Of course, that core family--
the one that supposedly always has
to take you in no matter what?
That core family has been, for me,
a real source of love and contention
and all of those things.
But one thing we did agree on was
that for all of the picnic holidays,
like Labor Day and Memorial Day, that we
would get together and eat.
Food-- food was the connecting force.
And so I grew up in--
as many of you may know, I grew up in the Midwest.
And you could probably hear that, and yet--
in Akron, Ohio.
And because of the politics of this nation,
most of my neighbors and most of my relatives
came from the South, looking for jobs, in the '20s.
And so there's a curious and interesting sense
of moving that Southern cuisine and language all the way up
into the Midwest.
"Family Reunion"-- "30 seconds into the barbecue,
my Cleveland cousins have everyone speaking Southern,
broadened vowels and dropped consonants, whoops and caws.
It's more osmosis than magic, a sliding thrall back to a time
when working the tire factories meant entire neighborhoods
coming up from Georgia or Tennessee,
accents helplessly intact, while their children, inflections
flattened to match the field they thought they were playing
on, knew without asking when it was safe to roll out a drawl,
just as it's understood "potluck" means resurrecting
the food we've abandoned along the way for the sake of sleeker
thighs.
I look over the yard to the porch
with its battalion of aunts, the wavering
ranks of uncles at the grill.
Everywhere else, hordes of progeny are swirling,
and my cousins yakking on as if they
were waist-deep in quicksand but, like the books recommend,
aren't moving until someone hauls them free.
Who are all these children?
Who had them, and with whom?
Through the general coffee tones,
the shame genetics cut a creamy swath.
Cherokee's burnt umber transposed onto generous lips,
a glance flares gray above the crushed nose we label
'Anonymous African.'
It's all here, the beautiful geometry of Mendel's peas
and their grim logic.
And though we remain clearly divided on the merits of okra,
there's still time to demolish the cheese grits
and tear into slow-cooked ribs so tender
we agree they're worth the extra pound or two our menfolk
swear we'll always bring them home.
Pity the poor soul who lives a life
without butter, those pinched knees and tennis shoulders
and hatchety smiles."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
You don't have to clap after each poem,
though I must say I'm on the side of not liking okra.
My husband loves it.
We have this argument all the time.
It's a consistency thing, you know?