Africa and the American South: Culinary Connections (Very Long but informative Read)

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Africa and the American South: Culinary Connections
Hall, Robert LView Profile. Southern Quarterly44.2 (Winter 2007): 19-52.

Abstract (summary)
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One result of the Atlantic slave trade and other aspects of what Alfred W. Crosby called the "Columbian exchange," in addition to the forced migration of people and diseases, was the movement of food crops.1 These consisted of a combination of crops originally domesticated in Africa and crops indigenous to other continents that had reached Africa before Columbus's voyages (mainly coming from Asia) or which did so during the first century or so after the opening of the New World to European colonial expansion (including such significant American domesticates as maize, manioc and the peanut).


One result of the Atlantic slave trade and other aspects of what Alfred W. Crosby called the "Columbian exchange," in addition to the forced migration of people and diseases, was the movement of food crops.1 These consisted of a combination of crops originally domesticated in Africa and crops indigenous to other continents that had reached Africa before Columbus's voyages (mainly coming from Asia) or which did so during the first century or so after the opening of the New World to European colonial expansion (including such significant American domesticates as maize, manioc and the peanut). Thus the African culinary tastes at the time of the massive forced migration - probably the largest in world history up to that time - constituted a fusion of food stuffs originating from every part of the Earth. The purpose of this essay, however, is to explore briefly what food crops and culinary habits were (or could have been) introduced into the Western Hemisphere from Africa. Emphasis is on the influence of Africans and their foodways in the Southern states, defined as the eleven former Confederate states plus the four slaveholding states that remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War. As recently as 1910, on the eve of an upsurge of black migration out of the South, nearly 90 percent of the African American population still lived in the former Confederate states and 73 percent in rural areas.2

There are two basic ways to approach the issue of African influences on Southern foodways. One is to emphasize the basic food crops that were either domesticated in Africa or, though domesticated elsewhere, had become incorporated into the diets of Atlantic Africa before the captives were shipped to the Americas. A second approach, rather than focusing on crops and ingredients of African origin, stresses how ingredients (regardless of their ultimate locus of domestication in the case of plants) were prepared and seasoned.

 

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African Agricultural Origins and Dispersals

Farming economies have a long history on the African continent.3 Indeed the subsistence economies of most of the source areas for the Atlantic slave trade were primarily agricultural. Africans in several regions played significant roles in developing agriculture, domesticating plants, and dispersing food plants and culinary styles to other parts of the world.4 In the most extensive and most recent list of Africa's contributions to the diets of New World populations, Judith A. Carney identifies three geographical areas where "agricultural domestication unfolded": the East African savanna, the West African savanna, and the tropical rain forest of West and Central Africa.5 For example sorghum was domesticated in the East African savanna, watermelon and African rice (Oryza glaberrimd) in the West African savanna, and white guinea yams, yellow guinea yams, the oil palm, tamarind, okra, cowpeas (black-eyed peas) and pigeon peas were domesticated in the tropical rain forests of West and Central Africa.6

Plant material preserved in a cave at Shongweni, Natal, South Africa (excavated in 1971 ) and dated to the third millennium BCE include finger millet (Eleusine coracana), Pennisetum typhoides, Sorghum bicolor, Citmllus lunatus, and Lagenaria siceraria. Pollen from the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) is found at excavated sites of the Kintampo culture of the Brong-Ahafo region of central Ghana - the earliest archaeological expression of a food-producing economy in West Africa south of the Sahel. In fact, the incidence of oil palm pollen increased in the Lake Bosumtwi core area about 1650 BCE.7 At Karkarichinkat in present-day Mali evidence dating to the second millennium BCE has been found for Pennisetum Americanum (bullrush millet) and Brachiaria deflexa (Guinea millet). On the animal side of the food ledger, footprints found in the Laetoli flats of Tanzania of what is believed to be guinea fowl have been dated to 3.6 million years ago. The prints were probably made in damp volcanic ash and then covered and hence preserved by later showers of volcanic ash from an active volcano nearby.

