African Roots in Southern Fields: What the Slaves Ate Kelly Kean Sharp

What the Slaves Ate African Roots in Southern Fields:

by KELLY KEAN SHARP, Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies

This 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. 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. 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 disproportionally lauds the male artisan, formally trained in his craft and producing goods for sale in the commercial marketplace. Provisioning Charleston expands the concept of what constitutes skilled labor and in what spheres enslaved people performed it by adopting Daina Ramey Berry’s definition of skill as “the ability to do any form of work well… [including] all activities and crafts that a person mastered with her or his hands or body.” 2 By examining bondpeople’s roles in each stage of provisioning, from cultivation 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 to, as civil rights activists anachronistically described, “make a way out of no way.” The chapters of my book outline how the skilled work performed by regional bondpeople greatly shaped not only the economic but also the cultural development of the US South. Finally, Provisioning Charleston asserts that race was historically more important than place in shaping culinary culture. Respected foodways scholar John Kelly Sharp speaks at the Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture on February 18, 2020. LUTHER PHOTO BUREAU, MCKENDRA HEINKE ‘21

Egerton articulated that the intimate “proximity of whites and blacks in the South… made Afro-European cookery an existential reality almost from the beginning.” 3 Thus, when I began this project, I presumed the foodways of antebellum Charleston would reveal a creolized culinary culture, one in which antebellum residents shared ingredients, cooking techniques, and dining practices across the bounds of race. However, Provisioning Charleston demonstrates that Black people, both free and enslaved, did not simply imitate the culinary habits of the planter-merchant elite. Instead, they created and developed their own culture which facilitated a distinct African diasporic foodway.

Making these arguments, my work is organized in farm-to-fork manner. Chapter one explores the crops grown by bondpeople on regional plantations both under the command of their enslaver and on their own time. Chapter two outlines the overland and waterway routes used by enslaved people bringing goods to market. This chapter exposes the critical skillset required by bondpeople to safely navigate marshy and sandy paths as well as swamp-streams under the command of their enslaver but most often on Sundays or covertly at night. I argue that in doing so, bondpeople formed an intimate and everyday knowledge of the regional landscape and actively used this knowledge to extract material gain and negotiate degrees of temporal freedom.

My third chapter explores the power dynamics enjoyed by the enslaved women who labored in Charleston’s Center Market selling to urban residents across the bounds of race and class. Recognizing their role in provisioning the city deepens the historical understanding of the involvement of enslaved labor in the daily economy of urban Charleston. Chapter four continues a close examination of enslaved women’s role in provisioning urban Charleston’s consumers by reexamining enslaved cooks within the framework of artisan labor. Historian Eugene Genovese argued that enslaved cooks merely demonstrated “a healthy concern with cooking.” 4 My research clearly shows that these women developed a distinct and specialized set

