‘Sinners’ on screen, a culinary history unleashed

The new horror flick starring Michael B. Jordan uncovers hidden cultures of the Mississippi Delta.

Warner Bros. Pictures

My mother left Mississippi when she was 18 years old. She had always planned to leave at some point, but what accelerated her decision was when a racist white state employee refused to grant her a driver’s license because she didn’t call him “sir.”

Therefore, my brother and I only got a taste of Mississippi life when we drove down there almost every summer in the 1970s and 1980s for a couple of weeks to visit family who had never left. Those relatives all resided in the northern part of the state or the southern part, which included Biloxi.

There were two worlds in Mississippi, as far as I was concerned, and to which I was exposed. There were white folks and there was the Black community, where I felt like everyone treated us like family even if we were not related. I never even considered there were other races and cultures in the state—and I never saw other races portrayed in civil rights movies like “Mississippi Burning” and “A Time To Kill”—until Eldridge Williams opened The Delta in Chicago seven years ago.

Situated in the uber-yuppie Bucktown neighborhood, the Southern-inspired eatery specialized in fried collard greens, shrimp and grits, fried catfish, red beans and rice, cornbread and buttermilk biscuits. There were also bourbon cocktails, hard cider, fried chicken fried rice, smoked Cajun corn elotes and red hot tamales.

If that menu sounds like it was all over the place, it wasn’t. It accurately reflected the culinary history of the Mississippi Delta. The region was situated in the northwest part of the state, plus portions of Arkansas and Louisiana. In addition to the Black and white communities, there was strong presence of Chinese, Mexican and Native Americans. Thus, the diverse menu reflected those cultures.

I hadn’t thought about The Delta restaurant in a while (it recently shuttered until further notice) until we watched the new Black horror film,“Sinners,” featuring Michael B. Jordan. The movie is outstanding. There’s no doubt about it. There’s just so much to take in during those two intense hours set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932.

What really struck me was the downtown scene with a tamale restaurant next door to an establishment specializing in fried catfish. Then, there was the Chinese family-owned general store. Much later in the film, a group from the Choctaw Nation rode up on their horses to warn residents about the dangers ahead, but their presence was brief.

Photo by Kim Daniels on Unsplash

But back to the food.

It’s always fascinating to get to the root of a favorite dish. I strongly believe that we don’t acknowledge enough just how influential Native Americans are to what we consider American cuisine. For example, grits, is a staple in Southern and soul food foodways. You’ll find it prominently on menus from coast to coast, from Portland, Oregon, in Miss Delta’s Grits Breakfast Bowl to the crispy fried flounder served over a mound of buttery grits at 82 Queen in Charleston, South Carolina. There’s also shrimp and grits, sweet grits, and grits with bits of bacon in it.

We would not have any of those variations without the Native American Muscogee tribe, who are credited with creating this delightful, creamy dish.

“The evidence exists that corn was being milled in 8700 B.C. in Central America,” Erin Byers Murray, author of Grits: A Cultural and Culinary Journey Through The South, says in an interview with NPR. “There must have been a dish of ground corn and water cooked over heat. It's a food product that's not just historic—it's ancient."

There are also the red hot tamales, an inexpensive snack that I remember devouring as a kid, not during those annual trips to Mississippi, but on Chicago’s South Side. I never gave much thought to them being on the menus at little corner neighborhood spots. I just loved them because of the earthy taste of cornmeal with a dollop of seasoned shredded chicken in between. It was the next best thing to my mom’s cornbread.

I had no idea tamales boasted Southern roots until I first ate at The Delta. Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) historian Amy C. Evans writes that their history is still complicated: “Some hypothesize that tamales made their way to the Mississippi Delta in the early twentieth century when migrant laborers from Mexico arrived to work the cotton harvest. African Americans who labored alongside Mexican migrants recognized the basic tamale ingredients: corn meal and pork.

“Others maintain that the Delta history with tamales goes back to the U.S.-Mexican War one hundred years earlier, when U.S. soldiers traveled to Mexico and brought tamale recipes home with them. Others still argue that tamales date to the Mississippian culture of mound-building Native Americans.” To add credibility to these claims, SFA conducted oral history interviews with tamale makers and vendors to reveal the various ways in which tamale recipes have been acquired and how they have changed.

In “Sinners,” a Chinese-American couple plays a pivotal role from beginning to end. That’s as real as it gets because the Chinese community was very much integral to the Delta’s economy, according to an NPR story by Melissa Block in 2017. That was also the same year The Delta opened in Chicago.

“The first wave of Chinese immigrants came to the Delta soon after the Civil War, and the pace picked up by the early 1900s,” Block writes. “The Chinese originally came to work picking cotton, but they quickly soured on farming. They started opening grocery stores, mostly in the African-American communities where they lived.”

It’s important to note that Chinese immigrants brought with them fried rice—it had been a staple in China for centuries to prevent food waste—yet it evolved once they found themselves in the American South. Its predecessors were Mexican rice and Cajun dirty rice, according to experts.

Further evidence comes from Dr. John Jung, author of Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain; Chopsticks in the Land of Cotton: Lives of Mississippi Delta Chinese Grocers; Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants and A Chinese American Odyssey.

“The Chinese don’t waste anything,” he explained during a presentation of his book, Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants. “We are great at recycling.”

In the end, it’s all just great food.