Learn the basics, and then make it your own. ~ Lynell


I don’t have many benign memories of my mother, but one of them was that she liked to get new cars. They were never new to the world, rather just new to her. It was an act of extravagance, a rebellion against a life of poverty reprieved only by a brief marriage to my father. New-to-her cars made her feel like a Jones.

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At ten years old, my mom remarried. At ten years old, my mom bought a used silver Ford Taurus bedazzled with grocery cart dings and potato chip crumbs. At ten years old, my dad put me in the backseat, told me he loved me, and explained that he would probably never see me again. At ten years old, I started planning my escape.

I didn’t know it - my escape planning, that is - because, of course, at ten years old you don’t know much of anything. You only know what you feel, which is to say that anything of great importance - or great consequence - isn’t premeditated. It’s unwittingly manifested through action and actions are determined by impulse and impulse is determined by feeling. That day - the day my dad put me in the backseat of my mother’s bedazzled Taurus - I felt like making bread.

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It’s an endless drive down a two lane highway to get to the blacktop road to get to the dirt road that sputters you into the gravel driveway of our modest, new, post and pier home. If you were to divide the home from front to back, you would see that the three bedrooms made up the right half; and the living area, dining area, and kitchen comprised the left half, each side sandwiching a row of bathroom, closet, and laundry room, like a tic-tac-toe game drawn askew. My bedroom, that I shared with my younger sister, was easy access to the kitchen.

As you know, our modest, new-to-us home was of the post and pier ilk, guaranteeing that it wobbled with each step. It was a discovery made almost immediately upon entry as my mother yelled at me to quit stomping. Out of necessity, I soon found that I was small enough to walk nimbly through without drawing attention to myself. The grownups, though - the ones in charge of the tic-tac-toe house - they made each transition from room to room a one-man march.

My superpower gave me a secret advantage, especially at night when the rest of the house was dark.

At night, when the rest of the house was dark, I walked stomplessly into the kitchen and plucked a cookbook off the shelf. It was a yellow, three-ring-binder cookbook published by Pillsbury in 1973. This was new to me - the replacement parent, the wobbly house, and the cookbook, that is - and I didn’t know what I was looking for. An important point of clarification is that when I said, earlier, that I felt like making bread, I didn’t know it. I didn’t discover it until I opened the food-splattered cookbook and arrived at page 48. On it was an exquisite loaf, shiny and braided like a schoolgirl’s hair, and I wanted to touch it. Not the picture… no, I wanted to touch the actual bread. I was caught in a wild gamble: do I risk waking the wobbly house, or do I risk the inevitable tears that an undistracted mind, a heart cracked by abandonment brings?

I climbed on top of the counter in search of a bowl.

I was working blindly on two accounts: I’d lived in this house for approximately six hours, and I’d only ever cooked cinnamon toast or Grapenuts, if you will. It never occurred to me to view this as an impossibility, however; after all, I’d been following painting instructions from Bob Ross for most of my short life. And, if I’m honest, things rarely occur to me as impossibilities, despite how impossible I learn that some things are.

I began measuring the flour.

Bread making requires a sort of precision that alludes ten year olds, largely because ten year olds are often unknowingly arrogant. I, at ten years old, was not an exception to this rule; however, I was rescued from my own arrogance, at least in this moment, by my love of the written word. In other words, I was saved by the two pages of bread making tips preceding this chapter of the book.

I slowly, carefully heated the butter and milk.

Yeast was new to me - not the word, of course, as even the poorest of elementary schools talk about fungi - rather, yeast was new to me in its fragility, the same way my new home was new in its fragility, and I found a peculiar comfort in this. Cautious not to kill the yeast with warm milk, and cautious not to wobble the floors of our post and pier house, I drizzled the buttery liquid into the bowl and plunged my tiny hands into it.

I squeezed the flour and yeast into a doughy ball.

Squeezing the flour and yeast into a doughy ball, I began to marvel at the feel of it - not just the malleability of what once was a simple spread of ingredients, but of the way I felt in these quiet moments of creativity. I couldn’t have articulated it at ten years old, but I know now that it was a sense of control, a sense of independence that my short, impuissant life had not afforded me. I know this now because somewhere between the first paragraph of this story and now, I remade the bread.

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That exquisite loaf of bread, shiny and beautiful like a schoolgirl’s hair - a middle-of-the-night, five hour success - restored my youthful arrogance, which is to say that I believed myself an immediate chef. A culinary savant, if you will. I had such a next-level sort of conviction about the matter that it would be years before I had another success. It would be sheets of one cookie that began as twelve. It would be rice that was curiously both hard and stuck together. It would be doughy biscuits coated in layers of char.

I once annihilated a packet of generic kool-aid by substituting a cup’s worth of my step-dad’s sweet-and-low packets for the sugar.

These quiet disasters continued for months until my mom appeared in the doorway scream-whispering to me that “it’s after midnight and I should be in bed and what did I think I was doing wrecking the kitchen, anyway?” The house wobbled as she marched away.

It would be years before I cooked again.

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When I turned sixteen, I broadened my escape plan by way of the nearest Dairy Queen. I used babysitting money to buy an ill-fitting blue button up shirt and navy slacks with which I remained at perpetual war to stay up. I didn’t need to feel fashionable, though. I needed to feel free.

My step-dad handed me the keys to his undersized S10 pickup, and a half hour later, I was handed an apron.

