Freedom does not keep well. It spoils if left unattended. Someone has to notice before it curdles, before it slips away.
In the Nation of Islam’s kitchens and storefront bakeries—liminal spaces of care that are rarely recorded—someone always knew when sweetness was slipping. That knowledge was practiced in the hush of repetition across the United States. The making of bean pie had to be tended to daily, a labor often feminized, fugitive by design, attuned not just to taste but to time. In this context, the possibility of spoilage was not a failure; it hastened action. It was a clock that encouraged paying attention. Bakers worked urgently to prevent spoilage and to preserve themselves. These women cooked in kitchens that could be raided, under governments that feared the freedom they fed their communities. What they preserved was more than food; it was a sense of order under surveillance, a rhythm of maintaining community bonds.
That rhythm stays with me in reading visual artist Christopher Joshua Benton’s chapter, “Bean Pie Sa7tein!” in Mapping Malcolm. Benton traces how the bean pie moved across Harlem, block by block, into the bellies of futurity. He writes that through the bean pie, “the Nation of Islam’s sense of community, Black resistance, spirituality, and economic independence was circulated and codified.” His map is spatial and symbolic; it includes not just streets and bodies, but belief, continuity, and freedom. In his telling, the bean pie becomes archive and theology, a technology of liberation and routine, sweetened by the labor of those who made it.
In view of this forum’s attention to the stewardship of power, I want to linger on a question asked by Benton: “What if we reframed the bean pie as a feminist foodway that subverted the group’s own retrograde treatment of women?” With this question, Benton invites us to see something more inside the material object. I want to add to his provocation by asking: What if we take it seriously as a Black feminist chronopolitics? To treat the bean pie not only as an artifact but also as a temporal practice is to recognize that Black women’s care work both responds to time and composes it.
More questions emerge: What kinds of time does care make possible? And must care—or the time that care creates—always promise permanence to be worthy of reverence?
Care can mean many things, but Black feminist thinkers suggest that it is more than affection or maintenance. I find the definition of care offered by historian Aisha K. Finch most persuasive. “At its core,” she writes, “care is painstaking or watchful attention.” Finch adds that such attention “must be about daring to recognize one another, refusing to look away from ourselves, and making sure that we do, indeed, want to be well.” For the women of the NOI, care was both theory and practice. It meant timing their preparation of the bean pie by feel, by smell, by memory. It meant keeping vigil over ovens, school lunch trays, and stacks of brown boxes destined for mosque fundraisers, neighbors, or Brothers coming home from prison. Their care was measured in temperature and texture, in whether the community held together or slipped away.
Care disrupts the metrics of worth imposed by state and capital, allowing us, as Finch puts it, to “dream our way out of the unlivable, conjure new moments, new states of being, and new thoughts of freedom.” It is how time gets made. Reading the bean pie as a chronopolitical device reframes this dessert as care’s own timekeeping tool. The conditions of its perishability organize the tempo of labor, nourishment, and community.
Women in the Nation performed spiritual labor that was improvisational, entrepreneurial, and often unsanctioned. Though unrecognized as “leadership,” this work is what sustained the NOI’s infrastructure. Here I’m reminded of scholar C. S’thembile West, who argues that the domestic sphere has always been a critical site of Black freedom-making. She notes that women in the Nation “had learned, internalized, and committed themselves to the principles of self-determination and self-empowerment, ingredients critical to survival as well as prosperity.”
Read alongside Benton that word—ingredients—springs to life, reanimating what might have seemed ordinary. Timed, textured, and circulated with care, self-determination and self-empowerment sustained a vision of freedom rooted in the body, daily practice, and what is spoilable. NOI leadership imagined liberation solely through sharp rupture from the afterlives of enslavement: new names, new foods, new cosmologies. By contrast, the women’s devoted attention to making bean pies reveals their refusal of a singular timeline whereby rupture is the only mode of transformation.
In the hands of its Sisters, the bean pie kept another kind of time. In their kitchens, the Sisters stirred freedom into navy beans, set them to cool, then prepared them into pastries for someone else’s hands. As Staci Jones observes, Black women have always known that you tend things not by rule, but by feel. Their knowledge is gut-driven and what she calls kitchen scholarship. In this view, spoilage is a sacred pressure that says: It is time. Do it again. Keep it warm. It’s gone bad. Start over.
Benton’s discussion of the NOI’s gender dynamics highlights this paradox of obedience and submission as a reminder that the labor of the Nation’s women calibrated the movement’s tempo. The women who baked bean pies—like Daisy, sister of the NOI—did not labor in compliance with the Nation’s conservative gender politics. Their labor calibrated the movement’s tempo. Their work aligned with the roles prescribed to them but it also carved out space for subversion. Ula Yvette Taylor similarly shows that NOI women helped build the very ideological and logistical scaffolding of the movement, even as they remained under the watchful eye of patriarchal discipline. Together they cultivated something far more radical than the submissive image imposed upon them.
