Savor

A Chocolatier at Heart Former gallery owner finds the art in making chocolate

by JACQUELYN VINCENTA photos byy BRIAN K. POWERS

Chocolatier Cherri Emery believes chocolate is healing. There are the health benefits, and there is also the simple pleasure of savoring something delicious with delightful textures. But there is even more to it than that for Emery.

“For me, getting through some major losses in my life, the act of creating something so beautiful and delicious was healing,” she says.

Those major losses could have been crippling. Her twin, Terri, died at 40 from an aneurysm in the wake of five major back surgeries. Emery’s son, Sean, had a rare blood disease and died just before he turned 30.

Above: Cherri Emery, left, and daughter, Ashley Rafferty-Billman, in front of the unique round cases displaying their chocolate treats. Right, from top to bottom: A cutter makes short work of cutting caramels, a coffee concoction that looks too good to drink, and beautifully decorated chocolates and caramels await shoppers.

“These are the things, I guess, that make us stronger,” she says. “What are you going to do? You can’t just give up. You miss them. You remember all the good stuff. You do things in their memory.”

It is clear that Emery loves and appreciates her life. She can’t wait to get to work every morning. She enters her shop, Cherri’s Chocol’art, at 101 S. Kalamazoo Mall, turns on the lights and starts brewing coffee. She wears all the hats in the company, handling the banking, figuring

out payroll and doing other computer tasks before and after business hours. When all that is under control, she says, she can “do the fun stuff”: make chocolate.

Every day she mixes large batches of chocolate to mold and sculpt into individual creations that she strives to make “as beautiful as they are delicious.” All production takes place in her shop, which also boasts an ice cream bar and a café that serves various coffee drinks and gourmet hot chocolate. Her management role here is familiar to her from many years as an owner of art galleries in Saugatuck, Douglas and Kalamazoo. She loved those businesses too, but this chocolate shop in downtown Kalamazoo is her own work of art, from the décor to the chocolates.

A workplace of art

Emery believes her intense love of chocolate and her desire for the chocolate shop to exist brought together the beautiful pieces that now adorn her chocolate shop. The coffee counter is from the basement of the former Piranha Alley, a skateboarding store on the Kalamazoo Mall from 1997 to 2003. She repaired it and added creative tile work by an artist friend. Wooden art-print file cabinets from her art galleries were repurposed as counters and storage. The antique pillars were something she’d envisioned for the shop and happened to find one day when she stopped at an antique store that was almost never open.

“The round chocolate case was just waiting for us when I looked through a window in Otsego,” Emery says. “I did have to hunt down the owner of the building on that one. And the large headboard that we use on the wall as a focal point near the entrance was from Florida and ended up in Grand Rapids. We painted our tagline there: “The Art of Chocolate.”

“With my galleries, it was a matter of finding the best artists and letting them shine,” Emery says. “I still do that here with my employees, but I have really created this thing from scratch and I am self-taught.”

Her confectionary experience started with caramels in 1970. They aren’t easy to make. One batch she shared with her father destroyed his dentistry bridge. Her caramels improved over the years, and then her brother asked her to make turtles (a treat made with caramel, pecans and chocolate), but he was never impressed with the final product. Until one day he was.

“You have to have a good base for turtles, a homemade caramel,” Emery says. “I started with my mother-in-law’s

recipe, and now we make about 10 varieties of salted caramels. Then you have to have really, really good chocolate and candied pecans for the top and bottom.”

Emery learned how to work with her primary ingredient, couverture chocolate, through three years of hands-on crafting while reading everything she could about the subject. Couverture has a higher percentage of cocoa butter (32 to 39 percent) than baking or eating chocolate, tastes creamier and adds a snap and sheen to the finished confection. From start to finish through the tempering process — a tricky, sensitive process that requires a steady temperature to create just the right kind of crystals — Emery stirred the couverture with a spoon and carefully watched it respond to the heat. Eventually she got a tempering machine that could process 10 pounds without her minute-by-minute attention. Her next machine handled 250 pounds per day. The current “robot” (as she thinks of it) does even more, monitoring temperature with precision and stirring perfectly.

From galleries to goodies

Emery’s daughter, Ashley RaffertyBillman, loves this chocolate business as well. Rafferty-Billman was one of the first students

Left: Cherri Emery uses a paintbrush to decorate chocolates. Above, top: a hot chocolate bomb suitable for the new year. Below: Special chocolate wares prepared for Valentine’s Day. to enroll in Kalamazoo Valley Community College’s Culinary Arts and Sustainable Food Systems program, graduating with honors. She is a partner in Emery’s work, and some well-timed suggestions to her mother have encouraged important career decisions by her mother. One of those came when Emery gave up her art gallery with the idea of retiring but discovered she wasn’t ready. Her galleries — the last one was Gallery 344, near the Kalamazoo train station — had weathered economic downturns over several decades because her financially comfortable clients continued to be able to buy artwork. But in 2009, the effects of the Great Recession were so severe that all sales activity dried up.

“It was horrible,” Emery says. “My husband had just retired. It seemed like a sign, so I had a big sale and closed the store. Two days later I was wondering what to do. My daughter says, ‘Mom, sell your caramels at the farmers market!’ One thing led to another, and then she suggested opening a retail outlet.”

Cherri’s Chocol’art first hung out its shingle at a small storefront on the Kalamazoo Mall, where it operated for three and a half years. Then, when the retail space on the first level of the Peregrine 100 building, on the corner of the Kalamazoo Mall and Michigan Avenue, came up for rent, Emery’s imagination was snagged.

