Soul Food and Self-Provisioning: VertaMae Smart-Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking

Although it was first published in 1970, only eight years before Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine , VertaMae Smart-Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking: Or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl seems a half-century distant: irreverent where the Dardens are worshipful, exuberant where the Dardens are restrained, flippant where the sisters are in earnest, and—most important with respect to autobiography—elusive, presenting readers with a multiplicity of seemingly incompatible self-representations. To the extent that Smart-Grosvenor makes use of the metaphor of travel to describe a self in process, Vibration Cooking is reminiscent of Jessica Harris's Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons . And, as with Harris's book, the model of the self in Smart-Grosvenor's autobiography is historicized by being developed in the context of colonialism. In this passage invoking the Under-

ground Railroad, however, cooking is not so much the metonym enabling political critique as it is itself quite literally a political act:

Sometimes they would be in the middle of their dinner when the stops [homes that hid slaves en route to freedom] got word that a slave or slaves were coming through that night. They might even have some neighbors or even members of the family there who were not cool . . . so they had to have signals to let each other know that tonight it would happen. Uncle Costen said they had a special dish they would serve called "Harriet Tubman Ragout." (29)

While this description locates the resistance to slavery inside the homes of African Americans rather than in the offices of William Lloyd Garrison, it does not oversimplify the dynamics of intraracial relations in order to do so. Community here is not a function of race but an active political choice; the picture of familial harmony around the kitchen table is deceptive, the affirmation of African American solidarity only apparent. Those readers who insist on racial uniformity put themselves in the position of the hood-winked individuals of more than one race, who unsuspectingly help themselves to second portions of a ragout that is to the circle of politically minded diners a vehicle for more than corporeal support.

This commentary provides a much-needed revision of a history of slavery and slave insurrections that is all too often framed in the plodding critical terms of binary opposition—those who "resist" set against those who "accede" to oppression. It provides, as well, a critique of that very aesthetic apparatus, the Black Arts movement, to which Smart-Grosvenor's epigraph to Amiri Baraka suggests her narrative owes a substantial debt. With Hurstonian resistance to being catalogued, the critical "community" Vibration Cooking 's title advertises as its own is simultaneously welcomed and held at arm's length by Smart-Grosvenor. Just as her commentary on the history of slave resistance invokes a position only to keep to its margins, so her use of the artistic credos of Black Power acknowledges her reliance upon such formulations and yet keeps them at a critical remove. On the one hand, then, she carries out Stokely Carmichael's manifesto on maintaining culture ("The racial and cultural personality of the black community must be preserved and the community must win its freedom while preserving its cultural integrity")^[25] when she argues for a reappraisal of black English:

You know people got to dig that "nigger dialect" is really beautiful. The slaves were just adapting to a language that wasn't their own. They were from many tribes, and plus the masters didn't talk too tough themselves. So they took the English language and did what they could with it and it was beautiful. Black people are the only people in this country who speak English and make it sound musical. (67–68)

On the other hand, she glories in parodies of Geechee tall tales that are designed not only to hoodwink unsuspecting white folks (this being almost too easy) but also to mock the sometimes pompous, often humorless prose of "Negro artists" whose black-and-white cultural models cannot do justice to the ragged contours of real life.

The "real life" of Smart-Grosvenor's Travel Notes has more switchbacks than Black Arts Movement critic James Stewart's formulations can safely negotiate.^[26] "In Paris I used to eat what they called crepes," Smart-Grosvenor recalls. "They are very good but I don't make them . . . . Crepes are delicate to make and you have to have an expensive and fancy pan to make them. I prefer hoe cake of bread like Grandmama Sula used to make" (20). Like white bread with a French accent, the crepe, sniffs Smart-Grosvenor, is too high-toned for any hard-working black girl from South Carolina to enjoy properly. Smart-Grosvenor's prose may be sassier than Stewart's essay, but her argument reproduces his own aesthetic agenda: "The dilemma of the 'negro' artist is that he makes assumptions based on the wrong models. He makes assumptions based on white models. These assumptions are not only wrong, they are even antithetical to his existence. . . . Our models must be consistent with a black style, our natural aesthetic styles, and our moral and spiritual styles" (3). Only a chapter later, however, Smart-Grosvenor doubles back to insist that "Salade Niçoise is a French name but just like with anything else when soul folks get it they take it out into another thing" (62). Recalling a series of wily female predecessors, this kind of contretemps flies in the face of Stewart's insistence that "we must even, ultimately, be estranged from the dominant culture. . . . Our black artists v can not be 'successful' in any sense that has meaning in white critical evaluations" (6). Like the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and her grandmother, who "use language as a weapon" to "suggest a feminine reflection of the trickster figure,"^[27] Smart-Grosvenor contravenes any attempt at systematizing and thus simplifying the complicated negotiations that make up both intra-and intercultural con-

