_If you told me tonight that I had twenty-four hours to live, I’d be on a flight to Alabama tomorrow, where, as soon as the wheels touched down, I’d book it to the Monroeville location of David’s Catfish House just off the Highway 21 bypass. The Alabama Bureau of Tourism backs up this zeal; they’ve named the catfish and grits one of the 100 Dishes To Eat in Alabama Before You Die for two years running. Under less dire circumstances, I’d order the two-piece filet with a side of grits (all their meals come with hush puppies and coleslaw, so that’s a given), but assuming my untimely demise was in the cards, I’d spring for the all-you-can-eat plate. The fish’s flesh would be flaky and tender, and though I’d add a few shakes of hot sauce (preferably Crystal), whatever proprietary blend of fish fry the good folks at Dave’s use can easily hold its own. The grits would be smooth and buttery (it wasn’t until college that I learned some folks take their grits with sugar, a tradition akin to heresy in my book). I’d break off the crispy ends of the filet and dip them in the grits. I’d die a happy man. 

I tell you this because death was in the air that summer, the summer of 2020, and the only photo I have to show for it is a snapshot of a meager plate of home-cooked catfish and grits. 

My junior year of college had come crashing to a halt that March when my study abroad program sent us home early, and I moved back into my childhood bedroom in Houston alongside my parents. I’d given words to my gender expression the summer before and had spent the year filling out what exactly genderqueer and nonbinary meant inside my body, but upon returning home, I carefully packed those parts of myself away, in fear of adding more tumult to an already uncertain situation. After a month and a half of lockdown, the state of Texas “reopened” at the beginning of May, making it clear that Black and brown lives, working-class lives, would continue to be sacrificed at the altar of capital at an even more alarming rate. I was not yet in treatment for what would eventually be diagnosed as an anxiety disorder, and as I struggled to breathe with a fist clenched around my chest, I was perpetually convinced that I’d contracted COVID-19 and that I’d expose my family. And come Memorial Day, Texas was thrust onto the world’s stage with the police murder of Houston native George Floyd.

I don’t consider myself a cynical person, but it was hard not to be that summer, as the headlines flashed and the newsletters rolled in, a veritable buffet of buzzwords and corporate double-talk, doling out promises of accountability, reading lists of White Fragility and How To Be An Anti-Racist. As May turned to June, it became clear that Juneteenth provided a convenient vessel for containing these promises. (If Floyd’s murder had taken place in December, would the same thing have happened with Kwanzaa?)

I struggled to write in those days. I had long turned to poetry as a place to crystallize and make tangible my feelings when the facts of life, petty grievances and structural injustices alike, became too great to bear. And left to fend for myself in a world where I couldn’t count on my fellow Texans to take care of each other, there was nowhere to go—what else was there to do besides document the everyday? I knew that I would want to remember this time, to form some sort of archive, to remember the specific ways that organizers for racial justice struggled against the failures of the state: the methods, the tactics, the places where community came together. But the contours of my individual life, where I usually found inspiration in the specific, paled in comparison to the suffering that I witnessed on the news day in and day out. I wasn’t a frontline worker. I hadn’t lost anyone to COVID-19. I wasn’t brave enough yet, in those days, to risk arrest, to be out in the streets demanding justice. The scale at which I was living my life suffocated me with its smallness. The thudding monotony of each day that passed without the end in sight felt like too much for my pen to bear. 

_Food was one of the only things that could cut through the grief. Cooking became the mechanism by which I differentiated one day from the next, the method by which I cultivated my desire, a daily meditation that life itself was possible, for a brief instant even pleasurable, provided I was willing to work for it. Conventional markers of time (hours, days, weeks—they all stretched out meaninglessly) were eschewed in favor of more tangible things: how long it took a blackberry pie to cool, how long the ceviche needed to marinate in the fridge, how long the scallions growing in recycled glass yogurt pots took to sprout in the windowsill. 

I’d never fried catfish before that summer; I’d never really fried much of anything (though I’m told my grandmother used to fry an entire chicken for road trips from Alabama up to see family in Ohio, those days ended well before I was born). But as Juneteenth neared, I was desperate for a reminder that Black Texans had never taken our freedom for granted, that we’d long celebrated our overdue emancipation in part as fortification for the battles we were still fighting. I needed a reminder that our love had always been enough, that our traditions as Black Southerners were still ours, and that they could still sustain me—so I decided to rise to the occasion and learn to cook the meal I so loved: fried catfish as the centerpiece, complemented by grits for texture and collard greens for some acidity. 

The afternoon of June 19, I started work on the collards, so they could take their sweet time in the Crock-Pot. I put on the “blk ppl’s autonomous zone of juneteenth” playlist my friend Kenia had made and let Solange’s “Stay Flo” stream through my earbuds as I rendered fat from bacon, attempting to recreate the savory heft of ham hocks, to which I added onions, then garlic. Rinsing the collards under the kitchen sink I recalled the speaker of Lucille Clifton’s “cutting greens,” as she holds the leaves in “obscene embrace,” telling of her natural appetite and “the bond of live things everywhere.” Holding produce in my hands was the closest I was getting to the nourishment of physical touch, to embracing anyone at all, and it served as a hearty reminder that I was still an integral part of the world, no matter how disconnected I felt. The salty smell of the bacon had already started to make me hungry. I wish I could tell you I took my time chopping the greens, folding their leaves into ever smaller sections until I could chiffonade them into ribbons so they’d cook down smoothly like the greens of my youth. The truth is, I am not very patient, and I settled for inch-wide strips. 

Once the collards made their home in the Crock-Pot, I talked my dad into a drive across town to source our fish fry, as I’d been meaning to pay a visit to Chef Jonny Rhodes’s new pop-up grocery store. As a chef, Rhodes was lauded for his work at Indigo, a tiny neo-soul food tasting menu restaurant tucked into an unassuming storefront in Houston’s Northline neighborhood. When he’d opened Indigo’s doors in 2018, he’d drawn notice not just for his James Beard-semi-finalist-worthy food, but also for his emphasis on the historical significance of Black foodways, and the restaurant’s location in a neighborhood that still bore the scars of white flight and subsequent disinvestment from the city. But when the pandemic forced many restaurants to close their doors, Broham Fine Soul Food and Groceries rose from the ashes, in part to address the systemic food apartheid that afflicted the neighborhood, supplying customers with the yellow barbecue sauce and smoked turnip “vegetable ham” that Rhodes’s customers knew him for, plus produce from a neighboring garden. When I passed through the doors, still emblazoned with the restaurant’s magnolia logo, I felt the space where the grand thirteen-seat U-shaped table used to be, where Chef Jonny would gather restaurant goers in celebration and commemoration. I didn’t manage to catch him in the store (I hoped to myself that he was celebrating the day somewhere, cooking with his loved ones), but I nabbed my plastic baggie of fish fry all the same.

The grits were the easy part; I’d made them more Sundays than I could count, but I was immediately intimidated when I poured the requisite inch of oil into our red stockpot to get started on the fish—for one, by the sheer amount that’s necessary for frying, and for two, by the prospect of burning myself. Though I love to cook, my hands haven’t quite gotten with the program. I’m easily nicked and bruised, and I’m as jumpy as they come. I lack my father and abuelita’s calluses for flipping tortillas barehanded, opting instead for a spatula. But I had a recipe in front of me. For the length of time it would take to prepare the fish, I’d have steps to follow, a clear direction to head in, a balm in a world that felt aimless. I took a deep breath and turned on the gas. 

The catfish filets were thicker than I’d hoped, and I worried that they wouldn’t get quite crispy as Dave’s, but I told myself to trust the process. I grasped the fish’s cold flesh and dunked it in a bowl of buttermilk once, twice, three times for good measure. I took the twist tie off the baggie of fish fry and rolled the fish through it, the seasoning coating my fingers as much as it did the fish. I ran the cornmeal through my hands, pressing it into all the crevices, smoothing out the clumps. Once it was thoroughly coated, I hovered my hand over the hot oil. I peeled a bit of excess batter off my fingers and dropped it into the pot to test the heat; it danced around the oil with a satisfying sizzle. Gingerly, I lowered the fish into the oil and watched the batter firm and crisp up, turning from pale yellow, to goldenrod, to russet brown. As I turned it over, I winced as a bit of the batter peeled off, then again when I removed it from the oil and set it on a paper towel-lined plate to drain. 

Admittedly, it was a little ugly. Lumpy in the places where I didn’t quite manage to smooth the seasoning evenly, lightly burnt around the edges, but still bearing a resemblance to the fish I knew and loved from Dave’s. Cousins perhaps. 

My dad and I ate standing up at the counter. There was no ceremony to it, and my mom had fallen asleep before I finished cooking. No one was coming over. There was nowhere to go. My dad, ever the family documentarian, snapped a handful of photos of the plate. Once he’d sufficiently archived the moment, I broke off one of the ends and dipped it into the grits. I would take ugly if it tasted this good, if it could rescue me from the edges of myself for long enough until I no longer saw death around every corner, until I could breathe deeply and without fear, until I could get back on the road to Dave’s again. 

This series was published with support from The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.