Although yams were widely consumed in Africa on the eve of European overseas expansion, the major environmental zone for yam cultivation was located in the moist woodlands and savanna of West Africa.8 Today four major varieties of yams are cultivated in West Africa: Dioscorea cayenensis, D. rotundata (white guinea yam), D. bulbifera, and D. alata (greater yam). The first two were almost surely domesticated in Africa. The third may have been domesticated in both Africa and Asia and the fourth was domesticated in Asia. D. G. Coursey suggests that in West Africa yams were gradually domesticated. "Protoculture" involving the removal of wild plants to more convenient, accessible or advantageous locations in or near settlements developed nearly five thousand years ago. Then, about four thousand years ago, through the interaction of "protoculturalists" and Neolithic grain-crop cultivators influenced by Southwest Asian cultural patterns a "cross-fertilization of ideas" took place resulting in "the development of a yam-based agriculture in something approaching its present form."9 As we shall see, yams (whether of the African or Asian variety) were frequently provisioned on slave ships particularly when the involuntary African passengers were known to have come from yam-eating societies.10 William Smith, who traveled to Africa during the 173Os, found yams to be among the major root crops cultivated in both the Gambia and at Cape Coast on the Gold Coast." It is significant that numerous persons engaged in the slave trade distinguished among the several groups of African captives according to their principal dietary staples. The British trader Henry ElHs, for instance, commented:

Those from the Gold Coast, who are accustomed to Freedom and inhabit a dry Champain Country and feed on nutritious and solid Aliments, such as Flesh, Fish, Bread of Indian Corn &c are healthy and robust; little subject to Mortality; very hardy and turbulent, as well as much disposed to rise on the White People...Those from the Grain Coast, which is also elevated, live chiefly upon Rice, Plantains, Potatoes &c are less hardy than Gold Coast Slaves, but somewhat more so, than those from Angola, whose Situation and Mode of Living is in many Respects similar. But the Slaves from Bennin, Bony, & the Calabars, where the Soil is low, moist, and marshy, and the Common Food nothing else than Yams, Plantain, Cassava, Potatoes, and other soft and succulent vegetables, are of all others on the African Coast, the most weakly and delicate.12

Wet rice of the species Oryza glaberrima was probably first domesticated on the middle Niger about 1500 BCE, with a secondary cradle of domestication between the Sine-Salum and the Cassamance Rivers. Africans whose ancesters had lived in Jenne-Jeno [Mali], the oldest Iron Age city in Africa south of the Sahara would have been accustomed to eating catfish and perch as well as rice and beef. The animal bones, grain fragments, and utensils found by archaeologists at the site indicate that between 100 and 1200 CE "everyone in this part of town dined nutritiously on catfish, perch, rice, beef, and presumably milk." According to Roderick and Susan Mclntosh, annual silt-bearing floods of the Niger River yielded huge surpluses of rice, making it one of Jenne's major exports. Peter H. Wood, John Michael Vlach, Karen Hess, and Judith A. Carney are among the scholars who argue that South Carolina's early economic success owed a great deal to the contributions of black slaves and their agricultural knowledge - especially their knowledge of rice cultivation.13

The beginnings of European exploration and colonization of the New World took new food imports from the Americas and the East that were added to the acquired tastes of populations in Atlantic Africa. One of the most important of these imports from the Americas was maize. First documented in the African regions of most direct interest to the Portuguese during the early sixteenth century, maize was also included among the items loaded onto the slave ships as provisions and it was destined to become a regular part of the food rations dispensed to slaves by their masters in the antebellum South.14

Previously my own research has concentrated on edible plants, particularly (but not exclusively) domesticated crops, but recently I have begun to pay more attention to the animal products consumed by West and West-Central Africans and their scattered descendants. Thinking of the Nigerian context, Elizabeth Isichei identified four distinct entities for profitable historical analysis in the realm of food production: the yam complex (most closely identified with the Igbo and such other present-day Nigerian groups as the Yoruba), the cereal complex, later plant accessions, and animal husbandry.15 Although most emphasis has been placed thus far on food crops and medicinal plants, there are glimpses in the written and archaeological record of what kinds of meats (both domestic and wild) were consumed in West and Central Africa during the era of the slave trade. For instance Nicholas Owens, who lived on the Gambia for many years, included meats in his description of what the peoples in that region ate:

Their diet is rice, palm oil and small fowls at their common meals. Other times they have wild deer, monkeys, elephants, alligators, and several kinds offish and birds, but the most particular kind of food is large worms that grow in trees close to the water, some exceeding three inches long and as thick as a man's thumb, of colour white and hideous to behold.16

While monkeys and elephants were absent from the new environment encountered by African forced migrants to the Western Hemisphere, deer, alligator, fish, and birds were in the habitat of many parts of the South and captives from the Gambia, for example, would have been familiar with these animals and with techniques for catching them.

