On one my favorite message boards, AALBC.com, one of my favorite sister-friends, Yvette, shared the following on a “Black Girls and Science Education” thread:

Many educators worry that the ability of the United States to produce enough scientists will fall short unless a more diverse group of students are recruited to science study — and thrive. Despite the odds, some black females do succeed in science. Swimming Against the Tide: African American Girls and Science Education (Temple University Press) looks at why some students succeed, and the roadblocks they face along the way. The book is based on a combination of statistics, surveys and interviews. Sandra L. Hanson, the author and professor of sociology at Catholic University, responded via e-mail to questions about the book….

Full interview: http://insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/02/hanson

…which prompted me to share the following:

My oldest daughter and her female classmates were recently invited to a presentation by a female astronaut, Pam Melroy:

Pamela Anne Melroy (born 17 September 1961) is a retired United States Air Force officer and an active NASA astronaut. She served as pilot on Space Shuttle missions STS-92 and STS-112 and commanded mission STS-120.

Melroy presented awesome pictures and video–inside the shuttle at launch, rendezvous with the international space station, which is also under the command of a female astronaut, space walks, their tiny living quarters, zero-gravity fun, and repairs to the solar array on the space station. Did you know that the shuttles circle the earth every 90 minutes, so they get to see a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes? And stars don’t “twinkle” in outer space. What we see as a “twinkle” is caused by the presence of the earth’s atmosphere.

Clearly, the chaperones learned as much as the kids did.

Melroy challenged the girls, telling them that the next frontier was sending humans to Mars. She and her comrades will be too old to go when that mission is ready to be undertaken. That mission will be undertaken by people who are kids in school today…maybe one of them.

She talked about diversity as well, but she did so in terms of the diverse professional backgrounds that astronauts must have: military, engineering, astronomy, and other fields that just don’t “scream” astronaut; it takes expertise in all these disciplines to build a strong mission team. You can’t really train in college to be an astronaut per se. You have to first be something else, and excel at it, usually at a PhD level. The average age of those entering the program at NASA is 35.

Anyway, the mission’s robotics specialist was a black woman, Stephanie Wilson, and we saw her in action in the video. After Dr. Mae Jemison, I didn’t know any other black women had gone into space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Wilson**fighting urge to pitch article about Wilson to a magazine…will return to book proposal now**

Here’s a little something for your soundtrack:

This past February, my girls and I watched the DVD Our Friend, Martin (thanks again to Christina for the heads up). In this movie, the main character, a black teenager named Miles, travels back in time and befriends a young Martin Luther King, Jr. The past and the present collide right up to the dramatic peak when our protagonist is faced with a decision that could alter the course of history. Our Friend, Martin weaves animation with black-and-white news footage and photography, including images of King’s funeral and those who mourned in the wake of his assassination. The film does not gloss over King’s murder, but protects its young audience by having the screen go dark after a shot rings out.

By going the “What would life be like today if it wasn’t for MLK?” route, the film pretty much gives MLK credit for the entire civil rights movement. But in the wake of a kid-friendly presentation that effectively introduces children to the concepts of nonviolence, justice, and equality, I can let that slide and embrace the teachable moment to discuss other individuals (Fannie Lou Hamer, for example) who also worked and sacrificed to hold America to its freedom-related promises.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968

Opens March 7th.

In case you missed it, check out Guest Blogger Laina Dawes thoughts on black rock and Black History Month here.

(Thanks, Dawn)

I thought about making the last post a round-up post, a “Best of…” retrospective of posts from this blog and those of my fellow 32 Days… celebrants. But frankly, I’m tired this morning, still fighting off something viral that must run its course. And I’ve got looming deadlines. Besides, I’ve never been good with superlatives, always hard pressed to name my favorite anything.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this whole blogging experience–in the preparation of my posts and in the reading of others I’ve been educated, challenged, and entertained. I’ve made new cyber-friends and gotten to know old friends better. My view of Black History Month as a celebration of the personal as well as the political has been solidified. I’ve been reminded of how much I do not know, and my thirst for knowledge and understanding has at once been quenched and intensified.

