Before the Fire - After the Flame: Barbecue, Bondage, and the Legacy of Chicago's Smoke

Before the first pit was dug in the South—before Chicago's smokehouses filled the air with hickory and song—there was Africa. There, fire was sacred, smoke was ceremony, and cooking was communion.

Before the Fire, After the Flame traces the powerful journey of that sacred flame across continents and centuries, from West African villages to the brutality of the Middle Passage, the plantation pits of the American South, and the rib-tip smokehouses of Chicago's Bronzeville.

With lyrical precisio...