Recalling his mother’s New Year’s Day black-eyed peas recipe, Michael W. Twitty traces this legume back to the Middle Passage and its roots in Africa, recognizing it as a seed of Black resilience.
When my mother was still here in body, she made a small pot of black-eyed peas every New Year’s Day. The pot was so small, in fact, that it held the volume of only about two cups of cooked peas.
“I thought you loved black-eyed peas?” I asked her.
“I don’t love them; I don’t really even like them. I just eat them because of tradition.”
“That’s a lot for tradition.”
“How else am I supposed to get good luck and change?”
With so many traditions for starting the New Year, I sometimes wonder at their roots. What do they represent in our psyche? How can we connect to these rituals from the past and still make them pertinent to our present? How can we continue to honor our ancestors?
I just returned from Sedona, Arizona, where I co-teach an annual New Year’s retreat. We use the teachings of the Native American Medicine Wheel to walk our intention into the New Year and examine it from different perspectives. One of those perspectives asks us to look at our history, our patterns, and our traditions.
“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”
~ George Santayana
As a storyteller, I have developed a new love of history as simply stories rather than just names and dates. When we look into the stories of our past and connect to the roots of our traditions, the rituals (like those of the New Year) have more power to call in the blessings of our ancestors and manifest change in our lives.
Check out Michael W. Twitty’s article on The Cowpea: A Recipe for Resilience in Emergence Magazine for an interesting history of traditions, finding meaning, and a recipe for black-eyed peas soup.