A Southern Barbecue, a wood engraving from a sketch by Horace Bradley, published in Harper’s Weekly, July 1887
Tim Miller helped explain why Texans might have forgotten slaves’ influence in his book,
Barbecue: A History.
Of course, barbecue would have come to much of Texas the same way it came to most of the American South: through the influx of slave owners and their slaves, moving west across the continent. The rewriting of the story of Texas described above not only made Texas history, focusing on cowboys, a proper subject after the Civil War, but in the process also wrote blacks out of the state’s history entirely, leaving a question mark in terms of where barbecue came from.
By the time Robb Walsh wrote his award-winning article for the
Houston Press, “
Barbecue in Black and White,” the black pitmaster stereotype was gone from Texas. Walsh asked, “How did it happen that we forgot blacks used to cook barbecue in Texas in the first place?” Walsh also recounts an admission from a famous white barbecue joint owner about Memphis’ barbecue roots. Charlie Vergos of the famous Rendezvous restaurant told Lolis Elie in his documentary,
Smokestack Lightning: A Day in the Life of Barbecue:
Brother, to be honest with you, [barbecue] don’t belong to the white folks, it belongs to the black folks. It’s their way of life, it was their way of cooking. They created it. They put it together. They made it. And we took it and we made more money out of it than they did. I hate to say it, but that’s a true story.
...I time stamped the part I wanted you to hear
