Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad

THE WAY TO A WOMAN’S HEART

204 April฀2004 Entering the kitchen on an April morning, I confront a mosaic of white chef’s hats framing black faces. A dozen students are busy: turning Betty Crocker mixes into cakes, cantaloupes into fruit salad, the previous day’s baked potatoes into twice-stuffed potatoes, and chicken breasts into fried chicken. Justice is standing alone between two pairs of bakers, dreads halfway down his back, at leisure. He flashes one of his megasmiles in my direction. “I owe you an apology,” I say. He looks confused. The knot in my stomach relaxes. Apparently he’s forgotten the exchange we had the morning before. Or maybe he has forgiven my condescending remarks—or dismissed them as predictable coming from someone like me. “Yesterday,” I say, “when I asked about your grade on the practice certification exam, you told me you got only six wrong. Remember ? I said I was certain you were putting me on. You turned to Kristen for con- firmation. ‘Tell her how I did,’ you said. ‘Tell her outta ninety questions I had only six mistakes.’” My assumptions regarding Justice’s performance didn’t spring from race or gender narrowly construed. All the students remaining in the class are African Americans, and three of the top five achievers are men. It was Justice himself. Justice advertises himself as a man of the ’hood. Tall, bearded, and very black, he generates energy by clowning and teasing the ladies. Shuffling around, he hides behind banter and self-mockery. “I’ve been watching you play the fool,” I tell Justice, “and I know you’re a smart fool.” He’s like King Lear’s fool, I tell him, inventing the role and himself. “Yesterday, when I questioned your grade on the test, it didn’t occur to me that the smart fool is also a smart student.” “A wise man can play the part of the fool,” Justice responds, “but the fool can’t play the part of the wise man.” Like millions of Americans, I have a head filled with media images of blacks growing up in Newark (or Harlem or South Central LA) who look and sound like Justice, boys and men with street smarts and fast mouths who rarely make it through high school. I wonder, does the sly game Justice plays, including his refusal to present himself as serious, constitute an invitation to a put-down? Did I THE฀WAY฀TO฀A฀WOMAN’S฀HEART฀ THE WAY TO A WOMAN’S HEART 205 react to Justice as he wanted me to—or as I was programmed to? Or is his conartistry a calculated challenge to the likes of me: a test of whether well-intentioned white liberals can get beyond the obvious and read him correctly? These questions trouble me still. At that moment in the kitchen, however, my intention was clear. I wanted Justice to see me as I saw myself: grappling with my prejudices and my ignorance. “Wanna know why I’m really here?” Justice asks. He leans back in his chair in the commissary dining room and scrutinizes my face. “I got tired of runnin’ back and forth to prison.” Justice’s father was a cook—a chef, Justice calls him—at a mental hospital, and Justice felt drawn to cooking. As a boy, he liked watching his father at ease in the kitchen. Between prison stints, Justice turned to the Food Channel for ideas. “Cookin’s the way to a woman’s heart,” he says, “and I love women. I love women ,” he repeats, taking his time with each word, giving each word equal emphasis. “I love women. I love women. I love women.” That’s Justice, playing with his script as much for his own amusement as mine. Prison looms large in Justice’s thirty-three years. He first went to jail at fifteen, for stealing. He was a kid who wanted everything he saw. But his mother kept saying no. “They’ll just steal it off ya,” she told him. He came out of each prison sentence more savvy about crime. He made money dealing drugs. In prison Justice began reading: first the Bible and then the Koran. “I’m very studious,” Justice tells me. “When I read a book in prison I read it over and over. I studied for my exam here the same way. I take nothing on face value. I question everything. Some people wanna call me a revolutionary,” he boasts, “but...