Home and Away: Cocktails for Fall
Photos by Michael Piazza / Styled by Catrine Kelty
What does it feel like to be from a place you don’t know, but have always known?
And, since this is a cocktail piece, what’s it taste like?
If you asked me where I am from, I’d tell you I was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. If you asked me where my family is from (correct) or where I am really from (incorrect), I’d say that like many Black Americans born in the U.S., my family came to New York from the southern United States—and before that, were forcibly brought to the United States primarily from West Africa as enslaved people. Some of my family are indigenous Americans as well.
This history is commonly shared among many Black Americans. In fact, this pattern is known as The Great Migration, which describes the period from the early 1900s well into the 1970s, when Black Americans migrated across the country as refugees, seeking political asylum from the violence and oppression of the Jim Crow South. The most common routes families took were from southeast Florida and Georgia along the Northeast, south central Mississippi and Alabama up into the Midwest, and southwestern Arkansas and Texas up into the Midwest and the West Coast. To the best of my knowledge, my maternal great-grandparents came to Brooklyn from North Carolina in 1940, and my paternal grandfather left Georgia for Queens in the early 1960s. Some relatives came (and some of those did not survive), some moved to other parts of the South and the rest stayed behind.
As a child growing up in a far-from-gentrified Brooklyn, I didn’t really think deeply into my lineage in other parts of the country. Perhaps this is because my natural disposition is as a daydreamer, a wanderer. I wanted to be everywhere: build a home in Africa, live in South Korea, retire in Ireland. While of course my cultural identity was very much Black, I also identified with what can only be described as being a “city girl.” I am from New York City (read that in all caps)—it’s not like anywhere, yet it’s a part of everywhere. I think, as in many families up North, new culture was created, while stories and photos and pieces of past heritage were lost, things I attribute to the traumas that would take generations to recognize and release from our DNA. It took me some years to acknowledge this—only then beginning to understand that maybe some of the daydreamer in me is an outward expression of genetic, spiritual memory.
When I started BarNoirBoston in 2018—then just a flash in my mind during a busy bar shift in Chinatown—I had mostly hoped it would help me to meet other Black people in the hospitality community. But as it evolved alongside what I consider a global Black hospitality renaissance, BarNoir became a space for me to investigate the city in the best way I know how. And on a more personal note, it became an outlet for me to document my own family’s history.
In June of this year, I went to Atlanta with my father and a handful of siblings to meet his sisters and relatives for the first time. (I also met two of my own siblings for the first time!) My older sister connected to an aunt through a DNA test; little did we know that she too had been searching, finding her own siblings one by one. We celebrated Juneteenth together, a holiday deeply fitting for the occasion. While many Americans are just becoming acquainted with the tradition, the celebration marks not only the emancipation of the last of our people in bondage, but is a memorial to our families separated time and time again over hundreds of years.
These are my first cocktail explorations since I’ve come back from Georgia. They are tender and new, yet they hold the familiarity of meeting someone for the first time, while feeling like you’ve been friends for much longer. It’s the expression of the home you know, the home you’ve always known and of being away from it, be it by choice or choices made for you. A little of the North, the South, Georgia, North Carolina, New York, Boston ...
This story appeared in the Fall 2021 issue.
