Verta Smart

Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, born April 4, 1937, in Hampton County, South Carolina, and who died September 3, 2016, was an American culinary anthropologist, food writer, poet, griot, and public broadcaster. She was born prematurely as a twin; her twin brother did not survive birth. Raised in the Low Country of South Carolina within a Gullah family whose roots in the region stretched back centuries, she grew up speaking Gullah and cooking Low Country cuisine. Her paternal grandmother Estella Smart's approach to oysters would later be recounted in her first cookbook. When Smart was approximately eight years old, her family relocated from the Gullah Geechee Corridor to Philadelphia as part of the Great Migration, where she spent her teenage years. Growing up as a latchkey child, she used the time alone to experiment extensively in the kitchen.

In 1958, at nineteen, Smart traveled to Paris to pursue theater in European bohemian circles, also visiting cities in Italy and elsewhere on the continent. During that time in Paris she met Bob Grosvenor, whom she later married. She observed a Senegalese street vendor using food preparation techniques she recognized from her Low Country upbringing, an experience that deepened her understanding of cooking as cultural expression. She returned to Paris in 1968, living there for a period with her two children, Kali and Chandra, before eventually settling in New York City.

In New York, Smart-Grosvenor pursued acting and appeared on Broadway in 1961, playing Big Pearl in Mandingo. She became involved in the Black Arts Movement, forming connections with artists including Nikki Giovanni and Leroi Jones. For three years she served as a chanter, dancer, costume designer, and cook with Sun Ra's Solar-Myth Arkestra.

Her 1970 cookbook-memoir, Vibration Cooking: or, The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, became her most recognized written work. The book blends narrative prose with recipes, most written conversationally and without precise measurements, drawing on her Gullah and Low Country heritage and her travels. It was reprinted in 1986, 1992, and 2011. Her second book, Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap, published by Doubleday in 1972, examined the lives and experiences of domestic workers as a work of sociology. She contributed editorial work to Élan and Essence magazines and published articles in the Village Voice, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She published under several names, including Verta Smart, Vertamae Grosvenor, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor.

Smart-Grosvenor appeared in several films, among them Personal Problems (1980), an independent production directed by Bill Gunn; Daughters of the Dust (1992), which centered on a Gullah family navigating a period of transition on the Sea Islands in 1902; and Beloved (1998), adapted from Toni Morrison's 1987 novel. She also appeared in a National Geographic documentary focused on the Gullah people.

Her broadcasting career was extensive. She served as a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered and as a regular contributor to NPR's Cultural Desk. Her documentary Slave Voices: Things Past Telling aired in 1983, and Daufuskie: Never Enough Too Soon earned her both a Robert F. Kennedy Award and an Ohio State Award. From 1988 to 1995 she hosted NPR's documentary series Horizons, which included AIDS and Black America: Breaking the Silence, a program on the AIDS crisis that received a duPont-Columbia Award and an Ohio State Award in 1990. She also produced South Africa and the African-American Experience, examining connections between indigenous South Africans and African Americans. Her radio series Seasonings, a collection of holiday specials on food and culture, won a James Beard Award for Best Radio Show in 1996. She hosted The Americas' Family Kitchen on PBS, which led to a television spinoff titled Vertamae Cooks, and was a contributor to NPR's NOW series.