 

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Provisioning the Middle Passage
The pathways of diffusion and the specific timing of the entry of common African food crops into the British colonies of North American have not been worked out fully, but provisioning of slave ships did not militate entirely against the persistence of some previous African food preferences both in terms of foodstuffs and food preparation techniques. Before about 1695 most black newcomers to the British colonies of North America, even those arriving in Southern colonies, arrived via the West Indies and undoubtedly brought with them African-influenced foodways that had developed in what Thomas Marc Fiehrer has called the circumCaribbean area.17 A turning point was reached during the window of time between 1695 and about 1720 after which the bulk of the black newcomers for the duration of slave importation into North America would come directly from Africa with no stopovers or seasoning in the West Indies. Also between 1700 and 1780 about twice as many Africans as Europeans were shipped from the Old World to the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry. By the early 170Os when Southern colonies from the Chesapeake to the Carolinas began to import the bulk of their Africans directly from Africa, European companies experienced in the slave trade had already begun to pay closer attention to the provisioning of these enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage. Such companies as the Royal African Company and the South Sea Company had learned that although some European foods were acceptable to the Africans, they fared better when the holds of slave ships were provisioned with their customary food. Provisioning records of the Royal African Company between 1705 and 1723 reflect this. At the company's factory in Whydah in 1705 corn, yams, malagueta pepper, and palm oil were recommended as suitable items. In 1707 the Royal African Company advised its agents at Cape Coast to supplement supplies of beans taken on in London with fifty chests of corn, forty pounds of malagueta pepper, twenty pounds of palm oil, two bushels of salt and twenty gallons of rum for every one hundred slaves. When the Royal African Company agreed to "slave" one of the ships of the South Sea Company carrying 340 enslaved Africans the contract called for the following: fourteen bushels of salt, 280 chests of corn, 170 pounds of malagueta pepper, and seventy gallons of palm oil. Such provisions are typical of items loaded on the slavers. In addition, depending in part on the slavers' perception of whether the captives came from rice-eating or yameating societies, large quantities of rice or yams would be provisioned. Prominent among Africans who preferred yams were those shipped from the port of Calabar in what is now Nigeria. "The Calabar slaves," wrote James Barbot, Jr., "value this root above any other food, as being used to it in their own country." The records of such slave ships as the Arthur (1678), the Elizabeth (1754), the Friend (1768), and the Othello (1768-69) indicate that significant quantities of yams were provisioned along with lesser quantities of plantains, limes, pepper, palm oil, and "gobbagobs" (goobers or peanuts). Not only did yams "take up so much room," as John Barbot (Uncle of James Junior) observed, but also on longer voyages they sometimes rotted before they could be consumed. According to John Barbot's estimate, more than 100,000 yams had to be loaded for a cargo of 500 Africans - more than 200 yams per person.18

Having sketched the African food crops introduced into North America, I turn now to the second approach mentioned near the beginning of the essay, moving beyond the ingredients to the preparation and seasoning of these and other foods for consumption.

