On the Road in Search of Soul

News of the “Chittlin Strut” at Mehitable Dorsey’s North Carolina cabin traveled by word of mouth. For less than a dollar each, guests could crowd into Dorsey’s home—which would have been transformed into a restaurant for the night, with tables and seating in every room, waiters rushing plates of hot food from the kitchen, and banjo players for entertainment—and enjoy a menu of cider, pickles, slaw, potato custards, cornbread, molasses, and chitlins. Chitlins, or chitterlings, are the small intestine of a pig, soaked in salt water, rolled in meal, and fried in hog fat. Chitterling dinners were frequently held within African American communities in the South during the Great Depression to raise money for myriad needs, whether it was to support the local church or to bring in extra money for cash-strapped households.

Dorsey’s chitterling dinner was documented by Katherine Palmer, an employee of the North Carolina office of the Federal Writers’ Project, the Works Progress Administration’s jobs program for out-of-work writers. Palmer had been assigned to an ambitious but doomed project called America Eats, in which writers were dispatched across the country to document Americans’ dietary habits, and especially to examine social food affairs such as church picnics, Thanksgiving dinners, and wakes. The stories were intended to be collected in a book—but before it could be published, the FWP was dissolved, in 1939. Manuscripts produced for the project are still preserved at the Library of Congress, and many have been repackaged online and in books. Embedded in these narratives are rich accounts of the culinary traditions of black Americans in the South, such as Dorsey and her neighbors.

In Virginia, a FWP writer describes how a group of women planning a fundraiser for their church debated whether they should serve chicken stew or pigs’ feet. (In the end, they served both.) Another writer described a Mississippi man named Bluebill Yancey as “the pit artist of the day”: Yancey was routinely hired to cook for politicians, who wooed potential voters to events with the promise of his legendary barbecue.

However, these scenes of largesse from the reports filed by America Eats contributors did not describe the daily diets of many black Americans in the South—especially not those who labored as tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. It was a system that the authors of the 2016 book A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression describe as “a relationship clearly descended from that of master and slave in the pre-Civil War South”—one that grew even more unequal when tenants depended on their contractors to provide their food, the cost of which was deducted from their own meager returns. Farmers might receive two daily meals consisting of “rice, cornbread, and coffee for breakfast and then peas and cornbread for dinner.”

Conditions such as these were part of why so many black Americans left the region during what’s known as the Great Migration: beginning around 1916 and continuing into the 1970s, more than 6 million African Americans left the rural South to resettle in the cities of the North, Midwest, and West. Many of these migrants ended up in Chicago, bringing their Southern cooking styles with them. This was not necessarily received with open arms by the pre-established black community, writes historian Tracy N. Poe in her 1999 article “The Origins of Soul Food in Black Urban Identity: Chicago, 1915-1947.” Such cooking—which Poe describes as a an “amalgamation of African, European, and early American resources and preparations” created by African American cooks—was looked down upon by Northerners as unsophisticated and unhealthy. But this only caused the Southern migrants to hold on to their food traditions even more tightly, and began opening businesses that catered to Southern clientele, advertising biscuits, fish, crab, shrimp, and barbecued chicken. Restaurants opened at a healthy clip in Chicago, alongside groceries and meat markets. Throughout the urban North, black entrepreneurs turned to cooking as a means of income, opening traditional restaurants—and running small operations out of their own homes.

It was an income-generating solution similar to that Mehitable Dorsey and other Southerners made when they produced chitlin struts, fish fries, and pigs’ feet dinners at their homes and public gathering spaces. FWP writer Palmer reported that Mehitable Dorsey hung festive lanterns from her ceilings, kept the hearth fires blazing to warm every room, set out china dishes, and cooked fresh servings of chitterlings throughout the night. Her guests sang and danced, and the strut ended just after midnight. Dorsey’s final act, according to Palmer, was to decide to leave the dishes until morning.