tact or, as her chapter titles articulate this division, "Home" and "Away from Home."

Throughout her culinary travelogue, in fact, Smart-Grosvenor invokes truisms of race relations in order to suggest their ultimate unreliability as a gauge of her subjectivity. As a kind of trickster chef, she serves dishes that look like the genuine article but actually have unsuspecting readers consuming humble pie. The text begins as a cross between a Daniel Boone narrative of the Wild West—translated to the swamps of South Carolina as the story of "Birth, Hunting and Gator Tails"—and an account of miraculous birth reminiscent of Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road . Just as Hurston focused on the originality of her introduction to the world, with her mother assisted by a midwife who was not only white but male, in order to ensure her success as marked from the cradle, Smart-Grosvenor describes her own birth as a remarkable event, complete with fortuitous intercessor:

I was so weak they put me in a shoe box and put the box on the wood-stove oven door. That was a kind of incubator. My mother says it was a case of touch and go for a while, cause she got the childbirth fever. She said, "I'm sorry child you'll have to fend for yourself" and started to throw me in the fireplace but all praises due to the gods Aunt Rose caught me. When I go down south now they treat me so good, cause they know that I wasn't but three pounds when I was born. Everyone always says, "Well do Jesus. To think that you wasn't no bigger than a minute when you was born and now you six feet tall and strong and healthy and you got two fine children of your own. The Lord works in mysterious ways His praises to behold." (7–8)

From this singular beginning the author goes on to describe the equally unusual food she was raised on, more straightforward recipes for "Smothered Rabbit" and venison giving way to progressively campier concoctions like "Stewed Coon" and "Peacocks" (too beautiful to be eaten, the cook advises, in the event that a reader seriously considered the possibility), ending with a flourish of "African" standards like "Kangaroo Tail Stew" and "Elephant Tails" and the American version of them, "Betty's Barbecued Gator Tails." Even the most gullible of readers, one assumes, would find this culinary history of African American culture a trifle disingenuous, especially upon learning that the kangaroo tail must be obtained at the local gourmet food store. In case the more earnest fail to learn their les-

son such directives are followed by more explicit critiques which call attention to the tall tale the autobiographer plays out. Recalling a Thanksgiving spent in France, Smart-Grosvenor describes her search for "genuine" American food: "I ran around to find an exotic food store that sold American canned goods and finally found one near the Madeleine where I bought cranberry sauce and Maxwell House coffee" (59). The juxtaposition of the "exotic" with the mundane disappoints readers determined to find in "soul food" access to the cultural Other.

Placed in the context of the Black Arts Movement, Smart-Grosvenor's critique of (white) cultural voyeurism appears at once less startling—many of her contemporaries were writing to protest the commodification of African American culture—and more specifically coded as a gendered response, its argument and form invoking a feminine literary tradition. The flyleaf of the second edition of Vibration Cooking genders Smart-Grosvenor's argument from the outset; just as Janie ostensibly tells her story to Phoeby in Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God , VertaMae writes to Stella, framing her reevaluation of cooking with a traditionally feminine series of appeals. Smart-Grosvenor counsels Stella and, by implication, all her women readers, "If you cook with love and feed people, you got two forces cooled out already. . . . Food can cause happiness or unhappiness, health or sickness and make or break marriages." The beginning of the narrative proper genders such culinary labors even more clearly: "I like men who enjoy food," Smart-Grosvenor asserts in a pointed razzing of one of the tenets of late 1960s Anglo-American feminism. "Cooking for a man is a very feminine thing" (3). Marialisa Calta sees the recipes in Ntozake Shange's 1982 novel Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo as "a way to acknowledge all the time women spend cooking for and feeding other people" (time, Shange argues, that "'the world at large often doesn't see as significant'").^[28] Similarly, Smart-Grosvenor reevaluates cooking: if it is quotidian, it can also "make or break life."

