The Recipe is Community
As we are gathering to collect the lost recipes in our culture, Ri and I agree community is a recipe that's been lost for quite some time now. It's time we preserve this together, as a community.
We carve it. We are all on this platform, even this publication to have it. The nostalgia of growing up with it and wondering where it went as we grow old. It’s safe to say many of us don’t realize this is our job to carry the tradition.
Assata has a poem titled, The Tradition, in her autobiography, and I implore you to read this poem after you read this essay. Then begin to carry on the tradition of Black community. Become the aunties and uncles for the youth. Give the children the foundation roots they need to carry on the strong, proud, Black tradition themselves.
Ri and I were talking about community being lost and how so many people have a strong desire for it, but don’t know how to go about it sometimes. My advice, start within this space. Subscribe and engage with the work of Black writers you resonate with, and be geniune. Connect to be in community not just to get another like on your new post. Read other writers work and engage in their chat threads. Take the conversations beyond a “great read” comment, if you truly desire community.
Get to know the people you want to know, community is a labor of love. It take time, and requires consistency, but community is not hard. Society made us believe it was difficult to obtain. But hey, look at you in community with 10,000 of us Black writers on a platform we joined to build that very thing. Ironic, huh?
Community as Communion
By
Before I ever knew the word communion, I knew what it felt like: gathering in living rooms, restaurants, churches, and on porch stoops. Breaking bread and breaking open. I remember the sound of overlapping voices, the way laughter and lament lived side by side, and how accountability could sound like both a sharp rebuke and a loving embrace. These were not perfect spaces. Voices clashed, truths stung, but there was always a return. To witness that was to understand that communion does not only belong to churches; it is found in the act of coming together, again and again.
And while my momma nurtured it in our home, I saw that same energy radiating into the neighborhood around us. Community was in our schools, in the quiet security my momma felt knowing she could call my principal and be answered with ease. It was my dance instructor, a consistent friend, caring for my sister and me whenever we were in her presence. It was in the way my hairdresser let me listen in on grown folks’ business as she sat with other stylists and other women, talking shop, sharing advice, and creating space. Community built me up before I even knew society was set on my undoing.
People came together to share meals, to trade stories (no matter how batshit crazy), to mentor children who were not their own, to tend to one another when life became heavy. I saw the same sacred labor my mother practiced in miniature everywhere I looked. A constant devotion to holding each other up.
What I witnessed growing up was more than fellowship; it was sacred work. Somewhere along the way, though, we’ve lost that recipe. Today, we speak of community as something we want, but rarely as something we are willing to labor for, and let’s be clear, love is labor, and there’s no community without love.
But to understand the labor of community means to understand how community has shown up in previous generations. How it created safe spaces where Black people could gather, create, and breathe. From the literary salons of the Harlem Renaissance to the prayer circles that rooted neighborhoods, these were not just places of refuge but of resistance. They were laboratories of survival and imagination, proving that even in the face of erasure, community has always been the ground we return to and the shield that carries us forward.
These spaces gave us permission to be our fullest selves, to imagine a future beyond survival, and to find courage in one another’s presence. They bent and reshaped themselves to meet us right where we were.
Community did more than shelter and protect us.
It taught us what the world was determined to withhold.
It was a classroom designed to shape minds and spirits, especially the minds and spirits of Black children. I think first of my momma, who created a summer camp for kids in the city who had nowhere safe to go. She gave them more than a place to play, she gave them room to learn and to branch out beyond what their neighborhoods allowed. That was community as education and as care. And her work was part of a much larger lineage. I think of the Black Panthers’ free breakfast programs and their liberation schools, where children were fed and taught not just facts, but their worth.
Time and time again, community has been the teacher where institutions failed us, reminding us that we are worthy and brilliant. And if community is a teacher, it is also a caretaker, feeding, guiding, and protecting children who are raised not only by parents but by a village. This is also part of the recipe we’ve begun to lose, the devotion of showing up for the next generation so they can inherit more than survival. When children are no longer held intentionally at the center of community, we’ve lost the plot.
