The humble chicken has possessed complicated associations for African-Americans from earliest slavery times,
especially for women, who traditionally had to cook the bird for white kitchens. Moreover, hawking chicken by 'waiter
carriers' became a key source of income for poor disenfranchised blacks, while stealing chickens reflected a kinship
with African-American 'trickster heroism,' according to Williams-Forson, an American studies professor at the University
of Maryland. In her valuable though dense and scholarly study, Williams-Forson explores how the power of food images
advanced the rhetoric of black stereotypes in lore and literature, for example, as portrayed in 'coon' songs like
Paul Laurence Dunbar's popular 'Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd' and characterizations of mammies in advertisements
in upscale magazines. With the Great Migration, blacks took their cultural practices with them, literally, in shoe
boxes containing fried chicken, and their route became known as the 'chicken bone express.' The author discusses
chicken as 'the gospel bird' in African-American churches (the strength of one's cooking skills elevated one's
status with the preacher), and how eating chicken (or eschewing it) provides a way for blacks to 'signify' class
and status. Following her hard-going study is a staggeringly thorough bibliography.