Religion in the Kitchen

Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions

Elizabeth Pérez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479836093
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Winner, 2017 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion, presented by the Society for the Anthropology of Religion section of the American Anthropological Association
Finalist, 2017 Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions presented by the Journal of Africana Religions Before honey can be offered to the Afro-Cuban deity Ochún, it must be tasted, to prove to her that it is good. In African-inspired religions throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, such gestures instill the attitudes that turn participants into practitioners. Acquiring deep knowledge of the diets of the gods and ancestors constructs adherents’ identities; to learn to fix the gods’ favorite dishes is to be “seasoned” into their service. In this innovative work, Elizabeth Pérez reveals how seemingly trivial "micropractices" such as the preparation of sacred foods, are complex rituals in their own right. Drawing on years of ethnographic research in Chicago among practitioners of Lucumí, the transnational tradition popularly known as Santería, Pérez focuses on the behind-the-scenes work of the primarily women and gay men responsible for feeding the gods. She reveals how cooking and talking around the kitchen table have played vital socializing roles in Black Atlantic religions. Entering the world of divine desires and the varied flavors that speak to them, this volume takes a fresh approach to the anthropology of religion. Its richly textured portrait of a predominantly African-American Lucumí community reconceptualizes race, gender, sexuality, and affect in the formation of religious identity, proposing that every religion coalesces and sustains itself through its own secret recipe of micropractices.

Part I

Ordinary Home Cooking

1

Space, Time, and Ache

When I open the front door, I am always greeted by at least a dozen eyes. They are not human but cowrie-shell, belonging to the Yorùbá god Elegguá, the guardian of portals, crossroads, and destiny itself. Small round mounds of cement, the Elegguás are ritual objects believed to embody one of the preeminent Lucumí gods. The cowries are usually embedded three at a time to create the eyes and mouths of uncannily watchful faces; on one Elegguá, the grooves on the shells form tiny eyelashes, on another, laugh lines, as if the god were smiling at the rainbow-colored toys and cellophane-wrapped candies arrayed around the clay plate where he rests. Studded with beads, blades, rooster spurs, feathers, brain coral, or none of the above, the sculptures are thought to possess specific personalities. Although invariably vigilant, an Elegguá may be perceived as a toddler or a gramps-aged grouch, as parrot-garrulous or as mutely enigmatic as a silent film star.1 Elegguá is the first god received ceremonially by Lucumí practitioners, and his presence—along with the metal implements of his companions, Ogún, Ochosi, and Ósun, collectively termed Warriors—indicates to those familiar with the religion that a home is under his aegis.2

The Elegguás with whom I am most intimately acquainted have been located a stone’s throw from a massive Baptist church, a nail salon, a donut shop, and a liquor store—which is to say, they could have been almost anywhere on Chicago’s South Side—at the home of Ashabi Mosley. Beyond the threshold, Ashabi’s own Elegguá, as her patron deity, normally sat ensconced within his own separate altar, draped in his favorite colors—scarlet and ebony—and sporting a diadem that bore more than passing resemblance to the royal crown of the Netherlands.3 This altar occasionally merged with another built for Yemayá, orisha of maternity, the domestic sphere, and the seven seas, to whom Ashabi’s son Fadesiye has been initiated since the age of thirteen. Together Ashabi and her son have acted as the leaders, or “godparents,” of a predominantly African American, working-class Lucumí community called Ilé Laroye.4 Laroye is one of Elegguá’s praise names, and Ashabi’s home has been viewed as his abode, as much as that of her and Fadesiye’s protégées, or “godchildren.”

Staggered throughout the three levels of Ashabi’s two-story bungalow were objects seen to contain or represent not only Elegguá and Yemayá, but also numerous other Lucumí gods. In addition, images of deities from other traditions were abundantly in evidence. A table above the row of Elegguás at the door displayed a drawing, as well as a print, of the obstacle-removing, sweets-eating god Ganesh, as if he were Elegguá’s Hindu cousin. On an adjacent wall hung a round plaque depicting the Mesoamerican sun god Tonatiuh, tongue protruding, the disc strongly reminiscent of divining boards used by the Lucumí order of male priests called babaláwos. Standing in the front window was a two-and-a-half-foot ceramic statue of Shou-Hsing, the balding and bearded Chinese god of longevity, holding the mythical peach of immortality. The piece had been a housewarming gift that Ashabi chose to interpret as an image of Obatalá, the elderly Yorùbá spirit of wisdom, peace, and coolness. Occasionally migrating from back porch to living room, a metal shelf unit kept framed chromolithographs and sequined bottles featuring the saintly Roman Catholic faces of Haitian Vodou gods; before she “made ocha,” Ashabi was first initiated into Vodou, although she did not go on to pursue religious seniority.5

