think.

Michele Norris: That was the message.

Tayari Jones: I think so. That I was supposed to be amazing adjacent. I was supposed to be that. Behind every great man is a great woman. I think I'm supposed to be a great woman for this larger project of great men. And Pearl was like, It could be you. And I was thinking, Oh, not me. Me. you think me?

Michele Norris: Go out there and change that world… I'm thinking of a young Tayari sitting at that glass table. This is before we mounted television. So with it, with the TV up on top of the refrigerator and everybody looking up at it. But there was a window in that room, right? 

Tayari Jones: Yes. 

Michele Norris: What was outside the kitchen window?

Tayari Jones: Oh, the back. The back backyard. We had a big in Atlanta. We had big backyards. Atlanta is a city built among… it’s an urban forest. And we had acres of dense forests where we would go, me and my older brother, we would go in the woods and there was a stream. We would catch crawfish. So we would do that. But then during the Atlanta child murders in 1979, we stopped going in the woods and we never went back and we never went crawfishing again, we never, there was like an old house deep, deep in the woods. And we peek in there, see what was over there. But we never did anything like that again. 

Michele Norris: You wrote about growing up during the era of the Atlanta child murders in Leaving Atlanta, your novel. I imagine that never leaves you.

Tayari Jones: No, it does not ever leave you. Two of the children who were murdered were children at my elementary school. There are 28 children murdered. At least by the official count. You know, folk wisdom has the number higher. And part of what made the child murders such a blow was that this was 1979, where ten years after King people felt like the city, the world, the country was moving forward. And then this thing happened that was reminiscent of, say, Emmett Till, you know, all of that. It felt ironic and devastating. And I watched this documentary on HBO and in the documentary, it felt like it was just more black misery. When I wrote my novel, I really wanted to write a love letter to a generation to talk about these amazing children that I knew when I was a child. And it just seemed reduced to such tragedy without texture.

Michele Norris: A disrespect for the black body.

Tayari Jones: I think so.

Michele Norris: Did your parents talk to you about this? You said you stopped going out to the woods. Did they sit you down at the kitchen table and explain, okay, life is going to be different. You're going to spend more time inside. This is how you have to order your steps now that there's this danger outside the door.

Tayari Jones: Yeah, but they don't have to tell us because as I often say in my book Leaving Atlanta, we were the ones it happened to. So if you're a child and someone's telling you children are going to being killed, nobody has to tell you to come inside. Meanwhile, I had to get fitted for a training bra. The training bra will not wait. And I remember I wanted the bra. I didn't really have to have a bra, but other people had bras and I thought I should have one as well. And Mama took me to Sears, and I'm getting fitted for this bra. And the bra lady measured me and that lady told me that I was chunky and therefore I had to have an extender on my non bra. And I was mad. And I remember I turned. And you know how they had those TVs back in the day stores? They have all those TVs. And I looked over at the TV and that's when I saw that someone I knew was missing. So I will always associate trying to get fitted for this training bra with that. Those things happened together. Puberty happened or in my case, didn't happen. Puberty was eagerly awaited and these child murders were happening and this always together for me, is part of my coming of age.

Michele Norris: It's the rituals. The milestones of childhood, of puberty were accompanied by this constant drumbeat of bad news, terrible news, tragic news in Atlanta. And yet there's a generation I know many people who were part of that generation, and they have still managed to find joy in their life. They've managed to compartmentalize the trauma that they experienced as young people. But it's still there.

Tayari Jones: Yeah, we still you know, after the murders, you know, we still went to the eighth grade prom. We still did the things we did. Because I also think keep in mind, these child murders lasted for two years. It became normalized for us, especially if you're only ten years old, That's 20% of your life. It just became part of what was happening to us.

Michele Norris: I wonder if there is a ritual or a tradition or a recipe. Let's go with a recipe that you would be willing to share with us or at least talk about that evokes the memories of your mother's kitchen.

Tayari Jones: I would be willing to share it because I believe there are two kinds of people in the world people who share their recipes and people who don't. And when you hoard recipes, that's how recipes and traditions die. I mean, I get it that back in the day, like your pound cake was your man catch and pound cake and you don't need anybody else to know how to catch a man with the pound cake. But that's how traditions die. Like, I remember I went to someone's house and I thought, This is really tasty. Do you have a recipe? And she says, Oh, we keep it secret in the family. And I was thinking, You're entirely that type of person. Grow up. We got to save these recipes. This is our history. This is our heritage. You can't just let it disappear because your grandmother caught a man with that cake. Stop it. Anyway, I digress. My mama and her mama before her and her mama before her make a blackberry jam cake.

Michele Norris: Which appears in your book, An American Marriage.

