Semaj Attaway was around 6 years old the first time he got suspended from school.
His mother, Shequite Johnson, said she would frequently have to go get him and bring him home during the day because of his behavioral problems.
One day, while he was home serving a suspension, she was trying to cook cornbread.
“I can’t follow a recipe,” she said.
Semaj took the recipe, she said, and followed it to the letter.
“It was so good,” she said of the finished cornbread.
Semaj has been in the kitchen ever since, and the eighth grader at Inverness Elementary is now a master chef and a better student.
“Sometimes when I’m really stressed doing homework, I’ll just go and cook something,” Semaj told The E-T during a recent interview. “Then I come back and I can do my work right. It takes my mind off some of the homework.”
Semaj’s turnaround was helped when he was introduced to Memphis Chef Ernest Dickson, founder of Mid-South Culinary Alliance, an organization that focuses on helping at-risk youth through the art of cooking.
“They felt it would be a good outlet for him and help him with his internal issues and his anger issues,” Dickson said of Semaj’s cooking hobby.
Dickson said he has seen many people resolve such issues through the culinary arts.
“It’s funny how that works together,” he said. “Food and food production is an outlet of sorts. The arts are involved. There’s math and chemistry… We’re stagnant in our thought process about who we are, but when we start messing with food, creativity is at our fingertips. It helps with our self esteem.”
Dickson was immediately impressed with Semaj and how he handled himself in the kitchen.
“He has a level of maturity that is associated with being reserved that allows him to stay focused better,” Dickson said. “He doesn’t get into a lot of kid-like conversations. He was sharp as any chef in the house. He looked the part. He walked through the door with the statuesque type demeanor.”
Dickson said Semaj is reserved, but he’s also confident in the kitchen.
“He has the level of confidence that comes from being focused,” Dickson said. “He approaches it like a professional. He’ll have questions, but if you show him one time, you can almost get out of his way.”
Semaj has spent the last three years participating in Dickson’s program, going to Memphis and competing with his peers and learning more about cooking.
“I was kind of nervous, but it was exciting,” Semaj said of the experience in Memphis.
He said he has learned a lot from the other youth who are under Dickson’s tutelage.
“I learned how to clean after myself and also to tell people what’s in your food, because some people are allergic,” he said.
Semaj said his favorite things to cook include steak, ribs, soup and burgers.
He enjoys learning how to cook new dishes, and he even got to learn how to make beignets for the Indian Bayou Arts & Eats Festival for the Beignets for Books booth.
When he’s not cooking, Semaj is covering the middle infield positions on the baseball diamond, a sport he enjoys almost as much as he does cooking.
