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She grew up the youngest of eight in a wood-slat house in rural Texas, heated by a pot-belly stove. The clothes smelled of soot in winter and magnolia in summer, but the kitchen always smelled like her mother.
Her mama was a professional cook — diners, hotels, family homes — but she never set foot in a culinary school. To young B, that cooking wasn’t a career or a craft; it was simply the gospel, the best food in the world.
The cooking lived in her quietly for years, surfacing at the card parties she hosted for her American Airlines coworkers at DFW. The spades and dominoes were really just an excuse, because the table kept filling up for whatever B was making in the kitchen.
She started selling pies and plates to those same coworkers, especially come Thanksgiving and Christmas. So many of them had to work the holidays instead of being home with family, and B’s cooking became the closest thing to home on the schedule.
Those players kept telling her the same thing: you should be doing this for real. Among them was the woman who would go on to found Legacy 4 Xavier — one of the very voices urging her toward the calling she hadn’t named yet.
So she did the thing her mother never got to do: she went and got the credential. B enrolled in culinary school, earned her degree, and became a trained, credentialed chef — and somewhere, her mother is proud of the education she chased down.
But the mantle was already hers. As she puts it, her mother had “tucked her mantle into the compartment of my heart” long before B knew what it was for.
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