Personal Narrative: The Old Stone Fort

My mother’s father, Virgil Adolphus Lusk, was the cook in my mother’s family. Like many people around the world in agricultural communities, the midday meal was the largest one.

He always cooked a protein – fried chicken, smothered pork chops, venison, rabbit (my grandfather liked game and sometimes traded vegetables for it), country fried steak, or ham, but it was always only a backdrop for the vegetables that my grandfather grew in a large garden in the back of his small house in town.

When my mother was growing up, the family lived on a six-generation farm in Blanton’s Chapel, Tennessee. The farm was sustainable – they grew hay, wheat, corn, and sorghum, which the family would eat and which would also serve as fodder for chickens, pigs,

The Old Stone Fort was not a fort at all, but probably used during seasonal celebrations as its entrance is lined up with the sunrise on summer solstice. He took me foraging in the woods surrounding the Old Stone Fort for plants used by the Shawnee and Cherokee. That our family was complicit in the loss of their homeland was never mentioned.

Though my grandfather praised Native American culture, his views on African Americans were racist and ignorant. He spoke of how slavery had civilised Africans, taken them out of the dark continent of Africa. Like too many Americans today, he thought of Africa as a single country, not as a continent filled with different cultures and a history of remarkable civilisations stretching back millennia.

My grandfather, like many other racists yesterday and today, claimed “Africans” would have never developed as a people without the intervention of white culture. He never understood that when he was eating sorghum syrup and watermelon, he was tasting African civilisation and