January has not always been about reinvention.

In the Black South, New Year traditions were shaped by history, uncertainty, and care. Long before resolutions and goal lists, the New Year was a moment of preparation—marked by food that sustained, homes put in order, and communities entering the year together.

In this episode of Beyond the Table, explores the origins and meaning of New Year traditions in the Black South, from the foods prepared on January 1 to the practice of Watch Night and collective reflection. These traditions were not about superstition or spectacle, but about steadiness, continuity, and readiness in the face of an uncertain future.

This episode opens the year with a grounded reflection on what it means to begin again—not by erasing the past, but by carrying forward what has endured.

History & Cultural Context

• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson — Context on Southern Black life, continuity, and tradition.

• Bound to Respect by Darlene Clark Hine — Explores domestic order, care, and discipline in Black Southern households.

• Library of Congress — African American traditions and cultural practices in the U.S. South.

• Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture — Cultural history of Black life, foodways, and faith practices.

Foodways & Tradition

• High on the Hog by Jessica B. Harris — Foundational text on African American food history.

• Southern Foodways Alliance — Research and oral histories documenting Southern food traditions.

• Toni Tipton-Martin, The Jemima Code — Historical documentation of Black culinary knowledge and survival cooking.

Faith & Watch Night

• National Museum of African American History and Culture — Watch Night and Emancipation history.

• Henry Louis Gates Jr., PBS essays on Emancipation Watch Night traditions.

• African Methodist Episcopal Church archives — Historical accounts of Watch Night services beginning December 31, 1862.

Seasonal & Cultural Reflection

• E. Franklin Frazier, writings on Black family structure and community continuity.

• Oral histories from the Works Progress Administration Slave Narratives Collection.

Hello, I'm Amanda. Welcome to Beyond the Table stories of culture, memory, and meaning.

In this short episode, I wanted to pause and say thank you.

Beyond the Table launched in October, and this moment is an opportunity to acknowledge the listeners who showed up quietly, consistently, and with care. This episode reflects on what it has meant to build this show, the importance of attention and listening, and the gratitude that comes with creating something rooted in culture, memory, and meaning.

This is not a recap, but a moment of appreciation and reflection as the year winds down.

Tomorrow, a new bonus episode drops our Soul Food rewatch, covering Season One, Episodes Four and Five.

Thank you for listening, and for being part of the early life of this show.

In this Christmas episode, we explore Christmas in the Black South a tradition shaped by food, faith, memory, and the enduring pull of home.

Looking beyond commercial narratives, this episode traces how Christmas became a moment of rest, gathering, and continuity in Black Southern life. From the historical roots of holiday pauses during slavery to the lasting significance of Watch Night services, Southern foodways, and returning home, we examine how culture transformed constraint into tradition.

This is a story about kitchens and churches, sound and memory, migration and return, and the quiet meaning of belonging. Designed for Christmas week listening, this episode is reflective, historical, and grounded in lived experience.

If this episode resonates with you, consider sharing it with someone who might appreciate this story.

All sources and references are listed below.

Follow the show on Instagram: @AmandaPaints1214

Tictok: beyondthetablepod
Email: beyondthetablecast@gmail.com

• National Museum of African American History and Culture
  — Religion in African American History
  — African American Foodways and Cultural Memory

• Library of Congress
  — Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narratives Collection

• National Park Service
  — Watch Night and the Emancipation Proclamation

• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

• Henry Louis Gates Jr., The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross

• James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Slavery and the Making of America

• Pew Research Center
  — Religion and African American Communities

• Southern Foodways Alliance
  — Oral histories on Southern food traditions and holiday cooking

In December 1993, three people were murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska: Brandon Teena, Lisa Lambert, and Philip DeVine. While Brandon Teena's story became nationally known, Philip DeVine a twenty-two-year-old Black man was nearly erased from public memory.

This episode centers Philip DeVine's life, presence, and death, and examines how race, media framing, and popular culture shaped which victims were remembered and which were forgotten.

In this episode, we explore:
• Who Philip DeVine was and why he was in the home
• The events of December 31, 1993
• How the legal system documented all three victims
• How Philip was removed from national storytelling
• The role of race in victim erasure
• Why restoring Philip's name matters today

All resources used to build this story are listed in the show notes so you can explore this further.

New episodes of Beyond the Table are released every Tuesday.

Follow the show on Instagram: @AmandaPaints1214

Tictok: beyondthetablepod
Email: beyondthetablecast@gmail.com

Journalism and Reporting
• NBC News — "Man pleads guilty in teen lesbian's slaying"
• Associated Press (AP) — Coverage of the murders, arrests, and trials
• Lincoln Journal Star — Local reporting on the 1993 triple homicide
• Omaha World-Herald — Trial and sentencing coverage

Documentaries
• The Brandon Teena Story (1998) — Documentary that references the full case
• Boys Don't Cry (1999) — Referenced for cultural context and erasure analysis

Academic and Cultural Analysis
• C. Riley Snorton — Black on Both Sides
• Jack Halberstam — In a Queer Time and Place

Written and produced by Amanda Clemons

© 2025 Beyond the Table. All rights reserved

In this episode, we explore the rise and fall of the Black mall one of the most important and overlooked cultural spaces in late twentieth-century America. From segregation-era restrictions to the emergence of malls as Black social hubs in the 1980s and 1990s, this episode traces how Black consumers reshaped retail, identity, and community across generations.

We take you through the history of restricted access, postwar suburbanization, the migration of Black families into new commercial spaces, and the cultural energy that made malls feel like community centers, fashion runways, and social worlds.

We also look at the economic forces that led to mall decline and what remains culturally, even after the escalators stopped.

New episodes of Beyond the Table release every Tuesday.

