African Roots in Southern Fields: What the Slaves Ate by KELLY KEAN SHARP, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies
I chose the city of Charleston as the location for this study because it was the heart of the antebellum South— its political, economic, and cultural systems. In 1790, Charleston was the fourth largest city in the young United States and indisputably the largest and wealthiest in the US South. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the city remained primary port for international trade and the commercial center of a vibrant regional economy. Even as its economic standing and population declined in relation to newer American cities such as New Orleans and Cincinnati, Charleston’s leadership role in the nullification crisis of the early 1830s and in the secession movement of the 1850s solidified its position as the standard bearer for the Southern way of life. But make no mistake! It was the coerced labor performed by millions of enslaved African and African Americans that shaped these social, economic, and political realities. At the heart of my book are three historical theses. First, Provisioning Charleston demonstrates the necessity to view city and countryside as economi-
cally and culturally integrated places in order to properly appreciate enslaved people’s exhaustive contributions to antebellum agriculture, economy, and culture. Economic, labor, and environmental historians have chiefly associated Lowcountry plantation agriculture with the commodity crop production of rice and cotton.1 This work embraces the importance of Charleston not only as an entrepôt of the Atlantic world but also as heart of the local economy, the provincial hub of consumerism for the region’s diverse population. In growing and selling produce for the city’s population, enslaved men and women of the US South not only filled pocketbooks of planters but also the stomachs of the region’s residents— rural and urban, white and black, free and enslaved.
to cooking, Provisioning Charleston articulates how bondpeople skillfully navigated the Lowcountry landscape both literally and metaphorically. Within the confines of bondage, enslaved men and women of the Lowcountry navigated sadistic working conditions, geographical isolation, restrictive state and municipal laws, enslavers’ merciless demands, and the bigoted social order
Second, Provisioning Charleston elucidates that the labor performed by bondpeople provisioning the urban metropolis of antebellum Charleston was in fact skilled work with each stage of the process requiring persons adept in a specialized skillset. Early American labor history Kelly Sharp speaks at the Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture disproportionally lauds the on February 18, 2020. male artisan, formally trained in his craft and producing goods for sale to, as civil rights activists anachronistiin the commercial marketplace. Provically described, “make a way out of no sioning Charleston expands the concept way.” The chapters of my book outline of what constitutes skilled labor and in how the skilled work performed by what spheres enslaved people performed regional bondpeople greatly shaped not it by adopting Daina Ramey Berry’s only the economic but also the cultural definition of skill as “the ability to do development of the US South. any form of work well… [including] all activities and crafts that a person masFinally, Provisioning Charleston asserts tered with her or his hands or body.”2 that race was historically more imporBy examining bondpeople’s roles in each tant than place in shaping culinary culstage of provisioning, from cultivation ture. Respected foodways scholar John Spring 2020/Agora
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LUTHER PHOTO BUREAU, MCKENDRA HEINKE ‘21
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his essay is based on the research presented in my forthcoming book, Provisioning Charleston: Food, Race, and Labor in the Antebellum South Carolina Lowcountry, which will be published by Cambridge University Press in the next year. Provisioning Charleston uses food as a lens to study the negotiation of race and culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry between 1783 and 1860. While historians have well documented ways in which white and black residents of the colonial and antebellum American South legally and intellectually constructed understandings of race, none have considered culture, particularly culinary culture or foodways, as an expression of racial identity.