I felt so adult as I filled strangers’ requests. It wasn’t the sort of adult that one is propelled into by a tumultuous childhood, rather the sort of age-appropriate adult one feels as she is learning age-appropriate independence. It was the sort of adult that ameliorated the goings-on outside of the ill-fitting clothing, outside of those red brick walls.

That Dairy Queen was home to me. It was a second home to my colleagues, a group of teenagers and young adults with varying backgrounds and dispositions. We were the late-night Breakfast Club, and I never wanted to leave.

At that Dairy Queen, I developed accountability and teamwork and self-respect. I met my first boyfriend and made lifelong friends. I realized the difference between good grownups and bad. I first experienced the joy of laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, and I had the best kiss of my life - a truth that still stands some thirty years later. At that Dairy Queen, I lost my virginity, and I gained confidence in my own voice.

And at that Dairy Queen, I learned to properly cook.

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We are the only Dairy Queen in the country with a hot buffet on Sundays. This is what Lynell tells me, anyway.

I’m not sure of the accuracy of that statement because Google had yet to exist, but I was fascinated with the idea. It was like a weekly treat having a Luby’s inside my home. It felt special, and sixteen year old girls often claw desperately for anything to feel special, even in the form of hot buffets. On Sunday mornings, gripping tightly to the specialness, I hovered over the chafing dishes between customers taking in the smells and gazing at the foreign vegetables.

Lynell, self-dubbed as the “Goddam Queen of Soul Food,” was in charge of the hot Sunday buffet. She chaperoned that space with the ferocity of a girl’s father at a middle school dance, which is to say that she didn’t allow anyone who wasn’t me near it. As a young girl still coming of age, still unwise to the world, I didn’t understand her affinity for me. I quietly, if not eagerly, accepted it, though, as that sort of care-taking, that sort of movie-like parental love had been missing for years.

We had private conversations in a public space. I was stingy with my words, because I felt obligated to protect my temperamental mother. Also, I wanted to. That’s what we do when we still believe in fairy tales and magic, though, isn’t it? We, in the name of hope, grip tightly a love for people, even when they hurt us. Lynell, though… well, she was generous with her words. She spoke freely of her parents, long since passed from earth-side, and she spoke lovingly of her children. She talked candidly about her siblings and friends and lovers, and all of this seemed normal to me. It was inconsequential conversation, really. Nugatory. Unimportant. Almost expressly trivial. Still, though, I inhaled her words.

I inhaled her words with a private longing for more because through her words, I was allowed a grownup conversation that didn’t require reaction. The only need was the occasional minimal encourager, an intermittent assurance that I was listening and just enough reciprocity to keep the exchange tilting toward equal.

One Sunday morning, I was hovering over the chafing dish of mystery greens that Lynell was chaperoning when she bumped me out of the way to refill them. This sudden move jolted the words out of me, initiating our weekly commutation of insignificant gab. What was I talking about? I don’t recall, as time has reliably faded my side of the conversation, but hers…. hers remains indefinitely.

“Hey, wee one, come back over here. I need your help.”

I should pause to say that she always called me ‘wee one.’ I found it both funny and sweet and only allowed it from her.

“Hey, wee one, come back over here. I need your help.” I reminded her that I can’t cook because “remember how I messed up the kool-aid?”
“Nonsense, wee one,” she says. “I’m teaching you ‘cause I was gypped by a trick this morning. S’why I’s late. That’s two-hunnerd i’m out and this hot buffet’s still cold. Those churchers’ll be here in twenty-nine minutes, an’ I need your help. You’re learnin’ to cook.”

In that moment, I realized that I’d befriended a real life prostitute. Not even just befriended. Looked up to. Treasured. Loved. And she was teaching me to cook.

My affection for her remained.

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I can’t recall which of us left Dairy Queen first, but until that era ended, I’d arrive at work early each Sunday, forgoing my time card until my scheduled punch-in, as she patiently guided me around her corner of the kitchen. “Just learn the basics,” she’d say. “Just learn the basics, and then make it your own,” she’d repeat with unearned confidence.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. Don’t read this to say that she instantly trusted me to do the job. Don’t read this to say that I learned the basics quickly or that I made anything there my own, as that wouldn’t come until long after we parted ways. No, we circled each other for months as she watched intently, guiding my hands, guiding me. It was a dance between the chef and her apprentice. The hooker and the cooker.

It would be a long time before she ever let me fill the chafing dishes with my own work, with food that I created from start to finish. And even then, her watchful eye was always involved. Even then, not more than a few minutes would pass before her hands would take over. After all, her good name was at stake.

The community knew Lynell. She was a fixture at the only Dairy Queen in the country with a hot food buffet, and they knew her to be in charge of it. They knew her to be dependable and quick-moving. They knew her to be conversational and quick-witted. They knew her to execute her art with precision. They knew her to be the beautiful black lady with strong arms and greying hair who raised her kids by turning tricks and feeding DQ country, and she didn’t want anyone - even her dancing wee one - to fuck that up.

One of the last memories I have of her was the first time she did hand me the greens, still bagged, still covered in dirt. This was the moment my short cooking career led up to. This was the culmination of endless directives, countless kitchen dances, and tedious prep work. Doings and undoings. This was the next big step in my escape plan, seven years in the making - the bridge connecting my precarious wobbling kitchen and my special hot buffet.

Keeping my smile to myself, I unbagged the produce and began to wash it, leaf by leaf until all the grit was gone while she stood there like a sentry, guarding me, guarding the collards, guarding her reputation as the Goddam Queen of Soul Food.