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 Rice and Peas Cotton and Peas Rice and Corn Cotton and Corn Rice and Potato Cotton and Potato Tandem Growth of Commodity and Provision Crops on Lowcountry Plantations of skills, passed on through training along kinship ties or apprenticeship. They held an expert level of competence using the tools of their trade. My final chapter exposes the ways in which Lowcountry residents used culinary culture, specifically meal construction and the accoutrements of dining, as a marker of racial distinction rather than an expression of economic class. Archaeological evidence, estate documents, and tax records left behind by Charleston’s free families of color confirm they did not live in impoverished conditions. In fact, by 1860, the majority of Charleston’s free blacks were in the equivalent economic category as the city’s white middling class. Regardless that their economic status was akin to middling class white Charlestonians, free black Charlestonians chose to serve meals that mirrored the culinary culture of regional enslaved people. Free black folks of the antebellum era again did not simply “mimic ladies and gentlemen of the master class” as historian Cynthia Kennedy argued but rather actively used food as a field of action to assert a shared history and culture. 5 It was bondpeople’s cultivation of foodstuffs on regional plantations, especially genealogically African food crops, that facilitated this distinct African diasporic foodway. Having outlined my book, I will now return to the plantations of coastal South Carolina that supplied Charlestonians with fresh produce. Pursuing the greatest financial profit possible, antebellum Lowcountry planters ordered the vigorous cultivation of rice and cotton for the transatlantic market. Simultaneously, they used their enslaved laborers to grow food crops to provision their own plantations as well as sell to consumers in urban Charleston. Lowcountry bondpeople applied their agronomic expertise most famously to tidal rice cultivation; their knowledge and labor also proved critical to the cultivation of the regional commodity crops—corn, sweet potatoes, and peas—grown under the command of their enslavers. An examination of plantation records clearly demonstrates the frequency of crop diversification beyond rice and cotton for export. Specifically, Lowcountry plantations supplied 38 percent of the state’s pea crops, 42 percent of the potato crops, and 15 percent of the state’s corn crops (see “Tandem Growth” below). These foodstuffs, grown in enslavers’ fields, served as the basic starches for all residents of the plantation enterprise as well as for Charleston’s burgeoning population, regardless of race or class. It was foodstuffs grown in bondpeople’s provision grounds—the plots of land enslavers set aside for their enslaved people to grow their own food—that allowed for the formation and maintenance of a distinct African diasporic culinary culture. Living and laboring under conditions of economic exploitation, enslaved people of the Lowcountry seemed poorly situated to perpetuate any sort of agricultural heritage. However, the African Diaspora was one of plants as well as peoples. African species were well-suited to the subtropical climate of the coastal US South and bondpeople perpetuated genealogically African crops by continuing to cultivate these foodstuffs such as okra, eggplant, and melons. They grew these alongside the subsistence staples of American Indians which had been naturalized in

The task system greatly shaped enslaved people’s ability to contribute to a racially-segregated Lowcountry culinary culture. It was a system of management popular in the Lowcountry, particularly on the coastal rice plantations. The task system divided “slaveholder’s time” and “personal time” during which enslaved people could labor for their own designs. It was during this time that enslaved people worked their provision plots, often with the help of the rest of the kinship network. The size of the family sometimes effected the plot size given. Some planters averaged “5 or 6 acres of ground” for each familial unit whereas planters like W.W. Hazzard of Berkeley District allocated “everyone a task of ground, and a half task for each child capable of working it.” 6

The produce grown by bondpeople in their provision plots served three significant and distinct purposes. The plots first of all reduced costs for enslavers to feed their bondpeople and secondly allowed bondpeople to select the production of foodstuffs specific to their individual preferences and collective culinary culture. Third, the provision grounds allowed bondpeople to develop an extensive range of independent marketing activities. While these purposes have been recognized in scholarship throughout the West Indies and greater Diaspora, my research argues that plots worked by bondpeople on plantations near urban centers uniquely facilitated a rural-urban culinary culture shared between the free and enslaved black population. Examining provision plots outside of the capitalist market system and instead considering their cultural importance reveals provisioning plots as vegetal landscapes of the marginal—land used by people in their spare moments under a barbaric labor regime to perpetuate their cultural identity.

Early generations of enslaved Africans introduced new dietary and medicinal plants to European naturalists/ plantation owners through pioneering cultivation outside Africa. In the 16 th and early 17 th centuries, European authors documented a host of African-origin food crops distinctly present in the plantation societies of the Americas. Bondpeople’s agency in the New World establishment is suggested in the African words adopted by the colonial languages of former plantation societies.”For crops with no existing words in European languages, whites often appropriated the names used by enslaved people who grew and prepared the crops. For example, banana, yams, and okra are words of African origin adopted into the English language. This is evidenced in other languages of colonial plantation societies such as guandu, guandul, and wando – the respective Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch adaptations for what in English we call field peas. Likewise demonstrating enslaved people’s agency in agricultural knowledge, Europeans referred to some species by geographical descriptors that indicated their African provenance such as guinea corn (sorghum), guinea squash (eggplant), guinea fowl, and Congo or Angola peas as an alternative name for field peas.

Plots of land set aside for enslaved people to grow their own food allowed for the formation and maintenance of a distinct culinary culture.

