Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Tayari Jones

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Award-winning novelist Tayari Jones speaks on her childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was raised in the midst of the historic civil rights movement, women’s liberation, and the tragic Atlanta child murders. She reflects on the role feminism played in her home life and how she learned to love cooking by cooking things she liked. Plus, she tells us about her delectable red velvet cake. Tayari Jones is a writer and novelist. Her 2018 novel An American Marriage won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, an NAACP Image Award, and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. She was also a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow for Creative Arts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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a one-on-one conversation, at the back of the bus, a chance meeting in the gym, or a coffee shop. So go on, give it a try. With over hundreds of thousands of listens a month, your person is probably here. Get closer to your audience. Make podcast ads with ACAST. Head to go.acast.com slash closer to get started. When I went to Spellman, it was the first time I had seen women's lives really valued, black women's lives valued for things that were not traditional. And I developed just an incredible appetite for unconventional different ways to live.

I felt like someone pulled back a curtain and said, young lady, this whole world could be yours. And when I looked through that curtain, I didn't see any pots or pans. Welcome to Your Mama's Kitchen, the podcast that explores how we're shaped as adults by the kitchens we grew up in as kids. I'm Michelle Norris,

and we're going to spend some time today with Terri Jones. She's a writer and a novelist, and she's a Georgia girl through and through. She was raised in Atlanta. She went to college in Atlanta. And since she still lives there, that's where we caught up with her. Terri is a writer and accomplished novelist. She was a 2021 Guggenheim fellow for Creative Arts, and her novel, An American Marriage, won the Women's Prize for Fiction, an NAACP image award, and it was an Oprah Book Club selection. MUSIC

Now, I've known Taari for years, and I know this about her. She can really throw down in the kitchen. She is a confident and creative cook. But as you will hear in this episode, she took her own sweet time finding her path in life and her path to cooking. You see, early in life, Taari decided that she would never cook a thing, but she's

turned it to someone who was always bringing food to the people around her, her neighbors, her friends, her landlord. And remember what I said about her being a confident cook? She will tell you that her red velvet cake recipe is as good as it gets. We will hear about her childhood growing up in the midst of the civil rights movement, women's liberation, and the Atlanta child murders that terrorized her hometown, and how all of that shaped who she is today. Tehari, it's so good to actually be with you in the studio.

Again, we've talked to each other in the studio from Washington, D.C., but now I'm on your home turf here in Atlanta, a city known for fantastic food. There's really no reason to have a bad meal when you're in Atlanta, because there's so much good food throughout the city. So thank you for coming into the studio to be with us. Oh, it is my pleasure and thank you for coming to Atlanta. I've always wanted to show you my hometown. Yes, but you know, I have to come back because I would love to see more of Atlanta with you. So tell me about your mama's kitchen. My mama's kitchen is orderly and it's very functional.

My mother is not a person who enjoys flourishes of any type. So she has, you know, lazy Susan Susan so she can spin and find her spices. Her pots and pans are underneath. She also has in there her every day plates and saucers, those dishes. But also her wedding china is in a cabinet very hard to reach. We only use it on special occasions. She doesn't love her wedding china because her mother changed her pattern. She said that when she was getting married, she opened one box at her wedding shower or maybe it was after the wedding, and it was some wrong pattern. And she thought, oh, you know, Mrs. So-and-So made a mistake. But she kept opening more and more. It's a floral

pattern. And she had wanted a plain white china with a gold rim, but her mother decided that wasn't enough and ordered a floral pattern. So that is my mother's wedding china. And we eat on it on special occasions, but she doesn't take pleasure in it. So it's stored high away. So she didn't even have control over her. Didn't it didn't have agency over something like that? I think about that. And for me, me it breaks my heart but she doesn't seem it's not something that she keeps bringing up she doesn't you know keep chewing on that

but I often think of it as a metaphor but I'm a writer I see a metaphor everywhere. So tell me about your mother's culinary world did she cook every week? Did she cook every night? My mother cooked every night when I was growing up. She learned how to cook Louisiana food because my daddy's from Louisiana. My mother is from Oklahoma, and she learned how to cook when she got married. My grandmother's sister, my aunt Edna, taught my mother how to make gumbo and other things.

And so my mother cooked every night. She still cooks. My mother is going on 80, and she cooks pretty much every day. And I actually think this is why I resisted cooking for so long. I associated cooking with catering to other people's appetites, because it occurred to me that I don't know my mother's favorite foods. She cooked what other people may want to eat.

