Chitterling Memories

Vernon Jarrett

Elbra Wedgeworth

H. Carl McCall

Vance Vaucresson

Boiled, baked or fried, chitterlings are a southern food tradition with a striking history. ¹ Chitterlings evoke hearty memories among HistoryMakers; the digital archive is ripe with early memories of this “soul food,” which was a common dietary component of most African Americans’ enslaved ancestors. ² As Vernon Jarrett described, “We went around making each other feel good with what we had. You don’t have a whole lot, but take what you got and magnify it, escalate it. That’s what soul food is. Soul food uses the throwaways of what white people had. Like you take chitterlings and make a delightful dish out of them.” ³ [Vernon Jarrett, THMDA 1.2.6] .

Chitterlings--as well as hog maws, neck bones and ham hocks--are, unsurprisingly, accompanied by a distinctive scent and flavor. Elbra Wedgeworth remembered her family’s tradition of cooking chitterlings on holidays, like New Years, when she helped her mother prepare them for her father: “And they didn’t have the pre-cleaned ones back in those days. I mean you had to literally clean them…The smell is still very real for me, even now . ” ⁴ [The Honorable Elbra Wedgeworth, THMDA 1.1.11] . Similarly, H. Carl McCall spoke of the significance for his childhood community and home life, as his maternal grandfather often cooked with chitterlings: “Throughout the whole building...we always knew when he was cooking. So it was a neighborhood where you knew what everybody else was doing; you knew what they were having for dinner.” ⁵ [H. Carl McCall, THMDA 1.1.8] .

In the 1960s and 1970s, “soul food” became “a self-defining discourse.” ⁶   While some African Americans, like Eldridge Cleaver, LeRoi Jones and later Dick Gregory , spoke outwardly about the negative associations of dishes that used chitterlings, ⁷ still others upheld such foods as necessary “to an enduring African American identity, serving as a reflection not only of the stamina, survival, and inventiveness utilized to persevere through the experience of slavery, but also their cultural separateness, or at least difference, from white southerners.” ⁸

Yet, chitterling dishes parallel to those of the American South are found across cultures. In Poland, kiszka, or kaszanka, requires the residual parts of a butchered hog ⁹ ; and kishke, in the Ashkenazi Jewish community, is comprised of the “unwanted portion of an animal”--in this case cattle--“whose most coveted parts were consumed by the rich.” ¹⁰

Vance Vaucresson ’s father, a prominent member of Louisiana’s Creole community, started the Vaucresson Sausage Company--which became the longest standing vendor of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Vaucresson spoke of their products' success: “You use up everything you could. You pickled your lips, you pickled your tongues…then you got the pig, you got tails. And so you [made] sure that from a sausage, you made everything you could. And that’s pretty much how we got to making good sausage: by making sure we saved.” ¹¹ [Vance Vaucresson, THMDA 1.2.8] .

Lauded federal judge and civil rights attorney George N. Leighton passed away this past Wednesday, June 6, at the age of 105 years old. ¹² From New Bedford, Massachusetts, Leighton graduated from Harvard Law School; and began his legal career in Chicago, where he eventually served as the branch president of the NAACP. In 1969, Leighton became the first African American justice of the Illinois Appellate Court.

In his interview with The HistoryMakers in 2002, Leighton was asked about his effectiveness as an attorney. He responded: “I think it’s my attention to detail. You see, a legal problem always requires analysis. It’s when you analyze the facts of every case, whether it’s criminal or civil. Then knowledge of the law and applying the law to those facts is what leads to the result. And that’s the part that I find intriguing…it is intellectually satisfying to analyze some facts, apply the law and derive the conclusion. That’s the legal process: it requires time, requires attention, and it requires devotion.” ¹³

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NOTES:

1. BANNER PHOTO: Photograph of a chitterlings meal, from Pinterest. Accessed June 8, 2018.

2. Laretta Henderson, “Ebony Jr! and ‘Soul Food’: The Construction of Middle-Class African American Identity through the Use of Traditional Southern Foodways,” MELUS 32, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 81-97.

3. Vernon Jarrett (The HistoryMakers A2000.028), interviewed by Julieanna L. Richardson, February 10, 2000, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 2, story 6, Vernon Jarrett talks about soul food and philosophy.

4. The Honorable Elbra Wedgeworth (The HistoryMakers A2008.123), interviewed by Denise Gines, November 5, 2008, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 1, story 11, The Honorable Elbra Wedgeworth describes the sights, sounds and smells of her childhood.

5. H. Carl McCall (The HistoryMakers A2014.146), interviewed by Julieanna L. Richardson, June 18, 2014, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 1, story 8, H. Carl McCall describes the sights, sounds and smells of his childhood.

6. Henderson, p. 82

7. Doris Witt, “‘Eating Chitterlings Is Like Going Slumming’: Soul Food and Its Discontents” in Black Hunger: Soul Food And America. University of Minnesota Press (1999).

8. Latshaw, p. 109

9. Robert Strybel and Maria Strubel, Polish Heritage Cookery. Hippocrene Books (1993).

10. We Eat What? A Cultural Encyclopedia of Unusual Foods in the United States, ed. Jonathan Deutsch. ABC-CLIO, LLC (2018).

11. Vance Vaucresson (The HistoryMakers A2010.056), interviewed by Denise Gines, June 10, 2010, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 2, story 8, Vance Vaucresson describes his family's charcuterie products.

12. Mitchell Armentrout, “George Leighton, legendary Chicago judge and courthouse namesake, dies at 105.” The Chicago Sun-Times. June 6, 2018. Accessed June 8, 2018. https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/george-leighton-legendary-chicago-judge-and-courthouse-namesake-dies-at-105/.

13. The Honorable George N. Leighton (The HistoryMakers A2002.042), interviewed by Julieanna L. Richardson, May 30, 2002, The HistoryMakers Digital Archive. Session 1, tape 7, story 4, George Leighton shares why he was an effective lawyer.