Story by Amber Lewis, Summer 2021
“I only bought three bunches this time because they looked pretty big,” my mom says as she enters the back door to our house. I get up from the living room to help her with the grocery bags, placing them on the clean kitchen counters before helping her put her purchases away. In one bag, there are visible tufts of green poking out from the top, exposing fresh bunches of mustard greens. For this bag, I simply open the chilling cabinet in the fridge and lay them inside.
“I’m not sure if this is going to be enough, ma,” I begin. “You know dad always eats up the whole pot.”
“Yeah, he does, but I think with the cornbread and chicken we should be fine.”
It’s Saturday, and the season in question is irrelevant because this is an almost weekly conversation. In the Lewis household, greens are made almost as often as water is drunk. The process to make them is almost ritualistic and needs to happen as soon as possible because Mom always wants dinner done before 2PM on Sundays so she won’t have to cook at the peak of the day, just like how my grandma used to do it when she was younger. After resting from running errands earlier, my mom asks for the same four things: a stock pot, a plastic bag, a long, sharp cutting knife, and the bag of greens that was placed in the fridge.
On some of these days, I grab a knife and help my mom cut the rough part of the stems off the greens to make sure they don’t come out as bitter. We sit on the couches in the living room, hunched over our pots as I talk about my boy problems, or my goals for the future, or anything else that’s been going on in my life. We laugh and exchange ideas while the greens are “picked” one by one, making sure to place the stems in the plastic bag and the completed greens in the other. When all of that is done, the knives get washed and the greens are placed in the sink, where they’ll be washed thoroughly before going into another clean pot with meat cuttings and seasonings for flavor.
My family isn’t the most closely connected to our culture. While I know where some of my family comes from-- my dad’s side branching from Arkansas on his mom’s side and my mom’s family mainly coming from the south around Shaw, Mississippi-- we don’t have many special traditions to connect us to our roots. However, Sunday meal planning is something that is the closest thing to a tradition that my family has. The rich, earthy scent of simmering mustard greens perfuming my house is ritualistic to my nose. Along with this scent, my arms sting with the pain of stirring cornbread batter while the heat in the kitchen wraps us in warmth-- or, suffocates us in heat, depending on the season.
I never get too upset about my roots, though; the muddled scent of mustard greens mixed with buttery, sweet cornbread is a reminder that I have found a family that extends past my home. Whether it be from the richness of collard greens and savory cornbread that come from a restaurant with origins in the deep south, or whether it be at my friends’ houses, who aren’t aware of their origins but they know that the recipe has been passed down for centuries, it makes me smile to know that somewhere along the way we might have still been close, or crossed paths somewhere.