Moros y Cristianos
by LC Neal
I have the very great privilege of working with many people from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Sometimes, one or two of them will cook for our little family of 30 or so, and I’m always fascinated by the folkloric tales behind some of the dishes they make. For instance, the woman who has ruined me for anyone else’s mole sauce. She still makes it a la antigua forma (the old-fashioned way), a ridiculously complex 27-ingredient day-long recipe, because it reminds her of all the women in her family cooking together when she was a little girl in Matamoros. They would talk over her head about their mothers and grandmothers making mole and bickering in the kitchen when they were little girls.
So I started thinking about which dish in my family history evokes the strongest memory for me; even I was surprised by the first one that came to mind.
In 1968, the dinner table in our sprawling, book-laden home in Chapel Hill often held the southern standards you’d expect, that my parents could more or less make blindfolded. But there were a few things my father tossed into the regular rotation on occasion, just to mix things up.
I was completely unaware of the fact that my family and our eating habits could be considered unique in any way, until a friend from elementary school came over to spend the night and my father made Cuban black beans and rice for dinner.
“Ewww,” our guest whispered too loudly to me when a plate of it landed in front of her. “This is black people food.”
My father’s face turned a fascinating color of magenta; my mother, usually unfailingly tolerant but possessed of a superbly honed tongue when needed, proceeded to explain that while humans kidnapped from Africa and forced into brutal slavery had introduced some foods into the diet of their undeserving captors (I distinctly remember her listing peanuts and peanut butter, okra and sweet potatoes), black beans were not one of them. (For the record, they are believed to originate in what is now Spain.) She was as furious as I’d ever seen her. My friend quickly dissolved into tears and ran off to hide in my room.
My mother and father stared at each other in silence for a moment, while my sisters and I gazed open-mouthed from one to the other of them. Finally my mother rose and went to find the stranger in our house, and eventually they both returned to the table, to finish a very awkward meal.
North Carolina was embroiled in the civil rights movement, riding a bumpy road towards true desegregation. Chapel Hill elected a black mayor that year, the same year that National Guardsmen fired on black students protesting at Greensboro. Our own elementary school days were filled with teachers and students of either caucusoid or sub-saharan descent, all native to the American south. We had absolutely no frame of reference yet for any other culture but our own.
To my soon-to-be-former friend, black beans represented a part of the population that the adults in her life were threatened by and hatefully racist towards. They taught their children to recite the same crap and think in the same crappy way they did, determined to secede from the majority of the human race that didn’t fit their idea of right.
To my Irish-French mongrel mind, black beans and rice were comfort foods, associated with my father. The fact that he called them Cuban was not at all enlightening to a seven year old who had yet to meet her first nonrevisionist American History teacher. Neither my classmate nor I would have known the difference between an African American and a Caribe, much less a Cuban and a Spaniard, or a Spaniard and an Italian. Neither of us could have told you a thing about their history.
We only knew that the island of Cuba and Fidel Castro seemed to have some mysterious significance to the adults in our lives (this included Walter Cronkite, who I perceived at that time as some sort of distant and talkative uncle). We were too young to comprehend how terrifying the Cuban missile crisis was to our parents. The little girl who came to dinner would have been stumped by the fact that the shouting man on TV with the unkempt beard and the funny accent liked black beans and rice also.
Some version of the dish known as Moros y Cristianos dates back to the 8th century, when it was believed to symbolize the Islamic (Moors) conquest of Spain (Christians), but black beans and rice wasn’t something you saw in restaurants or supermarkets in the Carolinas forty-five years ago. I’m ashamed to say that I was nearly an adult by the time I got around to asking how my father, born in the tiny impoverished town of Lindale, Georgia in 1924 and raised in the gorgeous city of Charleston, stumbled over a recipe central to the cuisine of a culture virtually unknown to both of us.
During World War II he was serving with the Army Corps of Engineers as a medic. He was bused to Miami and told to stay put until transport arrived to take him to join the rest of his unit bound for Manila.
Somehow, the U.S. Army misplaced him. He was getting paid, but no one could seem to figure out where he was supposed to be. This went on for weeks. So he checked in with his command twice a day and otherwise occupied himself roaming around Miami and soaking up the local culture, while he waited for his country to send him to his near death in the South West Pacific theatre.
During this oddly peaceful suspension in Miami limbo, the boy from Georgia taught himself to cook what I now know to be, after many taste comparisons, the best Cuban black beans and rice outside of Camaguey.
