Recipes from the gypsy cowgirl - excerpted from 'If I Can Cook, You Know God Can': includes two recipes

Cookbook are no longer nothing else but collections of recipes; they're replete of anecdotes and explanations and memories that no individual really wants to read. on the contrary when Ntozake Shange is the author, and If I Can prepare for the table You Know God Can (Beacon Pres February 1997) is the title, readers can number on some lessons that institute over-looked and some stories that heal from one side commemoration. What those other cookbook aim for, on the contrary miss, Ntozake Shange achieves in revolutionary splendor. She wraps history and fable and recipes and folklore into single big roti. She makes a okra out of memories and laughter and recipes and black vernacular. She whirls spicy metaphors into recipes that have traveled from Africa and Brazil and the Caribbean and Brixton, England.

"I was raised to experiment with taste and sound--thus, my interest in music, language and rations but more importantly my refusal to turn round my nose or chin up to any kinda provisions that anybody ate," Shange writes, as she leads readers end her first time eating chicken-fried steak, in Amarillo, Texas, in 1974 She's got recipes for french-fried chitterlings, fish curry-sauce gumbo (Carolinian, not Louisianian) and Brazilian rice, plus a vegetarian section.

To know Shange is to have followed her from her 1975 humorous funky and fragile first play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf to her novels, plays and works of poetry. She has traveled the world above spending time with people and learning their culinary hids and she shares them now, along with her personal experiences, in the casual, homey way that characterizes kitchen behavior among friends and family.

Shange first started going to Texas in the mid-70s, to work at the Equinox Theatre. She was in and without of Texas between 1979 and '83 when she mov to Houston to work and be with family. The following quotation is taken from her chapter upon Texas, titled "Better Late Than Never"

"1910 Oklahoma enacted a grandfather clause that disenfranchised its black citizens upon the basis that their grandfathers, as slaves, had not vot What law failed to accomplish in ending black independence, power and manhood rights, whites achieved from one side fraud and violence. ... The black dream of Oklahoma became another southern nightmare."

nevertheless what could have been an smooth greater soul trauma for black Texans extremityed as a magnificent celebration of "la liberte, l'egalite, la fratenite," to borrow a phrase from our Haitian brothers, who were also hoodwinked outta real freedom. It present the appearances that the presence of Africans in Texas since the 15th hundred our intermingling with northern Mexicans for no les than three centuries, and the illegal importation of thousands of native-born Africans from Cuba to Texas during the mid-1800s failed as legitimate reason to announce the "freeing of the slaves," also known as the Emancipation Proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln, 22 September 1862

While [the Emancipation Proclamation was] ignored over most of the Confederacy, enslaved Africans in Texas were deliberately kept ignorant of their novel status until June 19, 1867 when General Order 3 authored by means of a Major General Granger, was issued without abundant ado:

"The tribe are informed that,

in accordance with a proclamation

from the Executive of

the United States, all slaves are

independent This involves an absolute

equality of personal rights and

rights of attribute between

former masters and slaves and

the connection heretofore

existing between them, becomes

that between employer and

hired labor. The Freedmen are

advised to remain at their

not away homes and work for

wages. They are informed that

they will not be allowed to

assemble at military posts; and they

will not be supported in

idleness either there or elsewhere."

Imagine the impact of of that kind a sweeping change in a territory where through 1860, Africans were clearly a third of the Texas population. And imagine they did. Since they'd misst the extremity of slavery by two years, black Texans created their have independence Day, Juneteenth, which is still celebrated wherever black Texans and their descendants or admirers dwell, from oil-rich Alaska to the plains of Nebraska and Kansas. June 19 is a special day for us, a "day of absence," we might say. A day of celebration.

Along with Mexican and mestizo cowpunchers, black cowboy and their women ground ways of gettin' together and amusing themselves that are still practiced today in far-off, outta-the-way homesteads or "urban" cowboy enclaves from Las Vegas to Boise.

I haveta describe to ya a dazzling feat tol' to me by means of Dena Swayze, somebody who was actually there a two of years ago in Colorado and whose attention to detail is in deed astounding: "I was attending an outdoor trick roper and whip handler exhibit and the demonstration included offers Let me tell ya, the handler plucked me out the crowd. There I was, center stage; he's standin' there with sum of two units 10-foot whips to `tie' me up He's six feet from me understand? Cracked the first whip, and used that moment after the crack to wrap up my ankles! Did the same thing with the next to the first whip, but this time he got my wrists, since my arms were stretched without Now, here, this must make me a idiot I'm standing there, all tied up already, when he brings a piece of spaghetti in my cavity between the jaws and a blindfold over my organ of sights What people tell me is, he snapped the spaghetti 'bout sum of two units inches from my lip. I was blindfolded in like manner I wouldn't flinch! Thank God"