Part 2 — Reclaiming Our Lost Heritage: The Bean Pie’s Oral History to Written History

I have been curious about the origin story of the bean pie since 2009 when I converted to Islam and started attending the Atlanta Masjid. Unfortunately, the history of the bean pie is limited and hidden in family histories that we are losing as the older Black Muslims transition. Depending on where you live and the proximity to a Black Muslim Mosque is usually the easiest place to buy a bean pie. Outside of those narrow geographies, you would be hard-pressed to eat a bean pie unless you made it yourself which is what I began to do, to recover my family heritage.

Every Ramadan after 2010, I would make bean pies, and the idea of developing a bean pie business became an idea as orders rolled in and people shared their fondness for my pie and for the history that I could share occasionally. I had to regroup over the last few years and kept asking questions, interviewing elders, and scouring every book I could find on the Nation of Islam. I consistently found very little to no information on the bean pie. Aunt Daisy was in Detroit in the 1930s per oral history when the Nation of Islam started. Aunt Daisy moved to Chicago in the mid-1930s. Aunt Daisy and her sister Ceola raised my grandmother in Chicago where she was born in 1933. Aunt Daisy was a close confidante of Elijah Muhammad and was often at his home for dinner. Daisy is mentioned in the book,?The Promise of Patriarchy,?placing her in Chicago in 1941. I heard the stories passed down about the white carpet he had throughout his home. There is a lack of documentation about Black women’s roles in history generally. This is one of the reasons for this book.

I met Timothy Burnside, a Hip-Hop curator for the National Museum for African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) at the A3C Hip-Hop conference in Atlanta in 2016. I stayed in touch, and in the latter part of that year, I was invited to the White House for an educational conference before President Barack Obama left office. I was actively researching Aunt Daisy again and Timothy had given me VIP tickets to NMAAHC. When I got into the museum, I went straight to the 4th floor to visit the culinary section. I envisioned Aunt Daisy’s food press she used to make bean pie and bean soup and where it would be placed. I also found photos from the Shabazz Restaurant on display. The bean pie is an American icon and unique to the Black Muslim culture and deserves to be acknowledged and properly displayed. It was empowering to see so much Black history, but there were significant gaps in my knowledge about Aunt Daisy’s story and the bean pie. All I had at the start of my research was our oral tradition which was strong and on its second generation passed from my mother and family to me.

After I returned home to Atlanta, I followed up with Timothy, who put me in touch with other curators at NMAAHC that were more specialized in culinary history. I had a few phone calls about Aunt Daisy and their interest in her cooking tools. I was not ready to turn them over to the museum.

In July 2017, my mentor from Georgia State University, Dr. Joyce King, introduced me to the late Dr. Zakiyyah Muhammad of California State University, a founding director of IMAS — Institute of Muslim American Studies. We exchanged emails and then had a few phone calls. She told me I was the fifth person whose family had “created” the bean pie. All my life, I grew up hearing about how Aunt Daisy created the bean pie. I respect Dr. Muhammad and her scholarship tremendously. She told me to verify the timeline and confirm my information. From then until now, I have been researching my Aunt, the Nation of Islam, and looking at where and how the bean pie could have been created. Dr. Muhammad told me “you have more content than a children’s book. There is a shortage of literature about the Black Islamic experience and you have every right to write your family’s folklore”. My career progressed and I put the book down for a few years as I grew busier at Georgia State University, and with our philanthropic work with The Community Academy for Architecture and Design, which received approval as a charter school in 2018. But my curiosity about my family history never left me.

https://youtu.be/n9_oNjLx3WA

In this series, I will share excerpts and stories from my book, The Bean Pie: A Remembering of our Family’s Faith, Fortitude, and Forgiveness. I hope you enjoyed this post — if you enjoyed it and want to connect join my newsletter on?https://thebeanpie.com?to get updates on when the next article on LinkedIn/Medium goes live, and also with the link to my book when it publishes in January. If you want to connect, you can reach me here via email at?[email protected]?or connect with me on social:?https://www.instagram.com/thebeanpiebook/?and?https://www.instagram.com/tiffanygreenabdullah.