Charles W. Joyner insists that "food played a role in slave culture beyond mere sustenance.. .It had immense cultural and ideological significance: the choice of particular foods and particular means of preparation involved issues of crucial importance to the slaves' sense of identity."19 The possibility of continuity of African food preparation techniques even during the Middle Passage itself is suggested by several observations. That African women prepared much of the food during the voyage is suggested by an entry from the journal of the ship Mary for Monday, 20 June 1796: "The Women Cleaning Rice and Grinding corn for corn cakes."20 Even more explicit and detailed was the observation of George Pinckard, a physician who was aboard a North American vessel carrying enslaved Africans from "Guinea" to Savannah, Georgia, during the late-1790s. Their meals, too, consisted mainly of boiled rice and in a letter to a friend he gave the following description of how the rice was prepared:

Their food is chiefly rice which they prepared by plain and simple boiling. At the time of messing they squat round the bowl in large bodies, upon their heels and haunches, like monkies, each putting his paw into the platter to claw out with his fingers. We saw several of them employed beating the red husks off the rice, which is done by pounding the grain in wooden mortars with wooden pestles, sufficiently long to allow them to while beating in mortars placed at their feet. This appeared to be a labor of cheerfulness. They beat the pestle in time to the song and seemed happy; yet nothing of industry marked their toil, for the pounding was performed by indolently raising the pestle and then leaving it fall by its own weight.21

All of the food items such as corn or rice were usually mixed with a sauce of meat or fish or with palm oil, product of an indigenous African plant and a constant and widely sought element in many traditional African cuisines. Once survivors of the Middle Passage reached plantation America, the meals they consumed in the fields commonly consisted of boiled yams, eddoes (or taros), okra, callaloo, and plantain, all seasoned generously with cayenne pepper and salt.

According to Charles W. Joyner, "slave cooks not only maintained cultural continuity with West African cuisine but also adapted the African tradition creatively to the necessities and opportunities of a new culinary environment." There was what Joyner, using a linguistic analogy, has called "the African culinary grammar" - a set of implicit rules by which a bundle of ingredients is transformed into food deemed fitting for human consumption. Joseph G. Brand, Morley R. Kare, and Michael Nairn argue that "food habits are one of the last characteristics of a cultural group to disappear as the culture changes."22 Yet Africans had to adapt and change their foodways creatively as they encountered new environments. In this process they both influenced and were influenced by the foodways of Europeans and Native Americans.

A significant part of "the African culinary grammar" alluded to by Joyner resides in the condiments and seasonings used to prepare foods. Many African traditional dishes are characterized by "bitey" or "hot" seasoning with red peppers, malagueta pepper and other sources of hotness.

The Emergence of Sub-Regional Styles in the Colonial and Revolutionary South

If it remains generally true, as John K. Thornton observed in 1996, that "historians have not yet fully investigated the implications of this regional diversity for the development of African-American culture," the exploration of the role of this sub-regional diversity in shaping the food habits and cooking and seasoning techniques of African Americans is in its infancy. Enslaved African newcomers to the British colonies of North America (1619-1775), to the United States ( 1775-1810), to Spanish-held Louisiana (1719-1743 and 1777 to the early 1800s, including the ever so brief period when it was French-held) arrived through identifiable "nodes of import" to use John K. Thornton's apt phrase.23 For the British colonial era in continental North America, the major sub-regional distinction in the South among what W. E. B. Du Bois called "the Planting Colonies" was between the Chesapeake and South Carolina.24 These Southern subregions received African captives during different (though sometimes overlapping) time spans and from a different mix of regional origins in Africa. South Carolina, for example, experienced rhythms of African importation in which importation not only ebbed and flowed but in which the preponderant places of origin changed from one time period to another. True to the general pattern in the colonial South, the vast majority of the people of African descent carried into South Carolina came directly from Africa. The African origins of 63,401 individuals imported between 1733 and 1807 were summarized by William S. Pollitzer as follows:

 

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Senegambia ......................20%

Windward Coast .................23%

Gold Coast ........................13%

Whydah, Benin, Calabar......... 4%

Congo..............................17%

Angola..............................23%

(Congo-Angola combined 40%)

Between March 1735 and March 1739, a period studied intensely by Peter H. Wood, almost 70 percent of the incoming Africans whose coastal origins in Africa were indicated in the import duty records and the South Carolina Gazette had been shipped from Angola.25 During the 1740s, the decade following the Stono Rebellion, very little importation of Africans occurred at all and when importation resumed beginning in 1750 the main African sources for captive laborers shifted away from Angola. From the 1750s through the 1780s, when South Carolina suspended the oversea slave trade, Senegambia, the Windward Coast, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast, taken together, surpassed Angola as a main source area with a noticeable increase in the importance of the Gold Coast as a place of origin during the 1780s.26 Then, as we shall see later, when South Carolina reopened the trade in 1804, Angola resumed its prominence as a place of shipment for the last massive legal infusion of almost 40,000 Africans.

