Thursdays and Every Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap by Verta Mae

Thursdays and Every Sunday Off might be my favorite food book of the 20th century. Published in 1972, the woman we know as Dr. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor was a young culinary anthropologist going by Verta Mae, living and writing in NYC, raising her two young daughters in an era when the Black Arts movement was coming alive.

She was in community with Sun Ra, the Last Poets, Ntozake Shanga, and Toni Morrison. She was influencing and being influenced by a zeitgeist, asking critical questions about the future of Blackness. She was a Geechee Girl who had traveled the world and landed in New York to use her writing as an interrogation. She used food as her entry point for finding answers in the same ways her comrades were using music and poetry; amid this inquiry, she gave us a prism to reframe so many hidden culinary figures.

The book is a thin tome, about 150 pages or so, but is packed full of questions and interventions around labor reform, the invisibility of domestic workers, and the real seat of Black cultural ephemera. She writes in the same irreverent bombastic prose that she introduced in her debut book two years earlier, Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Note of a Geechee Girl, but leaves out recipes in place of case studies and questions in the form of funny, sad, complex vignettes that require the reader to sit with the unvarnished text and begin to ask different questions about the folks who create the food and ultimately the culture we love.

Areas of Interest: Black Arts Movement, Labor Reform, 1970’s era Black Culture, Domestic Work, Women In Food

Original Publisher: Doubleday& Company Inc. 1972