“Soul Food Scholar” Adrian Miller goes whole hog in this ’cue & A about his new book, Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue. From its Indigenous roots and heritage of resistance to the emerging world of plant-based options, barbecue is for everyone, Miller says, so “y’all got to eat it up!”
Interview by Allison Braden
July 8, 2021
Adrian Miller’s James Beard Award-winning first book, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time, explored how soul food traditions have informed Black culture and identity. His latest, Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue, is partially a response to mainstream barbecue coverage, which increasingly leaves out Black pitmasters and their restaurants. The book delves into the origins of African American barbecue traditions and includes profiles of pioneering barbecuers throughout history, plus 22 of the recipes that made them famous.
Before becoming a food writer, Miller worked in politics, including on former President Bill Clinton’s One America Initiative, designed to promote community dialogue and improve race relations. Miller spoke to me from his home in Denver about how barbecue’s history speaks to the present moment — and how this dearly beloved cuisine may hold the secret to building a truly New South.
Illustration by Truett Dietz
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Allison Braden: Black Smoke weaves together archival history and first-person reporting. Your chapters, which cover sauce, competition barbecue, and more, are punctuated with profiles of figures from Black barbecue history, like Arthur Watts and Marie Jean, an enslaved woman who eventually bought her freedom. How did you approach the subject and your reporting process for the book?
Adrian Miller: In terms of the archival stuff, I was just trying to get as much evidence as I could about barbecue’s early days, and there’s just not a lot of it. And then, in terms of first-person reporting, I just wanted to go to places and see how barbecue customs have developed, and talk to people and see how they think of barbecue. One thing that was interesting to me is whether these regional styles that we fight about so much really hold up to scrutiny.
AB: In the first chapter, you make the case that we can trace barbecue back to Indigenous cooking techniques. When Europeans arrived in the Caribbean, they likely encountered native peoples slow cooking small animals on a platform over a flame — a process that you argue eventually evolved into the methods we know today. Why do you think that claim may cause controversy?
AM: There are people who believe that barbecue is African in origin or that African Americans invented it. As I write in the book, I wanted to prove that. Because it’s one of the most delicious things on the planet. I wanted to cross my arms and say, “Wakanda forever,” right? Barbecue’s early history is very hazy. I get people who say that African Americans invented it, and then I get white people who say, “Well, this is no different than what Europeans were doing in the Middle Ages.” My response to each of those is, OK, for the African Americans who say it’s African in origin, I haven’t seen any evidence of that. And Europeans were in Africa 100 years before they came to the Americas. I would think that if there was barbecue happening, they would have drawn pictures and written about it the way they did in the Americas, because they were acting like this was something they’d never seen before. You've got older African Americans who call barbecue “cooking the Indian way.” We don't see any drawings of pit barbecue in the Middle Ages in Europe or anything like that.
AB: Did the wave of protests and broader reckoning last summer change the tenor of your thinking on barbecue and race?
AM: I already knew I was going to write about what I call barbecue and resistance. Even before emancipation, African Americans used barbecue to resist the racist white power structure. Some of the most successful slave insurrections [like the one led by Nat Turner in 1831] were planned over barbecues. So much so that an [1856 public safety committee in Clarksville, Tennessee] said white people should discourage African American barbecue gatherings because mischief may arise. And then there were African Americans who were very practiced at barbecue who actually ended up feeding the Union army, so that was one way of using their skill to support resistance.
Then I fast-forward to the present day and talk about, a couple years ago, the white woman who called the police on some African Americans who were barbecuing in the park at Lake Merritt in Oakland, [California]. You can see barbecue and protests as a common theme, especially when you’re talking about African Americans barbecuing on their own terms. Much of barbecue history is forcing Black people to barbecue for white people. For a long time, barbecue was a Black experience from beginning to end. Black people did the production work, they did the actual cooking, they did the serving. And then after all that was done, they had to entertain the white people who were at that barbecue.
AB: You describe in the book how ill will, including racism and lack of access to credit and financial resources, makes it harder for Black-owned barbecue businesses to thrive — and that’s in normal times. How did you see those factors play out during the pandemic?
AM: Anytime there’s a time of stress in our society, the things that are covered up get laid bare. With the tremendous pressure that was put on restaurants, we realized those who did not have financial reserves to begin with were really struggling. Ironically, because of historical racism in terms of lack of access to capital and other things, a lot of African American barbecue joints are built on a takeout model. They just can’t maintain dining space. So, in some ways, they were kind of ready for the pandemic, because all these places that had a lot of dine-in had to move to takeout.
AB: In 1982, Gary D. Ford wrote in Southern Living that “The barbecue addict who is also a seasoned traveler looks only at the parking lot to pre-judge a restaurant’s product. If pickup trucks are parked beside expensive imports, he knows the barbecue is good because everyone in town eats there. More than any other cuisine, barbecue draws the whole of Southern society, from down the street and from miles around.” First of all, does that reflect your experience as a seasoned traveler?
AM: I’ve been to a lot of places where the parking lot was really only one type of car, and the barbecue was slamming. With a lot of these Black joints, the parking lot is really small, and it’s about people just coming in and out. If I go up to any restaurant and I see diverse automobiles out there, I’m like, “OK, this is a meeting place for a lot of people.” So the food’s probably good. Another unfortunate indicator a lot of people point to is a stack of wood outside the restaurant, but a lot of places are faking the funk because they cook with gas. They’ll put some wood out, and then they’ll burn a little bit just to make you think that they’re cooking with wood. I no longer fall for that trick.
