BobbyQue? Yes!
THERE IS A DISTINCT CONNECTION BETWEEN the spelling or the pronunciation of a word and its cultural etymological root-that is, the true meaning of what people do culturally and how they refer to it. When I first began to write this barbeque cookbook, I felt the strongest urge to look up barbeque in the dictionary. To my surprise my spelling didn't appear before me. I found my treasured word but with the spelling barbecue-meaning to roast or broil on a rack over hot coals or over a revolving spit before or over a source of cooking heat. Historically, the word was pronounced "ba ba coa" by the Taino people of the Bahamas.
Oddly enough, throughout all my years from Texas to California, I had very seldom seen a pit or restaurant sign that used the dictionary spelling barbecue (especially in the Black community). When I had seen such signs near or outside my community, I didn't feel that familiar mouth-watering effect which my favorite food could provoke instantly. I later began to think perhaps I had an inborn prejudice to such signs because in the Black
community the word was always spelled "Bar Be Que" or "Bar B Que" or initialed
"B B Q," and accompanied with that special hickory aroma. I began to feel that the "cue" spelling represented something drab, or even "square," as we used to say in the 1950s. My realization was that most restaurants whose signs lacked the suffix -que seemed to be void of that ever-pervasive down home hickory-smoked aroma which would literally carry for blocks.
If the hickory-smoked aroma carried for blocks, surely the word of mouth praises carried for miles. My Uncle Tom Turner's Bar B Que Pit restaurant in Liberty, Texas, had just such a reputation. It was said that people would come from as far as one hundred miles just to feast on his barbeque delights.
I can remember clearly in 1950 the first two weeks of my Texas vacation in the late summer through early fall. My parents had moved from Texas to California following wartime job opportunities in the mid-forties, but late summers were reserved for going back to our roots. My parents missed Texas and would faithfully return to visit our kinfolk and loved ones throughout southeastern Texas-Jasper County, Beaumont, and Liberty.
Soon after arriving in Texas, our summer-fall vacations were often highlighted by attending huge church association fanfares. Under enormous tents which sheltered us from the blazing Texas sun, we'd feast on dishes prepared by the sisters of the church. Sweet potato pie, fried chicken and fish, and barbeques of smoked beef and spareribs were prepared by the men and women at the pits. In the midst of happy greetings, praises to the Lord, and harmless gossip, I'd hear statements like: "This bobbyque sho' is good! But Lawd, it takes Tom Turner to really bobbyque some meat!"
Bobbyque? Yes! To my young ears it always sounded like that, an idiomatic expression I certainly didn't question. For most of my life, when black folks pronounced barbeque, the first two syllables literally sounded like my name.
One year my favorite first cousin Alvin was leaving for the remainder of the vacation to spend time with his father, Tom Turner. I remember tearfully convincing my mama to let me go, too. I wanted to be near the soulful restaurant activity and luscious presence of the hickory-smoked food I couldn't get enough of. When we arrived, Uncle Tom greeted Alvin and me in his southern Texas hospitable style. He said we could eat to our fill plus earn two dollars a day if we would help him around his barbeque restaurant. Through the first week, I watched Uncle Tom with wide-eyed innocence as he went about the daily chores of preparing barbeque from early morning pit fire to afternoon scrumptious delights.
Because of my daily interest, Uncle Tom guided me through his secret process, teaching me how to place the hickory wood, burn it down, and spread the coals. He explained the importance of having a pit fire without any flames. He would pull out slab after slab of sizzling ribs, whole chickens, and browning hunks of roast beef and dip them into a large metal washtub of what he called "base." I could hear the watery drippings of the "base" sting as the droplets hit the hot hickory wood coals. The smoke conjured up a potion that would make me heady, almost paralyzed by its appetizing aroma.
"Bobbyque smells good, huh, Bobby?" said Uncle Tom smiling one day.
"Uncle Tom, it's the best in the world!" I exclaimed.
"How you know?" laughed Uncle Tom.
"I done ate some of everybody's BOBBYQUE .... Out in California and all over Texas .... And yo's is da best!"
Uncle Tom laughed as he hustled a hunk of browning beef out of the pit and dunked it once again into the washtub of baste. He would dip or mop-baste thirty or forty slabs of spareribs in the pit, turn them, and baste them again, and again.
"When you make BOBBYQUE, you don't put no sauce on it till it's done. Da base makes it tenda. Taste good right down to da bone," Uncle Tom would say matter-of-factly. The "base" marinade was the key. It was Uncle Tom's secret method: onions, peppers, garlic, lemon juice, vinegar, celery, and seasonings placed in two large boiling pots of water. "We gotta let dease ribs soak in da base ova night," Uncle Tom would say as he poured "base" over the meats placed in the washtubs.
The meats were marinated before the pit-smoking, then constantly dipped in or mopbasted with the marinade throughout the pit-smoking process. That delicious taste was further accentuated by the steaming smoke of the hickory wood in a large enclosed brick pit. This process was the secret behind that fascinating aroma and taste.
Throughout my month-long vacation I absorbed Uncle Tom's culinary art while I dreamed of owning such a restaurant some day. I happily served customers, many times watching them savor the moment and hearing their praises and compliments. My vacation was ending too soon. However, since I'd been such a good worker and pupil, Uncle Tom let me prepare a small batch of barbeque before I left for California. After I finished, I chose the juiciest slab of ribs and hunk of beef, and presented them to Uncle Tom for his opinion. "Bobby, boy, dis' heah is some really good BOBBYQUE!" Elated by the compliment, I hopped around the restaurant with a feeling of youthful accomplishment and my twelve-year-old chest poked out. It was a time I've never forgotten. I had been given the chance and the secret recipe method to prepare the food I loved the most. I decided that from that day on I would prepare barbeque like Uncle Tom "qued" it for the rest of my life. However, when I returned home to California, little did I realize that it would be years before I focused on the idiomatic expression, "BOBBYQUE" and its etymology, and why it was pronounced like my name.
After a four-year stint in the U.S. Air Force, and a couple of years as a comedian and jazz drummer, I enrolled at Merritt College in Oakland, California. The third semester I chose cultural anthropology as an extracurricular course. With the advent of the 1960s there grew a burning desire among my college peers and myself to know about Black American and African history. Reading Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mount Kenya I had the fantastic realization that Tarzan did not run Africa, and I wanted to know about my African ancestors who did. Following up afootnote, I encountered an article alluding to the roots of surviving Africanisms in Afro-American English. Black English?Through out my early school years I had often been criticized for pronouncing words incorrectly. My black and white teachers alike would vehemently criticize and say I spoke "pigeon language" or broken English. For example I would say "dese " instead of "these"; "flo" instead of "floor"; "do," pronounced doe, instead of "door," etc.
Preparing a term paper for my cultural anthropology class, I chose the subject of West African agricultural sites-that is, what particular vegetables, fruits, and other plants were first cultivated by African Homo Sapiens. It was an unconscious choice even though the topic was connected with food. Reading through a book entitled Myth of the Negro Past, by Melville J. Herskovits, I followed up another footnote that made reference to a Black professor of English, Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner. Dr. Turner had published Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949), a work on his twelve years of field expeditions researching surviving Africanisms in Black American language via West African ethnic groups and South American and Caribbean descendants of West Africans. It was yet another fantastic realization to find out that certain idiomatic expressions had survived among Black folks in the United States. There was a distinct reason why Blacks in the US and elsewhere in the Americas pronounced many English words as they did.
Dr. Turner also pinpointed a number of surviving words from Africa in the US, some of which related to food and plants first developed and cultivated in West Africa. From an anthropological standpoint, the stringy yam arguably comes from the Senegalese area, the location of Alex Haley's Roots. Yam originally meant "to eat." Kola nuts, a main ingredient in Coca Cola and other cola beverages, were first cultivated in West Africa. While "kola" sounds African, the English word cola is not an African word. Goober as in Granny Goose's Goobers (packaged peanuts) or the candy bar Goobers, is a direct surviving African word from the Congo and Angola areas. Goober derives from nguba and gooba (without the "er" or rolling "r" pronunciation), a word that means "nuts" that one eats. My research also revealed that watermelon, cotton, and okra were first cultivated in West Africa. The African Bantu word for okra is gumbo. This word has survived because of African American and Louisiana Creole usage. Gumbo is a very popular fish and shellfish southern stew which contains okra.
Dr. Turner's intent was also to prove that Black American idiomatic expressions had little to do with our White American southern drawls or dialects. After twelve years of field research (six in West Africa, six in South America and the Caribbean), Dr. Turner found that certain idiomatic inflections reflected surviving Africanisms in Black American language which contribute to how blacks pronounce many words.
Many Black Americans pronounce such words as these "dese, those "dose," floor "flo" and barbeque "bobbyque."
Here the lack of the "ar" sound produced "bobby" instead of "barbe." The "th," "er," and "ar" sounds are in fact absent in West African language, and Black Americans are largely descendants of West African peoples. The etymological path has been "ba ba coa," barbacoa, barbecue, barbeque, and "BOBBYQUE."
