My Auntie also makes delicious Hoe Cake. She makes two diff'rent kinds - cornmeal and flour. They call it hoe cake because in the plantation days, they'd stop workin' the fields only long enough to light a small fire, heat up the back of the hoe, and cook small cakes of bread on them.

Hoe cake is made from cornmeal mix, milk, and an egg. Drop a plop onto an oiled hot surface, turn when bubbly, and eat hot off the hoe!

It's funny how Native American and Mexican corn-based breads are praised and talked about, but Southern cornbread is like an "off-color" meal because of slavery. That's a shame.

Slavery is shameful. Slavery throughout history, slavery of the Jews by the Egyptians, slavery to repay debts, slavery of women throughout all cultures and history. Slavery in the South is shameful, too. The South has a rich culture surrounding, as a result of, and in spite of the slavery of innocent Africans brought here against their will, bought and sold at the whim of their owners.

My ancestors were definitely not plantation owners, my great grandfather was a sharecropper and my grandfather as well. They were free men, but not well "thought of" by society then or today. They lived here in Alabama, they worked cotton fields, they were dirt poor. When the civil war began, the Confederacy was shut off from trade and each state had to become completely self-sufficient. This made for some very resourceful people living through very hard times. I have a wonderful heritage from my hard working, agricultural, uneducated forefathers. I look forward to a time when that heritage can be celebrated without offending the descendants of the slaves. Until that time, I'll try not to offend.