I can’t really explain how it happened–osmosis maybe?–but as I’ve written here and read and read and read elsewhere throughout this past month, ideas related to my fiction and nonfiction writing projects have been challenged, reshaped, and solidified (again, that word). As I aim for it to do each day of my life, my world got larger, and as a result, my writingbetter. I picked up the pace, I’m clearer about the stories I want to tell about black folks, myself and others. As I shared with the students in Mini-Me’s class, history is all about storytelling, and as a storyteller, I have a more definite sense now of my marching orders.

In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude for this to: Yvette’s scholarship, Christina’s eloquence, Connie Divers Bradley’s novel, and Tami and ABW’s passionate writing about political and social justice. Of course this is not an exhaustive list. But noting that this partial list is all-female helps me segue nicely into…

March is Women’s History Month. While I think this is a worthy celebration, no more blogathons for me anytime soon! But I do encourage you to keep up with what’s happening on the following blogs in celebration of this month (and all year through): What Tami Said,WomensSpace, The AngryBlackWoman, and Christina Springer.

All that said…In the course of blogging daily this past month, I’ve observed what many a writer before me has noted: A writer can get lost in the blogosphere. The ideas! The great writing! The interesting cast of blogging characters and the commenters who love/hate them! The distraction! Now that this blogathon is over, I may well post less frequently, but I intend to post more of my own words here when I do.

(In case anyone is wondering, I know I hinted at a Soul Food Sunday, Part 2 entry yesterday, with pictures, but alas, it did not come to fruition. However, dinner was most definitely delicious…and I felt like a complete slug afterwards.)

What else? I must thank my co-celebrants…Yvette (most def), Tami, Christina, Chris, and Inkognegro. Many thanks as well to all our guest bloggers and interviewees!

Now I’m off to tend to my sick self, and tackle the three deadlines I have this month. I will be using this space to self-promote and update on my writing projects. I really appreciate the cheerleading many of you do for me as an emerging writer. It means a lot.

In the meantime, please keep stopping by and do leave comments. In case anyone was wondering (and I know at least one person was) you do not have to register or login to leave comments. Also, one of the reasons I moderate my comments is that it also serves as de facto private email. If you leave a comment, no one will see it but me until I approve it to be posted. If it’s obviously meant to be a private communication, I won’t post it.

I will leave you with a poem. It was written by Terrance Hayes, who I meant to profile here. I love Terrance’s poetry, and happy that I can count him and his wife, Yona Harvey (also a poet) among my friends and fellow Wranglers of Little People. Terrance has written three books of poetry, and the poem below is from his most recent collection, Wind in a Box. Enjoy!

the blue seuss

by terrance hayes

blacks in one box

black in two box

blacks on

blacks stacked in boxes stacked on boxes

blacks in boxes stacked on shores

blacks in boxes stacked on boats in darkness

blacks in boxes do not float

blacks in boxes count their losses

blacks on boat docks

blacks on auction

blacks on wagons

blacks with masters in the houses

blacks with bosses in the fields

blacks in helmets toting rifles

blacks in harlem toting banjoes boots and quilts

blacks on foot

blacks on buses

blacks on backwood hardwood stages singing blues

blacks on broadway singing too

blacks can charleston

blacks can foxtrot

blacks can bebop

blacks can moonwalk

blacks can beatbox

blacks can run fast too

blacks on

blacks and

blacks on knees and

blacks on couches

blacks on good times

blacks on roots

blacks on cosby

blacks in voting booths are

blacks in boxes

blacks beside

blacks in rows of houses are

blacks in boxes too

Today, we’re cooking up the kind of dinner you’d find in my grandmothers’ kitchens on a typical Sunday back in the day.

Many thanks to Yvette for providing the soundtrack to our afternoon. As we’ve cooked, I’ve been lecturing Mini-Me on the difference between “sucka” and “sucker” (she’s apt to say the later…sigh).

Because whining is not an ingredient in soul food, BabyGirl was sent upstairs for a nap right after we put the blackaroni and cheese (the anti-Kraft) in the oven.

