Ntosake Shange’s Sassfrass, Cypress, & Indigo
Ntosake Shange in 1979 Courtesy of New York Public Library
Ntosake Shange (1948-2018) had been a Black Bohemian Feminists in the 1970s Born Paulette Williams, she changed her name in 1971. Her first name means she who comes with her own things; and her last name means she who walks with lions. Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and WEB Du Bois are some of the notable creative thinkers who visited her childhood home. She would go on to graduate from Barnard College and earned a Master’s degree in American studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Sassfrass, Cypress, & Indigo (St. Martin's Press, 1982) represents the first of three novels Shanges wrote and the most innovative with the inclusion of recipes. The novel is in part her portrait of African-American women struggling in the 1970s to balance the demands of feminism, Black Nationalism, creative inspirations, and the domestic expectations their communities acculturated with such as cooking, childrearing, and cleaning their homes.[1]
For Shange the recipes of African-American women recipes serve as their narratives and collectively as their archives. (150-151) For Shange, kitchen knowledge learned around the open stove provide a rich archival history of African-American women. Her use of recipes in the novel is a strategy for recovering history lost during the trauma of the African slave trade and enslavement. (151) Historically, the word receipt and recipe come from references to medical prescriptions the doctor would give as a remedy for his or her patient. Beginning in the 1740s the terms became associated with cookbooks. In the pharmacology, the abbreviation RX has its history in the uses of the term recipe and/or receipt.[2]
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[1] Alexs Pate, “A Conversation with Ntozake Shange,” Black Renaissance Vol. 10, Iss. 2/3 (Summer 2010), 79; Harryette Romell Mullen, “Artistic Expression was Flowing Everywhere”: Alison Mills and Ntozake Shange, Black Bohemian Feminists in the 1970s” Meridians 4.2 (2004), 206, 208, 213.
[2] Patricia E. Clark, “Archiving Epistemologies and the Narrativity of Recepies in Ntozake Shange's Sassfrass, Cypress, & Indigo,” Callaloo, Volume 30, Number 1, (Winter 2007), 150-151, 153.
