Tomato Salad — The Best Tomato I’ve Ever Had

Set the Table's one-year anniversary. September 10th, one year since seven girls (six, then seven when Diamond showed up the second week) walked into the church kitchen and learned to make scrambled eggs and cornbread. I didn't plan anything special. The girls did. Destiny organized it — a potluck where each girl made the first dish she learned at Set the Table. Monique made pancakes (Texas-shaped, her signature). Diamond made — and I am not going to be able to write this without crying — Diamond made scrambled eggs and cornbread. The exact meal from the first class. The meal where Mama sat on the stool and directed traffic. Diamond was twelve then. She's thirteen now. She was silent then. She talks now. She made cornbread in a cast iron skillet and it was golden and cracked at the edges and she brought it to me on a plate and said, "This is for Miss Brenda."

I took the plate. I looked at the cornbread. I looked at Diamond. And I said, "She'd say it needs something." And Diamond laughed. And I laughed. And we ate cornbread for Miss Brenda in the church kitchen where Miss Brenda taught a girl she'd never met that she had hands, and the cornbread was perfect, and Mama would have said it needed something, and it didn't need a damn thing.

After the class, I sat in the kitchen alone. One year. Eight girls who can cook. Eight girls who can sit at a table and know they belong there. Eight girls who know that a kitchen is a place of power. Mama started this with me. Mama sat on that stool and said "Don't let them put sugar in my grits" and those girls will remember her for the rest of their lives. One year. This is the best thing I've ever done. Mama said so. I believe her.

Curtis brought me tomatoes from the garden. Three of them. Red, ripe, ugly as sin, split at the top where the heat got to them. He put them on my counter and said, "From your mama's garden." I said, "From YOUR garden, Daddy." He said, "Tamika, that garden will always be your mother's." I sliced one on the spot — thick, with salt and pepper and a drizzle of balsamic — and we ate it standing at the counter. It tasted like August. It tasted like trying. It tasted like a seventy-two-year-old man who planted tomatoes for a woman who'll never see them and grew them anyway. The best tomato I've ever had.

Curtis’s tomatoes didn’t need a recipe — but I want to give them one anyway, because food like that deserves to be made again. What he put on my counter that day was ugly and split and perfect, and what we did with it — thick slices, salt, pepper, a drizzle of balsamic, standing up — is exactly the kind of thing I want the girls at Set the Table to know: that a garden tomato in August, treated with a little respect, is already the whole meal. This is Mama’s garden. This is Daddy’s love. This is the recipe.