“A fully dressed woman walked out of the water.”
And so begins Toni Morrison’s grand introduction of this character that circles American literature and history as both temptress and taunter. Her name, Beloved. Her story as jarring and as familiar as all that takes place around us–the bombs and the cries we do not hear in the comfort of deliberate ignorance, the comfort of momentum’s melody–our comings and goings–to work, to school, to the gym, to pick up the kids, to Instagram and TikTok–the modern day mall where we window shop judgment and distraction.
Morrison continues:
“She barely gained the dry bank of the stream before she sat down and leaned against a mulberry tree. All day and all night she sat there, her head resting on the trunk in a position abandoned enough to crack the brim in her straw hat…Her neck, its circumference no wider than a parlor-service saucer, kept bending and her chin brushed the bit of lace edging her dress.
Women who drink Champagne when there is nothing to celebrate can look like that: their straw hats with broken brims often askew; they nod in public places; their shoes are undone.”
It feels like the world itself is becoming undone. Spirits awake, very awake. Silence for peace sake abandoned. I’ve always been curious about the world beneath our feet. Wine is no different.
It feels like the world beneath our feet is breaking ground. Spirits awake, very awake. Old pain no longer making room for new ones. It may be my Holy Ghost upbringing, the Manischewitz Grape Concord wine bottles mama hid in the basket on top of the fridge, the six bottles my aunt brought to my mother’s bedside as her body gently, carefully gave up its ghost.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved was not a ghost. At least, I didn’t see her that way. She was the embodiment of justice unrealized, the manifestation of all America was and still is. And in this time, she represents an exquisite chaos, so unbeautiful, so rampant, so unrelenting that if not for distraction, no human could survive it.
The story of Beloved is based on a historical figure named Margaret Garner. It is not my desire to devote this writing to that story but I will share this: Though in your Google search, you will read that Garner was a slave woman from Kentucky who killed her children to protect them from slavery, the question that haunts history is the question of her humanness and what role, if any, does that play in her action.
We gasp at the mothers who sell their five-year old daughters to brothels in southeast Asia but sleep peacefully knowing that a five-year old may walk into an American school but not walk out. That question of the value of one’s humanness is not topical. It’s not historical. It’s constant.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved–the spirit, the child-woman, whose body and blood mixed in Kentucky’s anguished terroir rose from the grave to stand at a mulberry tree like a woman who sips Champagne when there’s nothing to celebrate.
The earth is its own record of things present and past and what secrets this earthly soil holds from Boone County to Bordeaux is too frightening to consider though I do. Author and natural wine pioneer Alice Feiring writes this in her memoir, “To Fall in Love, Drink This”:
“Knowing that most people don’t really know what the word (terroir) means, Feiring writes that she did her best: ‘A French term that means more than earth. A combination of nature and nurture. Each plant has nature, but where it grows, and the way it is reared is its nurture.”
And when it is not nurtured, when we are not nurtured, then what?
In 2020, I wrote a piece for “The Feiring Line” about the role of the slave trade in building Bordeaux’s wealth. It took 13 years to write that story. I’m ashamed to admit that my traumatizing experience in Margaux had been more anecdotal in my writing up until that point for fear of scaring off my readers and sabotaging my own opportunities in the food and wine writing space.
I learned during the excruciating and yet invigorating research and writing process that it was a spirit calling me to write this piece. The call was so wild that I could not and did not want to resist it. What a time it was–the world forced, Covid-forced, to pause and consider for a brief, meaningful moment humanness in the form of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. Death would have it no other way.
But what of this spirit? Was it the spirit of the bronze statue that stands in Bordeaux. Chains at her feet. Can you imagine? Chains still at her feet. She looks like the mother–the late Sonia Nunes O’Connor. Marthe Adélaïde Modeste Testas (1765-1870) née “Al Pouessi—an Ethiopian woman captured at 14 then deported from Bordeaux and sold to Saint-Domingue which was renamed Haiti by the time she died. She lived during the time of Margaret Garner, and while their bodies were on separate sides of the world, it is one story.
A couple of weeks ago, I went to a trade tasting at Paradis–a natural wine and book oasis set in what I like to call Port-au-Prince, North Miami. I grew up on this side of town–where roosters roam free and black folk gather in barbershops and bakeries. Sometimes women in strawhats stroll by, some with laundry baskets on their heads. More than the space itself is the surrounding community–an intrinsic, Caribbean mysticism mixed with the everyday goings-on–the American hustle made more bearable by books and bottles, botanicas and bibles.
I swear, sometimes I feel the dearly departed spirits of writers circling those gigantic potholes in the parking lot before they sip pet’nat with me in the spot–not Baldwin or Morrison but the ink-soldiers that once lived along the strange and untelling Dixie Highway where Paradis blooms like the green banana trees in the neighboring backyards.
I can’t remember the last time I attended a trade tasting. Over the years, I’ve become more comfortable with being discriminating about where and with whom I share a glass and break bread. If there was ever a time to protect one’s energy, it’s now.
So many colliding energies in this new Miami where prosperity and poverty are accidental, or perhaps, deliberate lovers–the bodies that thrive taken care of by the bodies that don’t.
But it’s not just Miami. The global echo for changing structures that continue to place one group above another, one life above another is so loud. The stories beneath our feet inform the stories above them. That is what I know.
Margaret Garner and Modeste Testas are not historical figures sweetly tucked in pages or settling in screens. Their stories are alive.
It’s been a while since I’ve had Champagne. Over the years, the region has lost its weight in significance not because they aren’t beautiful wines being made in Champagne but because I started accidentally deprogramming myself from this idea that there were certain regions that had more value than others.
So I’ve been drinking those savory Lambruscos from Emilia Romagna, those dreamy pet’ nats from the Itata Valley and Slovenia, and a Champagne-style Folle Blanche blend from Loire Valley.
During the trade tasting, I sipped Herve Brisson and Vincent Couche, and I was reminded of the drama and romance of sipping Champagne, but this was far from the need-to-impress, vertical Champagne tastings I attended back in the day. It was a natural, beautiful vibe–passion and storytelling. Smiling and sipping. Roosters and straw hats. And women who sip Champagne when there’s nothing to celebrate.