And I was thinking, that will never be me. That will, I imagine myself to be kind of like, what's her name on Sex in the City? Carrie, I think is the character's name, how she stores magazines in her oven. I was that person for a long time because I was just like, that will not be me. I won't, you can't make me.

I'll starve to death first. Well, this is interesting to me because I've gotten to know you over the years. And you're always bringing people food. Someone moved in across the street, and you were baking for him. You were bringing food to the guys that worked at the pawn shop across the street.

You had neighbors, Mrs. Jenkins. You're your landlady, and you were baking for her all the time. Did that come from your mother? Well, I got into that because I had a friend. I told my friend how I wasn't gonna cook because I wasn't gonna make my life around other people's desires. And my friend how I wasn't going to cook because I wasn't going to make my life around other people's desires.

And my friend asked me, she said, well, what do you like to eat? She bought me a cookbook. And she said, look through this cookbook and see what looks like something you would like to have. And we'll make it together. And through that, that was kind of one of the first times when I felt I started associating cooking

with my own appetites instead of looking at it as a kind of obligatory act of service. Yeah, now I'm a cooking fool. I cook all the time. And now I cook sometimes with my mother. I now come to see it as an act of love. And so I do enjoy cooking for other people,

but I also really enjoy cooking for myself. And so it just became a way, cooking became a way of satisfying my desire for frills. Like my mom is no frills kind of person, and I never met a frill I didn't like. And so now my kitchen is a very frilly place. In contrast to your mother's kitchen. Yes. So what's your kitchen like?

I have, what is it? The Le Crescent cast iron. What color? I have, what is it, the Le Courser cast iron? What color? I have the blue because the first piece was given to me by one of my professors from Spellman and everything we do is blue. So I have the blue and I have also gadgets. I love a gadget. The more specific, the better.

And so your mom was not a gadget person. No, but- Like she chopped her garlic. She wouldn't use a garlic press. My mother chopped her garlic, she wouldn't use a garlic press. My mother chopped everything. My mother doesn't like to spend money. She has a PhD in economics, and she just doesn't believe that you should spend money on things that you could do yourself.

She likes to do things herself. And that's also really reflected in her kitchen. She doesn't like shortcuts. Like if she'll read about sourdough starters, she's gonna wanna start some sourdough, or she can mimic anything. My mother can go to a restaurant, eat the soup, come home and figure out how to make that soup. She likes the project of it. I think that this thing that she always disguised as, I don't want to spend money, was really she

wanted to make a project to do these things. But she never, she's not the type of person to say, I delight in hacking recipes. I delight in sewing my own curtains. This is how I satisfy my artistic impulse because I believe it is an artistic impulse. So instead of that, because I think that sounds selfish, she'll say, I'm saving the family money by making these curtains myself. I'm saving money by instead of us going to a restaurant, I will make the soup myself. But I've come to understand that some women,

particularly of a different generation, are unable to admit to their pleasure in their own creation. For many of us, kitchens are very gendered spaces. Was that true in your household? Yes, my daddy cooks his own breakfast. He is 86 and he always says, I cook my breakfast every day. It's a point of pride for him.

And daddy also washes dishes because my daddy cannot stand anything to be dirty. But he's not the kind of person to tell other people to clean it for him. He will wash the dishes. One of my earliest memories is my dad standing in front of the sink with the dish towel over his shoulder washing the dishes. But my mother does all the cooking and it is her place and it's her domain. So it's her place and it's her domain. It's her place because that's expected of her. But is this a place where maybe she had control over her life in ways that she didn't in other spaces. I think definitely she had a control of the meals and choosing the menus. And she enjoyed cooking when I was a child. I don't know how much she enjoys it now.

I think after 60 years she might have had enough. But when I was a child I would remember her delighting in trying new things. And I always loved her food. Her first name is Barbara. And she had this strange meal she would make called Barbara special. It was like ground beef and vegetables and something. We would have it like when my dad wasn't home. And as a child, I was like, this is delicious.

