When my mother was still here in body, she made a small pot of black-eyed peas every New Year’s Day. The pot was so small, in fact, that it held the volume of only about two cups of cooked peas.

“I thought you loved black-eyed peas?” I asked her.

“I don’t love them; I don’t really even like them. I just eat them because of tradition.”

“That’s a lot for tradition.”

“How else am I supposed to get good luck and change?”

In the South, a mess of black-eyed peas is eaten alongside greens as a good-luck food at the start of the civil year. No book preaches this scripture. It is word of mouth, the process of the heart, a lived text. Both foods were endemic to West Africa and the gardens of enslaved people in the South; their story, no matter what, is bound to the racial caste system of early America.

A recent photograph taken at a Southern museum attributed this tradition to white Civil War soldiers. Black-eyed peas were one of many varieties of field pea, also known as cowpeas, that crossed the Atlantic during the transatlantic slave trade. The museum caption, however, associated this Southern tradition with starving, gray-uniformed soldiers forced to consume livestock feed. Indeed, Robert E. Lee called the black-eyed pea “the only unfailing friend the Confederacy ever had.”

The caption had nothing to do with reality or fact. Not even a hint. It was part of another tradition of divorcing the Old South from its Black and African roots. This tradition left little room for me, a Black child, to know myself as an American and to understand my origins and the contributions of our Ancestors. The story of me and the black-eyed pea is how a single ingredient helped me do just that.