The region designated simply as Chesapeake (subsuming arrivals at various ports in both Virginia and Maryland) ranked tenth out of the seventeen most important "American ports of disembarkation" between 1662 and 1867 in a sample of voyages contained in the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Slave Trade Data Base. The 288 ships in the sample that arrived in the Chesapeake during those years brought in an average of 210.4 slaves per ship.27

The patterns of distribution of newly arrived Africans in colonial Virginia, for example, can be characterized with some specificity. These patterns, I would argue, have implications for the introduction and distribution of African foodstuffs, food preparation and seasoning techniques and of the African women who were responsible mainly for passing on and adapting these foodways. Allan Kulikoff, Douglas B. Chambers and others have recognized that the largest group of Africans shipped to the Chesapeake region during the eighteenth century were from the Bight of Biafra (roughly 40 percent of the total for 1700 to 1800) and a plurality of those shipped from Biafra were yam-cultivating Igbo-speaking peoples.28 Lorena S. Walsh has made astute and provocative observations of spatial and temporal patterns in the slave trade to the Chesapeake: slaving vessels from certain British home ports (London, Bristol, Liverpool) frequenting particular African coastal shipping points and they, in turn, delivering their black cargoes to certain specific Chesapeake ports.29 Such fine-grained analysis of regional patterns, African origins, and particular Chesapeake destinations undoubtedly has implications for the culinary history we are trying to reconstruct, but we are only beginning to tease them out.30 Most African newcomers to Virginia before about 1750 would have resided in the tidewater region, but, as Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls have indicated, ".. .in the years after 1750 most Africans brought to Virginia were taken up the James [River] to be sold at ports like Bermuda Hundred. Most were then marched into the interior, where planters eagerly sought their labor on newly settled piedmont plantations."31

Morgan has suggested that there probably were regional differences in the amount and composition of animal protein consumed by eighteenth-century slaves with protein rations being "much stingier" in the Lowcountry than in the Chesapeake. The analysis of faunal remains at eighteenth-century sites in the Chesapeake indicates that in addition to hog meat - the main source of animal protein for most slaves - some captives also ate beef and mutton. Fish were also a significant source of animal protein; usually such smaller species as catfish, herring, and bass.32 Thus in terms of the consumption of animals, the bulk of the animal protein consumed by slaves in the Chesapeake - based on the limited evidence available - was derived from domesticated rather than wild animals. In the Chesapeake sites that have been excavated, wild animals constituted less than five percent of the animal bones found.

In the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, on the other hand, not only were slave owner-dispensed rations thinner on the whole, but there was also a relative lack of domestic meat supplied to them by their owners. Archaeological evidence indicates that slaves on coastal plantations in the Lower South exerted considerable efforts to augment their diets.33 John Komlos' analysis of the heights of runaway slaves reported in advertisements published in newspapers between 1720 and 1770 reinforces the notion that Carolina slaves got the short end of the nutritional stick despite their obviously valiant efforts to supplement plantation rations. Clearly, Komlos observed "slaves residing in the Lower South were shorter than those in the Upper South."34 Thus out of sheer necessity, if nothing else, Lowcountry slaves during the eighteenth century may have had to be more enterprising in supplementing their diets. Also many Lowcountry enterprises, especially the rice plantations, operated on the task system rather than the gang system that was associated with tobacco cultivation during the colonial period and which would later be employed in cotton cultivation. Not only was there the necessity to augment their diets through their own efforts, but there was the greater possibility of gaining considerable control over their own time under the task system. Morgan states that "probably no group of slaves could match those of the Lowcountry for the amount of time spent fishing and hunting."35 Just as African-born females were able to continue many of their culinary ways during the Middle Passage and upon their arrival in North America, so African-born males shipped to South Carolina or Georgia did not leave their hunting and fishing skills behind. Nor did they become cultural amnesiacs as a result of even so horrible a journey as their transatlantic voyage. Morgan cites the example of Titus, a newcomer to South Carolina from Africa who spoke no English and had ritual scars down each side of his face. In 1775 he disappeared from a Santee River plantation and his master thought he had gotten lost "as he was out hunting." Lowcountry slaves also engaged in chemical fishing similar to that practiced by the Djuka band of maroons in Surinam who made use of sinapou (Tephrosia toxicarid) and damned up tidal pools and inlets as well as catching fish using a line and a hook.36 Archaeological evidence from eighteenth-century South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry sites supports the notion that a significant proportion of the animal protein in the diets of slaves in the region - in contrast to their Chesapeake contemporaries - was obtained from wild rather than domesticated species. These included opposum, racc00n, deer, rabbit, turtle, mullet, topgaffsail, and catfish.