You know, those food that you like as a child that grown people may not, but she would make anything. She, once she made donuts, nobody else's mom could make donuts. She would try anything, cinnamon rolls that she would make from scratch. And it was fun. She used to let me help before I decided

that I wasn't gonna cook anything ever. She would let me help with that kind of thing. And I thought it was like a fun mommy and me kind of thing. I'm imagining you cooking together. I'm also imagining the moment where you told her, mommy, I'm never gonna cook anything ever. What did she, how did she react to that? Did she try to talk you out of that?

Or did she do that thing that mothers sometimes do? Okay, we'll see. Yeah, she didn't even say we'll see. I can't even remember when I, I don't think I announced it because I think I probably didn't wanna hurt her feelings and say, I'll never be in the kitchen all the time like you are. I didn't want to say that.

So I think I just kind of eased away. Also, I went to college very young. I was 16 when I went to college. And I think that when you go to college, especially in my generation, that's kind of the end of getting parented in a way. So when I went to college at 16, it was almost like I had gone to boarding school, really. Sometimes I think I went to college

and I never really came home. And you went just across town. I did, but my parents- You went to Spelman? Yes, I went to Spelman College. I'm very proud alumna, but my parents moved to Texas on the day that I went to college.

So they didn't even take me to college. I went to college by myself. Yeah, I was 16. The timing didn't work out? Timing didn't work out. They had something else to do, something else to do. And so that began my, really my independent adult life. When I went to Spelman, it was the first time I had seen women's lives

really value black women's lives, valued for things that were not traditional. And I developed just an incredible appetite for unconventional different ways to live. I felt like someone pulled back a curtain and said, young lady, this whole world could be yours. And when I looked through that curtain, I didn't see any pots or pans.

I want to go back to your mother in her kitchen. She's still alive. Yes. She's still alive. Yes. She's still here. You still— We play wordle. As I do with my mother every day. You cook together sometimes. But when you kind of miss your mama's kitchen, like the kitchen of your childhood, is there

something that you yearn for? It's so funny. I miss my childhood home. My funny. I miss my childhood home. My parents moved out of my childhood home. And I know the woman who lives there and I really wanna ask her if I could come inside. But I'm just embarrassed. I don't know, it seems like it's her house.

It's not appropriate for me to go in there. And also our furniture isn't there anymore. Our glass table isn't there. But one thing I really miss from my mother's kitchen is she used to do my hair. She would straighten my hair with a hot comb and I would sit in the kitchen and we would just have that time and she never burned me.

I never got burned with a hot comb. I would hold my ear. You know you're part of a small percentage of black girls who never got burned. My mama is a very careful person. She's a very careful person. Because when you mention the hot comb, some people present company not excluded will just kind of...

Yeah, so no, I was just... Shiver a little bit just thinking about that. My mama is careful and I was obedient on that front, but I miss that in my mother's kitchen more than any cooking or whatever because that was something the boys was like, no boys allowed, no boys were interested. And it would be on a Saturday night, so we could roll it up, you know, it'd be cute on Sunday. And that's the thing that I remember. I love the smell of the hair oil, all of it.

I just, and I just also- And bergamot and- Yes, and I felt so clinked. I just, you know, had a bath in my hair. Anyway, that's the thing that I would love, and I would love to see that chair again that I would sit in. I'm sure that chair is long gone, but it was kind of a stool with a high back.

I was aware that when she was doing my hair, that it was something nice she was doing for me, because also she didn't believe in straightening hair. That was against their ideology or aesthetic. But I wanted to be like other girls and they allowed me that. And I would love to just see that chair again. I have the comb. I have the hot comb.

But I would like to see that chair again. It's funny. I still have the hot comb too. I still keep it. It's in a top drawer. Me too. Same, same. And I never use it. And I in a top drawer. Me too. Same, same. And I never use it. I will never use it.

Yeah, no, no. Those days are gone. No, no. And I didn't use it on my own child. But I still hold on because it's such a strong memory. Hey friends, this is Jen Hatmaker, your happy host of the For The Love podcast. You may wonder how I got into this podcasting thing. Well, I'm a speaker and an author who has happened to write a few New York Times bestselling books that really resonated with a pretty large community of women.

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I want to take you back to your childhood home. How many siblings and what was the dynamic, the family dynamic among your parents and your siblings? Well, I will say it's so funny when people say to me, how many siblings do you have? I kind of pause because when my parents met, my father already had two daughters, Maxine and Marcia, and they have two different mothers, but they grew up in the town where my daddy grew up. In Louisiana.

