Sweet Bones, Found Palates
My mother died on the first day of summer. It was Miami’s mango season, her favorite time of year. That soft, rainy morning, soon after she gave up her lovely ghost, I found her sweet bones everywhere. They were next to her nightstand and in the couch, in the bathroom and in the family room. My mother—who was known by many as “Sistah Sonia” loved mangoes, and these sweet bones (mango pits) were one of the few notes she left behind. While food was Sistah Sonia’s love language, her passion for mangoes was its own dialect.
Miami’s mango season brought the best and worst out of Caribbean folk, but my Jamaican mother was particularly dramatic, waking me up at dawn with hallelujah-fever, demanding that I go pick the mangoes from a rental property she and my father owned before her sister, Aunt Mavis, picked them all (She was even more intense during ackee season).
“Dinkinish, I am yuh maddah. Yuh cyan jus’ pick to dem fi mi.”
There were always rumors about neighbors and family members stealing someone’s bounty but mostly, mango season was love season, kind exchanges between friends and family—Publix plastic bags filled with those juicy jewels.
My palate was born among these pits, among the trees that bent over the back fence like church women catching the Holy Ghost. Sistah Sonia was one of those church women. Here among the guava and guinep, avocado and sour sop, Otaheite apple and ackee was the start of my journey with food and storytelling, a story that begins in a small village among those mystical Manchester mountains my mother came from and weaves through the backyards of North Miami (now a kind of Port-au-Prince). It’s a story that sings callaloo, scotch bonnet, and Sistah Sonia’s mango hymns.
They see black people’s palates as tropical.
It was the early 2000s (after September 11th), and I was a pourer in Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World Wine Program in New York City. Around the same time, I was the apprentice to the cellar master at a wine boutique on the upper east side. There I met one of the first black wine professionals I can recall. We’ll call him James, James from Bed-Sty. James’ wine career began with popping Champagne bottles when he worked at the restaurant near the Windows on the World Wine School when it was still on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
James spoke like he had a cigar locked in his throat—smoky, sort of sinister. He was short, his raw cashew-toned face framed in large spectacles, his loose dark curls shiny with gel. He grew up on Black & Mild’s, but his path led to Bordeaux and Champagne magnums. He once described a manager shoving him into a closet or cold room (can’t remember which) and sharing a Champagne bottle that transformed his palate.
He worked at that wine boutique on the upper east side, and it was James who spoke the words that I now realize defined the way I navigated these viny streets. He said his mentor explained that black people only liked sweet wine.
“They see black people’s palates as tropical like we don’t get dry wine,” James said, looking me in the eye with switchblade precision.
James’ words were a call to action. The idea that white folks thought that the black palate was a single story, a sweet story, too sweet to perceive typicity, too sweet to understand terroir, too sweet for intellectual exploration cut us both. So, for at least 16 years, I set out to prove that my palate was well, dry.
The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones,
And caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry. Ezekiel 37:1-2
I felt Moscato-maligned. Why? The answer is in all that is and all that is not—the rational irrational, the civil incivility, the justified injustice that swells beneath these borrowed feet. To be “other” is to be excluded from the main, society’s appendage dangling from the ruling body. How does one find self in this valley of dry bones? If you’re “other,” “BIPOC,” or belong to any number of these social categories that feel more like coffins, you do what you can to fit in.
So like any human trying to find home in a strange land, I learned the language. I was fascinated by the many ways one could describe wine—black currant, red currant, bramble, mulberry, gooseberry, quince, hoisin sauce, plum sauce, hibiscus, wet cellar, cigar box, even cat pee.
I was unfamiliar with these references, so while I looked for gooseberry, I wrote down references that I could relate to while tasting as many wines as possible. I went to every tasting, every wine dinner, every press tour I was invited to—always the only black person or one of two others in the room—the curiosity.
During a press tour of Cognac, I told the Hennessey representative that the cognac had notes of sweet plantain. He chuckled awkwardly and dismissed the reference. Years later, I discovered just under 2 hours away from Cognac in the famed, old world wine region of Bordeaux, slaves—a people of sweet plantain and mango helped build the region’s wealth.
It is in these twists and turns, we, black people, or other people, are challenged to find ourselves, know ourselves, and love ourselves enough to trust ourselves—our mango-selves, our sweet plantain-selves.
One of the biggest surprises of my wine career is as much as I set out to create an atmosphere where my clients and readers felt comfortable in the skin of their palates, the truth is most wanted to be told what wines to like in the same way we’re told to like “Coach” and “red-bottoms,” “gated communities” and “Lamborghinis.”
Knowing or trying to know or consider one’s own pleasure, one’s own preference, one’s own palate seemed like too much work—a kind of anthropological study that required a level of unearthing that might possibly lead to a knowing too uncomfortable to bear.
In the noise of history known and unknown, is it possible to really know one’s palate? In “Beloved” author Toni Morrison, presents the argument that haunts us still—to whom do we belong? In the state of Florida, Governor DeSantis has answered the question, critical thinking cursed and mocked by laws aimed at shackling intellect to those Jim Crow crypts. For what lurks in history still stalks us today—the daily murder that is not knowing and how that not knowing desensitizes and ultimately disempowers.
Knowing your palate is powerful. I believe the palate holds memory. It is the record of life sweet like love, hanging from trees that look like women so seduced by that Holy Ghost dance, they bend over backwards and shout out loud like my mama did. It is the record of life bitter like love when drained of itself, those bloody entrails that are your dignity, your mama’s dignity, your mama’s mama’s dignity seeping into the valley of dry bones.
In the Netflix documentary “High on the Hog: How African Cuisine Transformed America,” we journey to Apex, North Carolina, where we meet culinary artist and designer, Gabrielle Eitienne, who hosts community dinners with the goal of preserving black food traditions. In the episode, we learn that the Department of Transportation was building a highway that cuts through her garden through her family’s land, once undesired land sold to black folks.
“What’s crazy is my uncle talks about how the land wouldn’t even bear grass at one time,” she says. “Now that we’ve nurtured it, and we’ve given it ourselves, now it’s time to go.”
A valley of collard greens turned into a valley of dry bones. Here was her palate’s heritage, a story rich in love for food and community and despite the challenge of displacement, her decision to carry on cultivating and sharing food made me watch this episode over and over again. Eitienne called it “resistance.” Even from the screen, I felt it—the spiritual call, palates long gone on fire.
To know one’s palate is to know the holy ground where ancestors brewed bush teas, sent signals, spun magic, manifested miracles, and blew the sweet perfume of identity from between their legs into the dank abyss of the forcibly unknown self.
If you’re the descendant of the taken, the stolen, the enslaved, knowing and loving your palate is as complicated as loving yourself—the distant hips, the hilly nose, the profound plump of your lips, the deep dark soil that is your skin, and the wild buds that are your hair.
I can see Sistah Sonia now, tearing the mango skin with her teeth, biting through the luxurious, orange-gold flesh, her beautiful, nutmeg-hued face and dark, silky hair sparkling with those candied, soft bits. She never questioned who she was—daughter of those misty, Manchester mountains, mango pits for pearls. I miss that about her. Sistah Sonia took big bites, and each bite had its own sound, its own breath—a kind of food freedom song the ancestral spirits sang through her.