Most crops cultivated by Lowcountry bondpeople in the antebellum era are of distinct African genealogy and Asian or American genealogy but naturalized in Africa. For example, one Sea Island planter identified the plants in his bondpeople’s provision plot including “long collards, peanuts, arrowroot, sesame seeds, gourds, and watermelon”— all cultivars of undeniable African heritage. 7 In Africa as in the American South, people of African descent used greens to impart a bitterness to stews and thickened these dishes with peanut paste/leaves from the sesameplant. Gourds grown by bondpeople served as a starchy staple or could be made into a vessel. Even several generations removed from Africa, crop choices of Lowcountry bondpeople predominantly featured the chief crops of their African predecessors. These cultivars represented identity and humanity in the midst of a dehumanizing system.In addition to dietary and cultural preference, bondpeople focused on cultivars that did not require close and constant attention. For example, they cultivated genealogically African high-yield crops such as okra, which fruits up to four times a season, and peanuts, a protein-rich, self-pollinating bush that literally plants its own seeds. Not only did they plant high-yield crops but bondpeople also practiced lowimpact cultivation methods. Examples include the intercropping of companion plants such as corn and beans, tilling by hand so as to guarantee the best yields, and using compost material such as fire ash, household waste, chicken manure, riverbed soil, and grass to keep a plot fertile. Historian Frederick Knight explains that West Africans practiced the same techniques as adaptations to farming without a heavy reliance on livestock. Their labor time relegated to nights and Sundays under the task system, cultivating ancestral high-yield crops through low-impact practices ensured bondpeople the best return on their investment of time and labor. The availability of seed also likely perpetuated bondpeople’s choice to cultivate genealogically-African provision crops. Bondpeople faced virtually nonexistent financial costs if using seed saved and stored from the previous year’s plantings. Also, scholar Betty Wood points out that axes, hoes, spades, and baskets that planters regularly issued to field hands were available for use in the bondpeople’s own time. Bondpeople thus seeded their garden literally with heirloom seeds, perhaps hidden on the transatlantic voyage in women’s hair or smuggled in folds of clothes, and passed them down across generations in bondage, renewing the cultivar year by year. Uninterested in consuming the bizarre produce of their bondpeople’s provision plots, most Lowcountry enslavers hoped to foster a “disgrace attached to idleness” by allowing their bondpeople to sell their marketable crops outside of the plantation enterprise. Roswell King, overseer to over five hundred bondpeople at Pierce Butler’s plantation,

expressed many Lowcountry planters’ beliefs that “if industrious for themselves, they [bondpeople] will be so for their masters. No Negro, with a well stocked poultry house, a small crop advancing, a canoe partly finished, or a few tubs unsold, all of which he calculates soon to enjoy, will ever run away.” 8 Following suit of their Caribbean predecessors, Lowcountry planters believed the reward of a small amount of molasses or tobacco purchased through trade/ profit made by bondpeople selling extra produce posed little threat to the system of slavery. Planters also had the ability to mold their bondpeople into a more obedient and property-respecting workforce. Thus, bondpeople’s labor was critical not only in growing these dietary staples and specialties but transporting them to the consumers of urban Charleston. For urban African Americans living and working in Charleston, access to these locally produced goods served as powerful legacies of continuity, linking them to the larger African Diasporic community in the Lowcountry, US South, and Atlantic World. culinary culture. Genealogically African foodstuffs transitioned cuisines of survival to ingredients that deliberately references a shared past. Cultivating and selling the excess crops of African genealogy from their provision plots, bondpeople of regional plantations provided both free and enslaved blacks of Charleston the opportunity to participate in a shared regional diasporic culinary culture. These crops, introduced and cultivated by enslaved people for hundreds of years, are now central components to the stereotypical culinary culture of the US South. However, in the antebellum era it was exclusively free and enslaved African Americans that were nourished by the flavors and textures familiar to the generations before them. From these findings, as mentioned, my research asserts that race is historically more important than place in shaping culinary culture. For bondwomen, who on a daily basis performed the majority of domestic labor for their households, the intimate entity of food served as an important instrument with which to