After seeing the porcelain Buddhas on the windowsill, the winged Egyptian goddess Isis over the sofa, and Janus-faced Nigerian carvings of Elegguá, one could have come away confused at the profusion of artifacts pirated from different, even competing, aesthetic regimes.6 As Ashabi once told one of her Latina godchildren, “This is the house of whatever. Lo que sea.”7 But “lo que sea” does not mean the petulant “whatever” of popular parlance, implying passive acceptance of future outcomes and a stubborn reluctance to engage beyond this terse response. To translate literally from the Spanish, “lo que sea” is “what may be” in the present subjunctive, the grammatical mood of possibility, belief, obligation, and desire. Its members saw Ilé Laroye as the house of infinite potential and potency. Far from chaotic in décor, the house could be viewed as a North American convolution of the “Vodun vortex,” a phrase coined by Dana Rush to denote the unfinished aesthetic of accumulation and assemblage that organizes West African Vodun and Haitian Vodou, along with a number of Black Atlantic religions. The centripetal force of the Vodun vortex is such that any number of influences may be spun into it.

Lucumí’s extension of the Vodun vortex is attested by its ability to convert objects, particularly commodities, from one aesthetic regime to another, without requiring that the items countenance “monolithic interpretation.”8 The tradition does not demand that initiates recite a creed—none exists—or observe its ceremonies exclusively, but rather, master a repertoire of ritual procedures and norms of conduct dictated by context. Elegguá is not a jealous god; he will—and does—have other gods before him, although in Lucumí ceremonies he always comes first. Other Black Atlantic religions also allow, and even encourage, objects from foreign traditions to be incorporated into sacred spaces. They are then construed according to local frames of reference.9 Residential structures are similarly open to resignification, and Ashabi’s less-than-private home is exemplary in this regard. She has rallied to the standard set by generations of priests in reconceiving her house’s floor plan to capitalize on every square foot of available space.

The Spirit of the South Side

The contours of Chicago’s South Side were hewn during the Great Migration, in what was actually a wave of migrations between 1915 and 1940 that carried tens of thousands to Chicago in search of new beginnings. African Americans in the U.S. South faced lynchings, Jim Crow, and chronic economic problems that combined with environmental crises to render their everyday hardships impossible to bear.10 For those steeped in the biblical imagery of sermons and spirituals, the South was an Egypt tormented by plagues and the scourge of bondage, or at best a desert in which they were condemned to wander. Migration acquired the aura of a pilgrimage, with the journey itself compared to “crossing over Jordan,” a reference to the Israelites overcoming the last major barrier between themselves and the land of milk and honey. Urban areas with established Black populations, such as Harlem and Detroit, beckoned like electrified Zions. Their “second Exodus” would also be a “second Emancipation,” an act of redemption for the entire race, one chosen family at a time.11

Chicago’s South Side emerged as a Black Metropolis with distinctively African American institutions and forms of association. The most important of these were religious. Prior to the First World War, Chicago was already “a religious mecca for African Americans,” with historic African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.), A.M.E. Zion, and Baptist congregations that remained dominant social and political forces well into the twentieth century.12 During the Great Migration, these churches grew exponentially.13 Since the mid-nineteenth century, A.M.E. churches in Chicago had enjoyed a reputation for their proclamation of the Social Gospel and progressive activism. However, their tentative embrace of migrants cost them dearly, as ministers sympathetic to the Southerners’ plight abandoned the denomination to establish Community churches.14 Having let a golden opportunity for congregational growth slip through their fingers, A.M.E. churches steadily increased in size, but their gains lagged behind those of the Baptists.

Newly minted charismatic denominations made impressive gains. The expressive and participatory character of Pentecostal, Apostolic, and Sanctified church services stood in stark contrast with mainline Black Protestant congregations’ high-church formality and “high-brow pretensions.”15 Many migrants clamored for revival-style services with “foot-stomping and hand-clapping up-tempo songs,” rousing chants, ecstatic shouting sessions, and an immediate connection with a communally defined source of divine power, made manifest through speaking in tongues, faith healing, and the ritual dissociation, or “slaying in the spirit,” of congregants.16 Pentecostals adopted strict prohibitions on behavior, dress, consumption, and spectatorship, practicing corporeal disciplines intended both to purge their flesh of worldly desires and to prepare it to serve as a medium for God’s salvific purpose. But their rituals allowed for a much greater acceptance of the Southern body’s materiality than did those of more established Black churches.

Residential segregation intensified during the Great Migration, and it was with considerable disenchantment that many heartsick migrants in the “Black Belt” of the South Side—a series of neighborhoods that extended for thirty city blocks along State Street—realized that they had delivered themselves into another type of captivity, that of the modern ghetto.17 Yet migrants turned to religion not just as a refuge from the “vice districts, gambling houses, unemployment, and racial tensions” of Chicago.18 They sought fellowship with others affected by the sojourn north, with comparable experiences of dispossession from their land, vulnerability to mob violence, and racial, gendered, and class-based prejudice.19 Out of necessity, migrants from smaller denominations convened in spaces designed for business purposes, and in the process gave birth to a new institution: the storefront church. Storefront churches were pedestrian yet approachable, promising a spontaneous, unaffected, and visceral style of worship in a modest space reminiscent of the one-room church buildings of the South.

