Hot, Hot Chicken

A Nashville Story

Rachel Louise Martin

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780826501776
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

These days, hot chicken is a "must-try" Southern food. Restaurants in New York, Detroit, Cambridge, and even Australia advertise that they fry their chicken "Nashville-style." Thousands of people attend the Music City Hot Chicken Festival each year. The James Beard Foundation has given Prince's Chicken Shack an American Classic Award for inventing the dish. But for almost seventy years, hot chicken was made and sold primarily in Nashville's Black neighborhoods—and the story of hot chicken says something powerful about race relations in Nashville, especially as the city tries to figure out what it will be in the future. Hot, Hot Chicken recounts the history of Nashville's Black communities through the story of its hot chicken scene from the Civil War, when Nashville became a segregated city, through the tornado that ripped through North Nashville in March 2020.

CHAPTER 1

Brine with Hot Sauce

The Princes Move to Nashville, 1860–1924

A scrum of new neighborhoods have been carved into the farmland that once lined Split Log Road. The other developers had done their best at the naming game: Cromwell and Northumberland and Cross Pointe and Inglehame Farms and the Laurels and Tuscany Hills. The employee who came up with Taramore, however, what with its nod to a mythical Gone with the Wind–like lifestyle of moonlight and magnolias, deserved a raise.

I drove through the enclave, hoping to see a hint of the life the Prince family had led there in the aftermath of the Civil War as they negotiated what freedom and citizenship would mean for a Black farming family in Middle Tennessee. But when the builders for Pulte Homes created Taramore, they had bulldozed the acreage into a series of two-hundred-some-odd gently sloped, sodded yards, perfectly groomed settings for the McMansions erected in the center of each plat. The developer even cut down most of the mature trees, and the spindly saplings residents had put in to replace the lost woodland still needed decades to reach maturity.

FIGURE 1.1. The Sayers’ home, Wood Park, today stands in the center of the Taramore subdivision. The window to Ann Currine’s kitchen is peeking from behind the large tree on the right. Photo: Rachel Louise Martin

Only Wood Park remained. The red-brick, columned Greek revival house had once anchored life on the property. Erected in 1845 and built from bricks cast on site by John J. Sayers’ enslaved laborers, the home was once a showpiece of Williamson County. Now it had been restored and remodeled into the community’s clubhouse. The renovations to the building were carefully considered. I pressed my nose against the windows. An elegant stairway still curved through the tall foyer, and appropriate antiques graced the front rooms. The only obvious alteration to the historic structure was a sunroom/meeting space framed out in the breezeway that once separated the house from the kitchen. The grounds, however, had been refitted to the community’s desires. Out back where once the enslaved cook probably had tended a kitchen garden, the developer had laid a couple of tennis courts and dug a swimming pool complete with a twisting green-and-white waterslide.¹

Behind the pool, I discovered a bike path. Back when the Princes and the Sayers lived here, Wood Park had been known for its five “everlasting springs.”² Those springs had created a series of meandering stone creeks that carved deep valleys transecting the property. The builders of Taramore hadn’t been able to conquer the landscape or the waterways, so they had platted a greenway along them. They left the land around the paved route lined with the choking sort of undergrowth that encroaches on natural areas across Tennessee.

Maybe half a mile down the path, I saw a rusted metal eave peeking through a tangle of cedar trees and honeysuckle. Hiking up my skirts, I tried to plow my way through the brush, but I was blocked by a blackberry bramble wrapped in poison ivy. I tried another angle but again hit a thorny jumble. Surrendering, I retreated to the trail. A little ways on, I looked to my right and realized the tumbled pile of rocks beside me was the remnants of a dry-stack stone fence, a bit of landscape architecture known locally as a “slave wall.”