Still, the immediate precursor to Smart-Grosvenor's book is unarguably Amiri Baraka's 1962 essay "Soul Food."^[29] Replaying Ellison's debt to Proustian memory ("I yam what I yam," the narrator of Invisible Man acknowledges, as the fragrance of roasting sweet potatoes recalls him to all of black Southern history), Baraka's sweet potato pies "taste . . . like memory." Anticipating Smart-Grosvenor's attention to the class inflections of the culinary metaphor, Baraka uses "collards and turnips and kale and

mustards" to critique the pretensions of the black bourgeoisie; since greens are "not fit for anybody but the woogies . . . they found a way to make them taste like something somebody would want to freeze and sell to a Negro going to Harvard as exotic European spinach" (86).

Thematically Smart-Grosvenor's riff on greens, as we see below, owes much to Baraka's, but its tone and form recall a distinguished series of female autobiographical precursors: canny like Harriet Jacobs, feisty as Harriet Wilson in Our Nig . But again it is Hurston as anthropologist and autobiographer that Vibration Cooking 's complicated, jokey self-situating most closely duplicates. Other Black Arts writers condemn not only whites, particularly those who Stokely Carmichael calls the "Pepsi generation" ("young middle-class Americans" who "have wanted to come alive through the black community"),^[30] but also blacks who have internalized the hegemonic standard. Larry Neal, for instance, indicts black literature for "providing exotic entertainment for white America" (650). But, like Baldwin's blues, "tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged" (41–42), Smart-Grosvenor's assessments are self-conscious and street-smart, sharp-eyed hits that implicate herself, with Hurstonian bravura, as both buyer and seller of culture: "I exploit Afro-American dishes every chance I get . . . for instance, collard greens" (xv–xvi), she brags with a devil-may-care-but-all-the-time-looking-back-over-your-shoulder duplicity. Reliable narrator? Hardly. From the outset, Smart-Grosvenor represents herself as a trickster figure, pointing readers in one direction while she walks off in the other. Consider this grocery store exchange:

So there I was, in line, holding my collard greens. A white woman asked me, "How do you people fix these?" Now, more than likely if I had not been in such a Purple Funk, I might have let the "you people" go by, but this particular morning I didn't. "Salad," I said. . . . I have often wondered if that white woman went home and actually made a collard green salad with Italian dressing. (xvi)

Like Cabeza de Baca's emphasis on the impossibility of complete translation, Smart-Grosvenor's willful mistranslation provides a check on readers—at least white readers—eager to make African American culture their own. As a comment on the pitfalls of cross-cultural exchange, the story provides a gloss on the book itself, suggesting that cooks think twice before reproducing its recipes.

There are other cautionary tales. Take the coda to the story of how hush puppies got their name, for instance: "You can believe this," she says, "if you believe all the other American folk tales" (94). Besides providing the writer with a degree of interpretive control, such tongue-in-cheek gestures at the expense of the credulous also affirm black pride as they critique the paucity of white culture. The word-play in recipes for "Steak with Beautiful Black Sauce" and "Stuffed Heart Honky Style" (114, 115) requires no further commentary. While African American tradition is celebrated via culinary custom, Anglo-American culture is denounced through its edibles as a contradiction in terms. The directions for "Cracker Stew" advise cooks to "take a can of any kind of soup and add 1 box of any kind of frozen vegetables and then add 1 cup of Minute Rice. Heat and serve with toasted crackers on top" (79). The implicit contrast drawn between Anglo cultural poverty and the richness of African American life is later made explicit when Smart-Grosvenor describes the dinner preparations of a white colleague in the theater. "No smells of food cooking or having been cooked" (101) issue from the kitchen. The meal, when it arrives, is prepackaged: frozen peas, instant potatoes, canned chicken. Returning to her own kitchen, the author promptly "fried a piece of liver and put on a little bit of grits and in a short time I had an epicurean delight" (102). Echoing analyses by Killen, who characterizes white culture as the "pallid mainstream of American life," and Addison Gayle, who critiques gringo "cultural deprivation,"^[31] the Anglo-American cultural repast, according to Smart-Grosvenor, is scant: show without substance, containing little real nourishment—let alone flavor.^[32]

