Rose McGee’s love language is food — sweet-potato pie, to be exact.
On Tuesday, McGee took 46 sweet-potato pies to George Floyd Square in Minneapolis to give to volunteers to mark the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s killing; Floyd was 46 when former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds on May 25, 2020.
“They are beautiful pies,” said Erica DeValve, 26, who was volunteering at the food tent. “We’re really grateful that she wanted to share them with us.”
Five pies were earmarked for Floyd’s family; they were hand-delivered to a family member’s house. Another went to state Sen. Patricia Torres Ray, DFL-Minneapolis, “for all the incredible work she has been doing behind the scenes,” McGee said.
Ray, who represents the area near where Floyd was killed, said receiving her pie marked a “moment of celebration.”
McGee “brings communities together,” Ray said. “She brings people together to address challenges and look at the possibilities with hope, and this pie is a reflection of that. A lot of hard work goes into it, and then we eat it with so much pleasure.”
McGee, 69, of Golden Valley, got the idea for baking comfort pies in the summer of 2014 after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
“I was watching the news, and I knew I had to do something,” she said. “God told me that I had to bake some pies and take them down to Ferguson. I loaded up the trunk of my Chrysler 200 and took them down myself.”
A year later, when a white supremacist murdered nine worshippers at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., other people started baking pies. “It gives people a chance to do something, other than just donate money,” McGee said.
After the police shootings of Jamar Clark in 2015 and Philando Castile in 2016 and Floyd’s killing last year, McGee went back into the kitchen. “Sweet-potato pie is the sacred dessert of Black culture,” McGee said. “We’re trying to give pies to those who have suffered the losses. Sadly, it’s about the violence. It’s impacting us in so many different ways. Pain is pain, and it’s all happening right now.”
Baking pies is her mission and ministry, she said. “It helps to ease the pain,” she said. “It does not take it away, but it definitely helps.”
McGee was raised by her paternal grandmother and great-grandmother in Jackson, Tenn., but she said she didn’t learn how to bake sweet-potato pie until years later when she was married and living in Denver, Colo.
“I called my grandmother one Sunday morning and asked for a recipe, and she said, ‘Honey, I don’t have a recipe. It’s in my head,’ ” McGee said. “She told me what to do, and I botched it up very badly, but for some reason, I felt compelled to try it again.”
After that, McGee started “paying attention” to sweet-potato pie recipes, she said. “If they had something that I didn’t have in mine, I would add it.”
Volunteer pie-bakers gathered on Monday at Great Harvest Bread Co. in St. Paul to bake 108 pies. Sixty-two pies went to two St. Paul organizations: Ujamma Place, supporting Black men who are making new lives for themselves after being in prison, and the YWCA’s Transitional Housing Program families, said Bonnie Alton, the owner of Great Harvest.
Alton learned about McGee and her sweet-potato pies at a Hennepin County Library book event in April. The featured book was “Minnesota’s Black Community in the 21st Century,” and McGee, who appears in the book, spoke at the virtual event.
“She talked about how she wanted to make a bunch of pies to commemorate the anniversary,” Alton said. “I hung up from the Zoom, and I thought, ‘You know, the bakery is closed on Mondays. She could use the bakery to make the pies,’ so I emailed her, and that was the genesis of the whole thing.”
Neighborhood volunteers signed up to bake the pies, and Mississippi Market Natural Foods Co-op donated the sweet potatoes. “It ended up being a very local, community kind of fun thing,” Alton said.
“I understand the importance of food in all sorts of healing efforts, and Rose and I share the view that something as simple as a piece of pie shared with friends or loved ones can make a difference,” Alton said.Katie Wright, the mother of Daunte Wright, 20, who was fatally shot by a Brooklyn Center police officer on April 11, knows that firsthand.
Wright was at George Floyd Square on Tuesday afternoon and sought out McGee to thank her for the 17 pies she provided to Wright’s family earlier this month.
“We handed them out to all of our family members after the march, and they were amazing,” Wright said. “I cried. The pie that we received said ‘Daunte Wright’ on it. I almost didn’t want to eat it, but the pies were so good that I had to. She is a blessing.”
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