Global Holiday 1

A Pea In My Pocket

Flying pans and bowls with colorful food swirl through the purple air with champagne glasses and candles.

A line graph shows an increasing direction, punctuated by spot illustrations of bacon, an elderly woman, a ham hock, and a dancing man.

text and illustrations by Mariah-Rose Marie

A giant raw steak sits upon a stack of papers, next to a small book with a woman's image on it, next to images of meat like ham, ribs, and sausage with red x's through them.

The bottom half of a woman's face with dangly earrings beside a pair of hands shelling peas.

Foods like acaraje, akara, cakes, kosai, koose, and more have flags of African countries stuck in them.

A girl sits barefoot at a desk with books next to a woman standing in front of a full moon with the ocean in front of her, next to a pair of hand cradling dirt with a sprout coming out.

A watermelon, a peanut plant, a pepper plant, and an okra plant float on a beige background.

The planet earth has a large pea plant growing out of it.

It’s a tradition for Southern people — especially those of African descent — to eat black-eyed peas around the New Year to bring good luck and prosperity for the year ahead.

But about 10 years ago, our family’s tradition of slow-cooked black-eyed peas with ham hock suddenly changed when my grandparents were advised to cut red meat out of their diets, or risk their lives.

Their blood pressure was high, and they were at serious risk for heart disease, gout, colon cancer, and so many of the health problems that Black, Indigenous, and many immigrant communities are associated with.

A number of my relatives were already suffering from or had died from these things.

So although it was unthinkable for my grandmother — the family matriarch and cooking queen — to halt her practice of providing succulent arrays of meats year-round, she cut it all out, cold turkey.

A woman with large earrings stands next to an older woman in a head wrap while the silhouettes of other people speak with thought bubbles with question marks.

Hands stir a red pot full of food with whimsical steam and sparkles rising above.

This happened to coincide with my own decision to go vegetarian. Between this and my grandmother’s changing of the family menu, it was all deeply controversial.

But I was always her dedicated sous chef for any holiday or otherwise, so we collaborated on how we could make our typically meat-heavy dishes flavorful in other ways.

Black-eyed peas were one of our first experiments. Instead of ham hock, we used vegetable stock and shiitake mushrooms, and we tripled the garlic.

(Everyone approved.)

Those long hours cooking together were holy to me.

The smoke and steam seemed to draw out precious germs of memory.

My grandmother would reveal unspoken family history, from its painful, beautiful beginnings in the South to the Great Migration north, and beyond — all the things she didn't know about where we came from, all the things she did…

She would remember things, little cultural practices with origins nobody could seem to trace. Like how some folks in her hometown would keep a pea in their wallet to attract money or good fortune.

During one of those precious talks (in a failed attempt to sate a craving for fried chicken without the chicken), I shared a recipe for black-eyed-pea fritters I thought my grandmother would like.

Not only were they familiar to her, but after some research, I learned they may be the most diasporic African food there is.

Since my grandmother passed away two years ago, I’ve poured my grief into the historical, cultural, and culinary gaps that she and I spoke so much about filling.

I’ve learned that the association between black-eyed peas and prosperity did not begin during the hard times of the Civil War, as some sources claim, but dates back thousands of years to West Africa, where the bean was first cultivated.

Enslaved people brought the bean to what we now call the Americas as a means of survival.

If one could grow the food one was familiar with — even in unfamiliar soil, and under terrible circumstances — then one could live.

I learned that many familiar foods share the same African origins or introductions.

And that the significance of the pea in West African and diasporic cultures included a symbol of fertility, offerings for spirits, protection from the evil eye, and good luck.

And that even today, many people carry one in their bag or pocket for prosperity.

A giant black eyed pea and its pod shine and hover above the silhouettes of African people like the sun

I suppose I’m a little obsessed with the peas now, because of how they’ve connected me with a history I never thought I would know in my life.

They are a physical link to everyone in the diaspora, and a tether all the way back to my ancestors, who managed to pass such a little thing along, across the Atlantic, and through generations of trauma and cultural erasure, to my holiday table.

The plants suffuse life into overworked soil and feed many species of pollinators with their blooms.

A pair of hands presents a pot of black eyed peas with candles and sparkles surrounding.

And they remind me of my grandmother, too.

For me and my late grandmother, family history would unfurl in front of a stewing pot of black-eyed peas

Mariah-Rose Marie is a graphic novelist, storyboard artist, and writer based in Tovaangar, aka Los Ángeles. Find the recipe for black eyed pea fritters and more in Mariah-Rose's new international cookbook and guide, COOK LIKE YOUR ANCESTORS.