While such indictments provide readers with an appreciation of the fullness of Afro-American tradition, they tend to a certain extent to occlude the autobiographical subject herself. That is, although such anecdotes are often framed as personal narrative, the cross-cultural comparison they develop positions the subject as an ethnographic "we," a collective identity rigidly framed in opposition to "them." Consider, for instance, how the following critique of "white bread culture" positions pronouns, constructing an "I" contingent upon its affiliation with an aggregate that is unable to accommodate difference: "You white folks just keep on eating that white foam rubber bread that sticks to the roof of your mouth, and keep on eating Minute Rice and instant potatoes, instant cereals and drinking instant milk and stick to your instant culture. And I will stick to

the short-lived fad that brought my ancestors through four hundred years of oppression" (l77).^[33]

The "I" who eloquently protests racism and affirms African American survival expresses herself as a spokesperson more than she asserts singularity here. Yet at the opening of the text Smart-Grosvenor as vigorously affirms her specificity as a black woman writer who can maintain a cultural vision while she simultaneously practices cultural pluralism. She refuses to fix her identity as a "soul food" writer:

It seemed to me while certain foods have been labelled "soul food" and associated with Afro-Americans, Afro-Americans could be associated with all foods. . . . My kitchen was the world. . . . I don't have culinary limitations because I'm "black." On the other hand, I choose to write about "Afro-American" cookery because I'm "black" and know the wonderful, fascinating culinary history there is. (xv)

Unlike the concordance of autobiographic and ethnographic discourses which in Jessica Harris's Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons and the Darden sisters' Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine situates the subject in cultural context, in VertaMae Smart-Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking the languages of self and culture often appear at odds: contradictory, discontinuous, working against one another. Impulses toward black collectivity counterpoint an emphasis—reminiscent of that in Hurston's autobiography—on the miracle of the self's uniqueness. Yet this self-assertion is itself abruptly exchanged for an affirmation of "my people."

On the one hand, then, Smart-Grosvenor uses role-playing to insist on identity as multiple and contingent upon circumstance. "In Vibration Cooking I have told all I'm going to tell" (xx), she announces in the book's introduction, distinguishing between the narrative's "I" and the identity of the author who has produced the book. On the other hand, in a statement reminiscent of Jessica Harris's tribute in Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons , she uses the trope of culinary succession to suggest an identity fixed as woman-centered. "Throw out all of [the cooking pots] except the black ones" she advises. "The cast-iron ones like your mother used to use" (2). By dedicating the book to "my mama and my grandmothers and my sisters in appreciation of the years that they worked in miss ann's kitchen and then came home to TCB in spite of slavery and oppression and the moynihan report," she establishes gender as a central factor in her self-concep-

tion one that provides the book's multiple self-representations with a single reference point.

Smart-Grosvenor uses a variety of languages in this book in order to emphasize the shifting and multiple nature of self-representation and to document the historical struggles that have contributed to its formation. Lack of discursive harmony need not be read as a structural weakness, however. What enables the smoothly modulated articulation of both Harris's and the Darden sisters' culinary autobiographies, after all, is a conception of the subject as essentially fixed. Norma Jean and Carole Darden locate the first-person plural in childhood; Jessica Harris explores the development of an adult "I" through the detached observations of the tourist. Smart-Grosvenor's speaking voice, in contrast, does not remain rooted at any one vantage point. Travel produces neither an "I" emphatically rooted at home nor a subject whose visits to foreign places wholly defy efforts at self-situating; instead, it suggests the contingency of identity.

On the level of the (culinary) signifier, Smart-Grosvenor expresses this doubled vision in explaining her appearance on an ethnic cooking series: "I wanted to use the opportunity to prove that Afro-American cookery was more than chitlins and pigs' feet, and at the same time I wanted to acknowledge the traditional dishes" (xvi–xvii). The author also articulates the problematics of autoethnography more directly. In fact, the difficulty involved in affirming culture without being perceived as its one-dimensional emissary occupies the autobiographer throughout her narrative. In "The Demystification of Food," she addresses the problem by presenting two alternative selves. The first is celebrative, sentimental, nostalgic. Recalling past New Year's Day parties with friends, she exclaims:

What times! Times, oh, times! I often get nostalgia for the old days and old friends. Like those New Year's open houses I used to have and everyone I loved would come. Even Millie came from Germany one year. She arrived just in time for the black-eyes and rice. (3)

But the reader's understanding is promptly undercut:

And that year I cooked the peas with beef neck bones instead of swine cause so many brothers and sisters have given up swine. . . . You supposed to cook the whole hog head but I couldn't. I saw it hanging in the butcher store on Avenue D and I didn't dig it. I left the swine hanging right where he was. (3)

In this attention-getting shift, the first-person pronoun insists on self-determination. Here the idiosyncratic is affirmed; difference, not similarity, finally constitutes the "plot" of the passage.

This tactic—describing expected behavior only to flout expectation—is the rule rather than the exception in this narrative. I argued earlier that Smart-Grosvenor often presents herself in a manner reminiscent of Hurston's capricious narrators, and I would suggest that such teasing shifts in self-representation provide for both writers a means of circumventing readers' attempts to fix the speaker as an ethnic "type." Both Hurston and Smart-Grosvenor indict such type-casting, using their emphatically eccentric self-imaging as a means of insisting on their own agency. Constructing an ethnic identity is a difficult maneuver; it requires careful negotiation between the demands of cultural affirmation on the one hand and the requirements of self-determination on the other. And, like Hurston, Smart-Grosvenor does not disdain acclaim for her technical facility. Rather, she delights in the performance.

In "Home," the first section of Smart-Grosvenor's book, readers are treated to a particularly eye-catching display of autobiographical gymnastics when the author describes her brief stint in England as "Princess Verta from Tabanguila, an island near Madagascar" (26). As an African princess the author enjoys the attention of the Dover Press, who publish an account of her interview as "Princess Verta Studies Our Way of Life" (27). The 1970S equivalent of in-your-face attitude, this eye-catching posturing flouts racism's invisibility syndrome, what James Baldwin describes as, "Black people, mainly, look down or look up but do not look at each other, not at you, and white people, mainly, look away" (30). Besides critiquing racist type-casting through parody, this literary disguise acknowledges the complicated nature of cultural representation by playing upon the series of self/other oppositions any autobiographical description creates. As ethnographic investigator, Princess Verta is Other, not only with respect to her English "audience" but with reference to "Home" and readers as well. (Note, however, that the author insists on her subjectivity by placing herself in the position of actor: Princess Verta examines her audience; they do not study her.) In counterpoint to later chapters of Vibration Cooking that situate Smart-Grosvenor's "I" within a cultural community, this portion of the text acknowledges the divisive mechanics of ethnographic description. The admission of complicity in this land of type-casting ("A lot

of people like to say they are the descendants of African chiefs. I have been through that stage" [26]) checks complacent readers by suggesting that such eccentric behavior is itself "typical." Yet the confession also maintains Smart-Grosvenor's difference; the act of telling is itself an idiosyncratic maneuver that acknowledges, even as it critiques, the Afrocentrism of the Black Arts movement.

I would like to look closely at another passage that uses role-playing to call attention to the dynamics of self-representation. Aspiring to become an actress, the author initially settles for working as a cook for the Hedgerow Theatre. She mocks her efforts to fashion a self that is independent of the tyrannical structuring principles of race, class, and gender:

I used to get the Chester bus to Rose Valley from Media and it was only full of black women who worked out there. They couldn't figure how come I was wearing jeans and sweaters to work. In my most Chekhovian voice I would say, "I'm an actress, not a domestic. I'm on my way to the theatre." They would look at me like I was out of my mind. One day I got on and the driver said, "Too hot to scrub floors today, right sweetie?" (98–99)

This stereotyping becomes literalized further on. Her first "big chance" (99) at acting comes in A Streetcar Named Desire . She is not to play Blanche, however, but one of the women who observes this grande dame from her doorstep. Mocking at once her own idealism, the naïveté of her readers, and the closemindedness of the theater crew, she continues:

I had one line. "Dis is it, honey-o" or something like that. . . . I was a nervous wreck. Maybe they wouldn't like my projection. Maybe they wouldn't like my delivery. Maybe they wouldn't like my technique. Maybe they wouldn't like me. But they didn't pay me no mind. My little part was so insignificant. (99–100)