Other items on our today’s menu: fried chicken, fried cabbage, potato salad, and biscuits.

I’ll be back later with pics of our spread. In the meantime, tell me about some of your soul food faves in the comments.

Also, check out this article, “A 19th-Century Ghost Awakens to Redefine ‘Soul’”, that I found while conducting research for the essay.

From the New York Times…

November 21, 2007

A 19th-Century Ghost Awakens to Redefine ‘Soul’

By MOLLY O’NEILL

FOR nearly seven years Jan Longone, an antiquarian cookbook collector, has been haunted by a ghost. The spirit came into her life as thousands of other vintage volumes from book dealers had before: in a plain brown wrapper. But as soon as she held Malinda Russell’s “Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen,” she could see its author and her world — the small, seldom-discussed society of free blacks in the 19th century — coming to life before her eyes.

“I felt like an archaeologist who had just stumbled on a dinosaur,” said Mrs. Longone, who is the curator of American culinary history at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “I was in awe.”

Mrs. Longone, long considered the top expert on old American cookbooks, knew immediately that she was holding the earliest cookbook by an African-American woman that had ever come to light. Turning the 39 fragile pages of the 1866 pamphlet, she realized, too, that it could challenge ingrained views about the cuisine of African-Americans.

The black liberation movement of the 1960’s had celebrated “soul food”: dishes with a debt to Africa, like black-eyed peas, greens, gumbo and fried chicken. Neither the activists nor the scholars who later devoted themselves to black studies intended those dishes to be seen as the food on the stove of every black cook in America. But that is exactly what happened, historians say.

“Southern poverty cooking was mistakenly established as the single and universal African-American cuisine,” said Leni Sorensen, a researcher at Monticello outside Charlottesville, Va., specializing in African-American history.

And then the volume by Malinda Russell surfaced.

The evidence of a single cookbook is not enough to rewrite culinary history. Still, Mrs. Russell’s book suggested that a more nuanced view might be in order. Instead of rustic Southern “soul food,” it served up complex, cosmopolitan food inspired by European cuisine.

Mrs. Russell, who had operated a pastry shop in Tennessee, provided mostly dessert recipes, but they were for puff pastry and delicate rose cake, not sweet potato pie. Her savory recipes included dishes like an elegant catfish fricassee and sweet onion custard — not a mention of lard-fried chicken legs, beaten biscuits or slow-cooked greens. Here was a black cook who was already two generations removed from the plantation kitchen by the time Lincoln died.

And what seemed even more remarkable to Mrs. Longone was Mrs. Russell’s voice and the brief first-person account that she provided of her life. “I found myself straining to hear her voice, and trying to talk to her,” Mrs. Longone said. “She had such an American story, and it seemed like her message was timeless.”

Mrs. Longone soon became obsessed with finding Malinda Russell. And that is when the heartache began.

Old cookbooks, particularly small, privately published ones, can provide an intimate portrait of cultures and places and eras. But their authors tend to be unknown women who leave no record other than their own words. Such women can be all but impossible to track down, particularly if they were African-Americans who lived at a time when the births and marriages and deaths of black people were recorded haphazardly, if at all.

Mrs. Longone was undaunted. Mrs. Russell, she reasoned, had provided many clues. She wrote of having been born and raised in eastern Tennessee and of being a member of one of the first families set free by a Mr. Noddie of Virginia. She said she had joined a party that intended to resettle in Liberia, but after one of its members robbed her she had been forced, instead, to remain in Lynchburg, Va. There, she worked as a cook and lady’s companion and married a man named Anderson Vaughan.

Four years later, Mrs. Russell wrote, her husband died. She raised their son, who she said was crippled, while running a laundry in Virginia and, later, a boarding house and pastry shop on Chuckey Mountain in Tennessee.

With this information, Mrs. Longone, who had worked as a rural sociologist early in her career, was sure she could pick up Mrs. Russell’s trail. Her husband, Dan Longone, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan, shared her conviction.

