Lessons at the Southern Table: Childhood and Food in Dori Sanders’s Clover

Clover: A Novel by Dori Sanders (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1990). Image courtesy of McCain Library and Archives (de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection and USM Libraries Digital Lab), University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg.

Young adult and children’s literature often allows readers to see themselves reflected in fictional characters who navigate familiar complex social situations, while exploring self and identity. As young readers seek to develop a personal philosophy of what is right and wrong, these texts create a safe space to help them make sense of the world and define their role in society. Dori Sanders’s novel, Clover is no exception. The award-winning novel chronicles the summer of a ten-year-old African American girl in the rural South who must adjust to her father’s sudden death and life with her new white step-mother. Like many literary works set in the South and also in children’s literature, food in the novel is transformative and functions as an important vehicle to connect with the reader through shared experience. As Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard point out in the introduction to Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature, “Food experiences form part of the daily texture of every aware; thus it is hardly surprising that food is a constantly recurring motif in literature written for children” (10). Unlike in other works of children’s literature, Sanders’s use of food is not exclusively metaphoric, but is fundamental to the culture of the South and Clover’s community, thereby serving as a natural backdrop for her development. Food serves as a medium for Clover’s development as she observes and internalizes important social interactions while food is present during important social exchanges.

Given the troubled history of the South, food plays a critical role as a communicative device to negotiate tensions between race and class in the region. Marcie Cohen Ferris, noted Southern culture and foodways scholar and author of The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region, assesses the importance of food and its role in closing the divide between an uncomfortable nostalgia of the region and positive associations: “In food lies the harsh dynamics of racism, sexism, class struggle, and ecological exploitation that have long defined the South; yet there, too, resides family, a strong connection to place, conviviality, creativity, and flavor” (1). What we eat is inextricably tied to our identity and clearly marks our social boundaries (Latshaw 100), offering a collective sense of belonging. Southern food traditions help to solidify who we are, but at the same time they act as a cultural bridge, often helping us to understand the world around us (Ferris vii). The act of sharing a meal and the dialogue that surrounds it opens up the possibilities to break down barriers, build trust, and facilitate social growth. Southern food is an important rhetorical vehicle (Stokes and Atkins-Sayre 3) that gives us the opportunity to identify commonalities and get to know one another: “food, more than prayer, politics, or politeness, is the language of getting along” (Severson). As attribution to the power of the Southern table, it is fitting then that food functions as a device to cultivate the social integration of children into the complicated arena of societal norms.

The conversation around Southern foodways has gained momentum in the last several decades, due in large part to the exploration of the relationship between food and Southern culture by the late journalist and writer, John Egerton. Egerton, who passed in 2013, is known as a pioneer of this dialogue, rich with cultural heritage. It found legitimacy within the pages of his book, Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History, first published in 1987, as he emphasized the interconnectedness between food on the Southern table and the culture that embraces it. His goal was to call attention to the dichotomy of the deeply-rooted cultural heritage of Southern foodways and its “imminent peril of fading into oblivion” (viii):

Within the South...