Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor facts for kids

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor (born April 4, 1937 – died September 3, 2016) was an American expert on food and culture. She was also a writer and a broadcaster.

Vertamae grew up in a Gullah family in South Carolina. The Gullah people have a unique culture and language. When she was a child, her family moved to Philadelphia. Later, she lived in Paris, France, before settling in New York City. She was part of the Black Arts Movement, which celebrated African American art and culture. She also performed on Broadway.

Her many travels helped her understand cooking and food as important parts of culture. She was famous for her cookbook and memoir, Vibration Cooking: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970). She also wrote many essays and articles. Vertamae made two award-winning documentaries and was a commentator for years on NPR.

Grosvenor also appeared in several movies. These included Daughters of the Dust (1992), which was about a Gullah family. She was also in Beloved (1998), based on a book by Toni Morrison. She was even in a National Geographic documentary about the Gullah people.

Early Life and Learning

Vertamae Smart was born in 1937. She was a premature twin, but her brother did not survive. She grew up in Hampton County, South Carolina. This area is known as the Low Country. She spoke Gullah as a child. Her family had lived in the area for hundreds of years. They were part of the Gullah culture. In this region, many Africans were brought to plantations. They developed a special culture and language with strong ties to Africa.

Vertamae grew up eating Low Country food. She wrote about her grandmother Estella Smart's way of cooking oysters in her first cookbook. She noticed that African cooking and Low Country African American cooking had similar ways. This made her interested in food as a way to show culture.

When she was about eight, her family moved to Philadelphia. She lived there through her teenage years. As an only child, she had a lot of time to try out cooking. She wrote in Vibration Cooking, "I would use up all the food experimenting and she [my mother] would never fuss." She realized later how hard this must have been for her mother, because they were very poor.

Starting Her Career

In 1958, when she was 19, Vertamae went to Paris, France. She wanted to work in theater in Europe. She also traveled to cities in Italy and other European countries. In Paris, she saw a woman from Senegal selling food on the street. The woman used cooking methods that Vertamae knew from her own family and the Low Country. This made her start writing about food and cooking as a way to show culture.

In Paris, she met Bob Grosvenor, whom she later married. One of her hobbies in Paris was looking for "unusual food stores." A friend told her about a store that "sold frozen lion's tails and elephant tails with green peas."

In 1968, Grosvenor went back to Paris. She lived there for a while with her two children, Kali and Chandra.

She later settled in New York City. There, she became an actress and performed on Broadway. She was interested in the Black Arts Movement. This movement included artists like Nikki Giovanni. For three years, she was a dancer, costume designer, and often a cook for a music group called Sun Ra's Solar-Myth Arkestra.

Broadcasting Work

Vertamae Grosvenor worked for a long time in public broadcasting in the United States. She was a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered. She also contributed regularly to NPR's Cultural Desk. Some of her early important programs were her documentaries. These included Slave Voices: Things Past Telling (1983) and Daufuskie: Never Enough Too Soon. The second one won her a Robert F. Kennedy Award.

From 1988 to 1995, she hosted NPR's show Horizons. Her work there included AIDS and Black America: Breaking the Silence. This program was about the AIDS crisis in the United States. It won two awards in 1990. She also made a program about the connections between people in South Africa and African Americans. It was called South Africa and the African-American Experience.

She hosted the radio show Seasonings. This was a series of holiday specials about food, cooking, and culture. It won a James Beard Award in 1996. She also hosted The Americas' Family Kitchen on PBS. This show later became a TV show called Vertamae Cooks.

Her Writing

Grosvenor wrote several books about African-American cooking. But she is most famous for Vibration Cooking: or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (1970). This book is a cookbook and a memoir about her life.

In addition to books, she was an editor for Élan and Essence magazines. She also wrote articles for Village Voice, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.

She used different names for her writing. These included Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Verta Smart, and Vertamae Grosvenor.

Vibration Cooking

Vibration Cooking: or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl was first published in 1970. It was reprinted many times. In this book, Vertamae writes about her travels and her experiences as a black woman. She shares how food shaped her life.

Grosvenor talks about how food can nourish, connect people, and feel like home. She says cooking can be a way to express yourself. The title, Vibration Cooking, comes from her idea of "vibrations." She writes that when she cooks, she does it "by vibration." This means using intuition and all your senses. "Vibrations" also mean the energy and attitude you bring to cooking or eating.

The book mixes stories with recipes. The recipes are often conversational and don't always have exact measurements. They are part of her storytelling. Grosvenor encourages readers to trust their own feelings when cooking. She tells them to notice when food looks "right" or "done."

Her goal was to share creative ideas and to correct wrong ideas about African-American food. She wanted to tell stories about the people, the food, and its history. She wrote that "Soul food" was often misunderstood. She ties "soul food" to the good "vibrations" she uses when cooking.

She wrote:

People up here [in the North] act like it's going to a lot of trouble just to give you a glass of water and whenever those vibrations hit me, I remember how Aunt Carrie, with no electricity, no running water, no gas, no refrigerator, not even an icebox got us a beautiful supper with love. I know that northern folks are out to lunch and better go down south and get their soul card punched".

She made it clear that "soul food" is not just about race. She said, "To call it 'soul food'—it's how you could put your soul in the pot... You can't just say food that's been cooked by black hands. Black hands have been cooking food for centuries."

She did not see herself only as a "soul food" writer. In a later edition of her book, she wrote that any dish she made, no matter where it came from, could be "soulful." She chose to write about African-American cooking because she knew its wonderful history. She also felt that African-American cooks were not appreciated enough.

The book also talks about how some foods, like collards and terrapins, became "gourmet" foods. These foods had been part of African-American cooking for a long time. Grosvenor pointed out that white people often "discovered" foods after black people had been eating them for ages.

She used food to talk about racism and cultural understanding. She wrote about her own experiences of being treated unfairly as a black woman. She also shared her frustration with how African-American cooking was often simplified. She even included a letter she wrote to Time magazine. They had said soul food was tasteless. She wrote, "Your taste buds are so racist that they can't even deal with black food."

Documentary About Her

In 2015, filmmaker Julie Dash started a project to make a documentary about Vertamae Grosvenor. The film is called Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl.

Her Family Life

Vertamae Smart married Bob Grosvenor. They had a daughter named Kali Grosvenor in 1960. Kali Grosvenor-Henry is now a poet and writer. In 1969, a publisher decided to publish Kali's poetry and Vertamae's cookbook notes at the same time. So, in 1970, when Kali was nine, both Poems by Kali and Vibration Cooking were published.

In 1962, Grosvenor had another daughter, Chandra Ursule Weinland-Brown. Chandra is an actress, artist, and poet.

Awards and Honors

• Robert F. Kennedy Award for Daufuskie: Never Enough Too Soon (1990)
• Ohio State Award for Daufuskie: Never Enough Too Soon (1990)
• duPont-Columbia Award for AIDS and Black America: Breaking the Silence (1990)
• National Association of Black Journalists Award for her NPR piece South Africa and the African-American Experience (1990)
• CEBA Award for Marcus Garvey: 20th Century Pan-Africanist (1991)
• James Beard Award for Best Radio Show for Seasonings on NPR (1996)
• Honorary doctorate from the University of New Hampshire (1998)
• Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Foodways Alliance