When I dine out in Asheville, I count the minutes until The Question.
Whether I’m patronizing an establishment with $40 entrees or buying pizza by the slice, it will come. It’s inevitable. I grit my teeth in anticipation. It comes in different forms, but it’s some variation of “Where are y’all from?” or “Where are you visiting from?”
To be fair, it’s a reasonable question, in this mountain city of almost 95,000. More than 10 million tourists visit the region each year to immerse themselves in the Great Smoky Mountains, the Gilded Age ostentation of the Biltmore Estate, and the city’s hippie/hipster vibe.
It’s not the query itself that so chafes, though questions about one’s origins are often fraught for people of color; we’re often presumed to be from “elsewhere” instead of these United States.
It’s my response (“I live in Durham, but my father’s family is from here. Well, to be precise, Black Mountain”) that confuses people — white and Black alike. Wrinkled foreheads, questions in their eyes. Maybe, a surprised “Really?” Occasionally, a direct “There aren’t a lot of Black folk here” — though there are historic Black neighborhoods just on the periphery of the hustle-bustle of downtown (and I’m sure that some of those 10 million visitors have to be Black).
But we all know what an Appalachian person is supposed to look like: white and bearing the marks of the region’s most defining characteristic, perennial poverty. Dentally challenged, perpetually bedraggled, voluminous beards that are common to both mountain men and ZZ Top, likely driving a truck with Trump bumper sticker. At least that’s the stereotype, delivered with a soundtrack of banjo music à la “Deliverance.”
People like me — Black people with roots in these mountains and who claim them publicly — aren’t supposed to exist. Or we are an anomaly. Population demographics don’t lie. Appalachia is the nation’s whitest region, and Asheville’s Black population is shrinking, down to 10 percent in 2021. That’s just a few percentage points off Black Americans’ share of the national population, about 12 percent, according to the 2020 Census count. But we been here, and continue to be.
I’m chewing on these numbers as I sit in Benne on Eagle, just off the main drag of Biltmore Avenue. The restaurant has a modern, open kitchen and sleek design in tones of grey and brown. The Eagle Street area was once part of the segregated district, commonly known as The Block. It was designed to keep Black Ashevillans in their place — that place — during Jim Crow. But in the way that Black people refashioned segregated space with ingenuity and community, the community thrived with barbershops, candy stores, restaurants, hotels, taxi companies, hangouts and other businesses to serve the “Negro” clientele.
The server — who is an affable, young Black woman (I note that it’s a rare pleasure to see Black front-of-house staff here) — asks me The Question.
I don’t take umbrage because, in Asheville, the circle of Black creatives is small and intimate. Chances are, we would have run into each other by now. I also don’t bristle because I know that Black Ashevillans rarely patronize this restaurant, which plays homage to Black restaurateurs of yore. The reality and racial logic of this place demands that I MUST be a tourist, a native stranger in this place where my father was born.
Benne on Eagle, however, is white-owned, though you’d be hard-pressed to discover that fact from the extensive media coverage since the restaurant opened to much fanfare in 2018. I think about whether I want to spend my money here, whether my dollars are only feeding “Black-washing” and white capital in a city where there is not one full-service restaurant owned by an African-American. (this is bad. but let’s make sure this has not changed and still accurate)
I think about how the tourism sector of Asheville depended on bondage, with enslaved people serving grog to weary travelers, carrying their bags, and cleaning their rooms for no pay. In 1860, some 1,900 enslaved people lived and worked in Buncombe County — not a large number, but enough to debunk the myth that there was no slavery in Appalachia (and, by extension, no Black people).
My ancestors were, more likely than not, here before the families of servers who ask me the seemingly innocuous question. We are not latecomers, interlopers, the seekers casting about for veins of New Age energy and vegan biscuits. I am not a “foreigner” here or someone from “off” — a saying that old folks once used to note who belonged and who did not. I am not scared by trucks with rifle racks, not cowed by the unrelenting parade of whiteness, not surprised when men stop and ask me if my Border Collie is a good hunter.
My family tree in Western North Carolina includes a Scots-Irish slaveholder and my great-great grandmother, Myra. It’s not clear when she arrived in the mountains, but family lore says she arrived and didn’t speak a lick of English. He owned a traveler’s inn; Myra, no doubt, tended to his guests.
She had nearly a dozen children by her enslaver. When emancipation came, the story goes old Joe Stepp turned out Myra with only her clothes and a few cooking tools to sustain her. Some versions of the story go that she got a skillet. When I’m in an Asheville restaurant that serves cornbread in a mini-size cast-iron skillet, that affectation always throws me for a loop.
I want to tell the cashiers and the servers who ask me where I’m from that, over the mountain from where my grandfather hailed, there is a Greenlee School, Greenlee Street. Somewhere else, there is a Greenlee Bottoms. In a place like this, naming your land after you stands for something. I take some consolation in that my mother has bought a condo in Black Mountain, around the corner from Cragmont Road, which used to be the heart of the town’s Black community. While Black Ashevillans are moving away at a pretty rapid clip, largely seeking economic opportunity, some of us are moving back and staking our claims.
I remind myself of all that, and grit my teeth, when a friendly-enough coffee-shop barista eyes me as if I am the most perplexing stranger. Again.
