Photograph by David Bertozzi for BuzzFeed
Last month, Mississippi arrived in Manhattan. The initial meeting place was Butter, a Midtown restaurant where the booths are lined with dark leather and polished wood, the ceilings are high and the lights dim. The first to arrive was John Currence, dressed in chef’s whites and a ball cap that read “Make Cornbread, Not War." In the morning hours, he sautéed okra in a low, wide pot until the tough, green hulls were ready to be stewed with tomatoes and chicken stock. He let a pot of field peas simmer for hours, slowly growing thick with smoky pork fat.
Hundreds of transplanted Southerners celebrated their native state of Mississippi with a reunion picnic in New York City's Central Park, June 18, 1983.
Suzanne Vlamis / AP Images
For the past 35 years, Mississippi has been hosting a Saturday summer picnic in Central Park, a small affair of white tents and fried catfish and country music meant to promote the culture and heritage of the great, misunderstood state of Mississippi. Over the years, it has grown into a somewhat official pilgrimage. Every governor of the state has attended. This year, the Mississippi Development Authority hosted events stretching over three days including an exhibition of emerging artists at the National Arts Club and a night of short films in Brooklyn. Currence was here to cook not one, but two very different meals.
This morning’s private luncheon, held annually, was largely aimed at attracting what are known as “site selectors,” corporate employees typically based in New York who determine where their companies should place their next manufacturing plant, call center, or distribution warehouse. With an unemployment rate tied for fourth highest in the nation, Mississippi needs those jobs. They began to arrive around 11, in sharp, black suits, and were one-by-one greeted by the name-tagged executive team of the Mississippi Development Agency — here was the “Director of Tourism” and there was the “Chief Marketing Officer” and so on — and a glass of sweet tea.
As Currence began sending out boards of pimiento cheese sandwiches spiked with Tabasco and deviled eggs garnished with bright orange bursts of trout roe to the dining room, a black car escorted by a New York State Trooper arrived outside. As he walked in, Gov. Phil Bryant waved to the crowd, now about 60 in number, and took a seat.
Brent Christensen, executive director of the MDA, turned on a microphone, made a few small introductions to the room, bowed his head, and said a prayer: “Bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies and us to thy service. Amen.”
When Christensen raised his head, it was time to introduce the chef who had flown in to Mississippi to cook this meal. He said a few polite words about Currence's celebrated restaurants in Oxford, about his James Beard Award, about how happy they were to have him. Currence was called in from the kitchen and the crowd clapped politely in return. The mood remained polite, perhaps because of what Christensen politely left unsaid.
This spring, a Mississippi state senator and Baptist pastor named Phillip Gandy sponsored Senate Bill No. 2681, better known as the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The bill called for something simple, adding the words “In God We Trust” to the state seal, but also for something harder to understand: “to provide that state action shall not substantially burden a person's right to the exercise of religion.” Some say the bill simply protects freedom of speech. Others have suggested that it could sanction religiously oriented discrimination, namely that a Christian business would no longer need to serve gay customers. Unlike similar legislation in Arizona, which was vetoed under intense scrutiny, the bill passed in Mississippi with little national notice. Bryant gathered lawmakers' who sponsored the bill for a small private signing ceremony with Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian think tank that “believes that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large.” The bill will go into effect on July 1, 2014 — the day before the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.
Of the many Mississippians who voiced opposition to the act, Currence has been among the most prominent. In an interview with the New York Times , he said, “The law sends a terrible message about the state of consciousness in the state of Mississippi. We are not going to sit idly by and watch Jim Crow get revived in our state.”
Of course, people who speak out openly against the governor’s policies aren’t typically hired to cook for him. Currence had been booked months before Bryant signed the bill. Currence considered cancelling, but then he and another chef, Kelly English of Memphis, hatched a plan they thought would get more attention: On Thursday, they would prepare this luncheon for the governor and on Friday they would hold a protest dinner called the Big Gay Mississippi Welcome Table. The ploy was simple. The same weekend that the state’s ambassadors would be wining and dining in New York, Currence would be there to send a message.
The response from the governor’s office was swift. The morning the news broke about the Big Gay Mississippi Welcome Table, Currence said, “I got a phone call, a dressing down by the governor's office — they wanted to know why I would embarrass the governor like this. And then it fucking dawned on me: You assholes don’t fucking talk to me like a sixth-grader in the principal's office, I’m a 50-year-old man. More to the point, I’m on the right fucking side of this thing. All you assholes have to do is come to dinner.”
Currence extended an offer to the governor: If the bill wasn’t about discrimination, if it was simply about protecting freedom of speech, then all the governor had to do was come to the Big Gay Mississippi Welcome Table. “Just show up,” Currence said. “Show the world that we’re not going to accept discrimination on any level. That’s all you have to do. Just show up.” If this weekend was about sending a message to the rest of the world about Mississippi, then why not that message? The governor declined, but Currence promised to save him a chair, anyway.
Gov. Phil Bryant.
Rogelio V. Solis / AP Photo
Both the offices of Gov. Bryant and the MDA declined to comment for this story, but it is not hard to imagine what was in their minds as Christensen finished his prayer and invited Currence out into the dining room to say a few words about the food. Would he bring up the bill? Would he raise his voice at the governor? Would he say those two words — “Jim Crow” — that so many in Mississippi would like to never talk about again?
Currence walked up to the microphone and described the menu that they would be eating. Behind the scenes, even that had been a battle. Currence had wanted to serve a family-style meal of summer vegetables, to push the metaphor of sharing, of communal plates. In the bickering that followed his stand against the bill, his idea for the meal got axed. “The menu ended up getting dumbed down to plates of fried chicken and sides,” he said. Currence didn’t talk about that, nor did he mention the bill. He talked instead about his grandparents' Sunday supper table. His voice was nervous and he stumbled over a few of his words. He apologized for rambling about the food. He said, “I hope you’re going to enjoy it. Thank you for having me,” and walked back into the kitchen.