AB: That quote from Gary Ford plays into a common perception of barbecue as a cuisine that transcends race and class. That seems true to an extent, and I know you’ve talked about the power of foods like barbecue to bring people together. But I wonder if it also plays into this myth of the South where everyone lives in harmony, which has been used to paper over some deep, deep divisions in Southern culture. How can we think about barbecue as a uniting force without erasing or ignoring the inequities you describe in the book?
AM: One thing I tried to do in my book is to just tell the stories of how so many barbecue restaurants got caught up in the racial dynamics of their time. One thing I noticed is that white people were much more agreeable to going to a Black-owned barbecue joint, even one in, quote-unquote, “the hood,” to get good barbecue, because that was the conventional wisdom: If you want the really good stuff, you got to go get it from an African American.
Then we have Black people who were running whites-only barbecue restaurants. Black-owned places were picketed during the civil rights movement because of those practices. At the same time, we have to show the painful side of barbecue, how barbecue is associated with lynching. I tried to show the complexity of those situations and not shy away from race, and just understand the very peculiar ways that it plays out. How do Klansmen seek out Black barbecuers to barbecue for the Klan rally? I mean, what’s going through your mind to have that happen?
AB: It seems like there are a lot of conflicting associations with barbecue.
AM: I don’t see this happening in soul food. It’s different now, but in the 1930s, and ’40s, I don’t know of too many white people who went to a soul food restaurant in a Black neighborhood to get food. There were a lot of independent Black barbecue operators who had a steady white clientele. What is it about barbecue that makes it different? My thinking is that barbecue was such a specialized skill. Not everybody could do it. So that meant only a few people actually could make it well.
AB: You write that the staff and customers at Black barbecue stands “interact in a way that demonstrates the enduring community-building and power-reinforcing of the Black barbecue restaurant. … ” You’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to bring Americans together, in your work on the One America Initiative, for example. How did reporting this book challenge or reinforce your ideas about how to build and sustain community — especially across differences?
AM: The root of barbecue is community because cooking a whole animal demands community. There was no refrigeration. So, you cook this animal, y’all got to eat it up — and it takes a lot of people to eat barbecue. I thought about that communal aspect of barbecue and how that gets transferred to the restaurant. Even to this day, the restaurant is a gathering place, and because of a variety of factors, there are fewer and fewer spaces for us to come together. The restaurant and the table — those are some of the few places left. I still see the power of food to create community, large or small.
AB: It’s fascinating how barbecue is associated with bringing people together, even though it’s intimately bound up with so many things that divide us: church, race, politics.
AM: There’s something about having really good food that brings people together, and they’ll sit at a table and talk to somebody who they might not interact with in the daily course of their lives. It’s those moments that we have to try to figure out. First, how to create them, how to sustain them, and invite people who may not want to come into that space. How do we get them in that space to stay there awhile, get to know some people, maybe learn something? And then, pun intended, be hungry for more?
AB: You make clear that there’s room in barbecue for everyone, and the book touches on Indigenous, Latino, and white barbecuers, as well as trends like plant-based barbecue, but you also write toward the end of the book that “We’re champions when the barbecue playing field is leveled.” What are some of the tangible and intangible factors that you think make Black barbecuers champions?
AM: Maybe they didn’t originate it, but one thing that’s just incontrovertible is that African Americans were barbecue’s go-to cooks by the 19th century. Nobody can argue that. Description after description, it’s African Americans who are the principal cooks. In fact, in newspaper article after article that describes what an authentic barbecue is, they say, “You’ve gotta have a Black man do this.” We’re actually part of the recipe. But as I write in the book, I know plenty of white people who make excellent barbecue. There’s room to celebrate all of these people.
AB: Did you have any qualms about writing about barbecue as a non-Southerner?
AM: Oh, yeah. I’ve had that lingering ever since I started my soul food book. Whenever I do a talk on these things, I always say, “All right, I’m about to say something that’s gonna immediately lose me all street cred in soul food and Southern food,” and I tell them I was born and raised in Denver. The way I win people back is, I say, “Look, my parents are from the South. My mom’s from Chattanooga, Tennessee. My dad’s from Helena, Arkansas, so these are my traditions, outside of a Southern context.” But then the other thing that helps is it allows me to have a critical eye. It gives me a little room to say some challenging things. There’s things that I write that people do not agree with, especially people who were raised and spend all their time in the South.
AB: I found your “theology of barbecue” one of the most moving sections of the book: “Barbecue brings people together, creating a space where we can recognize the divine in each other, reaffirm our individual and collective humanity, and live the good life — here, now, not waiting until the afterlife.” What role do you see barbecue playing in the efforts to build a New South?
AM: Barbecue can be one of those gateways, because barbecue is so iconic and the way barbecue is changing can lead to a broader audience. Now, some will say this is no longer barbecue, but turkey is huge in African American barbecue, so that can be an entree to people who don’t eat pork. You’ve got people playing with plant-based barbecue. The love of grilled whatever and having a smoke profile could create spaces where people can come together, learn from each other, hear each other out, and understand each other. Barbecue is well poised to play a role in bringing people together in the near future and the far future — maybe more so than other foods.
Allison Braden is a writer and translator based in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she serves as a contributing editor to Charlotte magazine. Her work has appeared in Outside, The Daily Beast, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Massachusetts Review, among other publications.
