Okra: From seeds to stories

“With the harvest of fuzzy green pods we make a soup that plants seeds in you. Seeds that turn into stories. Stories planted in you…And in you. In you. And you.”¹

Kendra Hamilton, PhD, associate professor of English, Geechee from Charleston, SC

Kendra Hamilton is an associate professor of English at Presbyterian College, and she grew up in a Geechee community in Charleston, South Carolina—the city that was built by the agricultural knowledge of enslaved Africans.² In 2007, she wrote an article titled “The Taste of Sun: Okra Soup in the Geechee Tradition,” that speaks to the parts of Gullah Geechee culture that many feel are fading away. She talks about returning to visit her hometown and how much it has changed over the past decades. She says it is:

“…much sadder and far more mono-hued, where the newspapers are full of stories of brown people selling or being forced out of lands they’ve worked or owned one way or another for nearly 500 years (if you count the Africans who arrived with the Spanish), where the now-majority whites have created a paradise of “faux historic” suburbs and golf courses to poison the marshes and streams.”³

Hamilton talks about how this displacement of Black populations and replacement of culture through gentrification, the people in the South have “utterly lost a taste and feel for” working with the land and living in harmony with it.⁴ She says that okra soup—the Geechee version of gumbo—can help people find their way back to that cultural mindset. 

“Okra soup is a small point in this conflict between exalted ideal and fallen real—yet I think it’s a telling one…The key to making an okra soup that is flavorful and authentic, in the tradition of South Carolina Geechee, is simplicity itself: it lies in remaining true to the ingredients, remaining ever mindful of the fact that okra soup is a dish of summer.”⁵

By “remaining true to the ingredients,” Hamilton is talking about the use of ingredients one has planted, tended, picked and cooked with their own hands. But she knows that not everyone is able to grow their own foods, and admits that even she hasn’t always been able to eat this way. It wasn’t until 2006, the year prior to her writing this article, that she was able to grow okra and tomatoes in her own garden.

“…last year, for the very first time, I grew okra and tomatoes in combination and discovered for myself the profound and elemental pleasures of slow food. By this I mean simply food one has to wait for: a longing fixed into one’s chosen patch of earth with a seed.”⁶

Through “the profound and elemental pleasures of slow food,” Hamilton believes that the Gullah and Geechee peoples of the Lowcountry—some of whom now don’t even know about this heritage because they have become “so disembedded and disinherited from their own culture”—will be able to reconnect with their roots. Dishes like okra soup, as well as the dishes and stories Grosvenor, Raiford, Robinson and Bailey offer in their books, help people understand “who we are and what we’ve given to the world.”⁷ As with everything, it comes back to agriculture as Hamilton equates the sharing of these stories and this history to the planting of okra seeds:

“We are planting seeds. Small, black, perfectly round seeds that shoot up six feet high and produce papery pale yellow flowers. With the harvest of the fuzzy green pods we make a soup that plants seeds in you. Seeds that turn into stories. Stories planted in you…And in you. In you. And you.”⁸

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Footnotes

1. Kendra Hamilton, “The Taste of the Sun: Okra Soup in the Geechee Tradition,” Callaloo 30, no. 1 (2007): 85.
2. The Rice page on this website
3. Hamilton, “The Taste of the Sun,” 76.
4. Ibid, 78.
5. Ibid, 76 and 78.
6. Ibid, 78.
7. Ibid, 85.
8. Ibid, 85.