Follow the show on Instagram: @AmandaPaints1214

Tictok: beyondthetablepod
Email: beyondthetablecast@gmail.com

• Business Insider — "The rise and fall of the American Shopping Mall"

• Brookings Institution - Black Buying Power

• Atlas Obscura — "The Life and Death of the American Mall"

• Forbes - "It's the End of the Mall As We Know It ... And I Feel Fine"

Written and produced by Amanda Clemons

© 2025 Beyond the Table. All rights reserved

In May 2003, fifteen-year-old Sakia Gunn, a Black lesbian girl from Newark, was murdered in an act of homophobic violence that most of the nation never heard about. This true crime episode centers her humanity, her courage, and the community that refused to let her story disappear.

In this victim-centered true crime episode, we explore:

• Newark's queer youth culture in the early 2000s
• Who Sakia was before the violence
• The events of that night and the immediate aftermath
• The media's lack of coverage
• The community response and marches
• How Sakia's death shaped visibility, advocacy, and safety for Black LGBTQ youth

New episodes of Beyond the Table release every Tuesday.

Follow the show on Instagram: @BeyondTableShow
Email: beyondthetablecast@gmail.com

• Out In New Jersey — "Remembering Sakia Gunn"

• The Murder of Sakia Gunn and LGBT Anti-Violence Mobilization

• NBC News — "Man pleads guilty in teen lesbian's slaying"

• Queer Newark Oral History Project — Rutgers University

Written and produced by Amanda Clemons

© 2025 Beyond the Table. All rights reserved

Echoes of the Feast: A Thanksgiving History of Food, Culture, and Tradition is a cinematic, time-traveling journey through the real story of the American Thanksgiving meal. This episode moves across centuries to reveal how each dish on the table came to be — shaped by Indigenous agricultural knowledge, colonial hardship, national mythmaking, Black culinary traditions, migration, and modern reinvention.

Through immersive soundscapes and historical narration, the episode traces:

• Indigenous harvest practices of corn, beans, squash, wild turkey, and maple sugar

• The reality of seventeenth-century survival and why the 1621 gathering was not the first "Thanksgiving"

• Nineteenth-century writers and political leaders who invented the holiday as a unifying national tradition

• The deep influence of Black cooks in the post-emancipation South, whose foodways transformed the holiday table

• The Great Migration, which carried Southern dishes — including dressing, sweet potatoes, greens, and macaroni and cheese — into cities across the country

• The rise of industrial food brands like Ocean Spray, Libby's, and Campbell's, which standardized the mid-twentieth-century Thanksgiving menu

• And the modern feast, shaped by chosen families, fusion dishes, cultural diversity, and evolving traditions

This is not a story about myth.
It is a story about people — about how history, culture, and memory have shaped the meal we recognize today.

Echoes of the Feast is part of the Beyond the Table Thanksgiving arc, alongside:
• What's Cooking — a cultural exploration of the 2000 film and the families it brings to the table
• Thanksgiving, Everywhere — a journey across global gratitude traditions and how communities honor harvest, survival, and gathering

If Beyond the Table resonates with you, please follow, rate, and share the show. Your support helps these stories reach more listeners.

Written and produced by Amanda Clemons.

Resources:

• "What Was Eaten at the First Thanksgiving?" — History.com

• "The Story Behind Thanksgiving's Most Polarizing Dish" — Food & Wine

• "How the Traditional Thanksgiving Feast Has Evolved Over Centuries" — National Geographic

• "African American Origins to Thanksgiving Foods" — TN Tribune

• "At Black Thanksgiving, both body and soul are fed" — Los Angeles Times

• "How Thanksgiving Cuisine Earned a Place at the Table" — Library of Congress Blog

• "Why Do We Eat Turkey on Thanksgiving?" — Britannica

• "As an African American Who Loves Thanksgiving, Must I Simply Ignore the Historical Suffering…" — Religion Dispatches

To mark the film's 25th anniversary, this episode revisits What's Cooking? (2000) a groundbreaking multicultural Thanksgiving film directed by Gurinder Chadha.

Four families. Four kitchens. One holiday lived through Black, Latin, Vietnamese, and Jewish identities including one of the earliest and most tender portrayals of queer family truth in early 2000s cinema.

Amanda explores why this film was ahead of its time, how it reflected the real America long before Hollywood embraced intersectionality, and why its message still matters today.

Listen to Thanksgiving Everywhere a tour of gratitude festivals and harvest traditions around the world.

Stay tuned for Echoes of the Feast, one meal told across centuries, where every table keeps a piece of history."

• Emanuel Levy, "What's Cooking? Film Review" – Variety (2000).
• Kevin Thomas, "'What's Cooking?' Simmers in Los Angeles Melting Pot" – LA Times (2000).
• Mary Pattillo, Black Picket Fences (University of Chicago Press, 1999)
• Karyn Lacy, Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (University of California Press, 2007)
• Rubén G. Rumbaut – "Assimilation and Its Discontents" (International Migration Review)
• Jay Michaelson – "Queer Theology and the Traditions of Judaism"
• Loan Thi Dao – "Negotiating Culture: Intergenerational Conflict in Vietnamese American Families"Journal of Comparative Family Studies
• Andrea Weiss – Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film (Penguin, 1992)
• Patricia White – UnInvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press, 1999)
• Dan Jurafsky, The Language of Food (W. W. Norton, 2014)
  

Contains a brief excerpt from the official What's Cooking? (2000) theatrical trailer — © Lions Gate Films. Used under fair use for commentary and criticism.

Written & Produced by Amanda Clemons
Instagram: @BeyondTableShow
Email: beyondthetablecast@gmail.com

You can find Beyond the Table wherever you listen to podcasts — including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and iHeartRadio.

Copyright © 2025 Beyond the Table Podcast.
All rights reserved.