Silence, Shape-Shifting, & The Sips We Dare Not Taste
“I don’t remember lynchings being prominently portrayed in the newspaper, but we would hear about them by word of mouth. Someone got lynched in so-and-so county last night. The awareness of the Ku Klux Klan was always in the background. This awareness to the child of my generation grows with you just like, almost a part of your body and your being.”
I thought it was really important to start off this piece with this quote by Pauli Murray. Never has there ever been a description that so poignantly captures what racism does to one’s being, one’s essence, its atmospheric presence almost like a constant hurricane to the soul and the spirit.
Pauli Murray is one of the most important historical figures and human rights activists in American history whose story is largely unknown. I think that’s because she was a black woman who identified more as male. There is a documentary about her on Amazon Prime called “My Name is Pauli Murray,” and I highly recommend it.
This idea of trauma transforming into a kind of silence that becomes a part of one’s being is what connects oppressed people all over the world. To survive, we must become shape-shifters. We become shape-shifters. When I was invited to submit a piece for The Vinguard’s new wine storytelling and equity platform, I knew I wanted to talk about what has been very difficult for me to acknowledge much less share in story form and that has been the racism-related trauma I’ve experienced as a devoted wine and food storyteller.
My name is Dinkinish O’Connor. Greetings. And I have been studying wine since the late 90s and started writing about wine in the early 2000s. I was still living in New York and had done some small restaurant pieces for Time Out New York. I had written several features for a publication called The Black Star News where I was a staff member, but at that time, my shining moment or what I thought was my shining moment was when I wrote a profile about a wine bar in downtown Brooklyn for Wine Spectator. I thought I had arrived, but I had not. This was the beginning. This was the beginning of the shape-shifting me. This was a time long before wine bars in Brooklyn became commonplace.
I was young and ambitious and so excited to contribute stories to this community, but from the very beginning, it was clear that I was either not welcomed or a curious attraction white folks found entertaining.
One of my early recollections of feeling like only certain foods belonged with wine and only certain food cultures and stories were worthy of the pages of high-end glossy food and wine magazines was when I took a food writing bootcamp class with Food and Wine Magazine’s Senior Editor at the time. This was around 2003 or 2004. I shared with the small group that was being hosted by media bistro that I wanted to write about Haitian food, and this editor said that no one would be interested in a feature about Haitian food. At that time, I deified these editors the way groupies idolized rock stars. I’m not sure how I reacted in the moment, but I remember not reacting honestly for fear that I would lose an opportunity, for fear that I would be dubbed the angry, black woman. But I was hurt and confused. If there were features about Vietnamese food, why not Haitian food? Haitian food was a part of Miami’s identity in the same way Chinese take-out had been a part of New York City’s identity. Was she ignorant to this? Her sharp dismissal spoke of a more cruder truth, and while her feedback never stopped me from pitching and writing stories about Haitian food, stories that were eventually published in The Miami Herald and The New York Times, the moment, I realized shadowed a determination that has shaped my drive while simultaneously draining me. Silence is draining.
But what of the time before the silence? But what of this girl born of ink, grape must, and gravy?
I knew at age 11 that I wanted to study wine. I was watching Oprah with my mother, and she was interviewing a black woman who described herself as a wine connoisseur. The word itself—connoisseur. This crunchy word on my young palate. She talked about all the traveling she was doing, the food she was eating, and the people she met, and that kind of life spoke to me.
I grew up in a storytelling household in Miami. My Jamaican mother, Sistah Sonia, was a tambourine-wielding, God-fearing, ambitious nurse, educator, and minister who kept a bottle of Manischewitz Grape Concord wine in a straw basket on top of the fridge. It was the star ingredient in Jamaican black cake—a fudge-like, rum cake prepared mainly during the Christmas holiday season. She cherished the bottle the way folk cherish Romanee Conti. As a child, she gave me a swig during the holidays. This was my introduction to wine.