In a coup reminiscent of Hurston and the Brer Rabbit stories of African American folklore, it is the "lady on the stoop" (99) who enjoys the last laugh. By the end of the week she has caused a scandal:

Everyone had warned me what a bitch Diana Barrymore was, but she was the only person I talked to during the whole week I was there. As a matter of fact, we became friends. We talked about voodoo and vibrations and stuff like that. The scandal I caused was because some apprentice said he saw me in my dressing room on my hands and knees talking in unknown tongues. It

was a lie. I was on the floor looking for my shoes and cussing to myself. See, that's what I mean, white and black folks speak a different tongue. (100)

I have quoted this passage at some length because it so aptly illustrates the interplay of autobiographic and ethnographic discourses in the text, those "different tongues" Smart-Grosvenor speaks to forestall readers from reducing a complicated subject to a one-dimensional silhouette. Consider, for instance, the abrupt shift in posture from the self-castigating sarcasm of "My little part" to the subdued triumph the actress enjoys in her more significant role as friend to Diana Barrymore. The disjunction in self-representation is striking: from anxiety and belittlement as she labors over her part only to discover its complete "insignificance," to satisfaction at creating a performance that turns heads throughout the theater, if only backstage. Seizing the limelight, the author enjoys undeniable social prestige in a gratifying reversal of power over members of the cast who previously had found her too unimportant to acknowledge.

More significantly, however, it allows her to assert interpretive authority over readers who, like the audience of actors and theatergoers at the Hedgerow, are in a position to "pay no mind" to her literary performance in Vibration Cooking . Just as she takes the upper hand with Diana Barrymore—with respect to "voodoo and vibrations" the starring actress plays apprentice to the apparently more authoritative Smart-Grosvenor—so she advances upon the interpretive domain of readers by creating a situation of sufficient ambiguity to cause them to question their own proficiency at reading. "Home remedies" given earlier, such as, for a nosebleed, "Catch the blood on a piece of brown paper and burn the paper" (138), constitute a sympathetic-medicine practice not dissimilar to "voodoo and vibrations and stuff like that." Voodoo further resonates with Baraka's 1969 Black Magic and recalls Larry Neal's edict in Black Fire that the black writer must be a "magician, working juju with the word" (655).^[34] The disjunction between mundane actuality (looking for shoes) and exotic fantasy (speaking in tongues) needles readers with a penchant for primitivism, but it nevertheless calls attention to a race-inflected reading of a different order. To the apprentice (and to those unwilling to allow for a more generous reading of the subject as a black woman), she is in fact speaking in an unknown tongue.

Smart-Grosvenor's dramatic costume changes demonstrate that it is racism that produces, if only momentarily, a fixed identity. Stepping onto a bus after the driver has put up prolonged resistance ("Who do you people think you are?" he asks rhetorically), she responds: "We are" (89). The struggle for existence robs the "I" of singularity: faced with a hostile "them," eccentric individuality is exchanged for the security of a common "we." If it is generated in response to oppression, however, this means of grounding the subject is nevertheless framed in the affirmative. A cousin living in the West Indies provides the author with recipes for sweet potatoes and a tribute to Ellison: "Did you know there are all kinds of yams? These are only a few. There are many different types here. . . . Then there is a yam called nigger yam. I won't even deal with that because after all a yam is a yam is a yam" (46). An accusation that she is "misrepresenting" herself as African because she wears the clothes of her ancestors prompts another affirmation of the essential rootedness of the "I" who can dress up as Princess Verta and down as the woman on the stoop:

Now I have done a lot of research on food and found out that Long Island ducks are not from Long Island at all. They are the descendants of ducks imported from Peking around 1870. . . . Potatoes are native to South America and were taken to Europe by the Spanish explorers "when they discovered South America." . . . Now, if a squash and a potato and a duck and a pepper can grow and look like their ancestors, I know damn well that I can walk around dressed like mine. (120)

The acknowledgment that oppression checks self-assertion could potentially undercut the confidence with which Smart-Grosvenor insists she is free to define herself. Yet the down-to-earth quality she evokes here domesticates this scene and deprives it of the power to terrorize. Through culinary comedy, assault becomes the vehicle for a quite unforgettable kind of self-affirmation.