54 FEBRUARY 2021
TRAVEL
Y EARLIEST MEMORY is not
inscribed in my mind in words,
but as flavors. I was a toddler,
in the kitchen of my apartment
in the Bronx. It was just after
Christmas—the tree was still
up—and my mom served my sister and me
shrimp étouffée for dinner. Shrimp stock that
had simmered in a well-worn soup pot on the
stove infused the dish, along with crawfish tails
and crawfish fat. I hadn’t been to the sea, but
I could taste the sea in it. I didn’t know what
the trinity was—the onion, celery, and pepper
that form the base of so much Creole food—but
I could taste the trinity in it. Those flavors—but-
tery, silky, rich, deep, multileveled—were set
into me like scrawls on wet cement. Today, they
still mean one thing to me: home.
Children think their first memories are the
start of their story, but as adults we learn that
isn’t so. That knowledge isn’t always easy. For
Black Americans, it’s especially uneasy. For
many of us, our ancestors have often been
overlooked, their stories either actively erased
or simply deemed not important enough to be
taught to us in schools. But in my childhood
kitchen, the past spoke volumes through the
food we ate, and I learned at an early age that
those flavors had a history. I knew that my
mom’s étouffée recipe came from Grandma
Cassie, a woman bursting with warmth, with
a syrupy Southern accent, who drove to New
York City from Beaumont, Texas, with a suit-
case full of boudin and frozen crawfish tails at
Christmastime. But it wasn’t until I was in my 30s, last winter
on a trip down to Louisiana with my grandmother, that I fully
understood where that story came from.
I met Grandma Cassie at the Lafayette Regional Airport. I was
wearing my Malcolm X hat, given to me by her husband,
Winston, with whom I had recently traveled to his home in
Trinidad and Tobago, and I noticed she wore hers, too —her X
was in a lovely bright pattern. Our route would start in a small
town called Mamou in Louisiana, where my grandmother was
born, and end in Beaumont, where she grew up. She was excited
to be going back home with me, her only grandson.
So much is made of the city of New Orleans, it is easy to forget
that far from the Lower Ninth Ward and Tremé, the state is made
up of small towns and vast stretches of bayou and forest. Driving
north from Lafayette to Mamou, wetlands stretched out on
either side. Hardwood forests fuzzed the horizon. Swallows andkites zipped through the air. Houses
were ranch-style, modest and set back
from the road. Most businesses were
gas stations and farm repair shops. It
isn’t an unfriendly place, but not one
overly concerned with what you think
of it. This is a Louisiana you have to
work to know. It’s a place where the
best food isn’t in restaurants but in homes you need an invita-
tion to. Thankfully, I had Grandma Cassie.
Mamou is a town of about 3,000 in Evangeline Parish, which
bills itself as the Cajun music capital of the world. Though my
great-grandmother Momo, a French-speaking restaurateur,
lived in Ville Platte, when my grandma was born, Momo had to
travel to Mamou, 12 miles away, because it was the only town
in driving distance with a maternity ward for Black women.
The next morning, we hit up the courir de Mardi Gras in
Mamou, a procession to kick off Mardi Gras season. It was early
on a Sunday, and the shops on the tiny Main Street were mostly
closed. Grandma and I headed toward a group of revelers, asking
a passerby where the start of the parade was. “Oh,” said the
man, older, white, and friendly. “You’re looking for the other
Mardi Gras.” He directed us to a parallel parade, starting a few
blocks away, and nearly all Black. We joined at the start of the