Black Love: How has your life changed since “High on the Hog”?
Stephen Satterfield: No one has asked me that question yet. Prior to the release of the show, I had to keep it under apps for a really long time. It was quite an emotional journey, as you saw, and it also really required a lot of me, I think mentally and emotionally to kind of show up for the work. And after it came out and it was really well received, I’ve just been feeling so much relief, frankly, and also gratitude for the many comments and conversations, where our people can express our gratitude for this work. I have long been trying to put work like this into the world. So to be attached to this project that hit in such a big way at scale, so to speak, has just really been humbling. And even more so than I feel kind of unburdened by all of the anxiety leading up to it.
Black Love: I watched “High on the Hog” for the first time on Juneteenth in Inglewood with friends, and then I watched again a few months later back on the East Coast with my grandma and great aunts. While the ages of people in those rooms were vastly different in both spaces, there was this deep gratitude for this body of work. How does it feel to know that you’ve been able to be a part of something that has impacted generations of Black people?
Satterfield: The only word I can think of is humbling. I’m really humbled. You know, the likelihood of work like this getting made is super slim. It explains why we haven’t seen work like this made. And so to be able to reach our elders and to be able to reach my peers and the youth, it’s really a testament honestly to what was missing as far as representation in our culture and of our culture, because obviously at the cookout with the family, at the crib, you know what I mean at the church places where Black folks convene, not even in a US perspective, but even from a diasporic perspective, we just really haven’t seen that much of that type of media, and particularly as it relates to food traditions, the most kind of access we’ve seen to Black folks as it relates to our food culture is like maybe on cooking shows or some shows on the Food Network are kind of like gamified, so to speak.
This documentary was for us and by us. And it was really just one heartfelt love song for our people as told through food.
And I can only imagine, especially for the elders. They’ve never seen anything like that, you know what I mean? And so I really can’t imagine how impactful that would be to go so many decades without seeing your culture and your likeness fully reflected on screen. And then to just have this four-hour-long, really cinematic piece that covers that. I’m just really elated that I got to be a part of it.
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Black Love: As African Americans, we’re often taught as slavery has stripped us of everything. One of the most beautiful things about this series has shown that could not be true at all. So much of our culture was preserved and food. To see that on such a large platform in many ways was healing for us as a people, do you feel like it was healing for you too?
Satterfield: You’re completely right about that. First, just the premise of the struggle and the Black American story as told almost through the singular oppressive narrative of slavery. It obviously is paramount to our story as African American people, as in like, what are we even doing here? But that story is a story that is equally about persistence, perseverance and triumph, because otherwise, again, we wouldn’t even be here to take the narrative of oppression and enslavement as the singular universal Black story completely misses the point that if that was the whole narrative, we would have never made it.
Our traditions wouldn’t have endured, our culture wouldn’t have endured. And yet we’ve only come out of this experience stronger people, actually more resilient people. And you see the ways in which our culture continues to change the world on a daily basis.
Why not celebrate that? Why not lift that up? And I think if we really start to interrogate the reasons for why that is and we look at who controls media, right? We look at the percentages of Black folks who own media and production companies, especially those that are even in a position to be able to contract with platforms as large as Netflix.
We’re not in the building like that. We’re not even in the room like that. It’s not surprising because white people have been given all of the power to tell our stories. And that relationship, I think, tends to reinforce how white people view Black people in their own imagination, whether or not it’s conscious, which is about this kind of subservient class, this racialized subservient racialized hierarchy that obviously is the basis of this society. And those stories really come out looking like we see a lot of the so-called white savior narrative, white benevolence either in the themes themselves or just in the making, as in like, you all better be lucky that you even got this made.
“High on the Hog” is a triumph in that we had a Black director, Black executive producers, Black showrunner, and myself and Dr. J (Dr. Harris) as the front-facing narrators of this very Black story that is so unusual. And I think that’s the reason why you see so much care, love, and intimacy like the show feels Black. Like, for real, it does and that’s because there was Black people involved up and down.
Black Love: Speaking of Dr. Harris, There were so many beautiful moments between you two in Benin. Is there a favorite memory that you have of that time?
Satterfield: I don’t know about favorite, but I think I said this in the doc, but she has long been a major muse for me personally, has really deeply impacted my career, like years before, decades, even before this show is ever conceived. And so just on a personal level, to be sharing the screen and to be sharing this work in this text with her that dramatically impacted my life over a decade ago when it came out is so surreal that I don’t I’m not positive that will ever actually catch up to how surreal that is.
When we first started filming, I was a little freaked out. My career prior to this had not been really on screen. It was more as kind of intellectual as a business owner of my company Whetstone and in the media space. And so I had some pretty bad nerves the first day we were shooting in Africa, and she just, like grabbed my ear was like, bro, you got to get it together. And there was so much love in that, even though she was very stern, it wasn’t just about making me feel good. It was about saying, this is your moment. You need to step into your full power and embody this and that I received it in that way. And I’m so grateful that she did that because I maybe never would have gotten outside of my head.
