“Beating Eggs Never Makes the Evening News”

In One Crazy Summer and its sequels P.S. Be Eleven, and Gone Crazy in Alabama, Rita Williams-Garcia tracks the movement of African-American diasporas, generationally and geographically, through changes in food preparation and consumption. This chapter examines the third novel in the series first, showing how Delphine, the protagonist, becomes aware that her family’s identity is grounded in the deep roots of southern country foodways, dependent on personally raised or locally produced foods (especially milk and eggs) that are usually slow-cooked. The middle novel demonstrates the popularity of post-war convenience foods, cooked quickly and simply to match the faster tempo of urban life common to the generation that had made the Great Migration. The first novel, set in urban Oakland in the revolutionary year of 1968, shows the revolutionary power of food, most overtly through the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, which sought to better life for urban families by improving poor nutrition as well as to empower them politically. The novel also presents the deconstruction of the traditional kitchen: Cecile, the mother of Delphine and her sisters, rejects and revises the “yoke” of women’s service to men and family by making her kitchen into an art studio, redefining it as a new space that is both maternal and professional.