In chapter 4 [of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power], which is about food and travel, Williams-Forson recovers the history of black women packing up shoe box lunches for family members who were setting off on a trip. These box lunches allowed women who themselves might not be able to leave home to “vicariously” travel, and helped African Americans navigate the hostile landscape of the Jim Crow South, where few restaurants would serve them. Williams-Forson illustrates this with a quotation from a cookbook-memoir, Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine: Recipes and Reminiscences by Norma Jean Darden and Carole Darden. The Darden sisters recall how exciting it was to stay up late the night before a trip and help their mother pack the box lunches, which contained a bounty of goodies: fried chicken, peanut butter and jelly, deviled eggs, chocolate layer cake, nuts, raisins, and cheese. Except for the thermos of lemonade, “everything was neatly wrapped in wax paper” and tucked into shoe boxes, “with the name of the passenger Scotch-taped on so that special requests were not confused.” Even as young girls, the Dardens knew these lunches were about traversing dangerous terrain:
“These trips took place during the fifties, and one never knew what dangers or insults would be encountered along the way. Racist policies loomed like unidentified monsters in our childish imagination and in reality. After the New Jersey Turnpike ended, we would have to be on the alert for the unexpected. So, as we approached that last Howard Johnson’s before Delaware, our father would make his inevitable announcement that we had to get out, stretch our legs, and go to the bathroom, whether we wanted to or not. This was a ritualized part of the trip, for, although there would be many restaurants along the route, this was the last one that didn’t offer segregated facilities. From this point on, we pulled out our trusty shoe box lunches.”
Sitting in my kitchen in the borrowed chair, I think back to other books I’ve read about the era of Jim Crow, and I realize that what the Dardens recall was by no means unique (although, before reading Williams-Forson’s analysis, I hadn’t noticed it as a widespread cultural and political strategy). Other memoirs on my shelf discuss the same practice. For example, Gail Milissa Grant, who grew up in Saint Louis in the 1940s, recalls her mother doing something similar. Grant’s parents:
“…often went to the Union Station not to pick up anyone but to feed their friends. My mother would prepare a meal and carefully select the menu for its shelf life since it might have to last for hours without spoiling. Negroes could not “receive service” on trains until later in the 1950s, so they had to travel with their own food. The Negro Pullman porters couldn’t even serve other Negroes. She usually included fried chicken, hard-boiled eggs, a few candy bars, and ice-cold sodas and placed them all in a shoe box or hatbox. Their friends would give Mommy plenty of notice, by telephone or telegram, of their itinerary before boarding the train, so she had time to cook. On long journeys, my mother’s would be one in a string of meals, with other friends doing the same thing along the route.”
Mrs. Darden and Mrs. Grant’s food preparation is the best picture I have found for understanding God as a provider of food. Here is God preparing food for the Israelites journeying in the wilderness: God is not just abstractly raining coriander flakes down from the heavens. God is staying up late to prepare shoe box lunches for people on a perilous journey.
And this is the bread with which Jesus most explicitly identified—manna, journeying bread. Jesus as manna: fried chicken, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, deviled eggs, chocolate layer cake, all carefully packed into a small box. Jesus, a traveler’s lemonade in a thermos. Jesus as manna, the bread that sustains oppressed people on their journey through an unwelcoming land.