For years, I've been trying to resolve an argument that has divided our family for decades.
Why are my sister’s candied yams so inferior?
Look, I love my sister Comelita, so I would never publicly disparage her culinary skills. I am even willing to acknowledge that she is good at cooking non-yam cuisine. In fact, Comelita ranks in the top five cooks among my three siblings. She just had the unfortunate circumstance of being raised with an older brother who became one of the world’s foremost candiedyamologists. I can’t even imagine what it’s like growing up with a sweet potato prodigy like myself, but I assume it’s like singing in a children’s choir with Luther Vandross or being in a summer program for gifted and talented narcissists with Amanda Seales.
I don’t know the exact year the Great Candied Yam War began, but it has since become a legendary battle in the Harriot culinary universe. When I press family members privately, they will all concede that Comelita’s recipe tastes like Keith Sweat singing the national anthem. Yet, for more than 20 years, my sister has been engaged in an exercise in futility to convince the world that her candied yams don’t taste like sepia-toned photographs and wishful thinking when compared to mine.
I blame it on a childhood head injury that she suffered during an impromptu race in our church parking lot. It’s possible that the aliens who abducted her when she was 19 mistakenly erased her ability to remember how our grandmother made her yams. She claims she was just hanging out with our cousin Carmetta for a few days, but her sweet potato inability curiously coincides with her brief disappearance. In any case, she still refuses to acknowledge her position as the second-best yam maker in the family.
We may never know why my yams are better. All we know is that Comelita’s yams are why Jesus wept. Comelita’s candied yams got into Harvard on a DEI scholarship. Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” was originally about people who like Comelita’s yams. In fact, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sanford decision even talks about Comelita’s yams:
They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with her brother’s yams, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no taste which Michael Harriot was bound to respect.
Now, according to the members of our family, our candied yams taste exactly the same. They’ll point out that we use the exact same recipe, which came from our mother, who learned to make candied yams from our grandmother. But they’re just trying to spare Comelita’s feelings. Trust me, I know better. My belief in my candied yams might sound obnoxious, arrogant or crazy, but still …
It makes more sense than white supremacy.
Today’s reading list:
Pieces of Chicken, Ranked by Michael Harriot
How We Found Out About COINTELPRO by Martin Oppenheimer
The enslaved man who popularised mac and cheese by Lynn Brown
Just Being Black Was Enough to Get Yourself Spied on by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI by Betty Medsger
F.B.I., Before Raid, Gave Police Plan of Chicago Panther’s Flat by John Kifner
Thank you, Leslye Colvin, Dr. Mary M. Marshall, Jen Frye, Cris, P. J. Schuster, and many others for tuning into the Wake-Up Call live video! Subscribe to ContrabandCamp for our next live video.