This Currier and Ives print portrays a bondman using a pole to guide his flat downriver. His passengers are presumably his wife and child, as well as several chickens and baskets of eggs to be sold at their destination. The straw hat and striped shirt worn by the patroon mirrors the description penned by William Howard Russell on his visit to the Lowcountry. “Floating Down to Market” ca. 1870 COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

6 Agora/Spring 2020 Attention to how and what foods Lowcountry enslaved people grew illuminates the manner in which Lowcountry bondpeople not only perpetuated but also promoted an identifiably unique practice daily resistance to the material and psychological conditions of enslavement. Meal composition and tableware served as two of the limited forums in which bondpeople forged and promoted an alternative framework of cultural expression. Bondpeople’s choices in meal preparation and consumption document not only an extension of West African meal composition but also the underlying resourcefulness of Lowcountry black culture. Antebellum bondwomen employed a range of genealogically-African preparatory techniques. These included slowly simmering ingredients, baking in ashes, roasting food over coals, and steaming food by wrapping it in cabbage or poplar leaves. These techniques served two primary and significant purposes. First, slow cooking often required less fuel. Second, the slow cooking style allowed bondwomen to begin meal preparation before leaving in the morning and having a portion of the evening meal prepared when she returned in the midafternoon upon completion of her taskwork. While a cast iron pot stands as the ubiquitous cooking utensil identified at bondpeople’s quarters, bondwomen in fact wielded a host of culinary skills within their materially-limited conditions. The most striking confirmation of a racially-based foodways culture is verified through enslaved and free African Americas’ distinct preference for bowls, particularly shallow and shouldered colonoware vessels. Colonoware is a type of ceramic, specifically an earthenware, that is handmade from locally sourced clay. Material evidence documents it was made by both regional Native Americans and enslaved people on plantations. Bowls as a percentage of diningware recovered at Lowcountry bondpeople’s quarters range from 52-94% of ceramic vessel shards with an average ratio of 70% bowls to 30% plates. These statistics strongly advocate enslaved people predominantly prepared and consumed soups and stews alongside or on top of a starch. This meal composition is yet another reflection of West African culinary culture within the foodways of the antebellum Lowcountry. While roasted yams and leftover cornbread provided starches to be consumed on the move, bondwomen used peas and rice from rations provided by their enslavers alongside millet and sorghum from their provision

plots as the starchy base. As in West Africa, these legumes and cereals served as the foundation for a meal. Root vegetables, eggplants, collards, cabbage, and squashes from bondpeoples’ provision plots served as the bulk of the soups and stews. Just as contemporary West Africans used and continue to use the ingredients, Lowcountry bondwomen similarly employed sesame seeds, peanuts, and okra as thickeners for their dishes. Bondpeole’s meals also included meat in soups or stews. This is verified through chemical analysis of a colonoware jar from the slave quarters of Crowfield Plantation in Berkeley County. This data verifies that bondpeople prepared animal and plant matter in the same vessel and likely at the same time. Not only did this preparatory technique require one pot to prepare, but simmering small or scrap pieces of meat with ingredients on hand has greatly impacted postbellum, and even contemporary, Southern culinary culture at large. One example is purloo. Lowcountry bondwomen created this dish of boiled rice mixed with whatever fish, game, salted meat, and vegetables were on hand, and today it is considered a “classic” dish of Lowcountry cuisine. As with the dramatic predominance of bowls recovered from regional bondpeople’s residential sites, the ratio of vessel forms at sites of free black residences suggests a meal composition dominated by soups and stews. GenealogicallyAfrican ingredients grown by regional bondpeople were made available to free black Charlestonians through the enslaved marketers at Centre Market. Here, as mentioned earlier, free blacks purchased ingredients unfamiliar to their white peers’ foodways, such as millet, field peas, peppers, sesame, peanuts, and okra. While middling whites allocated their economic and cultural capital resources to mimicking the culinary culture of the planter/merchant elite—a Eurocentric entre of meat and side dishes on plate—free blacks practiced a meal structure and material culture not akin to their economic peers but rather to regional bondpeople. This preference of soups and stews served atop grain or starch is evidenced in the type of vessel recovered at their residences, specifically a high percentage of bowls (see table 2). While not of the same legal category as regional bondpeople, the antebellum city’s growing free black population was of the same culture—indeed, many had relatives who had been born into slavery or began life as enslaved people themselves. This shared patterning of food preparation/meal composition between Lowcountry bondpeople and free blacks served as a vital strand which wove racial group identity across the bounds of geography as well as economic, legal, and social status. Participating in African Diasporic foodways, free black Charlestonians asserted a shared distinctive culture with the lowest rungs in the most caste-like society of American history. While the free blacks of antebellum Charleston were very likely not discussing how their food choices communicated a collective history and culture, their everyday meals do illustrate broader social patterns, values, and beliefs which extended across the urban and rural spheres. Thus, plantation bondpeople’s garden produce contributed not only material comfort and health but also allowed urban enslaved and free blacks access to genealogically African produce and the ability to practice a shared culinary cult. The study of foodways has developed into a respected intersectional discipline over the past two decades. Southern foodways are indeed the most studied regional US cuisine, though the scholarDuring his visits to Richmond and Charleston as amanuensis to William Thackery, artist Eyre Crowe sought to learn all he could about American slavery and the American slave trade. He returned to England and published articles and illustrations about his experience in order to help raise awareness about the business of human trafficking. “A Group of Market women,” 1853. From Crowe, With Thackery in America. COURTESY OF THE ALDERMAN LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