Black Love: It seems like on some level you doubted yourself, and felt some sort of imposter syndrome. A sentiment we’ve often heard Black women express but not always Black men. If you could encourage Black men who are experiencing those emotions of not feeling good enough or prepared for the next step, what would you say to them?
Satterfield: Wow. It’s tricky because we have for all the reasons that we just described. Right? White supremacy is the devil, because it is so omnipresent. It’s like the air, it’s oxygen. And just like when we breathe, it’s not as if we’re conscious or cognizant of the fact we’re breathing. The only time we think about it is when we can’t breathe if you have an asthma attack or you are struggling to swim. And so when I think about the Black American experience, some of us were lucky enough to grow up in households where that Black love and confidence was deeply instilled in us.
And so we moved through the world in that spirit as a kind of armor against this pervasive white supremacy. A lot of the world, our world is still controlled by white men. We’re talking about systems of power. And I can assure all of my Black brothers answers from all the Black family that these white men at the very top who are consolidating power, they don’t wake up thinking about what they don’t deserve, right. People and white men in particular in the US are born with this entitlement. And as I started to move in that spirit, it actually did become something that became a kind of superpower and that I still tap into and how I moved through the world and thinking like there’s nothing that is above my own imagination or capacity. And I hope that Black people move with that same entitlement. There’s a lot of power in that.
Black Love: “High on the Hog” tells this painful but necessary story of erasure, especially of Black chefs. Unfortunately, often as a culture, when we think of chefs, we don’t think of a Black man making oysters. Do you think this representation will put us on a path to unlearning in multiple aspects, what spaces we think we can occupy?
Satterfied: I hope so. I’m optimistic. Nothing is more powerful than stories. And so if you look at story as a form of power. Then you start to see that our stories are a fight for Black power. And so what I in talking about these particular stories around the Black folks in the identity of a chef versus a Cook. Right. Like that one word is such an intellectual shift, you know what I mean? And again, that’s our own internalized shit. And it’s so subtle that it really is almost terrifying when you really start to see how pervasive these stories are even within ourselves.
The fact that we don’t identify as chefs, even when we were the foremost chefs in the country. The first two celebrity chefs in the US were Black folks. And you wouldn’t hear European-trained cooks referring to people in their family. As such, they will always say we come from a line of chefs. And so what I think and what I hope is that as people start to understand that stories are the most powerful and pervasive thing that we have in our society, that Black people taking ownership of our own stories are going to change society.
We’re going to get vastly different results because the reason that we never saw ourselves in that story is because that would give us power and agency. Knowing that we were the first chefs in the country, it’s like we’re going to feel totally different showing up to a fine dining restaurant. We’re going to occupy space differently, knowing that we’re the ones who brought mac and cheese you know?
Black Love: So I want to get a little personal and pivot to a holiday question for a moment. What family traditions and specifically food are you looking forward to for the holidays?
Satterfield: My house in Atlanta has always been the convening house. I’m going to call my Dad a chef in the spirit of what we’re discussing; he’s not formally trained. But he learned from his mother and from the elders in our family. Right. And so the reason I got into cooking and food as a teenager is because it was nothing for me to see the man of the house actually also be in the kitchen. And so this year, unlike last year, we’ll actually kind of resume our tradition of having folks come over and eat buffet style. We will have probably 60 people come through.
We’ve always been that house. And as far as the food itself, in my adult years, it’s kind of turned into a fun collaboration with me and my father. So he does all the iconic staples like the mac and cheese, collards, potato salad, all that stuff. I honestly still can’t even prepare those dishes better than I have been formally trained, which is again, a commentary on what we’re talking about. And then I usually get the honor of doing the meat. So I’ll do the Turkey. I’ll do all the butchering. I do like leg of lamb and stuff like that. And then my dad is nice with the smoker, he likes to smoke cornish game. So we throw down it’s a family affair. And that’s the spirit that I grew up in. And it totally is why I have the relationship with food that I do today.
Black Love: What can we expect from season 2, and what’s next for you?
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Satterfield: My media company has a podcast network that is coming out next month on December 8. It’s called Wet Stone Radio Collective, and that is a collection of stories from all over the world. We are producing podcasts right now from Taiwan to Mexico, the Philippines, and India. So we have this incredible one of a kind what I’m calling the Food Network of podcasting that we’re cooking up over at Weston, which is going to be a completely original podcast network, mostly with women at the center of all the stories around food and culture and care and preservation. And of course, season 2 is next for me. The story itself moves in a chronological space. And so we left off at Texas Emancipation. And so I think this next chapter is really going to be about picking up from that space of liberation. So I’m looking forward to approaching the storytelling from that sense, more kind of contemporary sense, I guess. And you can expect more untold stories from the Black diaspora.
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