In Louisiana. And then me and my older brother are like a couple of three years apart. And then I have a younger brother that's 10 years younger than me. But we had a round glass table and pedestal table in the kitchen and there was a television on top of the freezer. And from where I sat as a child, I could crane my neck up and see the television. But I didn't have a good seat. Everyone else had a seat where they could see the TV. I couldn't. I think because. Everyone else had a seat where they could see the TV.

I couldn't. I think that was the youngest. But this is before your younger brother came along. Yes. There was a yellow telephone mounted on the wall with that long curly cord. The one that always got twisted up? Yes. And on the other side, there was a swinging door and through that swinging door was a formal dining room that we never used. And we ate there all the time and did our homework on that glass table and the glass table had to be cleaned with Windex. It was very exotic.

And that's what we did. I think I just kind of took that space for granted. Atlanta, you know, Black Atlanta, Southwest Atlanta, ranch house. And the swats. Yes. A ranch house. And the swats. Yes. A neighbor would now call the swats. What was it called back then? You know, it wasn't really called anything because when I was growing up in Atlanta,

Atlanta was hyper segregated. So if you said you grew up in swats, it just meant you were black. Like there was something that was no reason to talk about. But the area where I grew up was called Cascade, in the Cascade area. Although a friend of mine who's older than me said when she was coming up, this kind of Southwest Atlanta educated class of black people were known as swans, which were Southwest Atlanta Negroes. So she says we were swans. I did not know that I was a swan, but I suppose that I was. And it was all black. Most of my teachers lived around the area of where I lived.

It's like our world was like a five mile square, but it never felt small. You know, it's one of the things that we forget about integration is that it tore apart communities where doctors and ditch diggers sent their kids to the same schools. Whereas your doctor was black, the person who ran the hardware store was black,

the insurance agent was black, there was this robust community where no matter what your station was in life, you were rubbing up against people who were strivers. Yes. There was nothing I could imagine anyone doing that I couldn't imagine a black person doing because if it was to be done, well, who else was going to do it? Because that was your world.

Yes. And in your household, the civil rights movement is going on. Was that something that was discussed? Your parents were involved in this. Your mother had helped organized sit-ins, lunch counter sit-ins in Oklahoma. Your father was part of a group of 16 young students

who because of their activism were banned from state colleges. Yes, I mean, the civil rights movement is in the water in Atlanta also, because we are the home of Martin Luther King. And there is a sense, I have a novel where every time the children misbehave the mother sighs and says This is not what dr. King died for and that's how your mother say that no

I had a teacher that did like if you wore a mini skirt She would say this is not what dr. King died for all the time So you always live though understanding that someone died for every little thing you do that's kind of heavy when you're young I just want to wear a mini skirt. Yeah, no, that's not what Dr. King did. Dr. King did not die for you to go out the house looking like that. Someone died for you. You need to put on some clothes.

But there was a sense that, you know, lifting as we climb, the kind of, you know, that uplift kind of mentality, I think it was very important that because we were in Southwoods, Atlanta, you know, you are not better than anyone else. You have had the blessing of being born at a time when there were opportunities. But there are many people who were born just 10 years older than you who didn't have opportunities. You are no better than anyone else. You have been fortunate, but that is not the same

as being better than anyone else. And you have to think about how are you going to spend your life to make the world better for anyone else. And you have to think about how are you going to spend your life to make the world better for someone else to come behind you because there is still work to be done. Well, there's a phrase in a household's home training. Yes. And that clearly reflects your home training, the expectations that your parents had, the stories that they shared, the life that they led as really a civil rights warrior.

What's interesting and knowing a little bit about your story though, is that for all of the effort that they put into fighting for equality, it sounds like they didn't always practice that at home when it came time to laying out the path forward for young boys and young girls. I think that they had really not considered gender as significant, which is, I think, not uncommon in this kind of, you know, if you remember the march on Washington,

the women were not allowed on the stage. They marched down a different street. Yes, right. They literally marched down different streets on their way to the Lincoln Memorial. And so when I went to Spelman College, I discovered feminism and I learned the word gender. I had never to the Lincoln Memorial. And so when I went to Spelman College, I discovered feminism. And I learned the word gender.