In the summer of 2002, the couple spent their 48th wedding anniversary trip chasing reports of Malinda, Mylinda, Melinda and Russel, Rusell, Russell in town halls, cemeteries, newspapers and historical societies across Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. They also began riding a seesaw of exhilarating hope and crashing disappointment.

“We’d get a lead that seemed solid and go zooming off to study the evidence,” Mrs. Longone said. “But as soon as we saw the documents, we’d find that the woman of record was either too old or too young to be our Malinda, and we’d just be crushed.”

After returning to Ann Arbor, they continued spending their evenings studying census reports and genealogies, searching archives for recipes that might be antecedents of Mrs. Russell’s and consulting academics and amateur food historians across the country.

Their efforts speak to both the limits and the possibilities of using cookbooks to understand history.

“Since food is not written about in charters and treaties, the historian has to go back to primary sources, to letters, travel accounts, diaries and genealogy,” said Sandy Oliver, the publisher of Food History News in Islesboro, Me. “It’s the most painstaking research there is, and even then it is all but impossible to find the beginnings of things, and no cookbook alone can provide an accurate view of African-American food ways in the 17th and 18th centuries.”

Scholars who studied early books by blacks — like “The House Servant’s Directory,” by Robert Roberts, published in 1827, and Tunis G. Campbell’s 1848 “Hotel Keepers, Head Waiters and Housekeepers’ Guide” — tended to see their blend of Yankee, European and Southern recipes as a reflection of who was being served more than who was doing the serving. The plantation kitchen recipes in books like “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking,” by Abby Fisher (1881), who was born a slave, were championed by these historians as a better mirror of the African-American kitchen.

In May 2007, Mrs. Longone published a limited-edition facsimile of the only known copy of Mrs. Russell’s cookbook and distributed copies at a symposium at the Longone Center for American Culinary Research, part of the Clements Library at Michigan. The volume was greeted with great emotion.

“It is an Emancipation Proclamation for black cooks,” said Toni Tipton-Martin, a journalist and food historian in Austin, Tex., who has spent a decade researching the cooking of African-American women.

“In isolation, Malinda’s book might appear to be an aberration,” she said. But in the context of the black-written cookbooks that followed, many of which reflected a sophisticated international kitchen, Mrs. Russell’s cookbook “dispels the notion of a universal African-American food experience, which is why the term ‘soul food’ doesn’t work for so many of us,” she said.

The release of the facsimile (copies of which are available for $25 plus postage from the Clements Library, www.clements.umich.edu/culinary or 734-764-2347) also brought new leads. One of them sent the Longones west this summer to Paw Paw, Mich., Malinda Russell’s last-known whereabouts.

After eight years of running the boarding house and pastry shop in Tennessee, Mrs. Russell wrote, she had “by hard labor and economy, saved a considerable sum of money for the support of myself and my son.” But then in 1864, she was robbed again, this time “by a guerrilla party,” she wrote, “who threatened my life if I revealed who they were.” Taking her son, she fled north to Paw Paw.

The Longones felt that familiar frisson of hope as they drove into the town.

And they felt the familiar sinking of hope when they learned that within months of the publication of Mrs. Russell’s book, the little town had been all but destroyed by a fire. They found no trace of her.

Locating the woman they call Malinda seems, therefore, increasingly unlikely. But to the Longones, abandoning the search is unthinkable.

“Our needle in the haystack gets smaller and smaller,” Mrs. Longone said softly, “but we’ll find her. She wants to be found, and we got some great new leads.”

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You are in the midst of a blogathon celebrating 32 Days of Black History! Yvette at Six Impossible Things…and I are joined by InkogNegro,Christina, Chris,and Tami.Visit, comment, bookmark!

–Albert Murray, biographer, novelist, essayist, literary and jazz critic

Here’s the first track off of it, Honey The Healer. Listen to it, and may your ears feel better than I do right now.

Maybe Yvette has a meaty music post for you to sink your teeth into today.

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You are in the midst of a blogathon celebrating 32 Days of Black History! Yvette at Six Impossible Things…and I are joined by InkogNegro,Christina, Chris,and Tami.Visit, comment, bookmark!