Although mainline denominations ultimately attracted more migrants than the storefronts did, theirs was a Pyrrhic victory, due to the storefront churches’ wholesale overhaul of the city’s religious and cultural landscape. Interwar Chicago and its environs were a “gate of tradition” for Black narrative, plastic, and ritual arts, particularly from the Gulf Coast.20 Storefront churches acted as “institutional bases for conjuring traditions” called hoodoo or rootwork, the medical and magical techniques developed by enslaved people that fused West and Central African, Amerindian, and colonial European ethnopharmacopeias, folklore, and ritual knowledge.21 In Northern homes, hoodoo doctors or “rootworkers” became Professors, Teachers, and “God sent healers”; in church, the same individuals were rechristened Prophets, Reverends, Elders, Fathers, or Mothers.22 The clairvoyant, curative, and entrepreneurial abilities of such migrants were mobilized liturgically, with scriptural foundations for their “spiritual gifts” cited chapter and verse if textual legitimization was called for.

In search of a moral-ethical community in which to address the here-and-now, those with a longer history in the urban North also contributed to what has been called “the rise of cults and sects.”23 African American religious historiography has reproduced the mainstream critique of storefront churches as merely colorful and idiosyncratic, their leaders as charlatans, and their followers as gullible rubes.24 In fact, Southern migrants had a relatively high rate of literacy, and they tended to be skilled and semi-skilled artisans from urban areas.25 The “vibrant experimental religious scene” they ushered in intermingled far-flung influences from both material and print culture. African Americans of every economic and educational level availed themselves of communal settings in which to explore esoteric traditions such as Freemasonry.26 Religious movements such as the Black Hebrew Israelites appealed to Chicagoans conversant with scripture, responsive to Garveyite claims of the African American Volk as a new Israel, and disposed to view themselves as a Lost Tribe. Committed to racial equality, Father Divine’s Peace Mission broadcast a message of prosperity, self-sufficiency, and cooperative living, along with the gospel of a flesh-and-blood Messiah.27

Derided as “primitive,” “hysterical,” and “frenzied,” the worship styles of the storefront churches violated middle-class models of female virtue, restraint, and decorum.28 Yet churches were often among the few “safe spaces” available to migrant women, in which their humanity as both Black and female was acknowledged.29 The Black Spiritual Church provided perhaps the greatest degree of authority and prestige for women, as well as gay men.30 Born in Chicago, Alethea “Leafy” Anderson founded her Eternal Life Christian Spiritualist Church on the South Side in 1913. About seven years later, Mother Anderson established a second, racially integrated church in New Orleans. Spiritual Churches spread throughout the Midwest along with Southern migrants. From the beginning, they incorporated Roman Catholic devotional practices and material cultural artifacts, including votive candles, statuary, and brocaded ceremonial vestments for ministers. Worship services bore strong traces of Pentecostalism, such as an emphasis on ritual anointing, a declamatory mode of preaching, and a “verse by verse” exegetical style.31 Members sang Methodist and Baptist hymns from the late nineteenth-century revival period.

Chicago was one of the cities, including New York, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, with a dense concentration of manufacturers specializing in healing and magico-religious products such as charms, talismans, candles, and hex-removing items, sold primarily through mail order. The same social and cultural currents that buoyed the popularity of these products—the desire for self-improvement and refashioning; insistence on this-worldly solutions for problems in the here-and-now; the discovery of the autochthonous in the exotic; the impatience with white models of religiosity and master narratives—combined with a thoroughgoing critique of the political status quo in the African American encounter with Islam. The Nation of Islam moved its headquarters to Chicago in 1934, but the foundation for its success among migrants had been laid in the 1920s, with the establishment of the Moorish Science Temple by Noble Drew Ali.32 Turning the Orientalism of the day to his advantage, Drew Ali instructed his Black followers that they were descended from the same exalted racial heritage as the urbane and accomplished Moors. His temples also welcomed female leadership.33

Despite its depiction as parochial and insular, the South Side has served as a nexus point of Black intellectual sophistication, born of a kaleidoscopic print and material culture blossoming in the midst of economic disparity and racial discrimination. The sociologist and Chicago-based Muslim community activist Rami Nashashibi has called this “ghetto cosmopolitanism.”34 The Black Metropolis has bred cosmopolitan virtues such as tolerance and ecumenism; both anecdotal and sociological evidence suggests a widespread exchange of tropes, techniques, materials, and personnel between religious communities.35 The historian of religions Charles Long writes that “extra-church orientations” such as conjure have historically offered “great critic...