Introducing Scott Alves Barton - one of our amazing contributors for the #ServingUp #crowdfunder w/ @unbounders!

Title: 'Eatplaces: Two Tables Talk of Yesterdays'

Synopsis: My family nuclear family integrated a community just after I was born. They fought to move the neighbors and city hall to move in. Only a few people would sell to a Black family. I grew up in the pink house on the hill in a bedroom with pink ballerina wallpaper and wall to wall pink carpets until my parents could afford to change the décor. 2020 was/would have been my folk’s centennial year. When I was nearly finished renovating our home in preparation to sell it, I realized that aside from my parents’ bedroom bureau, the only remnants from our family that were left were the utilitarian 60s-modern faux Eero Saarinen Formica “Tulip” kitchen fixture, and the formal dining; their 1940s stolid middle class aspirational mahogany dining set bought “on-time” by my maternal grandparents as a wedding gift. These two tables began to speak to me of NAACP meeting, family meals, grandmothers teaching us how to cook and serve their homefoods. They were the site of homework assignments, pattern making for special garments, celebrations and tragedies, prom dinners and repasts. They are an archive of our family and I became frightened to lose them. It was as if like my brother and I they had a heart, mind and soul. This essay is a disembodied conversation with these tables and my departed parents. It gives me a chance to remember the culinary culture, and the joy and pain of homelife when home was a safe zone in a sometimes-unfriendly world for an integrating Black family, and a child, tween, teen trying to understand how to cook, and how to survive and just be.

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