Grits by Any Other Name
While studying in Uganda, one Southerner learned that even eight thousand miles away, familiar flavors can bring you home in an instant.
The first time I saw posho, I thought it would taste like sweet air.
There was something about that bright mound, served on a plate between trays of goat and plantain, that reminded me of angel food cake. You could blame my ignorance on optimism, a hope that I could satisfy my craving for sugar with something other than chilled lemon soda. Blame it, too, on the dim light provided by a dying campfire. I had never seen posho, never broken it between my fingers and dipped it in groundnut sauce, never savored it to the sweet chords of slow conversation. I didn’t even know to call that porridge posho. I was naïve. Foreign. Homesick for the proud decadence of Southern food.
I arrived in southeastern Uganda in early September, one of fifteen American students studying wildlife conservation and political ecology in the pearl of Africa. I was far from home—eight-thousand miles from the rhododendron-lined riverbanks of north Georgia, the playground I called my own as a young girl. Eight thousand miles from my childhood home on the outskirts of Atlanta, and farther still from my four siblings who scattered across the country like dry leaves after graduation.
With doughy skin and hair that a few local girls described as the color of sisal twine, I was a spectacle in a temporary home. I grew accustomed to the excited, urgent cries of “mzungu!” that followed me through village centers and to the curious hands of small children.
“I like your feathers,” one boy told me, in awe of my wispy blonde arm hair.
Dust clung to the sweat on my skin. Even Georgia asphalt couldn’t prepare me for this sort of proximity to the sun.
Amid my otherness and longing for anonymity, I searched for traces of familiarity. Lightning that split the sky like a Southern storm. Little boys who gleefully played soccer in an afternoon deluge of hot rain. A faded Dolly Parton poster on the outside of a bar in Kampala. Inescapable, unrelenting heat that begged for some kind of makeshift fan and a simile or two. It’s as hot as…. Birds whose cousins I knew well—pied crows, Malachite kingfishers, Northern gray-headed sparrows. I kept these glimpses of home close, held them tight like lightning bugs in a Mason jar.
It was early November when I was offered another helping of posho, done up differently this time—a little less ground corn, a little more water. A little less stiff, a little more of a thick porridge.
I was again on the edge of a dying fire, this one propped on a hilltop overlooking Lake Victoria and an array of Highland banana plantations. I had come to the village of Ziba, alone, by a combination of city bus, wooden canoe, and motorbike to pursue a research project on wetland birds. The welcome in Ziba was ebullient, if wary. The village pastor, inn owner, roadside chapati chef, schoolchildren, canoe guide, watermelon farmer—their eyes rested a little longer when I passed, necks craned from door frames to linger on my burnt skin and binoculars. Often eager to introduce a wayward American to their haven of papyrus swamp, always confused by the choices that led me to stay in Ziba for a month to study, of all things, the chatty weaver birds and hornbills that abounded like stray dogs.It was the village pastor, Ivan, who offered me the posho. I sat with my back against his home, peeling sugarcane, watching him prod the boiling porridge with a stick. His roommate squatted next to a blue washtub nearby, smiling widely and wringing a few shirts into a mountain of suds. Dust clung to the sweat on my skin. Even Georgia asphalt couldn’t prepare me for this sort of proximity to the sun. Ivan handed me a bowl, apologizing that he had no utensil to offer.
Watered down and without expectation of sweetness, posho tasted unmistakably like home.
Not exactly like the battleship-gray house east of Atlanta that I grew up in, the one three stories high with a hole in the back fence and a stately magnolia out front. It tasted more like summers spent deep in rural Alabama with a hundred or so relatives who shared the same great-great-great-granddaddy, or something like that. Summers when my godmother, with snow-white hair and capris to match, wrapped her arms around me and offered me butter grits from a pan resting in the sink. During those sticky mornings in early July, we would sit in green rocking chairs on the front porch of the home place, cradling paper plates of grits and biscuits and fig preserves and always bacon, exchanging stories from the past year. Young cousins sat on the porch rails, barefoot and sleepy. Crickets buzzed with the sort of attitude and urgency only cicadas can match.
Eight thousand miles from Sixmile, Alabama, I was comforted by the nostalgia of ground corn.
Ivan and Elijah abandoned the washtub and fire to sit on their front stoop and eat. Sprinkling some English into his Luganda for my benefit, Elijah recounted how he stoned a Great Blue Turaco the night before. The bird came down effortlessly with a slingshot, a crumple of iridescent blue feathers on a patch of bare dirt. Ivan listened in what appeared to be horror.
“You told me that you killed a chicken yesterday. I thought that’s what we ate for dinner.” Elijah grinned that wide grin. “Eh, you couldn’t tell the difference, could you?” He then turned to me and said in his proud, emphatic way that I had grown to appreciate, “Madam, how is the posho?”
I felt time collapsing, the way it does when good food and friendship and a golden sun collide. I was on a front stoop in southeastern Uganda watching a setting sun bathe banana leaves in gold—but I was also home.
I felt time collapsing, the way it does when good food and friendship and a golden sun collide. I was on a front stoop in southeastern Uganda watching a setting sun bathe banana leaves in gold—but I was also home. I was on a porch listening to my great uncle or grandfather or 16-year-old third cousin tell a story that catches you just off-guard enough to make you wonder whether it’s okay to laugh.
The posho began to take the shape of the bowl beneath it, the same way grits congeal and hug the edges of paper plates after too much time, pats of butter forming small pools on top.
“The posho is delicious. Thank you.”
For as long as I can still boil water, I will make grits. I will continue to add enough dairy to make an iron stomach churn, to scrape the sticky bottoms of casserole dishes, to defend the soul of Southern cooking when others deem grits tasteless, too textured, or as one acquaintance from college put it, “bland poor man’s food.” Grits are a reminder of the people who built me and the land that raised me, a place as vibrant and complicated as any I’ve ever known.
Grits also happen to make this world a little smaller. Because corn porridge by any name tastes like home.
About the author
Before moving to the Canadian prairie to research shorebird migration at the University of Saskatchewan, Sydney Marie Jones grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and earned a bachelor's degree in biology from Carleton College in Minnesota. As she continues to chase colder winters and increasingly desolate places, she is anchored by memories of home and her family, who will always return to Georgia and Alabama to gather.
Great story Sydney. Especially being your first work.
Grits keep us Southerners grounded.
This story is so amazing ,I’ve been so excited as I was reading about Sydney Marie’s story .
She is very super very smart and dedicated person and everything she does is done with her sweet heart .. I’m positive about her talent and she can makes it beyond to be a successful person. Such fascinating experience can turn out to be an exciting book for reading . Nice job