Finding peace amid isolation
Losing yourself in cooking, finding yourself in food
Being black in San Francisco is akin to being visibly invisible. It’s an existence suspended in a polychromatic limbo, a rare mocha dot amid a sea of hues.
This perspective is intrinsically unique to a generation of black Millennials born too late to have visited the Fillmore when it was the Harlem of the West, home to frequent jazz visitors like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie. Ghosts of the neighborhood’s minority-owned clubs like Bop City, restaurants, and pool halls in the 1940s and 1950s exist now as upscale shops and hipster-chic eateries.
It’s a steep decline over time from the 1970s when 1 in every 7 San Francisco residents was black, to 2016 where the number was 1 in 20.
Suffice to say, it’s a lonely life being black in San Francisco.
I recently needed insight on how to live happily, in the cultural sense, as a 30-yearold black man in the city. Luckily, I met Shani Jones, a black woman in the local food industry who has called the city home for all but a fraction of her life. When I asked her how she finds refuge from a visibly invisible existence, her answer was simple: in food.
Jones is the proprietor of Peaches Patties, one of the city’s few Caribbean food outfits, and she named her business after her mother, a Kingston, Jamaica, native who went by Peaches. The family matriarch moved to the U.S. and married Jones’ New Orleans-born father.
In the Jones household, the cultural collaboration resulted in eclectic dinners: grilled meats with Jamaican flavors served on the same table as Creole stews and gumbos. This spurred Shani’s love of bold spices and culturally rooted recipes. That same passion gave birth to Peaches Patties.
“I can get lost in cooking. It’s something that’s therapeutic, and it’s a way to learn about yourself, learn about the people around you,” she says. “It’s been my escape when I need it to be.”
I confessed to Shani that as a Louisiana native who grew up in a small city where 57 percent of the population was black, I’ve been imbued with a sense of loneliness and isolation since moving to the Bay Area last year. But the loneliness isn’t a social construct, I clarified. It’s cultural, which itself embodies more of an emotional ache, exacerbated by the fact that African American culture is beloved by the nonblack Bay Area populace.
A cookie dough business can debut with hip-hop theme offerings, unaware of the correlating cultural appropriation. And BART conversations between Millennial tech workers span the gamut from the merits of Kanye West’s “Life of Pablo” album to the effortless beauty of Beyoncé — yet bags are clutched just a little tighter if a hoodie-clad, Kanye-looking male boards the train with them.
Shani and I grew up different. We also grew up very much the same. She attended Clark Atlanta University, a historically black college in Georgia, where she learned, among other things, about the beauty of Southern hospitality in black culture: “The black community is supportive there. They care about each other and that wasn’t something I’d never experienced,” she says.
She also discovered the similarities between Southern, overt racism — Confederate flags hanging from porches or restaurant windows — and the modern aesthetics of racism in 2017, where collared shirts and tiki torches can be repurposed as uniforms of hate. The lack of a black population in San Francisco has made racism more subtle, Jones says, less aggressive in the form of intolerance. Condescension. Dismissiveness.
“If I’m working at the kiosk, and especially if I have a head wrap on, people that aren’t black sometimes come in and want a Broadway production. A white guy once came in and said with a Jamaican accent, ‘Let me get a patty, bombaclot.’ I immediately told him that was not OK,” she says. “I’m not shucking and jiving for anyone. Sometimes people will ask me to do the accent anyway, like that’s OK. It’s frustrating.”
Racially tinged interactions are a core tenet of the black experience. Jones knew this even at a young age. She says she had to be an overachiever in grade school in order to be treated with respect by white teachers. She said she had to be a better citizen, more upstanding, with better manners than her white counterparts to simply not be judged or stereotyped because of her skin.
“I remember days where I’d be playing near the street at my house and white people who lived in the neighborhood with us would stop and ask if we lived in our house. Or if we were lost,” she says.
Cooking is her tangible way to connect with a part of her heritage not reflected in her environment. Jones doesn’t have a brick-andmortar location for Peaches Patties, but her temporary digs at 331 Cortland Avenue still provide a sense of comfort — a sense of calm achieved by losing herself in an order for her Jamaican grilled jerk chicken, Jamaican roast beef or Jamaican curry with potatoes.
“I love what I do. I feel connected to what I do. It’s an answer to that loneliness we talk about,” Jones said. “This is my refuge.”
And as one of the few black people left in this city, I completely understand.