Ashanté Reese, associate professor of African and African diaspora studies at UT Austin, is often thinking about food — where it comes from, where it’s going, and what it means. Her academic career and writing has largely focused on the the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, as in her award-winning first book, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. And behind all her work, academic and otherwise, lies the question, “Who and what survives?”
This spring she asked that question again in an article for Texas Monthly about the remains of Texas’s first college for Black women, Mary Allen College. Growing up in Crockett, Texas, Reese was aware of the college’s last remaining building — “a decrepit, four-story brick structure… obscured by tall grass and debris” — but it wasn’t until decades later that she began to think about the college’s significance both to the town and to the state.
This month we met over Zoom to talk about Mary Allen College, writing beautifully and usefully, the complicated history of Sugar Land, Texas, and Reese’s upcoming book about “the ways Black people gather in the midst of anti-Black violence to nourish ourselves and each other.” A lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation is below.
You start your Texas Monthly piece writing about how you grew up down the street from Mary Allen College’s last remaining building. How did you go from being casually aware of this site to writing a piece about the college for the magazine? What was that process like?
I started thinking about this story four years ago. I went home in 2019, and that’s when I really started thinking, “No one writes about this place and we should write about this place.”
Some of this also coincides with my move back to Texas in 2020. A lot of academics move for work, but I never thought I would move back to Texas. Then the pandemic happened right after I’d interviewed for the job here and I was like, “Who knows what the world is going to look like. I should move back home.”
All of that is to say, there’s been this longer reintegration or reclamation project for me around being more acquainted and reacquainted with all these places that informed my childhood. In my hometown there’s this idea that to be somebody you have to go away. It’s a small town, less than 7,000 people, and that’s true in a lot of ways and a recurring theme in my pieces that I’ve written about Texas so far. And I took that to heart. I went away and I never thought I was moving back. But there’s a loss in that, too. A lot of what I’ve been interested in, in terms of this reclamation, is that I want to be reconnected. What can I do with the skill sets to relearn and then introduce other people to these places that I care about? As much as I’m interested in it intellectually, I also think there’s a deeply personal element to recognizing that this place is as important as it is.
I actually had pitched a different story to Texas Monthly about Keith Lee and how he came to Houston to do his food critic thing, and the day I pitched it, someone else’s story about him came out. The editor said, “I’m sorry that this didn’t work out, but if you had something else…” And I was like, “Well, there is this place called Mary Allen College that I think most people don’t know about. I just searched your site. Doesn’t look like anyone’s ever written about it. Is this something you’d be interested in?” After that it was a quick process. I scrambled to go to Tulane at the end of January to see the college’s archive for myself. Then I went back home to visit a couple of the board members of the Mary Allen College Museum, who took me on a tour of the site and I was just so enchanted. After that I was like, “This feels incomplete. Someone needs to write a book about this place. I think there is a book here.” I can’t write it right now, but my hope was I write this piece and someone wants to say more about this place and maybe wants to write it. And I had a goal that I wanted to write for Texas Monthly — it’s a gold star for the state, and I’m always trying to figure out ways to write for different kinds of audiences.
Has the site changed very much since you were there in 2019? What’s the update on the college?
It’s in worse shape — the weather patterns over the last five years have meant a lot more rain. But the current board of directors, led by Dr. Thelma Douglass, is really diligent about their fundraising. The last time I talked to them, in March, they were still waiting on a report from an architectural firm to get an estimate of what it would cost to restore the building. As you can imagine, even without the numbers, it’s going to cost a lot of money. But they’re launching all these different fundraiser campaigns, and I think, in an ideal world and with their blessing, there’s a real opportunity to leverage other HBCUs and institutions for support. But I have a habit of taking over things, so I’m trying very hard to just follow direction and wait for someone to tell me that I can be helpful.
Someone said to me, “Maybe we can get Beyoncé to come to Crockett.” I was like, if we could get her to Crockett, that would make me so happy. So maybe I’ll do a blitz and be like, “Who knows Beyoncé’s people? How can we convince her to come?” And then we’ll make all the money we need.
If you get Beyoncé to go to Crockett, please let me know!
I would put that on my CV as hands down the best thing that I’ve ever done. Like, I can retire now. Just leave me be.
But I am actually quite surprised that this institution hasn’t gotten more attention. Maybe it’s just a matter of getting it in front of the eyes of the right people.
You said that writing for Texas Monthly was something that you had wanted to do for a long time. How do you think about writing for a broad audience for a magazine versus writing as part of your academic work or your research? What is the relationship between those two kinds of work?