In 1983, my then husband strode into the Base Exchange on Keesler Air Force Base where I was working. He was supposed to be on duty, and he was still in fatigues. Seeing him there without warning brought a frisson of fear — the country was not in any overt war, unless you count the invasion of Grenada. But you never knew what would happen next if you were on active duty in those days — there was even less transparency at the Pentagon than there is now.
But it couldn’t be bad news this time, because he was happily waving a piece of paper in his hand, like a kid with a good report card. We got orders, babe, he said, and everyone nearby turned to stare.
Please, I was thinking fervently. Not Minot. Not Offutt. Let it be Edwards…or Travis. Rhein-Main, or maybe Incirlik.
We’re going to Homestead, he said. Four years, maybe longer.
An enlisted man standing nearby said you, sir, are a lucky guy. That is excellent duty.
I pulled my husband away from the crowd.
Where the hell, I asked, is Homestead?
Miami, he answered, and practically lifted me off the floor in a bear hug. It’s Miami, Lee.
Keep your milk and honey, I thought. I’m off to the land of black beans and rice. I couldn’t wait to tell my dad.
By 1992, I was four years past divorced, with career stints in Miami, Palm Beach and Chicago under my belt, and had accepted an assignment on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. If you’ve never had the privilege, MacDill is practically all runway. A good thing, since the 482nd Fighter Wing at Homestead AFB was forced to scramble its F16s and support aircraft to MacDill with only hours to spare, as Hurricane Andrew took an unexpected turn to the west, accelerated and strengthened to a Cat 5 storm with Homestead directly in its sights.
Andrew was a Cat 4 at landfall, but it may as well have been a bomb. Nearly every structure on the base, including housing that had remained standing through storm after storm since 1955, was vaporized by embedded tornadoes. The city of Homestead was almost completely wiped off the map. The canal-side home I had lived in, with its enormous covered and screened patio, gone. The old rickety boat docks at Blackpoint and Flamingo Key, demolished.
I sat in front of my TV in Tampa, shocked tears streaming down my face, as the first photos of unbelievable destruction began to broadcast from various news outlets. The power grid and communications towers were in shreds, and I couldn’t reach any of my friends residing in the area. I grew more and more frantic with each new report, and each passing hour.
I went to work in the following days and watched traumatized families stream onto MacDill AFB with nothing, literally nothing left to their names but the clothes on their backs and heavily damaged vehicles — and those were the lucky ones. Many had their pets snatched out of their arms during the storm, or had let them go, hoping they would find a safer haven than their humans had. No one had any idea how catastrophic that terrible storm would be, and it changed early warning systems, emergency management and meteorological reporting forever.
On August 28th, four days after the storm, my boss (who also had friends in the Homestead area) decided to send crews in from Tampa to help rebuild. He asked me to manage them, and after one long sleepless night, I decided to do it. My family went nuts. My friends tried to talk me out of it. You’ll be alone with a bunch of rowdy construction workers, they cried. They’re pros, I answered with completely false confidence. I’ll be safe, I’m around a bunch of rowdy construction guys now anyway.
And off I went, back to Miami once again.
I was scared to death; but I did it, and wrote enough stories about it already, so I won’t repeat the details here; except to say that I met the love of my life in those tragic, heroic, awful, triumphant days after Andrew. I married him, and we’ve lived through Homestead’s recovery from that and subsequent storms, meteorological and economic. We’re still here.
My father died more than a decade ago. He lived to see me go from a tent in a debris field west of Homestead to a mobile home to building a house, selling it and buying another in this scarred but stubborn city.
Once in awhile, I attempt to make his recipe for black beans and rice. Mine are never quite as good as his; they lack some amorphous thing that I can’t put my finger on. Perhaps the missing ingredient is the man who first made them for me; after all, I may be the only person in Miami who takes a bite of that distinctive dish and doesn’t envision a crumbling city on a tropical island.
Instead, I picture my father as a young man bound for war, sitting at a lunch counter on Calle Ocho in Little Havana and quizzing the cook in terrible southern-accented spanish. I think of him as he was for the thirty-nine years that I knew him, the stoic, overburdened but dryly funny patriarch of a large and often dramatic southern family. I think of him when I saw him last; weakened, but still larger than life to us all.
I’ve talked a lot about allowing your senses and your geography to feed your writing. I know it was just one of life’s coincidences that I was eating Cuban food long before I knew a thing about Cuba, or chose to live in a city hosting an enormous Cuban American community.
But logic doesn’t snap the thin magical thread that connects my father and the southern kitchen of my childhood to this simmering, dysfunctional, exasperating, beautiful melting pot of a city.
And I like it like that.
