It’s harder than it looks, filming the ins and outs of domestic life for television consumption. But when 48-year-old Barbara Smith decided to inch onto Martha Stewart’s turf, she knew it wasn’t going to be a bed of oncidium orchids. Breaking ground has been a specialty of Smith’s since 1976, when she became the first black woman to appear on the cover of Mademoiselle. Now she is the purveyor of an original nouveau soul esthetic, through her B. Smith restaurants in New York and Washington, D.C.; her 1995 book, ““B. Smith’s Cooking and Entertaining for Friends,’’ and the two-month-old TV show, seen in 48 of the 50 major television markets. Her style combines a classic elegance with funkier ethnic accents–like her shrimp scampi with plantains. The restaurants give the burgeoning black middle class sophisticated yet comfortable places to gather, and the other enterprises extend that groove. Call them a Buppie guide for better living.
No wonder she’s been dubbed the ““black Martha Stewart.’’ That’s a characterization that neither she nor her husband, television producer Dan Gasby, feels comfortable with. Yet like any good businesswoman she’s already learned how to spin the moniker. ““The easiest way for people to understand what I do is to compare me to Martha Stewart,’’ she says. ““The difference is that I’m like jazz, which can be improvised. She’s more like classical. She’s straight.’’ (Martha Stewart declined to be interviewed about B. Smith.)
Smith adds that the do-it-yourself ethos that Martha Stewart represents is deeply rooted in the black community. She grew up in western Pennsylvania, where her father worked for U.S. Steel and her mother worked as a part-time domestic. ““My parents were the original Martha Stewart and Bob Vila. They had vegetable gardens. They canned. They made homemade root beer. It was a legacy from slavery–making the old new again. We ended up with chitlins because nobody else wanted them. We became quilters, learning how to put straw and cotton between scraps of fabric, in order to stay warm. We’ve worked in the kitchens and fields for years.''
Yet when Smith was planning her first restaurant, some blacks advised her not to go into the ““service industries’’ because that evoked painful images of black women in the kitchen, from Aunt Jemima to Mammy. Smith confounded those stereotypes, says Phyllis Palmer, an associate professor at George Washington University and author of ““Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the U.S.’’ ““She is an ironic reversal of the historical image of the black woman as fat, dowdy and cooking food to sustain white people. Now she gets to be slim, gorgeous and cook food that celebrates black culture for everyone.''
Right now, Smith’s first priority is her television show. In most cities it appears before 8 on Saturday mornings–not exactly an ideal time slot. Still, if you’re an early riser, you can catch a cheerful Smith making gumbo with Danny Glover or baking macaroni and cheese with Naomi Judd. In lushly photographed segments, she shows you how to stain furniture and make African jewelry, not to mention getting the aforementioned fish-oil smell off your hands.
Many of the shows are shot at Smith’s Sag Harbor home on New York’s Long Island. It’s a lavish two-story beachfront property that she helped design. It’s decorated in nautical style, a beach-community staple. But her maritime motif includes a drawing of the interior of a slave ship. And in one corner three African dolls represent Smith, her husband and her 9-year-old stepdaughter, Dana. That upscale-Afro twist on familiar themes is her calling card–nouveau soul. Others may fry better chicken or drape better curtains, but Smith is an aspirational celebrity, a symbol of what many African-American women want.
Smith hopes to open more restaurants in cities like Philadelphia, Chicago and Phoenix. She also plans to delve deeper into design. African-Americans will spend $469 billion on goods and services this year, a 54 percent increase from 1990. Right now there’s no African-American designer like Ralph Lauren (or personality like Martha) selling products nationally in the home market. Will we see Buppies decorating with B. Smith paint and covering their beds with B. Smith sheets? Maybe, maybe not. But, as the woman who never went to college says, ““I’ve always had a vision for myself.’’ Whatever the next step is, she’ll play it like jazz. She’ll improvise.