Were these stones laid by some of the Prince family? Perhaps. The first definite reference to any of the Thornton Princes is found in the 1880 census. That year, Thornton Prince II—this would be the father of the man who inspired hot chicken’s creation—was a thirteen-year-old farm laborer on the Sayers’ property. He was living with his brothers Billie and Austin (who may have been his twin), and he was under the care of the Sayers’ forty-five-year-old cook, a woman named Ann Currine who was probably his mother.^*

Currine would’ve worked in the two-story brick kitchen the Sayers ordered their builders to construct fifteen feet or so from the main house. The outbuilding was just close enough that the food cooked there might reach the dining room while still warm, but it was far enough away that there was a chance of saving the house if the kitchen caught fire. The distance also ensured that the smells of the kitchen wouldn’t fill the house when Currine singed off chickens’ feathers or chopped raw onions.³

But is this where the Princes lived before the Civil War? I don’t know. The records never mention them, an unsurprising development since one of the best ways to deny a people citizenship and even humanity is to refuse to record their names and hence their existences. In 1860, when the Civil War began, Ann Prince/Currine would have been an enslaved woman in her mid-twenties. That year, the United States Census Bureau created a slave schedule, or census, for Williamson County. The document recorded no names, but it did list sex and age. Was Currine one of the two twenty-three-year-old Black women living on the Sayers’ farm? Possibly. And where had she been living in 1850? In the schedule made that year, the Sayers’ entry has faded away. Was Ann’s information one of those lost lines?⁴

Wherever she was in 1860, Ann Currine had already begun her training as a cook. She may have even been in charge of the Sayers’ kitchen. Currine would have created all the food the white family ate, whether the Sayers wanted a quick snack or a celebratory feast. Hospitality was how families like the Sayers established their social standing. From intimate dinner parties to summertime picnics to lavish balls, they depended on their cook to create dishes that would impress their neighbors.⁵ “Plantation cooks were highly skilled, trained, and professional,” Kelley Fano Deetz wrote in Bound to the Fire, a study of enslaved chefs in Virginia. “[White] Southern hospitality relied almost exclusively on enslaved domestic labor.”⁶

Ann Currine could probably craft delicate pastries, butcher hogs, whip up frothy crème anglaise, and pound out beaten biscuits that didn’t taste like hard tack. She would have known the favorite dishes of each of Wood Park’s white residents, and she would have avoided the foods they hated. And in an era before electric stoves and oven timers, she would have done most of this over an open flame, and she would have been able to judge a dish’s doneness through smell, sight, experience, and intuition. When she made a mistake, serving an undercooked roast or a charred bit of toast, the fault and the punishment would have fallen to her. Enslaved chefs were under the constant scrutiny of the slaveholders who claimed the right to punish the enslaved for even the smallest infraction. Long after slavery ended, stories lingered of cooks who were whipped for burning the day’s bread, for making meals that didn’t suit one of the family members, even for being suspected of eating some of the food they had cooked.⁷ But when the family and their guests enjoyed the meal, they would have praised the mistress of the house, not Currine.⁸

The enslaved chefs were highly skilled workers, but their jobs were physically taxing. Culinary historian Michael W. Twitty set out to re-create the labor his ancestors had done in plantation kitchens in Georgia and Virginia by cooking in those same spaces, using period tools and techniques. Hefting the iron cooking pots on and off the fire left his arms sore, and chopping wood for the fire put callouses on his hands. Working over an open flame singed the hair off Twitty’s arms, and he was always aware of how flammable his cotton and flax clothing was near the hearth. Even thirty-six hours after he’d left the kitchen, the scent memory of the meal he had prepared would linger. “The smell of the burning wood becomes the smell of your clothes and your body,” he wrote. “It gets down to the root of your hair follicles. Your sweat marries with the smokiness.” Just as exhausting was the condescension or disdain or confusion of the white tourists who saw him at work.⁹

Enslaved cooks straddled the worlds of the enslaved and the free, “living and laboring in their enslavers’ homes, under their watchful eyes, yet belonging to the larger enslaved community who resided in field quarters away from the main house,” Deetz wrote. “These cooks occupied this liminal space and used this axis to manipulate their existence in the brutal culture of chattel slavery.”¹⁰

