It was the first book that really articulated my experience as a young, globally oriented black woman growing up in the US. In one particular passage she describes the shame she felt about her heritage in anticipation of the announced “International Day” at school, which was a sort of cultural “show and tell” day, complete with corresponding ethnic foods brought from home:

“I felt my cheeks burn. If they hadn’t been brown, everyone
would have noticed that they were red. I tried not to make eye contact with
anyone, in case they noticed my discomfort or figured out my shame. My
ancestors were slaves! I was the descendant of a group of people kept as
chattel, who lived in shacks, worked themselves to death, and if luck was on
their side, fled up north with Harriet Tubman and disappeared. What was I
supposed to do? Come to school dressed in rags with a handkerchief around my
head? And food? Slaves didn’t get to eat good food. Maybe my mom could bring
some table scraps for everyone to sample. I could feel my heart beating loudly
in my chest and my skin went cold. How was I going to deal with this? And me
being the only Black child in my class, my shame was my own.“

I felt as if the book had peeled back a heavy curtain and shed light on all that anxiety, all those thoughts I had whispered to myself in secret, all that stuff that could never be mentioned in polite, educated company.

It was hilarious. It was touching. It was uncomfortable.

I had the chance to meet the author some years ago, in a small setting in Philadelphia. She signed my copy of the book, and chatted a bit about my tenuous writing career. This was the first time that I had ever met a ‘professional’ black female writer ( I was in college), and it changed my perspective about a lot of things. The most important way it influenced my thinking was that it made me realize that my story was important too. I was convinced before that somehow, my writing voice was drowned out by skin color. It sounds silly now, but outside of some fiction written by Toni Morrison, I really lacked a fundamental familiarity of black women narratives. Later I found myself revisiting this book again, because I read an ‘expert’s’ commentary on black writing, saying people of color should stop writing about anything to do race, because it “limits” them ( he was Caucasian). I felt paralyzed for a long time, because I felt like so many of my experiences were colored ( no pun intended) by my background, which – yes- included things like social class, and place, and space and love and other ‘stuff’ but it Also included race. I couldn’t just pretend that had nothing to do with any my experiences, because it did, particularly when I describe reflect on gender and body image and the socializing of such.

So, Tharp’s book, Kinky Gazpacho, while simple, taught me something much more than how to craft a good memoir, or use humor in writing.

It taught me how to decline disingenuity; and indeed, to my own self, I am true.

Hi Ross, thanks so much for sharing! Yeah I guess “profound” might have been a bit much, eh? Still, every writer must have some book that influenced their writing, since most writers are readers first, after all. Interesting that the impact “Moon of Three Rings” had on you has lasted until now, sort of like how “Interstellar Pig” has also influenced me to this day.