Into the Gumbo Pot
No metaphor represents Southern culture better than a bowl of gumbo.
“It’s father was a West African stew,” Richard Murff writes in one of today’s stories. “Its mother was a French bouillabaisse.”
Murff is writing, of course, about gumbo. I have always contended that gumbo is the perfect metaphor for Southern culture. Its beginning was a meat stew stew brought here by people who came here enslaved and fish stew brought here by the colonialists who owned the slaves.. But somehow, the dishes merged and gave us the beginnings of gumbo, a dish that centuries later would be enjoyed by all of us around a more equitably set table.
The Southern gumbo pot continues to take on new flavors. The beautiful thing about gumbo is that the blending did not stop when the African stew first met the French stew. As each successive wave of immigrants arrived on these shores — whether by force or by choice — each came with its own flavors. They came with seeds in their pockets so they could grow the crops of their home places. And over time, all these flavors went into the Southern gumbo pot. It has picked up flavors of India, Vietnam, China and Thailand.
Waves of immigrants from all those places have found new homes on our shores in recent years, and they have enriched the gumbo on our Southern tables — as well as the gumbo that is our culture.
Remember that the next time you sit down to a piping hot bowl of the stuff. Spoon it down with reverence, which is what it deserves.
Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.