For me, wine cannot exist without the stories that precede and follow the bottle. I think we like to imagine the romance of family and heritage, vineyards and laughter. But like life, wine culture is complicated and full of human contradiction—the momentary pleasures mixed with inherent prejudices—the people who work with the soil next to the people who sip their sweat.
From the beginning, I wanted to explore wine in a way that was authentic and true to my experience as a Miami girl to the bone. Miami was and will always be rice and beans city—arroz con pollo, plantanos dulces, diri ak djon djon, rice and peas with coconut milk, jerk chicken. The smell café con leche springing from the concrete of a walk-up caféteria. That’s my Miami. Croquettas y Prosecco. Pork griot and a Languedoc red. Those stories, those stories I wanted to tell.
But those weren’t the stories fancy publications wanted to publish. Foods of the African Diaspora had no space, no place at a white, privileged table filled with redundant stories about Italian charcuterie, foie gras, and goose pâté.
So I pushed and pitched because that’s what I was trained to do. For so long, I accepted this ideology that you have to work harder and be harder and be better than everyone else because my sex and race as a black woman. So I worked harder. I studied wine books and publications. I connected with winemakers. I attended sommelier school. I pitched story ideas. I was rejected. I was accepted. I attended as many tastings as possible. I traveled to wine regions. And on the surface, this sounds wonderfully glamorous, but the reality was, each time I sat down and broke bread with people who did not want me there, who questioned my knowledge, growled at my value, and disregarded my intrinsic humanity, a piece of me, contorted and battered, changed shape. Like Pauli Murray says, this diminished state becomes a part of your being so much so that when a Paso Robles winemaker compared his dogs to Ethiopian children during an afternoon lunch on his estate, everything became silent, including me.
Then 2020. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. Covid-19. That screaming silence had been replaced with rage. And it was global. White folks were DMing me: “How can I help?” It suddenly became cool to be conscious. I was asked by a local wine socialite to attend an online conversation about wine and “diversity in the glass.”
Within 5 minutes, I wondered what I was doing in this conversation. “We all get along here,” the pretty, white host said speaking of Miami. That was not my experience, yet no one had asked me if that were true for me. She declared it the truth, and so it was. She later interviewed me for her new podcast where she shared that she had been robbed at gunpoint. She never actually said that the gunman was black. She instead focused on how she volunteered at a prison after the incident and that the inmates were enamored with her. I wondered why she was sharing the story with me, especially given the time, but my guess was that she was saying: Black people do fucked up shit, too. Again, what was I doing in this conversation? Why was I prostituting my time for a post? That’s the thing about growing up in a racist space, the silence and tolerance grows into your being, and you learn to accept the unacceptable.
In 2020, I wrote a piece called “Bones, Bottles, & Black Folk” for The Feiring Line. I decided to unpack an incident that took place during VinExpo in Bordeaux in 2007.
I was driving with a winemaker I met that evening at a dinner in Sauternes. I was staying at his chateau. The night was as dark as soil and as dense as silence. As he drove, he pointed at a dark space and said, “That’s where we kept our slaves.” Looking back, the moment, those words affected me on cellular level. I’m sure I was too shocked to speak in the moment. I remember going to VinExpo the next day looking for a dark face to share the experience with. Then, like I had done many times before, I shape-shifted into the tolerant, silent one with wings as light as forgetfulness.
Bordeaux’s wealth was built on the slave trade. Thirteen years later, I had allowed myself wandering into the cellars of my memory to see that moment for what it was. And I have Mama Alice, my editor, Alice Feiring, to thank for that.
I can now look back at this incident as a kind of violence against my personhood. And while some white allies have slowly receded from the frontlines of pursuing true equity and financial empowerment for those of us who have been contributing to the richness of this culture, I have stopped being silent. I break bread and sip wine with whom I choose. And a night, this purple palate of my mine turns into a wand.
Peace,
Dinkinish