More and more, those two things feel the same to me, the academic and the public. Initially what I thought about my academic work was, “The rigor of the research has to be at the forefront. People need to know how I did what I did and that I put a lot of care and attention into it.” And sometimes that does feel different from telling a great story.
What I have been focused on the last several years is trying to do both in a compelling way. Part of this is that I want to be a good writer. The other part is that when I wrote Black Food Geographies, a lot of people who do actual food justice work — they run organizations or activist groups or whatever — were reading the book as part of their own education and toolkit. And I was like, “Wow, that is really cool. I wrote something that is useful, this is great.” That was always the goal, but it’s different when you realize people really use it. That is what’s important to me. I want my work to be useful to communities. I think there are a lot of people who do fantastic on-the-ground activism and advocacy, and I think of my research as “I want to give you data that you can use and stories that you can use to support your work.”
During the pandemic I wrote a couple of pieces, and then I started to realize that another way I can develop my skill even more is by taking something that is super detailed and making it compelling to people who don’t care about the details. Or at least figuring out what details most people care about and still having enough heft for people who want to go deeper. That’s where I’m sitting these days. And I have two books in process right now and they’re very different kinds of books, so that’s exciting to me.
One of those books is about Sugar Land, Texas. I’m interested in that because — and this goes back to what we were saying about paying attention —as a Texan, growing up, I just accepted that there’s a town outside of Houston called Sugar Land. I never thought, “Why is it called Sugar Land? What is the history of this place?”
What’s so interesting about Sugar Land is the that it was the site of Imperial Sugar, arguably the site where convict leasing was perfected in Texas, and now it’s the site of a very wealthy Houston suburb that gets all these accolades for being multicultural. And yet there’s still remnants of these structures that really were extractive and harmful. It was also part of the original parcel from Stephen F. Austin and his 300 colonists who came to settle in Texas, and, up until 2011, the central prison farm in Sugar Land was still producing sugar cane, which was a byproduct of two centuries of perfecting an industry in the area. The history of this land goes even further back, obviously, but in terms of the pursuit of modernity in this part of the country, Sugar Land represents all of that.
The book feels like more of an intellectual challenge because I’m trying to tell a story about the interwoven relationships between people, place, corporations, and state institutions. That feels very exciting and also daunting because there are so many characters. It feels like the real test of how to write a book that has so many details but not get lost in the sauce. That’s also why it’s taking me so long. I’m lost in the sauce.
But even though this is a book that is particular to Texas, it teaches us a lot about the current moment in our food system where we could think about how to harness that energy for good or how to — I mean, we’re heading more quickly toward disaster than we need to be.
One of my goals with any project is to take big questions that seem important to the general public and try to answer them in some way. When I started writing Black Food Geographies, that question came from teaching middle school. I’d been teaching middle school and kids had lots of questions around their food environment, so that’s what I researched. Similarly, with the Sugar Land book, I was already doing work on prison agriculture before I pivoted to Sugar Land, and part of the pivot was because of the graves that were discovered in 2018 at the high school site. People had questions around, like, “how could these graves be here and no one know?” And in my mind, I’m thinking, “Oh, it’s a no brainer. Prisoners are not treated like people. There are probably thousands more graves.” And part of what I became interested in is that, growing up in East Texas, everyone is impacted by the prison system. You either know someone who works there, you know someone who’s incarcerated, or you’re just driving past the prisons. And there’s the reality that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice owns just shy of 200,000 agricultural acres. Prisoners work every day. So I was like, this is one of those things where it feels like we understand this on the surface, but maybe there’s more to say. Both of my parents worked as prison guards, so it also is an opportunity for me to look at the prison system differently and, quite frankly, to look at it from a position of privilege. I think often about how the reason I can think that prisons should be abolished is because I have parents who worked at one and who provided for me so that I could go off and play in the world of ideas. I almost feel like I owe it to them and other people like them whose labor really has fueled a system that, I won’t say that they don’t think about, but it’s ordinary, it’s everyday. This is just the industry where people work. It provides jobs and you go to work.
In some ways that’s what’s allowing some people to stay in these small Texas towns where there’s not a lot of other industry or opportunities.
Absolutely. And that is a part of the story too, right? I don’t think it’s an “us versus them.” I like to think of webs of connections or relations and try to figure out where people are located in these webs, why they are located where they are, and what do we do about it if someone’s caught in one part of the web and someone else is caught in another. Are there pathways where they might meet somewhere in the middle, or at least be able to see each other more clearly? That’s how I think about it, and for me it disrupts the binary of “there are prisoners in there and then there are us out here.” Yeah, but some of the food you eat may have been produced by people in there. Then what? That completely disrupts this idea that we’re disconnected from each other.
