Cornbread Nation 7: The Best of Southern Food Writing

Ode to Gumbo

154 Ode to Gumbo Kevin Young For weeks I have waited for a day without death or doubt. Instead the sky set afire or the flood filling my face. A stubborn drain nothing can fix. Every day death. Every morning death & every night & evening And each hour a kind of winter— all weather is unkind. Too hot, or cold that creeps the bones. Father, your face a faith 155 ode to gumbo I can no longer see. Across the street a dying, yet still-standing tree. So why not make a soup of what’s left? Why not boil & chop something outside the mind—let us welcome winter for a few hours, even in summer. Some say Gumbo starts with filé or with roux, begins with flour & water making sure not to burn. I know Gumbo starts with sorrow— with hands that cannot wait but must—with stirring & a slow boil & things that cannot be taught, like grace. Done right, Gumbo lasts for days. Done right, it will feed you & not let go. Like grief you can eat & eat & still plenty kevin young 156 left. Food of the saints, Gumbo will outlast even us—like pity, you will curse it & still hope for the wing of chicken bobbed up from below. Like God Gumbo is hard to get right & I don’t bother asking for it outside my mother’s house. Like life, there’s no one way to do it, & a hundred ways, from here to Sunday, to get it dead wrong. Save all the songs. I know none, even this, that will bring a father back to his son. Blood is thicker than water under any bridge & Gumbo thicker than that. It was my father’s mother who taught mine how 157 ode to gumbo to stir its dark mirror— now it is me who wishes to plumb its secret depths. Black Angel, Madonna of the Shadows, Hail Mary strong & dark as dirt, Gumbo’s scent fills this house like silence & tells me everything has an afterlife, given enough time & the right touch. You need okra, sausage, bones of a bird, an entire onion cut open & wept over, stirring cayenne in till the end burns the throat— till we can amen & pretend such fiery mercy is all we know. ...