Similarly, as Morgan indicates, "Lowcountry slaves cultivated a much greater range of plants, including many more African varieties, in their own plots and gardens than did Chesapeake slaves."37 During the eighteenth century white planters and European travelers visiting the Lowcountry observed Africans and their American-born progeny cultivating, preparing, and consuming the following African domesticated plants: Tania or tannier, millet, sorghum, sesame, African peppers, okra, black-eyed peas, and watermelon.

 

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In certain parts of West Africa sesame is called benne. Eighteenth -century Lowcountry slaves also called it "Benni" or "beny- seed" and not only made soups and puddings containing sesame, but also used sesame oil on salads. Writing in the 178Os C. Bryant noted that blacks in South Carolina raised "large quantities of it [sesame], being very fond of the seeds, and make soups and puddings of them, as with rice and millet. They parch them over the fire, and with other ingredients stew them into a hearty food. The seed in Carolina is called oily grain' it yielding oil very copiously."38 Today tourists visiting Charleston, South Carolina, will find individually-wrapped candies made of molasses and sesame seeds called benne candy or benniseed candy. In her letter book Eliza Lucas mentioned African peppers which she called "Negro pepper."39 And during his American travels between 1785 and 1787 Luigi Castiglioni saw Africans in the Lowcountry cultivate "an annual herb with mallowlike flower..., which was brought by negroes from the coast of Africa and is called okra by them."40 Although the plant, Hibiscus esculenta, is known by many different names in Africa, the word okra is almost identical in sound and meaning to ókrò in the Igbo language.41 Writing in 1783 Anthony Stokes stated: "in the Rice Colonies...the Negroes in General have Rice, Indian-corn, potatoes or black-eyed pease sufficient to subsist them."42 Despite the stereotypical identification of African Americans with watermelon, there is a kernel of truth to the linkage between the people's and the food's African origins. Geographers and botanists generally agree that the watermelon plant was first domesticated in West Africa and that it constitutes one of Africa's several original contributions to the world's storehouse of foodstuffs. It is not clear, however, precisely when and how African-domesticated watermelon came to be cultivated and consumed in North America, but by the early 173Os, Virginians of both races had grown fond of it.43 According to the Englishman William Hugh Grove, who visited Virginia in 1733, the Virginians he knew "chiefly Esteem the Water Melon, which is green, as bigg as a Pump[k]in, smoothe, not furrowed. They Eat it as an apple, but in my opinion [it is] too flatt and Waterish. They say [eating] it hurts no one, even in fever." African Americans are reported to have called the fruit watermillon rather than watermelon and George Krapp wrote: "The Negro's watermillon for watermelon was common English usage everywhere in America as late as the first quarter of the nineteenth century."44 As Jessica Harris states, "Once rooted in this hemisphere, African plants such as okra, black-eyed peas, and watermelon went on to become emblematic of the food of Africans in the North American Diaspora."45

