Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors,

Hi! My name is Michael W. Twitty, and I’m one of those interpreters who has watched you squirm or run away because you couldn't deal with a more honest and open narrative of American slavery. I’m not a reenactor, because G-d forbid I reenact anything for the likes of you. I am an interpreter, a modern person who is charged with educating you about the past.

I take my job seriously, because frankly you’re not the one I’m centering on. I’m performing an act of devotion to my Ancestors. This is not about your comfort or anyone else's, it’s about honoring their story on its own terms, in context.

For over a decade I have been working toward my personal goal of being the first black chef in 150 years to master the cooking traditions of my colonial and antebellum ancestors. With five trips to six West African nations and more on the way, and having cooked in almost every former slaveholding state beneath the Mason-Dixon Line, my work is constant and unrelenting, mostly because I have to carve my way through a forest of stereotypes and misunderstandings to bring our heritage to life.

I also just want to preserve the roots of our cooking before they’re gone.

Because minds like yours created the “happy darky,” some people of color are ashamed of my work. Although I am none of the things they imagine me to be, I can understand why they are confused about what I (and many people like me) do. Once upon a time, folks like yourselves wanted to have a national Mammy monument on the Washington Mall, to remind us about the “proper” role we were meant to occupy and to praise our assumed loyalty.

No, our enslaved forebears are the real greatest generation. With malice towards none, they constantly took their strike at freedom. Yet their heroism was obscured because … you guessed it … white supremacy had to have the final say.

Southern food is my vehicle for interpretation because it is not apolitical. It is drenched in all the dreadful funkiness of the history it was created in. It’s not my job to comfort you. It’s not my job to assuage any guilt you may feel. That’s really none of my business.

My job is to show you that my Ancestors — and some of yours (as quiet as it’s kept, go get your DNA done, like right now)— resisted enslavement by maintaining links to what scholar Charles D. Joyner famously called a “culinary grammar” that contained whole narratives reaching into spirituality, health practices, linguistics, agricultural wisdom, and environmental practices that constituted in the words of late historian William D. Piersen, “a resistance too civilized to notice.”

Want to read about it? Since you already know I’m a literate runaway from the American educational system, I wrote an award-winning book called The Cooking Gene. (Like Eddie Murphy said, “but buy my record first…”) By the way, it’s not a cookbook; it’s the story of my family told through culinary history from Africa to America and from enslavement to freedom.