No one knows exactly what the "ba ba coa ," meant historically and culturally to the Taino and West Indian peoples. However, whether you are a New World African-American, Euro-American, Asian-American, or Native American, the present-day American barbeque is an exciting and culturally appetizing event. Everything about the word barbeque (or BOBBYQUE!) evokes pleasure. To que the meat to that special flavor-to que the meat to a luscious hickory-smoked tenderness-to que it with my traditional down home recipe method, will "que" a person's heart, mind, and soul to expect a delectable experience, thanks to barbeque secrets handed down to me by my Uncle Tom Turner and passed on to you in this book.
Righteous down-home barbeque has been developed all over America with considerable improvisation. Perfection can only come from trial and error over many years. Thousands of culinary experts, particularly in the South, guard and hoard their secret recipes and methods. l happen not to be one of those people.
Having traveled extensively across the United States (over 40 states several times over), I have tasted some of the best and the worst barbeque prepared around the country. At the 1987 fifth annual "twenty-five thousand dollar first prize" National Rib Cook-Off, in Cleveland, Ohio, I was selected to be one of the judges of the contest for the "Best Ribs in America." For two whole days I had the opportunity to eat and evaluate barbeque ribs from Hawaii and all corners of the U.S., and from countries around the world: Mexico, Canada, Australia, England, Hong Kong, and Ireland. Barbequing in all its contemporary activity, recipes, and methods has truly become an international festive occasion, a culinary example of human creativity.
From years of testing and tasting, with my Uncle Tom's recipe-methods as my starting point, I've developed my own contemporary southern-style, hickory-smoked barbeque recipes that have delighted the taste buds and appetites of politicians, writers, community activists, movie stars, family and friends, and thousands more at numerous barbeque fund-raisers. For over thirty-five years I have perfected my pit-fire techniques, my sauces and bastes, so that they will be distinguished from the commercial and many times bland recipes found on "bottle-backs"
With its wide variety of hickory-smoked meats, fish, and poultry entrees and its baste-marinades and barbeque sauces, you can't miss with this book. Also included are many delicious southern-style side dishes such as Hickory Honey-Seasoned Collard Greens, Hickory-Hocked Black-Eyed Peas, Marshmallow-Orange Pit-Baked Sweet Potatoes, and Bacon-Cheddar Southern Corn Bread. At the end are recipes for salt free, low sodium and sugarless barbeque entrees and accompaniments. I'm sure this book will answer many questions you may have had about preparing and getting the best results from backyard pit-grill, smoke barbequing. With this work I've outlined my creative recipe-methods on how to "do it" like Bobby Seale and my Uncle Tom would "que" it.
Barbequing doesn't have to be an isolated festive occasion set aside only for holidays and summer days. With this book, the American tradition of barbequing can become your own savory, mouth-watering regular dining event. On the other hand, barbequing can also be the attraction or fund-raising occasion for your social or community event.
With more than one hundred recipes, this work becomes part of a continuing culinary contribution to the American and intercommunal worldwide culture. If you "bobby-que" with me and creatively improvise with me, or just follow my recipes to a T, I guarantee that you will spice up your lifestyle and add the very best contemporary down-home barbeque cuisine to your culinary endeavors. So with these mouth-watering recipes I invite you to participate in barbequing, or, if you will, "bobby-que'n"-a truly American act of soulful hospitality.
Bobby Seale
United States of America, EARTH.
― Snappy (sexyDancer), Wednesday, 2 February 2005 16:54 (nineteen years ago) link
i
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/rauk/mc5grpsm.gifWhite Panther Party 10-Point Program
1. Full endorsement and support of Black Panther Party's 10-Point Program
2. Total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock n' roll, dope and fucking in the streets.
3. Free exchange of energy and materials -we demand the end of money!
4. Free food, clothes, housing, dope, music, bodies, medical care - everything free for everybody!
5. Free access to information media -free the technology from the greed creeps!
6. Free time and space for all humans -dissolve all unnatural boundaries.
7. Free all schools and all structures from corporate rule - turn the buildings over to the people at once!
8. Free all prisoners everywhere - they are our brothers.
9. Free all soldiers at once - no more conscripted armies.
10. Free the people from their "leaders" - leaders suck - all power to all the people freedom means free everyone !
John Sinclair Minister of Information White Panther Party November 1st, 1968
― El Janko (JasonD), Wednesday, 2 February 2005 20:29 (nineteen years ago) link
two years pass...
four years pass...
four years pass...
five years pass...