I had never heard the word gender. I came home. I thought I was spreading the good news. But the thing about gender equality is that when you start revamping your life around new ideas about gender, you have to really be prepared to tear that house down to the foundation and rebuild it. What did your mother think of that? Was she a feminist? What did she think of the feminist

movement? She told me that she thought that feminism was just something that white women thought about or did. And I was like, no, actually, it pertains to us. And I think she was like, not so much. I mean, feminism is a very radical thing to think about. I mean, so much of our lives are built on this foundation of gender and so much in terms of the African-American community is this idea that racism has deprived us of our patriarchy, our rightful patriarchy, and that we have to almost like we

want to enjoy a patriarchal fantasy for a while before we go on to these other things. And that was the space where I found myself. And I just think it's really generational. And I also think I'm not married, I don't have children. And so my thinking about what my life looks like and is going is so unprecedented. Like unmarried women who don't have children

really have no role models. And you're trying to figure out what life looks like without a guide. Do you still feel that way? Well, yes, because I would have to be, I think I'm a guide for others, but when I look at the generation ahead of me, because I mean, if you even just think about my age,

I am born in 1970, the birth control pill came into wide usage right around the time I was born. So I am of the generation of women who basically didn't get pregnant in their teens and early 20s. That is also unprecedented. So there are all these women who had control of their fertility. That is also unprecedented. So there are all these women who had control of their

fertility. That is unprecedented in human history. And so when you are living your life in an unprecedented moment in human history, you have to figure it out for yourself and hope that you're making decisions that people who are younger than you will then find helpful. And I do find when I talk to young women, they're on a whole different page. I mean, they think I'm uptight, and I am delighted that they think I'm uptight. Because that's progress.

That's progress. That's moving on. But for our mothers, progress must have produced a certain kind of vertigo, because the world shifted under their feet. And feminism and progress in some ways meant looking back at their lives, and it must have felt like some of what they believed and some of what they did and the

Norms that they lived in embrace just because that's what people did somehow felt suddenly invalidated. Absolutely and envelope needs pushing and we push the envelope in our way And I think that my mother pushed the envelope too for her generation. My mother has a PhD in economics That was a bold thing. That's not what the envelope too for her generation. My mother has a PhD in economics. That was a bold thing. That's not what her mother imagined for her life. So I think we all take these steps forward.

I mean, different people take different kinds of steps. I was blessed with a mentor, Pearl Clegg, who is such a radical woman. And she took me up under that wing when I was about 17 years old. And she always me up under that wing when I was about 17 years old. And she always asked me, what can you do to make your life more free? And that is such a radical question to ask someone at 17. How can you make your life more free?

And that is always in my mind when I'm at a crossroads. And it helps me to be brave. That's going to live inside me for a while. To think about what can you do to make your life more free and free on your own terms. Because people will define that in different ways. It was very helpful to me when I would try to figure out I wanted to be a writer.

Nobody was that into me being a writer. I don't know if people didn't think I could be one, if I should be one. I don't know what the thought was, but no one ever said you can't, but I was not raised to be like, yes, you should do that. You should be an artist. But Pearl always encouraged me to write and to, she said to me, she sent me a postcard once when I was dropping out of a PhD program and I was very stressed out because I felt like I was going to let the whole race down. I felt like I was gonna let my parents down. And she sent me a postcard.

It said, your life is just that yours. Oh, do you still have that? Is it framed? No, it's in a box. Girl, take that out of the box. Frame that, mount that. But no one had ever said anything like that to me. Like no one had ever said to me, you can be your own free person.

Your life is yours and you can do something amazing. I think as a girl, I think I was probably meant to marry someone amazing, I think. That was the message. I think so that I was supposed to be amazing, adjacent. I was supposed to be that behind every great man is a great woman. I think I was supposed to be a great woman for this larger project of great men. And Pearl was like, it could be you. And I was thinking, oh, not me. Me? You think me? Go out there and change that world. I'm thinking of a young Teari sitting at that glass table. This is before we mounted television, so with the TV up on top of the refrigerator and everybody looking up at it. But there

was a window in that room, right? Yes. What was outside the kitchen window? Oh, the backyard. We had a big, in Atlanta, we had big backyards. Atlanta is a city built among, is an urban forest. And we had acres of dense forest where we would go, me and my older brother, we would go in the woods and there was a stream, we would catch crawfish. So we would do that. But then during the Atlanta child murders in 1979, we stopped going in the woods and we never went back and we never went crawfishing again. We never, there was like a old house deep, deep in the woods and we never went back and we never went crawfishin' again. There was like a old house deep deep in the woods and we would peek in there to see what

was over there, but we never did anything like that again. You wrote about growing up during the era of the Atlanta child murders and leaving Atlanta, your novel. I imagine that never leaves you. No, it does not ever leave you. Two of the children who were murdered were children at my elementary school. And part of what made the child murders such a blow was that this was 1979, we're in 10 years after King.

