Winston-Salem, NC, June 2015.
Annabelle Googles Moravian cookies.
Out of 155,000 results, the first is: shop.oldsalem.org. Yes, tea kettle emblazoning its homepage – Moravian Cookies and Old Salem, synonymous since 1807. Annabelle picks up a wheat cracker, swipes it through roasted garlic and basil hummus, crunches and takes a swig of beer. Such is dinner today, swipes and swigs. She’s working. She wipes her hand clean on the side of her jean shorts and scrolls further.
The recipe, the recipe, she thinks, her movements rhythmic – hunting, scrolling, pecking. Perched on a bar stool in her kitchen, bird’s eye view and a mere stone’s throw away from Old Salem, she adjusts the laptop screen and hunkers down lower to scroll with more purpose – zipping along scenic cobblestone lanes past Old Salem’s town square and through the museum and gardens, her past converging with her present and future.
Annabelle brushes cracker crumbs from her lap and clicks on Winkler Bakery. Instantly, the screen is flooded with a cornucopia of baked deliciousness, a visual intoxication that, when mingled with her dying father’s wishes the previous year, connect her to imaginings of another time – a distant past of injustices unrequited – one, thankfully, she would never personally know. Annabelle revisits her father’s delusions, his stories about dear Great Aunt Annie, matriarch and legend of the Conrad family, buried over a hundred years prior in the rolling hills of Bethania, north of what is now Winston-Salem.
“What’s your story, little cookie?” she asks, finding Moravian Cookies for sale in the online store – available in tins, tubes, holiday gift and regular packaging, all priced from $4.99 to $19.99 plus shipping and handling.
“Dang, Henry’s people gettin’ paid,” she says, then crunches on another cracker. “Reparations! Heck, this is the 21st Century,” she mumbles, reaching for another cracker
Remembering back, Annabelle culminates her father’s drunken rants and incessant ravings into today’s quest for justice for dear Aunt Annie, beginning with Henry Wilson and what her father told her:
“The Wilsons, Henry and his family, Moravians from Bethania, stole Great Aunt Annie’s ginger snap cookie recipe way back before black people were freed,” he’d said. “Henry stole her recipe and got rich off of it!”
***