BLYTHEWOOD – The Blythewood Ladies Club hosted a Black History program during its regular monthly meeting at its club house on Sandfield Road on Friday, Feb. 9. The program featured special guest Lavern Meggett, who lives in Blythewood’s Oak Hurst neighborhood, and her Great Aunt Isabella Meggett Lucas, age 94.
Meggett told two stories about how her family has been recognized separately – her mother’s side and her father’s side – and nationally for their connections and contributions to Africa-American history.
This week we are publishing the second of the two stories – the story that Lavern Megget told about her mother Emily Meggett’s life and love of cooking, and how her Gullah Geechee cookbook became a New York Times best seller.
“My mother was one of 10 children who grew up in a large extended family on Edisto Island. Her parents and their parents were born on the island in a lineage that connected to the enslaved Africans who were brought to the island to work the cotton plantations.
“Emily Meggett’s family worked in the fields in the daytime,” Lavern Meggett told the members of the Blythewood Ladies Club. “But my mother didn’t like to do field work, so my grandmother let her stay home and cook and bring the food out to her siblings and other family members in the field at mealtime.
“She basically learned to cook alongside my grandmother. Through the years she also cooked for her own family of 11 children,” Meggett said.
As the story goes, Emily Meggett cooked large and in her later life would feed anyone who came to her door and needed to eat. It became known on the island that when the side door to her kitchen was standing open it was an invitation to anyone who was hungry to stop by and eat.
For her culinary skills and her generosity with her food, Emily Meggett eventually became known as the Matriarch of Edisto. An article published in the Atlanta Journal noted that many stores and vendors on the island recognized her many contributions to her community and when she shopped for food, they wouldn’t take her money, recognizing the service she rendered to the hungry residents of the island.
For many years, Meggett said, her mother also worked as a cook for wealthy white families who lived on the island.
The idea for the cookbook came about in 1994, when a white family named Smith, who spent summers on Edisto, hired Emily Meggett to cook for them.
“My mother had never used a cookbook and she used limited ingredients,” Meggett said. “But Becky Smith, who she cooked for, was so impressed with our mother’s cooking that she suggested they put my mom’s recipies on paper and into a cookbook.”
After a few years of cataloging her recipes, and with help from several friends and professional acquaintenances, the book, Gullah Geechee home cooking was published in 2022 with 123 recipes and Emily Meggett’s life story. She was 89 years old at the time.
Within the year the cookbook was on the New York Times best seller list. Before her death in April, 2023, at the age of 90, Emily Meggett’s life was a whirlwind of honors, including from President Biden and many state and Charleston/Edisto Island area organizations. Congressman James E. Clyburn presented Emily Meggett with the President’s Volunteer Service Award July 22, 2022. The award honored her decades spent cooking meals from her home and offering hospitality to the Gullah-Geechee island community. And that same year, her book was nominated for the James Beard Award.
Today, Meggett and her siblings devote much of their time maintaining Emily Meggett’s legacy.
“She was remarkable,” Meggett said of her mother. “She contributed so much and many people love her and they love her recipes.”
