For most of my childhood, my paternal grandparents employed Lessie, an African-American housekeeper whose most important duty — as far as my young mind could see — was the preparation of my favorite cake, yellow with chocolate frosting, at least twice a year: once for my birthday in June, the other around Christmas when we would visit my grandparents' winter home in Florida.
Proust had his madeleine and I have the memory of this cake, which was moist and rich beyond belief. During one visit to Delray Beach, Lessie confided in me that she had used an extra stick of butter beyond the already large amount required by the recipe. I wasn't sure if that bonus stick went into the cake or the frosting. Either worked for me.
After my grandfather passed away, there was some kind of sundering and Lessie disappeared from the household. No one in my life since then has fed me so much butter in concentrated form.
All of this came back to me in recent days as my son and I consumed the birthday cake my wife had baked for me (delicious, but it could have used more butter) while we watched the fall of Paula Deen.
It's been a rotten six weeks for the celebrity chef since her deposition in a lawsuit brought by Lisa Jackson, a former manager of one of Deen's flagship restaurants. Jackson's suit claims she was fired after she became concerned about offensive treatment by Deen and her brother, the unfortunately nicknamed Bubba Hiers.
"Have you ever used the N-word yourself?," Deen was asked by Matthew Billups, Jackson's attorney.
"Yes, of course," Deen said, as if the attorney had asked her whether or not she loved a certain churned dairy product.
"OK. In what context?"
"Well," she said, "it was probably when a black man burst into the bank that I was working at and put a gun to my head." Deen specified that she might have used the word when telling her husband about the 1987 incident and not when the stickup artist was threatening her — proving that there was a time in Deen's life when she knew how to comport herself appropriately in perilous circumstances.
After that, Billups turned to the suit's allegations that Hiers runs his own Deen-branded restaurant, Uncle Bubba's Oyster House, using a management style that pays a bit too much homage to Simon Legree. Deen was asked about her desire to see Bubba's wedding done in a "southern plantation" theme, modeled in part on a restaurant she had once patronized where the middle-aged black servers wore white jackets and black bow ties.
Billups asked if Deen might have "slipped" and used the N-word in describing that fondly recalled establishment. "No, because that's not what these men were," she said. "They were professional black men doing a fabulous job."
If you want to mark the end of Deen's career, it's in this answer, which seems to presuppose the existence of a category of waitstaff who might be deserving of the racial epithet.
We should be clear about what Paula Deen is in trouble for; and, paraphrase the title of her best-selling 2009 memoir "It Ain't All About the Cookin'," it ain't all about the N-word.
Ugly as it is, that epithet was no doubt uttered dozens of times by anyone singing along to Kanye West's new album "Yeezus," the top-selling disc in the nation last week. This week, it was replaced by D.C. rapper Wale's "The Gifted," in which the N-word doesn't appear until the third line of the first track. Next week's top-selling album will almost certainly be Jay-Z's "Magna Carta Holy Grail," another disc in which the N-word shows up almost as often as mention of various designer brands.
Is there a difference between a black hip-hop artist using that word today and a traumatized Southern white female bank teller using it 25 years ago? Sure. Which just goes to show that just as there are no inherently bad food ingredients, there are no inherently evil words — thus the key turn in the lawyer's line of questioning from usage to context.
But I wonder if what we're seeing in Deen's ouster is a sort of cultural exorcism in which the corporations making an incredible amount of money off the concept of Southern "comfort food" and the hospitality that supposedly goes with it are trying to purge the market of its often ignominious history. Put another way: There's a reason why some of the most memorable protests of the civil rights movements were enacted at lunch counters.
We shouldn't expect the Food Network to provide much in the way of cultural analysis, just as you don't go looking for relationship advice on the Playboy Channel. This nation will do almost anything to convince itself that it doesn't have lingering problems with race, and Deen's deposition made it untenable for us to avoid or at least obscure these subjects. Consequently, she's gotta go.
But can she come back? It will take time. The restaurant chain Cracker Barrel, which shares a customer base with Deen's demographic, spent years atoning for its previously shabby treatment of minorities.
The best advice might be for Deen to settle the lawsuit, cut her brother loose and stay out of the public eye for a few months, or longer.
And ease off on the butter.
cseiler@timesunion.com • 518-454-5619