Their labor produced a way of keeping time outside the Nation’s visible clocks—outside the master clock altogether. For them, spoilage was not loss but a demand for rhythm, for return, for care that resists even as it insists on renewal. The bean pie and its keepers offer a lesson about freedom where care work is both intellectual and political. They show us Black freedom is not something preserved and stored on a shelf. It is something tended to gently, insistently—in cycles of spoilage and renewal—and always passing from hand to hand. Viewed in this way, freedom’s temporality is not a single event but a fragile, perishable inheritance, a clock that counts down unless we remake it.
Yet time itself remains political. Chronopolitics names how power is exercised through the structuring and distribution of temporal experience. Questions of space and place are always also questions of tempo, waiting, pacing, and delay. Who gets to inhabit time on their terms, and whose rhythms must always adjust? Rasheedah Phillips calls Western timekeeping the “Master’s Clock” and it is bound to colonial violence. The invention of horology (timekeeping) was essential to transatlantic conquest: mapping oceans, charting longitude, slicing the globe into zones of domination.
Time became a grid, mapped and militarized, turning lives into schedules. As Phillips notes, “Clocks are themselves maps, offering another way of spacing time and timing space. Like maps, clocks embody certain ideas, politics, notions of time, and boundaries.” Clock time mapped the world in domination’s service, simultaneously measured and weaponized, marking who belongs to futurity and who is rendered disposable. It erases the lived, layered rhythms of Black life.
Black temporality has long needed to coexist with and break from the master’s clock. To illustrate this point, Phillips invokes Watch Night: the evening before the Emancipation Proclamation when Black communities held breath in churches for midnight and the promised dawn of Freedom’s Day. That moment did not deliver freedom in any final sense; many had to wait years more until news traveled on a different timeline entirely. Yet the ritual of watching and waiting together for freedom’s arrival offers another temporality: one centered on care, collectivity, and the embodied practice of keeping time together. Breaking free from the master’s clock is also what spoilage tends toward.
We might imagine a temporality of spoilage: a Black feminist chronopolitics in which revolution is not always announced by rupture, but by shifts in texture, scent, decay, memory, and care. In this frame, freedom becomes a perishable good, sustained only through daily acts of devotion. The master’s clock makes no room for softness, for sacred pause—but spoilage does. Spoilage follows its own rhythms untethered from Black unfreedom, but attuned to sensation, urgency, and the labor of preservation.
It’s here that I return to the spatial because to spoil is also to refuse enclosure. Spoilage demands air, movement, and exposure. A freedom you try to contain will ferment. And that fermentation may become another lifeform. Celeste Winston’s concept of “maroon geographies” helps illuminate this. The history of maroons offers an embodied lesson in freedom’s fragility and the need for its constant renewal. Across the Americas, enslaved Africans who escaped bondage formed clandestine communities—neither utopic havens nor fixed zones of liberation, but enclaves where negotiations with time, terrain, and threat were ongoing.
Winston shows that maroon communities improvised new power relations outside the colonial gaze. Always moving (marronage comes from the Spanish cimarrón, meaning fugitive), maroons kept running or hiding; to stop meant risking capture. Thus, they saw freedom as continual action. Freedom lived in each day’s decisions to resist capture and build community under constant threat. She draws continuity between the present and the past: the tactics used by maroons historically inform survival strategies among multigenerational Black communities in the contemporary United States. These communities endure state abandonment through what she calls “fugitive infrastructure”: the material arrangements everyday people create when survival seems foreclosed. Spoilage lives here, too, not as collapse but as temporal indicator of when previous forms of nourishment reveal themselves as inadequate or illusory.
Some speak of freedom like a recipe already perfected. Others are still figuring out how to make do with the scarps they are given. In 2025 when so much has soured, the gap between promise and practice tastes sharper than ever. The reasons we once ran have not disappeared, yet freedom is still spoken of as if it were already secured—already possessed. But what if freedom is not something we inherit, but something we rehearse despite unchanged conditions? Have we been naming freedom, or just its iconography?
Marronage teaches us that freedom is a verb: something we do, not something we have. We drift toward complacency the moment we treat it like a settled noun. Freedom cannot be stockpiled, tucked away with the hope that it won’t rot. Each generation must engage in work anew every season—whether fleeing, fighting, or negotiating but always adapting.
Saying that freedom must be made and remade is an urgent directive for us in Malcolm X’s centennial year. Commemoration means little if not coupled with continuation. Freedom that is discontinuous is a reminder of an unfinished meal. We have to feed the future with freedom, getting back in the kitchen again and again. Spoilage’s temporality ensures that each generation faces its turning point. We embrace the notion that the work of tending to freedom is humble and grand at once. Freedom work is checking the oven and also chanting in the streets; it is the faith that a recipe passed down for a century can still rise, so long as loving hands continue to hold it.
Let freedom be fragile so that we never forget to care for it. Let it be perishable so that we handle it with urgency and devotion. The bean pie will spoil, yes, but we will always bake another—spiced with the lessons from the last bake. This, ultimately, is Benton’s and Malcolm’s shared gift to us: the understanding that freedom, like food, gains its meaning in the shared labor of making and remaking, in the nourishment it provides, and in the community gathered to savor it.
Sa7tein! May we have double health and may our freedom be forever sustained.