ship is dominated by studies on the 20 th century which portrays an already entrenched Southern culinary culture with no distinction of contributions along the lines of race. Of the 19 th century, previous scholarly interpretations trivialize to a singular culinary culture grounded in the “bounty of nature” and fetishized with an African American “flair.” 9 My workrecognizes that most iconic dishes of today’s US South are derived from black peoples’ culinary culture: from gumbo to shrimp and grits, Hoppin’ John to red beans and rice. Provisioning Charleston uses food as a lens to study the negotiation of race and culture in the antebellum era, but this lens can also be applied to contemporary culinary culture, as just demonstrated. As historic interpreter and culinary historian Michael Twitty explains, black Americans “are surrounded by culinary injustice where some Southerners take credit for things that enslaved Africans and their descendants played key roles in innovating.” 10

6. “An Impartial Hand,” Information Concerning the Province of North Carolina, Addressed to Emigrants from the Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland (Glasgow: J. Knox and C. Elliot, 1773) in Philip Morgan, “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Low Country Blacks, 1700-1880,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (October 1982), 579. 7. Joseph Dabney, The Food, Folklore, and Art of Lowcountry Cooking: A Celebration of the Foods, History, and Romance Handed Down from England, Africa, the Caribbean, France, Germany, and Scotland (Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebook, 2010), 235. 8. R. King, Jr. “On the Management of the Butler Estate and the Cultivation of Sugar Cane,” Southern Agriculturist and register of rural affairs; adapted to the southern section of the United States, vol. 1 (Charleston: A.E. Miller, 1828), 523. 9. Quotes from Levi Van Sant, “Lowcountry Visions: Foodways and Race in Coastal South Carolina,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies vol. 15, no. 4 (2015), 22 and 23. 10. Michael Twitty, “An Open Letter to Paula Deen,” The Huffington Post, 26 June 2013 and quoted in Hillary Dixler Canavan, “How Gullah Cuisine Has Transformed Charleston Dining,” Eater, March 22, 2016.

Notes

1. See Peter Coclanis’s Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Joyce Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1991); S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Judith Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Drew Swanson, Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape (Athens: University of Georgia, 2012). 2. Daina Ramey Berry, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 9. 3. John Egerton, “Forward: A Gallery of Great Cooks,” Toni Tipton-Martin, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), x. 4. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York, Vintage Books, 1974, 543. 5. Cynthia Kennedy, Braided Relations, Entwined Lives. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005, 103.