There’s likely no better expert on the food and the culinary practices of African Americans than Dr. Jessica B. Harris, and millions of people are going to find out a lot about the same when they sit down to watch the new Netflix docuseries based on her book, “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America.” It arrives on May 26, just in time for Memorial Day weekend binge watching, and it is a must-see documentary of the African American journey from Benin in West Africa to Charleston, S.C., to Monticello, to New York City and beyond. Along the way you’ll learn more about the history of slavery and its connection to the foods most Americans consider their own than you ever learned from a history book. And you’ll be surprised by much of it.
The Times talked with Harris about her fascinating book, now becoming a visual journey as well as a written one. She is in the first episode of the series alongside the film’s narrator and guide, chef and writer Stephen Satterfield. How Harris, who spends summers in Oak Bluffs where her parents bought a house more than 60 years ago, ended up as part of the series after she sold the rights to the book is a true Vineyard story. “I wasn’t involved in the making of it, and was only in the first episode by accident,” she says, “and the Vineyard connection goes back to July 2019.”
Abigail McGrath, niece of Harlem Renaissance author Dorothy West and founder of the writer’s retreat Renaissance House in Oak Bluffs, invited Harris to go to a preview of writer, director, and producer Roger Ross Williams’ documentary “The Apollo,” at Union Chapel that July. Harris meets Williams, they walk back to her house in Oak Bluffs after the screening, joined by a few other people, and they hit it off. She invites him to her annual Bastille Day party that takes place the next day, and they spend some more time together over the summer, getting to know each other, and he says, “I think you need to be in it,” meaning the Netflix documentary he was producing and directing based on her book.
“I hadn’t thought to be or not to be in it,” she says. “My agent kept saying, You sold the book; it’s not yours anymore. I was pleased and delighted to be asked to be in it. I think people who watch will learn that food is culture, and there are many stories to be told through food.”
The first episode opens in the Dan-Topka Market in Benin. Satterfield and Harris walk through the colorful market filled with all manner of goods, and as they stop by a stand selling okra, Harris explains that it was slaves who brought it to the U.S. We see yams in the market and realize for the first time, for me anyway, that they look nothing like the sweet potatoes we commonly call them. Yams didn’t grow well in the U.S., Harris explains, so they relied on the large, starchy root vegetable that does grow here. Candied yams, we find out, are not a real thing.
Throughout the first episode, we also hear about the slave trade, Benin being one of the places from which slaves were transported. We see Satterfield walk the same path slaves with chains on their feet and wrists walked before they were herded onboard ships, ripped from their lives and their homes. He visits Ouidah, once a busy slave port, and the Gate of No Return. Harris is with Satterfield as he stands in this place, realizing the enormity of where he is. She asks him how he feels, and he responds that he wants to thank them, all the ancestors, and he feels like he is convening with them. It is moving to watch Harris embrace Satterfield when his tears start to flow.
“The part that meant a lot is the fact that it begins in a market in West Africa,” Harris says. “It was important to me to show origins that people don’t necessarily know. I think out of all the episodes, I’m very glad that was the one I was in.”
Satterfield makes the perfect guide as he leads the way throughout the series. He is a young chef and founder of Whetstone, a company that uses food as a way to better understand people and the world. It produces magazines and podcasts that tell stories that connect people. Satterfield is someone Harris said she respects and admires, and we see in the documentary that the feelings are mutual.
“High on the Hog” and Satterfield take viewers to places they’ve never been, expose them to things they’ve never thought of. That peacemaker’s song, “Kumbaya,” we hear it sung in a church in the low country of South Carolina, where it came from, only the words are “Come by here, Lord,” not “Kumbaya.” The American favorite, macaroni and cheese, we learn was prepared in the kitchen at Monticello, where slave James Hemings (Sally Hemings’ older brother) was Thomas Jefferson’s executive chef. Hemings traveled to Paris with Jefferson and was trained by some of the best chefs of the period. He eventually sought his freedom, but Jefferson wouldn’t agree to that until Hemings trained another slave to take his place. Hemings trained his younger brother.
There are young Black American chefs in “High on the Hog,” chefs who are working to create cuisine that relates to the African American diaspora. Some of them prepare one-pot meals, another lets the viewer in on desserts she prepares for a Juneteenth celebration. We meet Black cowboys in Texas, and we meet Benjamin Harney, who operates an oyster cart in Brooklyn called Mothershuckers.
“High on the Hog” on Netflix covers only the first half of Harris’ book, and it leaves the viewer wanting more. We asked her how her experience with the Netflix series differs from the book.
“In many ways it is different,” Harris says. “The Netflix series will be seen in 190 countries and in, I think, 32 languages. Equally, there’s a certain degree of anonymity in writing a book; people don’t necessarily know your face, and that can be a good thing. But writing and appearing in the series now, my face is there, and it’s connected.”
Harris arrives on the Island in a couple of weeks, and plans to work on her current book while she’s here. “My best writing time is around mid-afternoon and early evening,” she says, “and then I’ll look up and it’s 9 o’clock.” Writing books was a side hustle for Harris at first, she explains, because she was a professor of English at Queens College for decades, as well as a journalist. She said what she’s looking forward to most when she gets here is visiting with friends. “I’ve been going to the Vineyard for 65 years,” she says. “My parents bought the house 64 years ago. There are a lot of people who don’t remember the Island I remember.”
Harris has led an interesting life, traveling to West Africa for the first time in 1972 with her mother. Now she’s been more times than she can count, Harris said. She was travel editor of Essence magazine in the late 1970s, so “High on the Hog” wasn’t a “sit down and write the book” experience, but rather the summarizing of a long journey.
“I think people are going to see it and learn things they didn’t know, and hopefully it will make them think of things they hadn’t thought about,” Harris said about the documentary series. “What we are taught in school and what the larger story may or may not be are often two different things.”
“High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America” debuts on Netflix Wednesday, May 26.