People felt like the city, the world, the country was moving forward and then this thing happened that was reminiscent of, say, Emmett Till. All of that, it felt ironic and devastating. And I watched this documentary on HBO, and then the documentary, it felt like it was just more black misery. And when I wrote my novel,

I really wanted to write a love letter to a generation to talk about these amazing children that I knew when I wrote my novel, I really wanted to write a love letter to a generation to talk about these amazing children that I knew. And I was a child. And it just seemed reduced to such tragedy without texture. Disrespect for the black body. I think so. Did your parents talk to you about this?

You said you stopped going out to the woods. Did they sit you down at that kitchen table and explain, OK, life is going to be different. You're going to spend more time inside. This is how you have to order your steps now that there's this danger outside the door. Yeah, but they didn't have to tell us because as I often say in my book, believe me, Atlanta, we were the ones that happened to. So if you're a child and someone's telling you children are going to be killed, nobody has to tell you to come inside. Meanwhile, I had to get fitted for a training bra. The training bra will not wait. And I remember I wanted the bra. I didn't really have to have a bra but

other people had bras and I thought I should have one as well. And mama took me to Sears and I'm getting fitted for this bra and the bra lady who measured me and then the lady told me that I was chunky and therefore I had to have an extender. And I was mad and I remember I turned and you know how they have those TVs back in the day in stores, they have all those TVs and I looked over at the TV and that's when I saw that someone I knew was missing. So I will always associate trying to get fitted for this training bra with that,

those things happen together, puberty happen, and these child murders were happening, and this is always together for me, as part of my coming of age. It's the rituals, the milestones of childhood, of puberty were accompanied by this constant drumbeat of bad news, terrible news, tragic news in Atlanta. And yet there's a generation, I know many people who were part

of that generation and they have still managed to find joy in their life. They've managed to compartmentalize the trauma that they experienced as young people, but it's still there. Yeah, we still, you know, after the murders happened, you know, we still went to the eighth grade prom. We still did the things we did because also, think, keep you know, after the murders happened, you know, we still went to the eighth grade prom. We still did the things we did because also, keep in mind, these child murders lasted for two years. It became normalized for us,

especially if you're only 10 years old, that's 20% of your life. It just became part of what was happening to us. I wonder if there is a ritual or a tradition or a recipe. Let's go with a recipe that you would be willing to share with us, or at least talk about, that evokes the memories of your mother's kitchen. I would be willing to share it because I believe there are two kinds of people in the world. People who share their recipes and people who don't. of your mother's kitchen. I would be willing to share it because I believe there are two kinds of people in the world,

people who share their recipes and people who don't. And when you hoard recipes, that's how recipes and traditions die. I mean, I get it that back in the day, like your pound cake was your man catching pound cake and you don't need anybody else to know how to catch a man with a pound cake, but that's how traditions die.

Like I remember I went to someone's house and I said, this is really tasty. Do you have a recipe? And she says, oh, we keep it secret in the family. And I was thinking, you're entirely that type of person. Grow up. We got to save these recipes. This is our history.

This is our heritage. You're going to just let it disappear because your grandmother called a man with that cake. Stop it. Anyway, I digress. My mama and her mama before her and her mama before her make a blackberry jam cake. Which appears in your book, An American Marriage.

Yes, it's, and you make it on Thanksgiving and you eat it on Christmas. And it involves, it's really all about the icing. You have to boil the icing. And my mother makes several of them and she mails them to other people in her family. And she shares the recipe freely for this very reason. Now, the recipe that I hold most dear is my red velvet cake,

but it's not as meaningful, I think, as a jam cake. And a jam cake isn't a choir cake. It's like everyone loves red velvet cake, but a jam cake is an unusual tasting cake. It's got kind of like a fruit cake. It's got like stuff in it, but it's very tasty. You eat it on Christmas. You eat a small piece, drink it with your coffee, and it's special and it's unique.

