Walker undermines the notion of Southern hospitality by showing how the slaves’ ceaseless service, provided only through their being forced into a lifetime of bondage, made such extraordinary provisions a possibility. By enumerating the items that Aunt Sally and, later, Vyry cooked for the Dutton household, Walker demonstrates that slavery was key to Southern presentations of refinement and good taste. Ironically, black people, who were deemed barely human, were the only ones who knew how to cook the extraordinary dishes that the white planters and their guests enjoyed, while the slaves were never able to sample the fruits of their own labor, unless doing so undercover.

What many white Southerners resented in the aftermath of the Civil War was not only that black people would now enjoy many of the same freedoms as whites, but that white people would no longer be entitled to slaves’ unyielding service, which was provided only under threat of the lash. Mrs. Jacobson, the wife of Innis Brown’s employer in Alabama, seems gracious and willing to help the Browns but bristles when Vyry announces that the family is moving; therefore, Vyry will no longer be able to cook for them.