Editor’s note: The following essay is excerpted from “Gather: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness,” a forthcoming book by Ashanté M. Reese. This excerpt is used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton &; Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Preorder the book here.
Repasts are often thought of as offerings to people we know or are somehow connected to. They are a way to provide some respite for grieving families. But what happens when a whole city is mourning? Can the repast be imagined as a broader practice of community care? These aren’t questions I’d considered until I met Chef Tam Patterson, the owner of Underground Café in Memphis, who organized a dozen businesses to provide a repast after the killing of Tyré Nichols.
On January 7, 2023, twenty-nine-year-old Tyré Nichols was pulled over, dragged from his car and severely beaten by five police officers in Memphis. Three days later, he died. The official cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma to the head. At the time of Nichols’s assault, only a week had passed since Keith Muriel, a forty-one-year-old Black man, died in police custody in Jackson, Mississippi, after being tased several times in the back of a police car. A mere ten days after Nichols’s death, Darryl Williams, a thirty-two-year-old Black man in Raleigh, North Carolina, died in police custody after being tased three times, despite disclosing to officers that he had a heart condition. Nichols’s death was part of the unrelenting refrain of Black death at the hands of the state that sometimes feels both expected and unending.
Nichols’s death hit me particularly hard. In addition to my ongoing weariness at the assaults on Black life, Memphis was close to my heart. My first full-time academic job, in 2014, was at Rhodes College, a small, overwhelmingly white, private liberal arts school in the middle of the overwhelmingly Black city. Moving back and forth between white Rhodes and Black Memphis was difficult. I had lived in places where contradictions and racism thrived, but Memphis was different for me, as both a community member and a scholar of food studies.
In 2010, the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) released a report that identified Memphis as “the hunger capital of the US” with a food insecurity rate of 26 percent. Memphis, like Baltimore, has a Black population that exceeds 60 percent. Like Baltimore, many of those residents are poor or working-class, and 22.5 percent of Memphians live below the poverty line – a figure that is double the national average. When people think of food insecurity, they may imagine emaciated, undernourished bodies. However, research has consistently shown that food insecurity and obesity are closely linked, especially for women in the US. Though researchers are still trying to understand the underlying mechanisms that fuel this conundrum, many suggest that poverty and lack of access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food is a contributing factor. Given this, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Memphis experienced high rates of both. Memphis, like many cities in the US, is a place where there is no debating the presence and impact of anti-Blackness. Unarmed Nichols, treated as a threat though he posed no obvious one, became another example of how deadly that reality is. After his murder, I was mourning and so were others who were much closer to him. As in the aftermath of Freddie Gray’s murder, people were also demanding justice.
During a press conference before bodycam footage documenting the assault on Nichols was released, the Memphis police chief called his death “a failing of basic humanity” and urged the public to temper their responses and to not resort to violence. A request for peaceful protest also came from Nichols’s family. Many people – Memphians, political pundits, and those watching from around the country – expected violent protests reminiscent of what had happened in Baltimore after Freddie Gray’s murder in 2015. Much of the city was on edge.
On January 27, the Memphis Police Department released over thirty minutes of camera footage that confirmed that Nichols was unarmed and that the officers took turns dealing blows that would ultimately lead to his death. Even more harrowing to me, as I watched only three minutes of the video, was that this didn’t happen in an empty parking lot or on an abandoned street. Nichols was assaulted in a residential neighborhood, reportedly two minutes from his home. I wondered if the residents at the corner of Castlegate Lane and Bear Creek, beckoned by the lights from the police cars at the scene, watched in horror or curiosity.
A wave of activism in and beyond Memphis ensued. NBC News reported that at least seventeen protests erupted within hours of the release of the bodycam footage. Protesters shut down Interstate 55. Others gathered for a candlelight vigil at Tobey Skate Park, where Nichols used to skate. Across the US, people connected their local struggles against police violence to Nichols’s murder and a broader call for police defunding and abolition.
While many protested, Tamra “Chef Tam” Patterson, a Memphis-based chef and owner of Chef Tam’s Underground Café, channeled her sadness, rage, and exasperation into a community-wide repast. Chef Tam had met Nichols’s mother, RowVaughn Wells, soon after his death. She offered her hand for a handshake, but Wells refused it, choosing to pull her in for a hug instead. “I hugged her like, I mean, it was one of the tightest hugs you could imagine,” Chef Tam remembered. It was a moment between two mothers of Black sons – one who was experiencing the worst and one who carried the fear that she could be in the same position one day. Chef Tam wanted to honor all that and create a healing space for a family and a city that badly needed it.