You know when you eat that cake, you're not going to ever see a Blackberry jam cake in a bakery. And so that would be the recipe that I would share. And the Blackberry jam is actually included in the dough. It's added at a key point. Yes. And this includes you soak raisins and nuts. You soak things, you put the jam in there.

You do things. I have to ask mama more details. You do things. Okay, so you'll have to go to our website to learn more about the Blackberry jam cake. But mama will have to share it. And to get the icing right, because you have to have the exact right temperature to get the icing right. You have to go to our website to learn more about the Blackberry Jam cake. But mama will have to share it. And to get the icing right, because you have to have the exact right temperature to get the icing right.

You have to get the icing right, but I will say if you get the icing wrong, it'll be fine. It won't be as fine, because every now and then I must say sometimes I'm like, this icing is not quite right, but it still tastes fine. That's another thing. That's one thing my mama is not. My mama is not a perfectionist. And I appreciate that she gave that to me, that I don't hold myself to unreasonable standards.

You do your best, and it'll be okay. Sometimes you'll do something great, and that's exciting. But if you do it well enough, then that gets you through, and you'll have another chance. That's the great thing about cooking. There's always another chance. There's always another chance. There's always another chance. And because we're greedy, we may ask for that red velvet cake.

I'll happily share the red velvet cake. We'll take it. Because here's the thing about red velvet cakes. I will tell you this. I feel very strongly about this. Red velvet cakes you get in bakeries are not great because a traditional red velvet cake is very delicate and bakery cakes are made to be transported

from one place to the next. So they have to actually like take some of the oil out so that it won't be too crumbly. But if you come to my house and you are welcome Michelle, I can make the red velvet cake the way it's meant to be made and you will be able to tell the difference. It's so much more moist. It's like velvet. It seems like velvet, but it's a delicate cake. It's hard to take it even to your neighbor's house

Invitation accepted. Okay. I have love talking to you. I love talking to you always Terri's mentor left her a question that we can all ask ourselves How can you make your life more free? Teary's journey with cooking is a bit like her journey to becoming a writer. She had to forge her own path in a way that made sense to her and in a way that felt like it empowered her. Once she learned how to cook the things that she liked,

cooking became enjoyable, something that was expressive rather than the expectations that have historically been placed on women. In becoming a feminist, Terri also spotted something. Her mother's habits were forms of creative expression as well, whether it was replicating soup from a restaurant or sowing her own curtains. You see, cooking is not always just about nutrition. Sometimes the act of creating a meal or a culinary experience can also feed something deep in our souls. That's a good thing. If you'd like to learn more about Terri's

red velvet cake that she brags about, you can find the recipe on my Instagram page at Michelle underscore underscore Norris. That's two underscores and you can also find it at our new website, yourmommaskitchen.com. You'll find all the recipes from all the episodes there. And finally, we want to hear from you. Send us a voice memo of your mama's recipes, memories from your kitchen growing up. We want to hear all about your mama's kitchen. Make sure to send us a voice memo at ymk

at highergroundproductions.com for a chance to be featured in a future episode. Thanks so much for joining us. See you next week, and let's make sure we do see you next week, and until then, be thoughtful. Hmm! This has been a Higher Ground and Audible Original produced by Higher Ground Studios.

Senior Producer Natalie Rinn, producer Sonia Tan, additional production support by Misha Jones, sound design and engineering from Andrew Epen and Ryan Koslowski. Hire Ground Audio's editorial assistants are Jen Eleven and Camilla Thirdacus. Executive producers for Hire Ground are Nick White, Mukta Mohan, Dan Firman and me, Misha Norris.

Executive producers for Audible are Nick DiAngelo and Ann Heperman. The show's closing song is 504 by the Soul Rebels. Editorial and web support from Melissa Bear and Say What Media, our talent booker is Angela Paluso. Special thanks this week to W.A.B.E. in Atlanta. Chief Content Officer for Audible is Rachel Guiazza. And that's it.

Goodbye, everybody. Make sure and come back to for Audible is Rachel Guiazza. And that's it. Goodbye, everybody. Make sure and come back to see what we're surfing up next week. Copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2023 by Higher Ground Audio, LLC. Marketers and advertisers, brands big and small, you've been after a special someone for a while now. You think they're into you. I mean, you share the same interests, both passionate about the same stuff. Why wouldn't they be? Wait. There's a moment of silence. It's finally just you two alone.

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