Speaking of food and webs of connection, tell me more about Gather.
Gather is an accidental book. In 2022 or the beginning of 2023, Norton started a series called The Norton Shorts, and all the books are 40,000 words or less about some idea. They reached out, and I had done a paper at the American Studies Association on Black family reunions, so I said to them, “I have a real interest in how people gather together around food and what that means.” So we hopped on Zoom and we decided that this is the book that I’m writing.
The book is organized around different sites of gathering — gardens, family reunions, post-funeral repasts and mutual aid projects — and those different sites ended up foregrounding different cities that I’ve lived in. The gardens chapter revolves around a garden started by Hebrew Brown of the Black Church Food Security Network in Baltimore. He started that network after Freddie Gray was murdered and people couldn’t get to grocery stores and he was driving around the city in his church van passing out food. The mutual aid chapter opens up with organizing during Winter Storm Uri here in Austin, which a lot of people at UT were a part of. I write about that in conjunction with Community United Front (CUF) who, in the ‘70s, started a free breakfast program at UT. That chapter is really thinking about what the legacy of organizing and mutual aid looks like in a city like Austin.
For the chapter on family reunions, I just put on Twitter, “Who wants to invite me to their family reunion?” and I got like 30 invitations, which was very cool. I went to eight reunions last summer; it was really wonderful. For that chapter, I write about both what makes it possible for people to be together and also about the challenges, like the gender divisions of labor, as well as about things like radical hospitality. And the repast chapter opens up in Memphis with the death of Tyre Nichols. After he was murdered, there were 11 restaurants who came together and did a citywide repast for his family and guests who came to town. They all donated food and then they did a gallery walk with all of his artwork up in the different restaurants. It was beautiful, and one of the things I think is fascinating about post-funeral meals is that there is a general belief that people who are grieving should not be doing work, that they should just be taken care of. I write about what that idea means for us, especially in the context of racial justice or struggles. Funeral meals to me are such a perfect example of people understanding that those who are most impacted should do the least work. And I extrapolate to think about how we might turn that idea on to our food system so that those most negatively impacted actually are cared for.
The whole idea of the book is that we keep thinking the answers are big and that they’re somewhere else, but actually the answers are embedded in these everyday things that we’re already doing. It ends with the question “Why gather in the first place?” and with some thoughts for organizations around how they might tap into and potentially fund some of these things that are already happening. Because in the end, communities take care of communities. That’s the point of the book — that in times of real struggle, communities close rank around each other, so maybe it isn’t the best idea that outsiders are trying to create the solutions. Maybe we need to come back to a hyper-local level and trust that people have the skills, the knowledge, and the desire to take care of each other.
In addition to your book projects and your writing, you also just received a Mellon National Archives grant for a project you’re doing with Ashley Farmer about student activism at UT Austin. I would love to hear more about that project.
There’s a theme here, which is that I am on Team Too Much. But we initially got money from our department and from the campus Contextualization and Commemoration Initiative to address two issues. One is that there are several disparate archives at UT but there’s no real university-wide archive. And then Ashley teaches African American history, and she was like, “Every year students feel surprised when they learn about these different activist things that happen.” On my side, I’m interested in how students who do activism on campus, nine times out of 10, also do activism out in the city. I was curious about how Austin has been transformed through actions that UT students have taken. So, we started doing these deep dives into university resources and then we applied for that Mellon Planning Grant and got it.
Now we’ve found hundreds of resources so far related to student activism at UT, and we have a team of graduate students who have been sorting through what we have. We’re also working with the college IT team to build an interactive site. We want to map out some of the major actions by former students and local organizations and connect those back to UT, and then also actions by current students at UT. We’re hoping to have a pilot site by mid-2025, which we will test out with K-12 teachers and some university classrooms as well, get feedback, and then there will be a live site by 2026 that anyone can use.
Last spring we also did a freedom school for student organizations where we helped them digitize all of the things that they had, and they were invited to select things that they might want to showcase as a part of this digital humanities project. We’re going to do another freedom school in the fall, and this time we’re going to host it in the community because we want organizations to have a plan for how to document their own story. That way, no matter what anyone says about what you did, you have things that you pass down or keep safe within your organization that are just yours.
This Q&A was originally published on Extra Credit, COLA’s Substack newsletter. Learn more about Extra Credit and subscribe here.