“With Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash managed to highlight the diversity within the African-American experience. She did so by giving voice and agency to a group that had become invisible. The question of who controls the images and representations of people of color is still urgent, and not only in the realm of food” – Fabio Parasecoli 

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In the spirit of Daughters of the Dust creates an Ancestors Table and an ode to all the people forced to crossed the sea from the shores of Africa with seeds in their hair, toiled land, preserved recipes, and traditions along the way of their tenuous journeys. The original feast was part of the unveiling of Ife Franklin’s Indigo Project and her 4th slave cabin.

 

Daughters of the Dust is a movie that takes place over one day with a Gullah family, An African American population-based off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia as part of the Sea Islands. There is a profound forbearing as they prepare for the great migration north. They prepare for a celebratory repast and gather food of the region like crabs, shrimp, clams, fixed with tomatoes, okra, corn, greens, beans, and other bounties from the earth and sea. Their meal is symbolic of the gratitude they have for their ancestors as they leave their familial lands that have preserved their connection to Africa because of their remoteness and inaccessibility to the mainland. Struggling between modernity wondering if their change of home will bring progress and stability when their traditions have survived the terror of the middle passage, the exploitation of being enslaved peoples working indigo and slave plantations, the doomsday of the Civil War, tenuous nature of Reconstruction and thereafter.

 

The Gullah table connects us to Africa in the form of production in okra which makes the iconic gumbo, and peanut is guba and made into peanut stew, Red Rice and purloo, a one–pot meal of rice, and any variety of add-ins – vegetables like the popular okra, shellfish (shrimp, crab, and oysters), and meat or sausage connect to West African Jollof Rice all of which Nana Pazant, the matriarch of the Gullah clan in the movie, teaches the children that sit at her knee the customs of the past. Although the cuisine of this region is different from the food we know as Soul Food, the Daughters of the Dust table represented the soul of the family contending to stay connected to their heritage as they leave their ancestral and familial lands.