Tayari Jones: Yes. And you make it on Thanksgiving and you eat it on Christmas. And it involves it's really all about the icing. You have to boil the icing. And my mother makes several of them and she mails them to other people in her family. And she shares the recipe freely for this very reason. Now, for me, the recipe that I hold most dear is my red velvet cake. But it's not as meaningful, I think, as a jam cake. And a jam cake is an acquired taste like everyone loves red velvet cake, but a jam cake is an unusual tasting cake. It's got kind of like a fruit cake has got like stuff in it, but it's very tasty. You eat a very you eat it on Christmas, you eat a small piece. Drink it with your coffee. It's special and it's unique. And it you know, when you eat that cake, you're not going to ever see a blackberry jam cake in a bakery. And so that would be the recipe that I would share.

Michele Norris: And the blackberry jam is actually included in the dough. It's added at a key point.

Tayari Jones: Yes.

Michele Norris: And this includes you soak raisins and nuts.

Tayari Jones: You soak things. You put the jam in there, you do things. I had to ask mama more details.

Michele Norris: You do things. Okay. So you have to go to our website to learn more about, Yes, the blackberry jam cake.

Tayari Jones: But Mama will have to share it.

Michele Norris: You have to get the icing right, because you have to have exact right temperature.

Michele Norris: You have to get the icing right. But I will say if you get the icing wrong, it'll be fine. It won't be as fine because every now and then I must say sometimes I'm like, oh, yes, icing is not quite right, but it still tastes fine. That's another thing. That's one thing my mama is not. My mama is not a perfectionist. And I appreciate that she gave that to me, that I don't hold myself to unreasonable standards. You do your best and it'll be okay. Sometimes you'll do something great and that's exciting. But if you do it well enough, then that gets you through and you'll have another chance.

Michele Norris: That's the great thing about cooking. There's always another chance.

Tayari Jones: Always another chance.

Michele Norris: And because we're greedy, we may ask for that red velvet cake.

Tayari Jones: I'll happily share the red velvet.

Michele Norris: OK, OK.

Tayari Jones: Because here's the thing about red velvet cakes. I will tell you this. I feel very strongly about this red velvet cakes you get in. Bakeries are not great because a traditional red velvet cake is very delicate and bakery cakes are made to be transported from one place to the next. So they have to actually like take some of the oil out so that it won't be too crumbly. But if you come to my house and you are welcome, Michele. I can make the red velvet cake the way it's meant to be made, and you will be able to tell the difference. It's so much more moisture. It's like velvet. It seems like velvet, but it's a delicate cake. Is hard to take it even to your neighbor's house.

Michele Norris: Invitation accepted.

Tayari Jones: OK.

Michele Norris: I have loved talking to you.

Tayari Jones: I love talking to you always.

Tayari’s mentor left her a question that we can all ask ourselves: “How can you make your life more free?” Tayari’s journey with cooking is a bit like her journey to becoming a writer, she had to forge her own path in a way that made sense to her… and in a way that felt like it empowered her. Once she learned how to cook things that she liked, cooking became enjoyable. Something that was expressive rather than the expectations that have historically been placed on women. In becoming a feminist, Tayari also spotted something… her mother’s habits were forms of creative expressions as well: whether it's replicating soup from a restaurant or sewing her own curtains.

“Cooking is not always just about nutrition. Sometimes the act of creating a meal or a culinary experience can also feed something deep in our souls. That itself is a radical act. 

And if you’d like to learn more about Tayari’s red velvet cake, you can find that recipe on my Instagram page at Michele underscore underscore Norris, that’s two underscores. AND you can also find it at our new website—yourmamaskitchen.com.

Lastly, we want to hear from you! Send us a voice memo of your mama’s recipes, some memories from YOUR kitchen growing up, or your thoughts on some of the stories you’ve heard on this podcast. Make sure to send us a voice memo at Y-M-K AT Higher Ground Productions DOT com… for a chance to be featured in a future episode!

Thanks for joining us! See you next week and until then—be bountiful.

Michele: This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original. Produced by Higher Ground Studios

Senior producer - Natalie Rinn 

Producer - Sonia Htoon 

Additional production support by Misha Jones

Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Ryan Kozlowski

Sound design and engineering from Andrew Eapen and Roy Baum 

Higher Ground Audio's editorial assistant is Camila Thur de Koos.

Executive producers for Higher Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Fierman and me, Michele Norris.

Executive producers for Audible are Nick D’Angelo and Ann Heppermann.

The show’s closing song is 504 by The Soul Rebels.

Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media.

Talent booker - Angela Peluso

Special thanks this week to W.A.B.E. in Atlanta and Audio Ruckus.

Chief Content Officer Rachel Ghiazza

And that’s it—goodbye everybody.

Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.

Sound recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC.