An Undeserved Gift

October 22, 2019

y mother knew two okra recipes. She would fry the chopped pods in cornmeal. Almost edible, because fried. The other dish was from her childhood, the one she ate on still summer afternoons at her grandmother’s house in Columbia, South Carolina. Stewed okra and tomatoes for the mid-day dinner prepared by a cook named Addie. 

Addie had a lumbering gait. She wore a china-blue uniform and a heavily starched white apron secured with a wide sash knotted in a butterfly bow. Behind a swinging door shielded by a folding screen, her kitchen contained a large work table that held her staples and spices. Pots hung from hooks, pans stacked on a shelf beneath. A gas stove with porcelain petcocks had to be coaxed into flame with wooden matches. A sink with a drain board where she washed produce purchased by my great-grandmother, who drove her Packard to a farm market on Saturday mornings before the heat of the day with my mother in tow. Sunburned farm women sold boxes of figs, watermelons, ears of corn. Bees hovered over the cantaloupes. Hens squawked in crates. My great-grandmother, in a linen dress and Panama hat, moved from stall to stall, truck to truck, inspecting the ripeness of tomatoes and the fragrance of peaches. Shelled butter beans measured into a tin quart container and okra weighed in a dangling scale. Women facing one another across laden tables, each keen to her responsibility, money tight during the Depression, mouths fixed to hard lines and harder bargains. 

Every day, at five minutes after 2, Addie rang a silver dinner bell. My mother washed her hands and prompted curls into order before standing next to her chair at the oval table in the high-ceilinged dining room. A covered dish of rice and a gravy boat rested next to the meat platter at her grandfather’s hand. He carved while Addie elbowed through the pantry door and circled the table with her vegetables. 

My mother said she would not have learned how to cook okra those two ways without Addie. 

Hard truths lurk behind this sentimental memory passed down to me. Both dishes are tied to the Columbian Exchange, the cross-oceanic trade of ingredients that introduced the greater world to corn and tomatoes. But both dishes would also not be possible without the Middle Passage, the other transatlantic trade that transported millions into bondage. 

Green snot, hacked from the back of the sinuses in the final stage of a bad head cold, swimming in a bloodbath.

Greens:
i found a calm
Okra:
a rinsing off of history too grimy
Greens:
a washing away of memories not fit for sleep
Okra:
a burnin salted cleansing

— Ntozake Shange,
“From Okra to Greens: A Different Kinda Love Story”

No one can say for sure who carried the first okra pods across the Atlantic. The location of origin is also obscure and its lineage unclear. Botanists squabbled for centuries over okra’s classification, finally settling on Abelmoschus esculentus, from Arabic abu-l-mosk, or father of musk, and a Latin root word for delicious, full of food. It is a member of the Malvaceae, or mallow family, kissing cousins with cotton, cocoa, durian, and hibiscus. When the pods get too big and fibrous, okra takes on the characteristics of its inedible relative balsa wood. Some scientists argue okra came out of the Ethiopian Highlands, then spread across the Arabian Peninsula and onward to the African subcontinent on two principal trade routes known as the Monsoon Exchange. (To add to the confusion, indigenous edible mallows also grow in India, China, and Southeast Asia.) The first located and unique mention of okra comes to us through Moorish explorer Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Mufarrij bin Abdillah, a descendant of freed slaves whose Botanical Journey, published in 1216, was an early book on plant and herb species based on his observations in the field. He was a teacher of fellow botanist Ibn al-Baitar, who quoted his mentor in a later work about a preparation of tender okra cooked with meat in Egypt. He wrote: “By nature it is cold and moist — the moistest of all vegetables. The blood produced from it is bad. It is of little nutritive value. It is said to agree with people with a hot temperament. Its harmful effects are averted if it be eaten with a lot of hot spices.”

Language is more telling about okra’s exodus. Òkụ̀rụ̀ (Igbo), okro, ochroes, okree. Ila (Yoruba), nkruma (Twi), kingumbo (Bantu), quillobo (Congolese), quingumbo (Portuguese). Gombo (French), kalalou gombo (Haitian Creole). Baamiyaa (Arabic), bhindi (Hindi), tindisha (Sanskrit). The Fon people called it fevi. Sunn m’Cheaux, the resident Gullah lecturer in the African Language Program at Harvard University, explains that okra is a loanword, carried here phonetically, not in writing. Okra does not appear on ship provision manifests, unlike horse beans, cassava, or yams, the most common rations fed to kidnapped Africans during voyages to the New World.

And yet, here it is.

The oldest African dish in 17th century Portuguese Brazil settlements is a spicy stew called carurú, made with smoked fish or shrimp, quiabo (okra), onions, palm oil, and peppers. It is almost identical to Senegalese soupou kanja and Nigerian ila asepo. Cou-cou was an okra and cornmeal dish eaten in British colonial Barbados. In French colonial Haiti, boiled breadfruit with okra sauce was called tomtom ak kalalou gombo. A fleeting reference to “un gombeau” appears in a court document dated September 4, 1764, in the deposition of a female slave named Comba by the French Superior Council of New Orleans. It may be the earliest mention in colonial Louisiana. Less than a year later, Acadian leader Joseph “Beausoleil” Broussard arrived in Louisiana by way of Haiti with almost 200 French Canadian exiles. 

Thomas Jefferson recorded the cultivation of okra in 1782, while the earliest published recipe is credited to Mary Randolph in The Virginia Housewife (1824), and signposts a possible entry point with “Gumbo, a West India Dish.” She also included the first method for “stewed ochra and tomatos” (sic). Sarah Rutledge came fast on her heels with Okra Soup in The Carolina Housewife, and the first recipe for a gumbo with okra from southern Louisiana appears with the publication of Lafcadio Hearn’s La Cuisine Creole in 1885. About its preparation, he advised: “Keep one vessel sacred to soup.” The Picayune’s Creole Cookbook (1900) first edition lists many okra dishes, including Gombo Fevi and Fevi Sauté à la Creole, a classy way of saying stewed okra and tomatoes. It is not a coincidence Creole recipes used the same word for okra as the Fon, who made up a large percentage of the slaves brought to Louisiana in the early 18th century. 

That is the mostly white timeline of okra’s arrival on our shores. The black narrative is oral, and this is where crop introduction takes a fanciful turn. It also infuriates culinary historians who decry perpetuation of the “magical Negro cook” toiling in a hot kitchen for her mistress. In the Caribbean and South America, this foundation lore has been applied to ackee and rice, particularly a version persistent to the Maroons of Suriname involving an escaped slave named Paánza, but the same tale also crops up about okra and always centers on a woman of African heritage hiding precious seeds in her hair and delivering them from slave ship to subsistence plot — the slave quarter gardens historian Judith Carney refers to as “the shadow world of cultivation.”

The story has taken on mythic stature, the fecund heroine conveying sustenance on a terrifying journey, and into a hellish world where familiar dishes from the homeland empower and strengthen, even unto resistance and freedom.

Nowhere in the South is this tale more persistent than New Orleans.

“Loaves and fishes were His powers — they did not belong to an ex-slave who had probably never carried one hundred pounds to the scale, or picked okra with a baby on her back.”

— Toni Morrison, “Beloved”

“Do you know what gumbo means?” asked Ricky Paul Breaux.

His bicycle lacked rubber tires, and he pushed it along on the steel rims, grinding to a stop next to the communal table where the Rev. Hannah Nielsen Quick and gardener Brooke Bullock were arranging place settings. Caught off guard, the two young women looked up at him, puzzled. When they didn’t give him the right answer, Breaux set down an insulated lunch bag, wiped his graying beard and shifted into Cajun French. “I was raised in the garden, and my mama would say: ‘Va me chercher du gombo.’”

Okra Abbey is a “giving garden” behind a charter school on the corner of Hickory and Eagle streets, two blocks away from the Sewerage & Water Board treatment facility. Fresh-food insecurity is high in this part of Pigeon Town, a historically black working class neighborhood in the 17th Ward. A couple of corner stores sell po-boys and fried chicken platters to go, but that’s about it within walking distance, so this Presbyterian mission brings welcome greenery to a part of New Orleans still pockmarked by Katrina. A circle of flowers and herbs growing at the entrance is called the Gumbo Pot. Inspirational signs about faith and food hang on chain link fencing. Raised beds bordered with cinder blocks rest on asphalt paving, one of the most hostile environments for growing things when the heat bounces or the rain crashes down. 

“There’s nowhere for the water to go, so we get flooded with every storm,” Bullock said. “And it would be great to grow in the ground. Everything was dead when we got here, and all the beds sky high with weeds.” 

She rose to help Breaux, who had wandered off to shovel compost. When lucid, he lends a hand washing dishes or pulling weeds.

I turned to Rev. Quick.

“Tell me about the name?” 

“Well, okra is one of the key ingredients here in New Orleans,” she said. “And historically an abbey is a place of refuge to care for the poor and the young. The whole neighborhood is my congregation that I have been called to serve.”

A native Californian, Quick left seminary in 2016 and landed in New Orleans last year. Instead of a pulpit, she has a tool shed. On occasions that call for her to dress formally as a pastor, the 26-year-old redhead wears a dog collar and bright green stole with two okra pods stitched like a cross, but she prefers ripped jeans and a T-shirt on weekdays when Okra Abbey opens its gates for a free midday meal called Grace & Greens. 

“We try to identify folks who need food in the area,” said Quick. “The corner stores don’t even sell peanut butter.”

When the garden first opened three years ago, it was imagined as a community project where residents would plant their own seeds. That model, Quick explained, didn’t work, but they found that people used the space in other ways. Sometimes, just to take a nap on the patio swing chair. Play chess. Meditate. Local street muralist Henry Lipkis painted a river winding through the block-long plot that ends in a labyrinth. He also sprayed biblical graffiti on the vegetable beds. Christ with loaves and fishes on the Mount. The Last Supper. Cajun Adam and Eve picking fruit in a swampy Garden of Eden teeming with alligators.

The Rev. Hannah Quick says grace at Okra Abbey.

As noon approached, more people arrived on bicycles or by foot, and helped themselves to pink plastic cups of ice water from a stadium cooler. A young couple with a toddler living in a renovated house across the street. A widower who doesn’t cook for himself. A middle-aged woman who explained that she comes for the Word, and stays for the food. Two cooks carried hotboxes from a car parked outside the gates. A restaurant in the Garden District donates the meal, making use of the produce now grown by Bullock. Turnips, cucumbers, radishes, eggplant, leeks, tomatoes, corn, and peppers. Basil and thyme. The obligatory okra. Any harvest that doesn’t go into the weekly meal gets bundled into sacks and delivered to Pigeon Town’s homebound the next day.  

Quick and her volunteers served plates of baked chicken and vegetarian shepherd’s pie. Salad greens from the garden were passed. She welcomed the 18 people seated at the makeshift table and offered a brief benediction, head bowed, citing the first letter of Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, chapter 13.  

“Paul says that there are different kinds of gifts but the same spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone, it's the same God at work. We're all blessed in different ways, and we all kind of bring that to the table as a community.”

The meal ended quickly, but people lingered in the shade. Breaux leaned on a walking stick fashioned from creeper vine. A pile of chicken bones rested on his plate. Born in Assumption Parish, he lives a few blocks away but sometimes sleeps rough over by the Riverbend. He unzipped his lunch bag and pulled out bundles wrapped in facial tissue. Gently pulling apart layers, he revealed bars of soap carved with his pocket knife into fleurs de lys and turtles. Twin baby alligators, one with a bow around its neck, smelling like Irish Spring. 

Breaux pointed at the gators.

“He got goo-goo eyes.”

“What did your mother grow in her garden?” I asked, handing back the carving.

“We grew okra, we saved our seeds.” 

“And what did she cook?”

“Well, cherie,” he said. “You can make a gumbo outta anything.”

“There is the big-knife-and-wooden-board approach that you can hear three houses away. The okro fingers are cut into small pieces, then chopped, then jounce-chopped to within an inch of life. The seeds are pounded with the knife until the personality of the vegetable is extracted from every pristine seed to create green and white surrender. The okro is then cooked in oil and stock with fish, meat and smoked crayfish until you have a pot of goo. It is cooked for close to twenty minutes until it flatlines. It is what it is. It’s goo. 

— Yemisí Aríbisálà, “Longthroat Memoirs: Soup, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds”

“Okra will grow in Hell.”

Timmy Perilloux tossed a plastic bag filled with pods into a hanging scale at his Crescent City Farmers Market stall on Carondelet Street early Saturday morning. 

“They don't like cold weather,” he said. “But once you get them up, they will grow and bear, every day, every day, every day.” 

Perilloux, a retired oil refinery worker, farms in St. Charles Parish, west of the city, deep in Acadiana. He started with a pumpkin patch, and then got into Creole tomatoes and a few other crops. He’s not sure about the variety grown in his fields, but he has been saving okra seeds for 30 years, and before that his uncle did the same. I asked how he cooked it. He paused between customers holding out dollar bills.

“Oh, listen. I plow the ground, I plant the seeds, I fertilize them. I cultivate them. I pick them. I’d be damned if I’m cooking them too. But Cracker Barrel got pretty good fried okra.”

With my bag of okra in hand, I walked to the French Quarter for a quiet morning in the reading room at the Williams Research Center, which has an extensive collection of early Louisiana plantation records and family papers on microfiche. The staff attendant at the front desk noticed my purchase, and pointed me toward the lockers for safekeeping.

“You know our ancestors came here with okra seeds in their hair?”

“Who told you that?”

He smiled.

“People in New Orleans have always told that story. It’s been around forever.”

The day before, a local radio host snapped at me in a cookbook store for trying to track this down. 

“Don’t spread that awful story!” she said. “Haven’t those people suffered enough?”

The Williams Research Center’s papers include a menu dated April 13, 1886, referencing gumbo, from a course on domestic arts at Straight University, established by the American Missionary Association as an institution of higher learning for African Americans. I also found a Depression-era label for the Tabasco brand’s canned whole okra and tomatoes, a photograph of okra in the French Market dated 1936, and more recent images of Arthur J. “Mr. Okra” Robinson, one of the last singing street vendors who sold produce from his truck. He died last year.

By mid-afternoon, people started gathering on the street to pay last respects to the musician who wrote “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya.” At the corner of Basin and Canal, I waited with hundreds more as the glass-sided hearse drawn by a pair of horses, one black and one white, rolled by, bearing the Night Tripper home. Malcolm John Rebennack Jr. — aka Dr. John — once gave me a hug in Galatoire’s while I was in town reporting on the relief effort in St. Bernard Parish after the BP oil spill, and so I walked a little ways toward St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 with his coffin and second line. The Kinfolk Brass Band played “Li’l Liza Jane.”

Still hanging onto the bag of okra, I caught a ride to Violet, out beyond the Lower Ninth Ward in St. Bernard Parish, and to get there, crossed over outflow canals and along roads next to levees that hold back the Mississippi, a disconcerting vantage point as tankers floated at an elevation higher than the car roof. Passed the field where the Battle of New Orleans was decided, and Andrew Jackson became a national hero. Not much farther, the river drains into the gulf, but not before a whole lot of alligators occupy a whole lot of bayou. The storm surge from Katrina hit hardest here. Pretty much everyone who didn’t evacuate died. And just as the parish was recovering, the oil spill happened, another kick in the teeth to the shrimpers and refinery workers and farmers and hourly wage earners at the Walmart Superstore.

Betty Funches gave me such a look when I didn’t chop the holy trinity fine enough to suit her. 

“Get out my kitchen!” she joked. 

She attacked the celery, bell peppers, and onions with a small knife until satisfied. The pre-K teacher learned to cook gumbo from her mother. One of 17 children, she also bakes OoeyGooey and 7-Up cakes for celebrations in the neighborhood. Her father drove a truck for National Food Company but also farmed four fields in Violet. 

“He had a little farmer truck going around selling zucchini, squash, mustard greens. Okra, he sold it to Circle Food Store. It looked like this kind. This is Creole okra, you can tell because it got these lines.” 

She indicated the smooth ridges that ran from stem to tip. Funches picked through the bag of okra from Timmy Perrilloux, looking for the freshest pods, then trimmed them and threw the rounds into a skillet for browning. 

“See that slime coming through? That’s where the grease been pulling it out.” 

“How can you tell when okra is fresh?” 

“My daddy taught me,” she said, holding out a firm pod. “If I can’t cut through it, means it’s too hard and you can’t cook it. If the seeds be real big, then the okra gone to seed, and my daddy would let them dry and replant them.” 

She wiped slime off her hands and stirred together Golden flour and corn oil. Her Creole accent made oil sound like “earl.” She called roux “brown gravy.” Doesn’t believe in the tradition of stirring it with a wooden spoon, saying hers will come out “just fine.” When running short on time, she confessed to putting a little Zatarains in her roux. 

“That’s my cheat,” she said, grinning. “All good cooks cheat.”

Funches chopped up skinned chicken thighs and hickory-smoked sausage, and tested rice in another pot simmering on the stove. Diced Creole tomatoes. Her youngest daughter Jighra, a 10-year-old with long micro-braids, fetched more bowls and knives from next door. A dog barked in the backyard. The neighbors had returned from crabbing down in Delacroix. She dropped crabs one by one into a slow boil, and they expired barely struggling, turning from bluish gray to traffic-cone orange. She flipped up the back shells and removed the gills, and then cracked them down the middle. When the trinity finished sautéing in the sausage grease, Funches put everything into her stockpot except the crabs and okra. 

“Do you know how okra got here?” I asked. 

“No.”

I lost track of the seasonings. Salt, pepper, garlic powder, a jumble of spices. She pulled jar after jar from the cupboard, poured in handfuls, stirred, tasted, and added more. 

“Gumbo is just whatever you want to put in there.”

Before Katrina hit, Funches evacuated to Houston with her mother. It was the first time she left for any storm. The flood topped the roof of her ranch house, and her family lost everything. They stayed away for two years in a rented apartment with an electric stove, and she kept burning things. Her oldest son still lives in Texas, but she came back to renovate in Violet. Jighra was her change baby.    

She finally added the crabs and okra. Funches wiped her glasses, steamy from stirring the thickening soup. Her daughter went outside to play until dinner. 

“Don’t let anybody know I’m cooking okra gumbo,” she yelled.

“Ou sèl dwèt pa manjé kalalou gombo.”
Translation: “One finger does not eat okra.” 

— Haitian proverb

“Be food for one another.” 

The Soulful Voices choir at Saint Augustine Cathedral belted out this refrain on St. John’s Eve. They sounded more tent revival than Catholic mass. Or an early-to-rise jazz session, anyway. Keeping the faith doesn’t have to mean keeping it solemn, and as the Rev. Emmanuel Malenga gave a homily about the Eucharist, the congregation murmured their “amens” and “hallelujahs.”

“Come to the feast, sustain us in our daily lives,” he preached.

A handsome church two blocks north of Rampart Street in Fauborg Tremé, Saint Augustine is famous for the War of the Pews. Established in 1842 by free people of color, who also bought side pews for the enslaved, they outbid white parishioners vying for the age-worn wooden seating that remains in place to this day. A tomb on church grounds, dedicated to an unknown slave, is hung with chains and shackles. I sat in a pew at the back, where the acoustics were better, and found a little refuge. A good way to bookend a day that would conclude in an entirely different ceremony singular to this city. 

Or, as mambo Sallie Ann Glassman said, “It feels good to cool our heads in these traumatic days.”

St. John’s Eve always appears on the Gregorian calendar next to the Solstice in late June. Unlike other saint days, which commemorate martyrdom, this one celebrates the birth of John the Baptist. 

It is also the holiest day in the Louisiana Voodoo calendar. The first account of St. John’s Eve in New Orleans appeared in the Commercial Bulletin on July 5, 1869: 

Loa and other invisibles in Rosalie Alley.

“June is the time devoted by the Voodoo worshippers to the celebration of their most sacred and therefore most revolting rites. Midnight dances, bathing and eating, together with less innocent pleasures, make the early summer a time of orgies for the blacks.” 

Other newspapers of the period printed sensationalized accounts with tropes about race and faith. Despite this, Marie Laveau, the original Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, was largely responsible for popularizing the celebration with bonfires at the place where Bayou St. John drains into Lake Pontchartrain. A devout Catholic, she was also known for her charity work, attending to yellow fever victims and reportedly bringing gumbo to condemned prisoners as a last meal. She spoke “Gombo French.”  And a hairdresser by profession, Laveau is portrayed wearing a tignon, the knotted headdress required of enslaved Creole women. Any altar to her memory always contains hair accessories. Pins, barrettes, combs, ribbons.

Sallie Ann Glassman erects an altar for Laveau every Midsummer night on Bayou St. John. She is a Voodoo priestess for the modern age. A vegan. Wears spring-loaded jogging heels. Climbed Kilimanjaro. Born Jewish in Maine, she heard the calling in New Orleans, and initiated in Haiti. Her house of worship, Achade Meadows, is in a blind alley decorated with graffiti art of the loa, Voodoo spirits, between Piety and Desire in the Bywater. Her weekly ceremonies have as much to do with interpretive art as summoning the invisibles and honoring the ancestors. 

“People refer to Voodoo as a kind of gumbo religion because it takes on these other influences that are blended together,” Glassman told me before the ceremony started. “A lot like ingredients in a gumbo where the spices remain distinct, but it becomes another dish different from what you started with. It's so fluid and expressive.”   

An artist who works in pastels and oils, Glassman has often portrayed Laveau opening a curtain beaded with cowrie shells that shields a darkened room, inviting viewers into an unknown space.    

“Voodoo gave people the power to endure slavery and to transform horrible experiences into strengths and creative genius,” she said. “That ability to draw on an invisible power that didn't bend to earthly powers was certainly very reassuring for enslaved people, and terrifying for slave owners.”

An altar to Marie Laveau on Bayou St. John.

A southerly wind blew as Voodooists dressed in cooling white gathered at dusk on a neutral ground between the water and Esplanade Avenue, closer to Magnolia Bridge than the outflow at the lake. Many sat on the grass chugging from water bottles. The altar held votives, petit four cakes, fans, perfume, Catholic saints, jewelry, dolls, sequined flags, and bottles of rum, an assemblage installation worthy of a gallery. A troupe of drummers started their upbeat banging and clanging. Others chanted as Glassman drew patterns of veve, Voodoo symbols, with cornmeal at the base of a statue depicting Laveau holding a gris-gris bag. Observers were invited to contribute offerings, and some came forward with fruit or flowers. 

“Manjelwa” means to feed the gods, and each loa has favorite ritual dishes. In Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, which has the same roots as Louisiana Voodoo, the warrior spirit Sàngó, or Xangô, loves a stew called amalá that is remarkably similar to carurú, the first recorded okra dish in the New World. Twelve okra pods are always stuck upright in the offering. Papa Legba, guardian of the crossroads, craves palm oil. Baron Samedi demands rum. Beautiful Oshun wants honey. According to Glassman, Marie Laveau loves elegant Creole foods, and fruits and vegetables prevalent in New Orleans. She also has a sweet tooth, which probably explains the cake.