Nichols’s murder drew national and international attention, and the family anticipated his homegoing would be attended by hundreds of people – not only family and friends but also people from out of town. Chef Tam’s restaurant was one of the largest in the city, so it would be perfect. This repast would have to be big enough to host a large crowd but intimate enough to not feel like a spectacle. Amid the ongoing unrest, other restaurant owners were afraid of what could happen to their businesses. They lamented how much money they’d lose if the city erupted into protests. Chef Tam countered with the grim reality that while these restaurant owners worried about their businesses, she worried about what could happen to her son in a country plagued by racist policing. “I have a teenage son,” she told them. “I’ve got to tell my son how to act and present himself in public yet again so he’s not killed by the police.” Her vulnerability with her peers turned out to be an invitation. Many of those restaurant owners started asking a different question: What can we do to support?
Thirteen restaurants donated food for the repasts. Chef Tam’s restaurant provided Black American staples: roasted chicken, catfish, macaroni and cheese, sweet potato casserole, and collard greens. Chef Kelly English of The Second Line and Red Iris donated red beans and rice. The Beauty Shop restaurant made turkey and gravy with cranberry chutney. Felicia Suzanne’s sent deviled eggs, while Tsunami offered chicken satay with Thai peanut sauce. McEwin’s provided cheese grits – a Southern delicacy. Rendezvous laid out sausage and cheese platters. Cocozza offered lasagna. Acre Restaurant donated sweet potato and sausage hash. Muddy’s Bake Shop, Ecco, and Sunrise rounded out the offerings with pastries and other desserts. The restaurants – some Black-owned, others not – participated in the long-held tradition of feeding bereaved families after a funeral. No one was under the illusion that food could replace this son of Memphis. But by operating within this sacred tradition, Chef Tam recognized something else: that by extending an invitation to others, they could perform the sacred acts of witnessing, serving and nourishing.
The citywide support from other restaurateurs freed Chef Tam to focus on how she wanted the repast to feel. According to those who knew and loved Nichols, photography was his happy place. So Chef Tam downloaded several of his photos and had them printed on canvas. Her husband drove through ice and snow to the only open Walgreens to pick them up. In a private room reserved for the immediate family, she set up those photos so that they could be surrounded by their loved one’s life and not only his death. One photo captured the Hernando de Soto Bridge straddling the Mississippi River set against a darkening red and orange sky. Another showcased a close-up of train tracks at the place where rails met gravel. As a mother, as a person who had lost people in her own family, Chef Tam wanted to create an atmosphere that emphasized that Nichols’s life mattered.
Chef Tam and her colleagues took a well-known, beloved tradition of supporting bereaved families and transformed it into a practice of community care at a larger scale. Memphis was in a state of collective grief. Nichols’s murder was yet another moment in which people in Memphis and beyond recognized that the failures to protect Black life are built into the systems that we’re taught are supposed to keep us safe and nourished. In these moments, we see clearly that we cannot cede the soul and community-saving work of nourishment to the state or capitalist institutions. We must imagine otherwise.
I grew up among Black people who understood that their time of need would come. They embodied a scripture I heard countless times during the offering at church: “Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” What Chef Tam pulled together is an excellent case study of how to extend the “we” outward, to widen our embrace to include people who are not “ours” – as in, our family, our friends, our immediate community. Chef Tam looked at Tyré Nicholas’s mother and saw herself. She didn’t know her personally, but she knew what it was like to be a mother of a Black son she couldn’t fully protect. She had an intimate relationship with her own fear about her newly licensed teenage son driving alone – the restlessness, the angst. She empathized. Her empathy moved her to action, to be of service. Perhaps more than any other type of gathering, repasts invite us to not just sympathize, but to empathize with others.
Those lessons of empathy, widening our circle, drawing on tradition, and gathering despite difficult emotions are necessary tactics to further food justice. Any pursuit of justice must have space to hold both grief and joy: grief for the many losses that accumulate every second that injustice goes unfettered, and a deeply embodied joy that comes from knowing that each being has a shot at living a nourished life.
Ashanté M. Reese is a writer, anthropologist, and associate profes sor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Raised in Cooper Settlement, Texas, she lives in Austin and is involved in food justice movements nationwide.