More contemporary writers have also explored gender dynamics and maternity through the collard. In “Harriette Winslow and Aunt Rachel Clean Collard Greens on Prime Time Television,” Alabama poet Ashley Jones observes the matriarch on 1990s sitcom Family Matters and her own mother cooking the greens:
… a kitchen is sweetened when collards are cooking, the air a swelling pork fat perfume, the onion’s pungent terror nulled by the ribboned greens — I loved to watch my mother cut them, roll the piles of flat foliage up like a cigar, the kitchen knife shining against a tight army of collards. We needed no superheroes when we had her …
In “Lessons,” Jacqueline Woodson’s “Mama” recalls her own mother’s attempt to teach her and a sister how to make collards and potato salad while male siblings were left to frolic. The girls stage a quiet household revolution to be as free as the boys, who purloined buckets of peaches from a neighbor’s tree and refused to share.
The peculiar rise of the “collard crime”
Before these women poets, collard references also appeared in racist limericks and doggerel. Just as the watermelon became a vehicle for stereotype, the collard green and its association with Black Southerners inspired racist creativity. The vegetable was conscripted to become an agricultural accessory to the national and Jim Crow project: the denigration and subjugation of Black Americans.
Circumstance, season, age and race made all the difference. For some people, collards were abundance; for others, subsistence food. It was the 1890s, and not everyone could go to the fair — or the same one. As Jim Crow laws swept the South, many states hosted separate “Colored State Fairs” or opted for a single fair that was theoretically for all but hosted a “colored day” when only African Americans could attend. And not everyone could sing the praises of fried chicken and collard greens without facing jeers.
Black collard love, “collardphilia” if you will, was supposedly so strong, that those in its sway would pilfer gorgeous greens from others’ gardens. Media accounts suggested that collard spats frequently disrupted civil order, like when Atlantan Clara Mitchell’s “vengeful lawlessness” started a brawl when she cut down Bob Pounds’ winter collards in October 1897. But newspapers also contradicted themselves about the prevalence of collard crime: The Clarion-Ledger railed about a 1930 overnight collard theft in Jackson, Mississippi, saying “This hideous act is without precedent in this city!” It shook its editorial head at the presence of a “perverted and malicious vandal” in its midst. One can guess what a perverted and malicious vandal looked like in the Southern white imagination.