December 17, 2025
Host Beryl Dakers invites us on a culinary adventure of Black food lore with guest Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, author of Vibration Cooking or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl in 1970. Through poetry, music and historical narrative, Vertamae shares the origins of and preparation of soul food, or food originating from the Gullah people who were brought over as slaves from Africa. Check the Side Notes to learn more about this special guest, and some of the topics and artists that she mentioned in her program.
This ETV Classic is an engaging journey and one that you will remember long after the program is over!
Side Notes
- Vertamae Grosvenor (April 4, 1937 – September 3, 2016) was a culinary griot, cook, writer, actress, traveler, and NPR commentator (1980s through the early 00s) who was born and raised in the Gullah Geechee community of Daufuskie Island in SC. She wrote a handful of books including the groundbreaking “Vibration Cooking: The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl” (1970) along with titles like “Vertamae Cooks in the Americas’ Family Kitchen” (1996)“ and “Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off” (2018) all of which intertwined autobiographical narrrative with recipes she grew up with.
- Cultural Exchange by Langston Hughes.
- Middle Passage - The Middle Passage was the stage of the Atlantic slave trade in which millions of Africans sold for enslavement were forcibly transported to the Americas as part of the triangular slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods (first side of the triangle), which were then traded for captive Africans. Slave ships transported the African captives across the Atlantic (second side of the triangle). The proceeds from selling these enslaved people were then used to buy products such as furs and hides, tobacco, sugar, rum, and raw materials, which would be transported back to Europe (third side of the triangle, completing it.
- Great Migration - The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. It was substantially caused by poor economic and social conditions due to prevalent racial segregation and discrimination in the Southern states where Jim Crow laws were upheld. In particular, continued lynchings motivated a portion of the migrants, as African Americans searched for social reprieve.
- Cyrus Bustill - The Man Who Knew His Worth. Cyrus Bustill opened a bakery and gained a reputation for honest practices and good bread. During the Revolutionary War, he was one of the bakers recruited by Thomas Ludwick to supply bread to the troops at Valley Forge. Cyrus saw this as a patriotic duty, not a distraction from his Quaker beliefs. The family tradition describes a personal appreciation from Thomas Falconer, head of supplies for the troops, and a gold coin reward from George Washington.
- Doug Quimby - Sea Island Singers. David Holt introduces a 1988 clip from Celebration Express when he got to visit Frankie and Doug Quimby, leaders of the Sea Island Singers, who kept alive the music and dances of the slave era after founder Bessie Jones passed on. Doug Quimby died in 2006, but Frankie still embodies the tradition.
- Lucille Clifton 1936 -2010 Cutting Greens. Lucille Clifton, the author of Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000 (BOA Editions, 2000), which won the National Book Award, was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999.