Does ‘it takes a village’ no longer hold true for us?
Have we drifted so far from each other?
Because caretaking has always been at the heart of the community. The village feeding children who weren’t theirs, neighbors stepping in when parents could not, elders passing down stories and wisdom like artifacts. I grew up in that kind of world, where watchful eyes kept us safe, even when we thought they were just nosey ass neighbors. Where kitchens became study sessions, and where children belonged to everyone. That was the village. That was the community as caretaker, and it was as sacred as any sermon or prayer circle.
But when I look around today, it’s clear to me we’ve forgotten the fullness of what a community can be. We’ve settled for fragments. Group chats, social feeds, passing connections, while neglecting the communion that once brought us home to ourselves.
We’ve lost the recipe, or maybe we’ve grown too comfortable to put in the work. And I’ll admit, I’m not innocent in this either. I’ve drifted from what I was raised to know. Choosing convenience over commitment, ease over the sacred labor I once witnessed, the protection of the known over the possible hurt of disappointment. But the truth remains: everyone needs someone, and the space for us to gather is still waiting. The question is whether we are ready to wake the hell up, to gather again, and do the work. Because without that labor, there is no love. Without love, there is no community. And without community, there is no movement.
Ri laid this message out so beautifully, there is nothing for me to add, so I leave you with the poem I mentioned in the opening of this newsletter. Let’s carry this discussion in the comments, it’s time I give us a chance to commune together as a community.
In what ways can you or are you laboring love in community?
THE TRADITION (A poem by Assata Shakur) Carry it on now. Carry it on. Carry it on now. Carry it on. Carry on the tradition. Their were Black People since the childhood of time who carried it on. In Ghana and Mali and Timbuktu We carried it on. Carried on the tradition. We hid in the bush. When the slave masters came holding spear And when the moment was ripe, leaped out and lanced the lifeblood of our would-be masters. We carried it on. On slave ships, hurling ourselves into oceans. Slitting the throats of our captors. We took their whips. And their ships Blood flowed in the Atlantic and it wasn’t all ours. We carried it on. Fed Missy arsenic apple pies. Stole the axes from the shed. Went and chopped off master’s head. We ran. We fought. We organized a railroad. An underground. We carried it on. In newspapers. In meetings. In arguments and street fights. We carried it on. In tales told to children. In chants and cantatas. In poems and blues songs and saxophone screams, We carried it on. In classrooms. In churches. In courtrooms. In prisons. We carried it on. On soapboxes and picket lines. Welfare lines, unemployment Our lives on the line, We carried it on. In sit-ins and pray ins And march ins and die ins, We carried it on. On cold Missouri midnights Pitting shotguns against lynch mobs On burning Brooklyn streets Pitting rocks against rifles, We carried it on. Against water hoses and bulldogs. > Against nightsticks and bullets. Against tanks and tear gas. Needles and nooses. Bombs and birth control. We carried it on. In Selma and San Juan. Mozambique, Mississippi. In Brazil and in Boston, We carried it on. Through the lies and the sell-outs, The mistakes and the madness. Through pain and hunger and frustration, We carried it on. Carried on the tradition. Carried a strong tradition. Carried a proud tradition. Carried a Black tradition. Carry it on. Pass it down to the children. Pass it down. Carry it on. Carry it on now. Carry it on TO FREEDOM! -Assata Shakur
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Thank you both for this piece. It served as a much needed mirror, showing me that I have not been as involved in building or maintaining community lately. And reminded me the many different ways being in community can look.
Our community muscles have been in atrophy for some time. Community often approached with selfish interests, that invoke phrases like “doesn’t it take a village?” when things don’t go our way; without recognizing that building community IS the sacred work. It comes with its ups & downs. That damn euro-individualism has been a major player in our move away from what it means to be in community. Even with all that we still ain’t off the hook, the question still remains…“whether we are ready to wake the hell up, to gather again, and do the work.”