After the fried chicken was served, Bryant picked up the microphone and gave a pitch to the site selectors in the room, listing the companies that have moved operations to the state: Toyota, Nissan, Elon Musk's SpaceX. (“I tell people that a man’s going to go Mars one day and he’s gonna have to pass through Hancock County to get there.”) By the end, the pitch started to resemble something closer to pleading. “If you need tickets just call me, I’ll get you there. We’ll send a plane or a helicopter. People come from all around the world to see what Mississippi’s all about and they like what they see and they’re buying into it.”
It is still unclear what kind of an economic impact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act could have on Mississippi. Before Jan Brewer vetoed similar legislation in Arizona this spring, companies as large as Delta, Marriott, and AT&T threatened to relocate their business from the state. While those same companies operate in Mississippi, they’ve yet to threaten Mississippi with a similar boycott. When contacted for comment, AT&T spokesperson Kim Allen wrote, “AT&T is proud to work in Mississippi. We do not believe that Senate Bill 2681 will have an impact on how we do business in the state. The Governor and legislative leaders worked hard to ensure this legislation mirrors national law to protect the individual religious freedom of Mississippians of all faiths from government interference.” (Delta and Marriott have not yet responded to a request for comment.)
If that was the kind of protest that Currence wanted to support, talking about discrimination at this luncheon could have been an opportune forum. Instead, he held his tongue. It is, perhaps, the decision of a person stuck between loving a place and fighting to change it.
Later on, I asked Currence why he hadn’t said anything, why he hadn’t mentioned the act or the Welcome Table dinner. “Had I felt like being there and facing off with the governor would have made a positive difference, I would have,” Currence said. “I had a job to do. I did it."
Photograph by David Bertozzi for BuzzFeed
Currence is 49 years old. His hair is mostly gone. In the past five years, he has been hospitalized with pancreatitis twice. The meniscus in his left knee is torn. One doctor has suggested surgery, but Currence is hoping that it will heal. Standing in the heat of the kitchen line, streaks of sweat stream down his face. His body is evidence of what a lifetime of work in a kitchen will do to someone.
Currence was not born or raised in Mississippi, but down the river in New Orleans. His father made his living in the oil business, first as a landman, then running supply boats to offshore oil rigs. It was on one of those boats that Currence had his first kitchen gig. He bounced around colleges in North Carolina and Virginia, more interested in being the lead singer of a band, Chapter Two, than finishing his degree or holding a steady job. Eventually the band broke up and he found himself washing dishes in the back of a restaurant called Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, N.C. Currence had come to Chapel Hill in 1986 looking for a music scene that exploded in Athens, Ga., instead. What he did find was Bill Neal, a temperamental self-taught chef who was doing something very few other chefs were doing at the time: taking Southern food seriously.
“There wasn’t a moment of being around Bill that you didn’t realize you were in the presence of someone important,” Currence said. “Everything he did was way beyond his years.”
Neal’s first book, Southern Cooking , had just been published by UNC Press. The New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne visited Crook’s Corner not long after and came back to tell the world about Neal’s shrimp and grits. At a time when Southern food was largely considered to be unsophisticated, provincial cuisine, Neal engaged deeply with the Western European, African, and native American traditions that he described as “meeting, clashing, and ultimately melding into” what we know as Southern food. In other words, Neal wrote of and cooked a deeply international, deeply complicated food shaped by the beauty of an agricultural region and the horror of the Atlantic slave trade, a food that borrows a palate from Sierra Leone as much as Lyon, France. It was out of this spirit — both of academic rigor and pride for the region’s food — that Currence began his culinary education.
After cutting his teeth under Neal, Currence returned to New Orleans to work as the sous chef of Gautreau’s. Currence mostly remembers that time as a haze of long hours and bourbon, but also as the turning point in his career. “There was this moment of rapture after service one night, drunk and stoned, I was sitting in the dining room and I realized, ‘This is what I’m doing for the rest of my life.’”
Three years later, he was lured by an old friend to Oxford, Miss., a place that he hardly knew, with the idea that a little university town with no culinary scene to speak of might be an easier place to make his mark than in the packed, competitive French Quarter. In 1992, he opened City Grocery on the town square.
October 1, 1962. On the campus of the University of Mississippi, James Meredith, the first African-American student to attend the University of Mississippi, walks to class accompanied by U.S. marshals. [photo: Marion S. Trikosko])
Flickr: Marion S. Trikosko/ Creative Commons / Via Flickr: speakingoffaith
Oxford occupies a violent place in the history of the civil rights movement. In October 1962, James Meredith became the first African-American to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Riots broke out. White supremacists and segregationists drove in to join the fight. National Guard and U.S. marshals were called in to keep the peace and protect Meredith, who endured ceaseless torments. The campus became a battleground of Molotov cocktails and rifle fire. Hundreds were injured and two were killed. If you know where to look, you can still find a few bullet holes on campus.
Oxford is now a town that prides itself as an epicenter of culture, where the literary pedigree stretches from William Faulkner to Barry Hannah to Donna Tartt to Jesmyn Ward; where the local record label, Fat Possum, puts out records by R.L. Burnside and the Black Keys; where the bookstore, Square Books, is the biggest destination. Today, Oxford is considered one of the state’s most liberal enclaves, a place that Dwight Gardner now calls “America’s best small city.” In a list of the country’s most desirable college towns, Travel + Leisure quoted one resident as saying, “I was surprised to learn Mississippi could be so progressive.”
City Grocery in Oxford.
Flickr: Adam Jones / Creative Commons / Via Flickr: adam_jones
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