Pot committed urban dictionary7/31/2023 Kelly who, like Green, has made a career on blending the sacred and the sexual. But it may have also inspired disgraced singer R. Green’s hot grits encounter left him with second-degree burns, mourning Mary, and struggling to make sense of what happened. Mary promised to stay in touch after getting to Memphis, but the narrator’s father nixed that, saying “there was something wild in her face.” In Jones’ telling, Mary threw the grits at the novel’s Al Green figure the next day. Sitting in the chair, Mary talked about this “man I got” who sang with a healing touch, and she cuddled the feverish then-5-year-old narrator. Dressed in a homemade (but chic) pink pantsuit, the Mary of Jones’ novel came to Atlanta for a church conference and had her hair curled in a salon by the narrator’s mother, Laverne. Then 28, Green was slim of hip, wide of smile, and never wanted for female company.Ī Woodson-inspired character makes a brief appearance in Jones’ novel Silver Sparrow the book’s Mary met the narrator and her family before the fateful, fatal night with the novel’s Al Green. The two had only known each other for several months, but Woodson may have been uncomfortable about the other women in Green’s life -and the other woman right there in the house. Shortly before the bathroom scene, Woodson had asked the singer about his marital intentions. On October 18, 1974, the crooner had stripped naked and was preparing to bathe, when his new lover, Mary Woodson, entered the room and doused his back with a pot of hot grits.Įgg-sized blisters erupted on his skin, but Green was saved by the quick thinking of another woman who was also in the house, heard his screams, and pushed him under the shower’s cooling water. It’s almost as much of his legend as his songs that described the unpredictability of love, which will make you both do right and do wrong. Or even worse, used to cause pain.” Within Southern African-American culture particularly, the throwing of grits is often a woman’s tool of rage and domestic warfare.īecause this humble breakfast staple seems a novel instrument of vengeance and a well-known incident involved legendary soul singer Al Green, the idea of grits as a weapon has worked its way into Black film, literature, music, and a fair share of legal cases.īut it’s Al Green’s story of being on the receiving end of tossed grits that may be most responsible for pop culture representations of harm by hominy. The poem, published in Jackson’s 1998 collection And All These Roads Be Luminous, is part of a larger history of grits becoming a weapon in the hands of Southern, mostly Black, women.Īs Erin Byers Murray, author of Grits: A Cultural and Culinary History of the South, notes, grits “aren’t always comfort. She means to maim and mark him, so there will be no mistake that he’s unfit for fidelity or other partners. The sticky, grainy mess will cling to his skin. His absence keeps her awake, doing the impossible of keeping even long-cooking grits creamy for hours. He means enough to her that his supposed duplicity keeps her angry.
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