After church on Sundays, there was always a meal — fried chicken, skillet potatoes, green beans and tomatoes and okra from the garden, a pot of dumplings, a peach or apple cobbler. My wife’s grandmother, Nobie Bookout, would call Sunday mornings and ask if we wanted to come up, knowing full well she’d close the deal with, “We’ve got blackberry cobbler.”
But the food was never really the point.
That table was where the young listened and the old talked. Someone would share a story about their week — good or bad — and the adults would weigh in. They’d let you know, gently or not so gently, when you’d done right and when you hadn’t. Those conversations would often move to the living room after the meal and get rehashed all over again.
Nobody called it moral education. It was just Sunday dinner. But looking back, that’s exactly what it was — values handed down one story at a time, the same way a quilt comes together one square at a time.
I don’t think many families still gather around a table like that. I think we lost something when we stopped.
A question for you: Did your family have a version of this — a meal, a porch, a kitchen table — where the real lessons got taught? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. More reflections on growing up in the Delta are in A Journey from the Turnrows of the Delta to the Front Rows of Higher Education
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