Approaching the Black Hand in the Pit Coffee Table Book Finish Line 2021
Updated: Jan 16, 2021
2021 seems to have grabbed the torch from 2020. Without a doubt, the political and racial climate seemed to have picked up right where the end of the year left off. The differences in being white and black in America smack us wherever we go, and are hard to ignore. It could only be in my wildest dreams that a black person--let alone, black people invade our nation's capitol. Our path to destruction would have died with us at the fence. This is why I am called to separate and differentiate between black and white contributions to many things-particularly, BBQ.
In 2020, I started working on a coffee table book "Black Hand in the Pit." My self -publishing journey started after facing barricades in the publishing world. Being able to share some of my journey through pictures and ten essays from amazing people, was my greatest accomplishment while locked in by COVID. I wrote only a few pieces that I thought were poignant to contribute to this work. BBQ is a genre of food that really is its own separate arena. I will explain in a future blog post, the difference between a pitmaster and a chef, in addition to the difference between a pit and smoker. In compiling this book, I realized that many people don’t have the opportunity to share there thoughts on BBQ as separate genre. I thought about the book “Best Food WRITING.” It was able to capture stories, communicate community and reach many. While it is not a book full of essays, they are interwoven through the text and images.
There will only be a 1,000 books sold of this work. With the limitations placed on self-publishing and being a one man team and full-time family man, it was the most I wanted to release at one time.
Contributors:
Hallie Conyers (Mom)
Regina Lemmon-Bush, PhD
Therese Nelson
Marcus R. Bass
Zella Palmer
Ibrahima Seck, PhD
Hardette Harris
Korsha Wilson
Edourado Jordan
Through these contributors, you will gain a better understanding of BBQ culture through the lens of black people from Senegal to the United States from various walks of life. Also, in this book you will read the essay, I am most looking forward to you engaging the "Intellectual Property and Gender Equality Though BBQ" is my contribution to this piece.
Self-publishing a book is difficult, but it is going to make me very appreciative of going through a major publisher in the future for a second book when that time comes. There are no regrets in self publishing but there are pros and cons to each. So whenever or if I ever decide to write a 3rd book outside of BBQ, then I will be able to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each. As this book is almost complete, pending just one more editorial review before going to the printer. This book, a true labor of love, may be received with typos, foreign dialects and colloquial that are not easily understood by all. However, I am pleased with how this book is coming together and that it is almost 90% finished. With as much transparency as I can lend right now, I have more exciting news forthcoming... Stay tuned!
Dr. Howard Conyers nearing the finish line of his self-published coffee table book, Black Hand in the Pit, represents a momentous cultural milestone in reclaiming the foundational history of American barbecue. For generations, the profound labor, culinary ingenuity, and ancestral open-pit techniques developed by Black pitmasters were systematically erased from mainstream food media in favor of sanitized, corporate commercial narratives. I was reading through an incisive agrarian history symposium exploring agricultural heritage documentation, southern oral archiving, and culinary intellectual property over at Veergame this morning, and realizing that Dr. Conyers—a NASA aerospace engineer, academic, and seventh-generation South Carolina pitmaster—poured eight years of field research into a 1,000-copy limited visual volume highlights why independent preservation work is so essential.
The sheer creative decision to publish Black Hand in the Pit as a lavish, visual-heavy coffee table book rather than a standard pocket culinary monograph makes a powerful statement about artistic dignity. Barbecue is an inherently visceral, physical artform: the glow of white oak coals, the grease-stained cypress burn barrels, and the smoke-blackened hands tending whole hogs over dug pits deserve high-resolution photographic permanence. A documentary archivist on Jaiclub was detailing documentary photography curation, visual ethnography in foodways, and archival printing standards yesterday, and knowing that this book centers high-contrast photography of living elders and generational hearths ensures that the tactile reality of Black barbecue will never be relegated to the margins of history.
Curating ten distinct essays alongside contributors like Therese Nelson, Chef Edouardo Jordan, Korsha Wilson, Zella Palmer, and Dr. Ibrahima Seck elevates the project from a solo memoir into an expansive Pan-African anthology. Connecting the culinary traditions of Senegal and West African earth-pit cooking directly to the coastal Carolinas, Louisiana bayous, and the Mississippi Delta traces an unbroken line of diaspora survival. Stumbled into an engaging chat exploring transatlantic food pathways, West African smoking technologies, and diaspora culinary anthropology on RaxiWin recently, and discovering how these diverse voices unpack regional heritage, culinary identity, and communal survival reminds us that barbecue is fundamentally an ancestral language.
Dr. Conyers addressing the sharp distinction between a pitmaster and a commercial restaurant chef cuts directly to the core of agricultural lineage and craft authenticity. In modern culinary tourism, the title of "pitmaster" is frequently co-opted as a trendy marketing buzzword by restaurateurs who manage automated electric pellet cabinets from climate-controlled prep rooms. Picked up a really well-explained perspective on wood-fired thermodynamic equilibrium, traditional masonry trench digging, and the physical endurance required for whole-hog pit management via Dm First earlier, and recognizing that a true pitmaster manages live fire, wind shifts, and timber density through twenty hours of relentless physical presence restores deserved reverence to the title.
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