The enslaved chefs—especially, though not only, the female chefs—also had to fear sexual violence. Their work in the kitchen kept them near the white family where their enslavers could have easy access to their bodies and where they were separated from most of the other enslaved laborers on the property. The kitchen’s separate building also meant that when the cooks were attacked, the slaveholding family could claim to have heard and seen nothing. Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams, a mother and daughter writing duo, set out to use food to re-create the lives of five generations of women in their family, a journey that became their book Soul Food Love. “Until we started working together on this volume, we knew the kitchen was a difficult territory for some Black women,” they wrote in the book’s introduction, “but we had never contemplated the significance of kitchen rape—an event we discovered was sufficiently common in our family history as to merit the coining of a phrase so the atrocity might be better mourned.”¹¹ Was this part of Ann Currine’s experience? She at least lived with the fear and the threat of it.

And what about Thornton Prince I? His life was even sketchier in the records than Ann’s was. All that’s certain is that he was from Mississippi, and by 1880 he was no longer living with his family in Williamson County. Had he been sold away from them before the Civil War? Been killed during the conflict? Left them voluntarily? All of those are possibilities.

Slavery wrought chaos on the lives of those trapped within its system. No matter how “good” a white owner supposedly was, the slave system was an economic one. The humanity of those trapped within it could never matter as much as the price they might bring on the auction block. Marriages and other familial bonds were not formally recognized by the legal system, thus denying the ties that bound the enslaved people together. And families lived with the constant threat of sale. Parents, children, siblings, cousins, and spouses were sold whenever the white owner decided. Even running away—the act of stealing one’s person out of slavery—destroyed families. Successful escape meant never again seeing the friends and family left behind.

Black families faced further upheaval during the Civil War and the violence that swept the South during the war’s aftermath. At the beginning of the war, the United States still embraced slavery. The federal troops sent south to fight the Confederate forces were instructed not to aid and abet the escaping enslaved peoples. In fact, because the Fugitive Slave Law was still in effect, the white soldiers were supposed to return the refugees to their captors. Then in late May 1861, three enslaved people—Shepard Mallory, Frank Baker, and James Townsend—escaped into Union general Benjamin Butler’s camp near Hampton, Virginia. Butler suddenly changed the rules. He did not contact their white owners. He put them to work instead, arguing that these humans were “contraband of war.” If he found an abandoned wagon or a rogue mule, he wouldn’t send it back to its owner to work for the enemy. He would confiscate it for the federal troops. Why shouldn’t these men be analogous to any other bit of moveable property? Since he didn’t believe the escaped people were free, Butler wrote a receipt for them, a promise he would return them to captivity when the war ended.¹²

Then half a million enslaved people ran away from bondage and into the Union camps in Tennessee and across the rest of the South. “All of them knew that if freedom was to come during the Civil War, it was not going to come directly to them,” wrote historian Amy Murrell Taylor in Embattled Freedom. “Freedom had to be searched for and found.” Union commanders, however, continued calling the escaped people “contrabands” and they called the Black settlements “contraband camps,” perhaps to remind themselves, their troops, the public, and the refugees that slavery lived on.¹³ But the slave system had begun to collapse. Suddenly the war was no longer about the right of the federal government to regulate slavery; it had become a fight to end it.

These enclaves of refugees sprouted up anywhere the military went. Many were temporary migrant communities following the soldiers as they campaigned. Others were permanent settlements where residents platted streets, built wood cabins, and organized churches. In Nashville, three camps perched near the military installations on the eastern, western, and southern borders of the city. Another one north of town was a farming community. One south of town ran a supply depot for the army.¹⁴ It’s tempting to imagine the Prince family living in one of these camps, joining the mass of people who had walked away from bondage, moving into Nashville and shepherding their growing flock of children toward freedom. Was that where Thornton Prince II was born and spent his earliest childhood days?

If the Princes were in the Nashville camps, their early experiences of freedom were not h...