“If you can’t stop thinking about it, you better investigate it,” she remembers thinking. In late 2019 Emery opened the doors to an expanded shop at that location, a few months before Covid-19 restrictions began. She and her crew found themselves having to adapt quickly to the restrictions by adding outdoor seating, curbside pickup and free delivery — anything they could think of to get through the hard time. And the business has expanded its selection of chocolate and caramel creations as sales have continued to grow.

“It’s amazing when you do something that you truly love how successful you will be at it,” Emery says. “You have to have an amazing product and be passionate about your trade, and everything will fall into place.”

It was an unexpected post-retirement career. But now Emery’s spirit has brought life to a place where people can come for chocolate and coffee, to be delighted and uplifted. One never knows what seasonal shapes and hand-painted colors, what new flavors and textures or what combinations of ingredients might be found in the shop’s glass cases.

“We just want people to enjoy it and feel comfortable here. It’s not about the money,” Emery says. “What it really is about is the customer on the other side of the counter saying, ‘Wow, that is gorgeous. Thank you so much.’”

other. “After their gigs, they would come back and continue to gig and practice and play music. And as my mother says, I’d be up and they would start playing jazz. That was the way to put me to sleep, by putting out some Count Basie. Music is probably one of the most important aspects of who I am. Music and radio were one of my first places of autonomy, you know, being able to pick my own radio stations and to play my own music.”

Johnson says that despite the fact that she “has been gender-nonconforming” her whole life, she never thought women could be disc jockeys. It wasn’t until she was 40 and a DJ friend from Saginaw hooked her up with some equipment that she began to live out the dream from her youth. She started small, DJing for events at Fire. Then in 2006 an opportunity to DJ a show at 7 a.m. Saturdays at WIDR, WMU’s student station, arose, and the Slip Back Soul Show was born.

“That’s when I realized that I absolutely loved it, because there wasn't another thing in the world that I would get up at 5 o'clock in the morning to prepare for,” she says. “There’s been nothing else in my life that I have done with that level of commitment. It grounds me, and it's also my contribution to folks who really love radio and love this music and have quite frankly come to love me. I was named WIDR’s Most Beloved DJ, and it means a lot to me.”

When WIDR had an 11 a.m.–1 p.m. slot on Saturday open, she took it, playing R&B, soul, jazz, blues and funk, and that’s where her show had been until the pandemic.

Johnson’s DJ career has extended to public events where she spins music as DJ Disobedience, the moniker she invented for herself 14 years ago. “Originally I was going to be DJ Sag Nasty because I have a strong Saginaw identity and Sagnasty is what we call ourselves sometimes, but I got talked out of that and I think it was a good thing,” she admits. Before the pandemic, she was a regular DJ at the Grand Traverse Distillery the second Saturday of every month.

Her radio days have also translated into podcast producing. She is currently putting the finishing touches on a podcast she calls “Raising Hay,” which focuses on Southwest Michigan Black female artists who come from a farm background and explores how that background has informed their artistic endeavors. She has conducted all the interviews and now is piecing together “two cohesive 50-minute segments” that include stories about Remy Harrington, Heather Mitchell, Lindsay Kelly and Selina Johnson.

Writing at ‘full steam’

Johnson is also sharing her voice off the air, as a writer of fiction, essays, creative nonfiction and plays.

Her biographical historical essay, “‘Tell ’Em What We Did!’: Choosing and Building Black Space in the Midwest” was published

Johnson’s work has expanded to producing podcasts and writing and publishing a number of essays, stories, plays and other works. Photo by Terry Johnston.

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“I feel like we are in an incredible time in history,” Johnson says. “There is a growing and powerful critical movement of Black folks seeking to do something. The level of conscious activism is rising. Kalamazoo, for all its challenges, responds to group action. There is a focus here on social justice, and we have a crucial mass of people here who understand racism and the inherent injustices in many of our institutions.”

in September in Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest. It looks at Black experiences in Kalamazoo and Saginaw from Johnson’s viewpoint.

“Rooster,” her creative nonfiction treatment of the Kentucky raid on Black people who had escaped slavery and lived in Cass County in the spring of 1847, appeared in the literary journal Midnight & Indigo in December.

Her historical essay, “Black Shapings,” which explores Michigan’s rich Emancipation celebrations long before Juneteenth, will appear in the Middle West Review in the spring.

In 2019, Dreamin,’ a play she penned, was staged by Face Off Theatre.

And Johnson is currently working on a memoir with Carlean Gill, a former dancer and producer of the Idlewild Review at the Paradise Club in Idlewild, a famous summer resort in northern Lower Michigan that had its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s and was known as the Black Eden.

At the same time, Johnson has proposals out for a novel and a television series. “I am going full steam right now on my writing, and I’m wondering why I waited so long,” she says.

One more thing...

When asked if there’s anything else she’s working on, she shares yet one more thing: “We’re trying to republish the Michigan Manual of Freedmen’s Progress.”

Originally prepared for the Lincoln Jubilee, a national halfcentury exposition held in Chicago in 1915, the Michigan Manual of Freedmen’s Progress (Negroes in Michigan) was a 300-page quantitative and qualitative study of the status of Blacks in Michigan. It was compiled by Francis H. Warren and was republished by John M. Green in 1968 and 1985. Johnson would like to see a new edition of the manual published with an updated preface by Green, an introduction by herself and a more extensive index. “It’s a really incredible piece,” she says. “It is just rich, rich, rich, rich, rich with material. There are photographs, census data and small biographies of key folks from across the state.

“It's just a huge repository of information and history and perspectives on Black people that are showing them as very educated, very connected to each other, and integral in the formations of places like Michigan Agricultural College (which became Michigan State University), the University of Michigan and what would become Wayne State University. It's a fascinating and important text that I want to see published again.”

With all that Johnson is pouring her heart and soul into, you’ve got to wonder if the avid historian is going to make a little history herself.

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