The head washing began after sunset.

Glassman set bowls on the ground and grabbed handfuls of a white layer cake to thicken a soupy concoction of champagne, Florida water, and vetiver, also known as the oil of tranquility. Bystanders kneeled as she massaged the fizzy, sticky, weirdly fragrant brew through their hair, and then bound it into a simple cotton tignon. 

Only cake and champagne will do for a Voodoo hairdo.

No seeds.

“Today is a day like any other day. You wake at 5 a.m. and can’t wait to greet the brisk air and the empty streets. Before the daily errands, before delivering the parcels to the post office, getting milk for the day’s chai, before going to the sabziwala for okra, potatoes, and green mirchis, you take a ride to witness the rare stillness.”

— Naazneen Diwan, “Cyclewali”

Okra may do well in Hell, but it also grows in Arkansas. 

Krishna Verma favors plaid flannel shirts, even on humid summer mornings in the Ozarks. She lives with her husband Jayesh Ramnani, a Walmart executive, in a bedroom community that was once a railroad stop outside Bentonville, Arkansas. Where apple orchards and strawberry farms once lined the road, now there are subdivisions fenced from view and occupied by Walmart home-office employees. Her chickens and ducks peck around the front yard. A former IBM engineer, Verma has a real estate license and among dozens of other properties, owns a 30-acre lot she wants to turn into a community garden as giveback to the diverse population changing the face of a region all too familiar with sundown towns, Ku Klux Klan rallies, and memorial statues erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. If that isn’t enough for one woman, she also runs a food truck called Indian Dhaba and sells vada pav to customers homesick for Mumbai street snacks. 

Clutching a handful of okra, she cleared a place on a crowded counter in her kitchen. 

“Atithi devo bhava,” she said.

In Sanskrit, it means “the guest is God.”

The last time I heard someone utter this welcome phrase was five years ago in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan during the okra harvest, as a yellow dust storm blew in from the Thar Desert, and exhausted women field workers immersed themselves, saris and all, in tanks of well water. Verma was raised in Mumbai but emigrated on an H1-B visa, met her husband through an online dating app, and settled in Arkansas, where in late July she was prepping a catered dinner for a director of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, founded by Walmart heir Alice Walton.

“When I came to the U.S., everybody said, ‘Oh, you are like Slumdog Millionaire!’ And I'm, like, no.” 

“Is bhindi masala the same everywhere in India?” I asked.

“The only difference is the masala,” she said. “Every region has a way of using spice. Like in Maharashtra, there’s a lot of coriander powder in a normal gravy.”

She sliced okra pods lengthwise with a paring knife.

“Okra has to be tender for me. If its gets rough, or spongy, I cannot use it.”

Verma pulled out a bigger pod and handed it to me.

“If you press it, you can see the heart, the seeds are more developed. This one is going to be chewy when you eat it, rather than crunchy.”

She opened a cabinet full of spices, and measured them into a bowl. Roasted cumin, coriander, garam masala, Kashmiri chili powder, cayenne. Salt went in, too. 

“If you do an uneasy mixture, you will see the bitterness of the spice.”

Verma heaped masala into each pod, and set the frying pan on the stove. The okra soaked up the spice as she stirred. She explained her style of cooking evokes the Punjab and Rajasthan, her family’s ancestral home.

“This is what I make for my day to day life.” 

“Who taught you?” I asked. 

“Mom! I'm happy that she did, otherwise I would have been dependent on somebody else for my food truck business. In India, it’s such a strong patriarchal culture. And my mom was like, hey, the in-laws would blame us if we did not teach you how to cook.”

Verma’s food truck menu has a fusion section. Paneer naan tacos. Bhaji pizza bites. They’re not really pizza or tacos, but she figures getting people to try something new will be easier if familiarized. A customer orders curried chicken every day. She mentioned that food trucks have thrived as Bentonville tries to keep pace with a rapidly globalizing palate. Fried chicken and mile-high pie are making way for dumplings, pani puri, bubble tea. Smaller groceries supply fresh crushed sugarcane juice and halal meats. Bitter melon, loofah, and bamboo shoots are sold next to purple hull beans and ears of corn at farm markets. 

“What does the term ‘Eve teasing’ mean?” I asked.

“You saw it on our Instagram feed, didn’t you?” Verma said. “It’s what we call sexual harassment in India. Happens even here. This one customer wouldn’t stop teasing one of my team. We scolded him. Next time, the cops.” 

The okra turned bronze, and the masala filled the kitchen with the scent of a desert caravan.

“They say that if you eat okra, you'll be good at maths.”

“Really? Why?”

“I have no idea,” she laughed. “Just people wanting their kids to eat.”

“Never plant okra while standing. Always stoop and the plant will bear while still low.” 

— Folk saying

“Does it look like I deserve to be here?” asked Yer Lor, grinning.

She sat on a small stool pruning plants in the high tunnel at her son Ger’s farm. She paused to wipe away sweat with a towel, and turned back to work, thin hair pasted to her scalp. Yer, 83, was visiting from Minnesota to help with the harvest. She started gardening at age five in her homeland of Laos. 

In the 1970s, Hmong hill clans that supported the American armed forces during the Secret War in Laos were given asylum status, and during several refugee resettlement waves, church groups sponsored families in the Upper Midwest, which now has the largest Hmong population outside Southeast Asia. But it’s cold up there for an indigenous minority accustomed to farming in a tropical climate. In 2002, members of the 18 clans moved to Gentry, Arkansas. 

The drowsy town has a Little Debbie snack cake plant, a feed store, a tattoo parlor named Two Guns, and a junction for the Kansas City Southern Railroad. The Trail of Tears crossed pastures near here. A decade ago, Ger and Xeng Moua Lor bought a 40-acre farm set back on a gravel road lined with black walnut and sassafras. One side of their house is hung with prayer flags, and an American stars-and-stripes is hoisted on a pole next to the front porch steps. In the side yard, a grove of bamboo, a swing set for the grandchildren, a pear orchard. The garage has been converted to a cooler unit for cut flowers and produce headed for the weekly market stall called Sisters Sprouts, operated by their six daughters. 

Wearing a broad straw hat and a windbreaker, Xeng dragged a wheeled five-gallon tub, jerry-rigged with a patio umbrella, into the okra patch in a field beyond the tunnel garden. The 58-year-old mother slipped on blue surgical gloves to protect her coral pink nails and reached around the waist-high stalks to snap off ripening pods, tossing them in the tub. The newly budded okra felt wooly like a caterpillar.

“It's a baby, and so that means easy to pick,” Xeng said.

Xeng Moua Lor

“If you don't wear long sleeves and you're trying to pick okra, you're going to be itching everywhere,” said her second daughter, Pachee, standing with me in the field as Xeng went down the row. She explained Hmong women typically do the farming.  

“My dad does a lot of the plowing and stuff, but he never goes to the market. It's always us girls.”

She shaded her eyes against the sun.

“Hmong women always complain about how they want to marry an American farmer so then they can get them to do their work.”

We walked through rows of eggplant and squash. A line of sunflowers cast welcome shade. The cicadas were louder than bomber jets. 

“In Minnesota, my parents used to plant a garden for themselves,” said Pachee. “When they came down here they saw the opportunity to own their own land. They love the Ozarks because it's so hilly, just like Thailand and Laos. They said this is like our homeland.”

Two weeks before, at a Trump political rally in Greenville, North Carolina, a chant erupted targeting Somalia-born Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

“Send her back, send her back, send her back.” 

The racist “go back to where you came from” refrain certainly isn’t new to Southerners. Taunts targeting people of color and immigrant communities have renewed agency of late, and in some cases are leading directly to violence, but just as often this xenophobia plays out in subtler discrimination, like being charged higher interest on a business loan for your dream farm than the neighbor down the road. 

“Like they're not directly saying it to us and not directly lashing out at us, but as a person of color you can definitely feel it,” said Porlai, the Lors’ youngest daughter, when I asked if the family had problems integrating after moving South. “That's just how America is. We’re all used to that.”

The Lors worked hard to fit into their tight-knit rural community. They also know other places are less welcoming. 

“But then we don’t ever go there anyways,” said Porlai.  

They’re too busy planting.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Germplasm Resources Information Network lists 2,407 okra accessions gathered globally from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The plant material from Africa alone is staggering. India has even more. American seed savers have conserved heirloom cultivars like Grandma Edna’s Cherokee Long Pod, Cajun Jewel, Choppee, Jambalaya, White Velvet, and Carmine Splendor. The Campbell soup company developed a variety known as Emerald in 1950. But most Southerners wind up eating the prolific Clemson Spineless, introduced in 1939. The Lors buy their stock from a seed catalog company based in Minnesota.  

Xeng headed back to the house to wait for a cooler hour to finish harvesting. Ger drove his mother on the tractor and his dogs followed behind. Shoes in piles on the front porch, and over the door, a wood carving of crossed swords, a Hmong shamanic ward against evil spirits. Inside, several grandchildren watched television while snacking on chilled watermelon from the field. Friday evenings are labor-intensive, as the family prepares for market the next day. Hauling in produce, boxing it up, trimming flowers, collecting bulk orders. Xeng’s third daughter, Voua, told me her mother could make more money selling vegetables than her former work at a chicken processing plant. The Lors have always had side jobs — house cleaning, wedding dress alterations, carpentry — extra earnings they could apply to a down payment.  

Ger served as an Air Force mechanic in Udon Thani, on the northern Thailand border, right across from the capital Vientiane in the early 1970s. He showed me precious family photos, carried with them from Laos, hung in the dining alcove next to the kitchen: in formal uniform with a tiger silkscreened on his cravat, his training class graduation, posed in field khakis next to a T-38 bomber on a landing strip. He was 21 years old then. His mother Yer, showered and changed, took me down the hall and stood under a photo of herself as a young mother, with Ger on her knee. All 15 of her children, including three she adopted, now live in the States. 

One baby wanted more watermelon, so her mother, Tee, sliced pieces from a plate on the table. The little girl toddled back to the living room with a full bowl.

“We already know we're going to have granddaughters,” said Pachee. “Our sons, they know they have no choice, they're gonna have girls and not boys, because this family's meant to have girls first.”

The sisters beamed.

The Sisters Sprouts at the Lor family farmstead.

Xeng was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes after giving birth to Porlai, who is studying to be a dietitian. She checked a monitor taped to her mother’s arm. Dinner was usually a light meal after coming in from the fields, since Ger rose at four in the morning to feed their pullet chickens, and the women needed to set up their farm stand at the market in Fayetteville. Sticky rice, some vegetables, a yellow curry. 

“Do Hmong eat okra?” I asked.

Pachee shrugged.

“Not really. We started growing it because there was a demand from our customers. But now Mom puts it in her egg drop soup.”

“It’s all that okra she eats. You can’t eat okra willy nilly for two meals a day and expect to get away with it.”

— Marsha Norman, “’night, Mother”

On the day after a mass shooting by a white nationalist at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, I was still in Bentonville, so I sought solace in the galleries at Crystal Bridges and for the longest time stood in front of an installation by artist Titus Kaphar, whose work renders judgment on troubling moments in American history. His painting “The Cost of Removal” reimagines the portrait of Andrew Jackson, soldier, statesman, slaveholder, mounted on his horse Sam Patch, with his face muffled by shredded canvas strips hanging from rusty nails. The cloth is painted with Jackson’s own words from a document estimating the relocation of the Cherokee Nation on the Trail of Tears. The embellishment, according to the artist, echoes nail-spiked nkondi, spiritually charged ritual objects invoked by Congolese conjurers searching out and punishing wrongdoing. The nails represent vows, signed treaties, to banish evil.

“In my dining room, we changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken.”

— Leah Chase

Wish I knew Addie’s last name. She’s long gone. So is my mother, who remembered the meals this cook made for a troubled girl sent away from home. Okra doesn’t sit well with me; it blooms like cotton in my stomach. The slime makes me nauseous, too. Even so, I ate a lot of it for this story. Canapés of pickled okra rolled in deli ham, made by a church lady in Charleston. Okra roasted with nutritional yeast and hatch green chile salt by a preacher’s son in Bentonville. Okra smeared on Creole cream cheese. Tempura-battered whole pods. Cornmeal fried chunks. Okra pilau. Okra soup. Okra fritters. Okra remoulade. Betty’s gumbo. Krishna’s bhindi masala. Xeng’s pods, crunched raw in the field. Stewed okra and tomatoes, Lebanese-style bamieh, prepared by a former army cook who extended a dinner invitation while I was far from home myself. These tastes ranged from creamy to earthy. 

But it took a conversation with Nigerian author Yemisí Aríbisálà to change my perspective, if not my palate. West Africans embrace okra’s goo. 

“It's a whole thing like a dance around this bowl,” she said as we ate breakfast in London, where she now lives. “Everything has to have a bit of draw, or stretch, so when you pull up the soup with a spoon, it’s elastic and doesn’t break.” 

The look on my face made her smile.

“And okra is a first food. Easy for a baby to swallow. All that starch and glue. When you’re brought up eating it, you don’t question it. You just want these really dense things.”

The story of women arriving with seeds in their hair is probably apocryphal. The more likely explanation for okra landing in the New World has to do with the ugly reality of trade in human beings, and feeding them like so much livestock, in order to get them to market. Amethyst Ganaway, a young Gullah Geechee chef from North Charleston, whose social handle is “okrasoup,” said it best: “It wasn’t something that was given. It wasn’t something we had to learn to like.”

These ancestors brought a gift we do not deserve. 

Like a nkondi nail, okra binds us all.

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