"White men are too much,"; says a Negro advertising copywriter in New York. "Here we are, trying to live the way they do, and what happens? They get themselves beads and shades (dark glasses) and go out and dance the boogaloo." Indeed, few Negroes can suppress a grin at the growing fascination among earnest whites for things black.
The most bewildering of all is the current hunger for black cookery. Soul food, Southern Negro cooking that was born in the slave quarters and is based on ingredients that the plantation owner ordinarily would not have on his table, has become a fad in U.S. dining.
For those who want it, of course, soul food has always been around. In Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), a Communist organizer tried to impress the black protagonist by eating soul food in a black restaurant in a black neighborhood. One of the reasons that Rodgers and Hart's lady was a tramp back in 1937 was that she wouldn't "go to Harlem in ermine and pearls."
In those days, the few white connoisseurs of ham hocks and black-eyed peas had to go to Watts or Chicago's South Side to get them. To supply today's faddists, soul food is moving out of the ghetto.
Two new soul-food cookbooks have just gone on the market, and every week or so soul-food restaurants open in white sections of Manhattan, Chicago, Los Angeles and cities in between.
King of Wings. At Manhattan's West Boondock, tor example, miniskirted waitresses ply the tables while a jazz combo plays softly in the background; there is a wine list, and Diners' Club or Carte Blanche cards are honored. The Player's Choice, a restaurant on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip that claims to be "strictly soul," is jammed to the rafters each night with customers—90% of them white— dining with apparent gusto on such soul specialties as barbecued ribs and yams. Melvin's, a soul-food place in the heart of Boston's department-store district, is a popular luncheon spot for shoppers and a favorite meeting place for professional athletes, both black and white.
The Little Kitchen, an 18-seat restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side, got such good newspaper reviews that its Negro owner-cook, who calls herself "Princess Pamela," finally closed the place for three weeks last month to get a rest. In Detroit, Charlie Red, owner of a soul-food takeout business who is known locally as the "King of Wings," reports that orders from whites for his fried chicken wings in barbecue sauce have nearly quintupled in the past two months. The craze has even spread to Paris, where Leroy Haynes, an expatriate Chicagoan, serves Spanish yams and African okra in his restaurant near Pigalle. Last Thanksgiving, Liz and Richard Burton took 58 friends to dinner there and ran up a $2,000 tab.