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  • A Conversation with Reginald McKnight
  • Xavier Nicholas (bio) and Reginald McKnight

NICHOLAS: I like the anecdote you tell at the beginning of your essay Confessions of a Wannabe Negro. You're six years old at the time, and you're standing in line with a group of your schoolmates at a predominantly white elementary school in California. When one of your schoolmates asks, "Where was you born?" you answer, "Germany." At that point, a little white girl named Marsha turns around and says, "Coloreds can't be born in Germany." You try to clarify the matter by saying, "I didn't say I was German, I said I was born in Germany." Marsha, however, insists that you're lying because, as she puts it, "Colored people do not come from Germany." Could it be that your father was in the military, which would explain why you "come from Germany"?

MCKNIGHT: Yes. My dad was in the Air Force, and he was stationed in Fürstenfeldbrück, Germany. That's where I was born. There were four of us—I have two sisters and a brother. Whenever I say that my dad was in the Air Force for twenty-seven years, he always says twenty-six years and nine months. He's a military guy, and everything has to be exact. Actually, my dad was a reluctant airman. He did four years and got out, but then he went right back in because he thought that staying in the military would be the best way to take care of his family. Everything—medical, dental, that sort of stuff—is taken care of. We always had enough food to eat and clothes to wear. It's blue collar. It's kind of a nice life. It's like a little fiefdom. I can't say I care for the weaponry, though.

NICHOLAS: What did your mother do?

MCKNIGHT: My mom is retired now, but she cooked for children at a nursery school for the last fifteen or twenty years. My dad, by the way, was also a cook. He served in both the Korean and Vietnam wars as a hospital chef. He won a Bronze Star in Vietnam. He would write up diets and prepare food for medical problems—anything from diabetes to cancer, you name it. My mom would still be cooking today if my dad had not coaxed her into retiring by promising to take her back down to Waco, Texas, her hometown. My parents' first argument was over food. My dad's gravy was too lumpy and white and my mom's gravy was burnt.

NICHOLAS: Now I know the source of your story "Soul Food," which is in your second book The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas. That story ends with a litany of food imagery. It's enough to make a reader's mouth water. [End Page 304]

MCKNIGHT: I'm surprised that I don't write more about cooking and food. Our house was always full of recipes. My brother used to sell wholesale and retail food to restaurants. He owned a business and used to work for another company in California. I was a purchasing agent in a four-restaurant hotel in the mid-eighties. That was in Denver. I found it interesting working with all the chefs, snobs, and sybarites. Aside from the customary meat and potatoes, I ordered ostrich eggs, sea urchins, horse flesh, Johnny jump ups, every variety of "baby" vegetable, intentionally maggoty cheese, suckling pigs; you name it, from the savory to the horrific. It was the beginning of what American people like to call 'foodyism,' the eighties, and that was fine by me, coming from a food-happy family and all. But you're probably wondering who would eat maggoty cheese, or sea urchins. I can tell you it wasn't the purchasing agent.

NICHOLAS: I assume that you and your family moved around a lot as a result of your father being in the military.

MCKNIGHT: All over the place. After Germany, we moved to New York for a brief time in the late fifties, and then we were in California until 1962. Then we moved to...

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