In some instances American plants were substituted for similar African plants as appears to have happened with the sweet potato. As writers such as Jessica B. Harris and Raymond Sokolov have been at pains to point out, sweet potatoes and yams are not the same thing; although they are both tubers they are not of the same species or even of the same genus. Beyond that relatively little has been said about the ubiquitous sweet potato which in much of southern cooking seems to have substituted for what was the yam niche in Old World African diets. Beyond the fact of this substitution nothing has been said about the world travels of the sweet potato and few explanations have been offered for why the substitution for true yams may have been attractive or advantageous. The ideas of the French writer Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat whose monumental History of Food, originally published in French in 1987, did not appear in English translation until 1992 are helpful here. According to Toussaint-Samat, "the sweet potato comes from the equatorial forests of America," which has been common enough knowledge.46 But it may be less commonly known that it reached Polynesia about 2,000 years ago. To those who thought that the sweet potato was introduced into Africa near the beginning of the era of the Atlantic slave trade she says "we now have to put that date back several centuries, without knowing how or why it got there." This raises the possibility that the sweet potato reached Africa in pre-Columbian times via the Melano-Polynesian connection from Ecuador or Columbia to the Pacific archipelagos to Maylasia and South-East Asia or to East Africa via Madagascar or by several different paths. Did American-derived sweet potatoes, ground nuts, peppers and cassava diffuse to Africa in a cluster sometime before 1492 as the coconut palm, the banana tree, and taro (eddoes) appear to have done? Leaving aside the question of whether, how, or why the sweet potato reached Africa before the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, Toussaint-Samat offers a persuasive reason why, when Africans from the yam zones reached North America, it slipped into the diets so readily and held its ground so effectively.

On 12 October 1774, even before the outbreak of hostilities in the American Revolution, the first Continental Congress discontinued the overseas slave trade, that prohibition to go into effect on 1 December of the same year. The only holdout among the thirteen colonies was Georgia which did not adopt the resolution until the summer of 1775.47 During the Revolution South Carolina and Georgia were loci of a disproportionate share of the fighting and experienced significant losses of their enslaved populations through a combination of warfare, disease, being carted off with the British army, or being evacuated with slaveholding Loyalists. Thus, once the war ended, Patriot slaveholders were eager to make up for the losses in their labor force by re-opening the overseas slave trade. When they did so, however, importation from the West Indies was no longer permitted. This may have been because one result of successful revolution was that, as Stephen J. Goldfarb has suggested, "the United States was not part of the British imperial system."48 And it may also have been, in part, because the West Indies were perceived to be rife with revolt. Virginia and Maryland abolished the overseas slave trade at the state level in 1778 and 1783 respectively. North Carolina levied a prohibitive import duty in 1786. In 1787, before the gathering of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, South Carolina had temporarily suspended the trade. As the convention met, Georgia was the only state to have a legalized overseas trade in enslaved Africans. Georgia, which had not legalized slavery until 1750 and did not experience its first direct importation of Africans until 1766, began to impose restrictions in 1793 and closed off the trade altogether in 1798.

Even within South Carolina the demand for slaves from abroad was not uniform throughout the state. Lowcountry slaveholders were much less in need of additional laborers than the upcountry farmers. After the expiration of the initial five-year moratorium imposed in 1787, Lowcountry representatives in the state legislature were able to resist the demands of upcountry representatives to re-open the trade. Instead a series of extensions of the prohibition, two years at a time, was passed (in 1788, 1790, 1792, 1794, 1796, 1798, 1800, and 1802) amounting to an official fifteen year suspension of the trade.

As indicated by Ira Berlin, who may have done as much as any living historian to sensitize us to the significance of regional variation and change over time in slavery and African American culture, "at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great mass of slaves lived along the Atlantic seaboard, cultivated tobacco or rice, and practiced a variety of religious faiths derived from Africa."49 In 1803, as the expiration of the initial twenty-year constitutional shield protecting the overseas slave trade from federal interdiction approached, South Carolina re-opened the trade with a flurry of activity, importing almost 40,000 Africans over a four-year period. Since, by that time, Lowcountry planters (whose political representatives in the state legislature had resisted re-opening the trade) had a sufficient and self-reproducing slave population, most of these newcomers were destined to be transported to the Upcountry of South Carolina or re-shipped to Louisiana. The closer to the end of the legal transatlantic slave trade the greater the concentration of the newcomers' origins in the Kongo-Angola area of Central Africa. Thus while African-born people in the Chesapeake had diminished to virtual demographic insignificance by the turn of the nineteenth century, South Carolina - especially the Upcountry - and Louisiana (recently acquired from Napoleon Bonaparte's France) received a massive infusion of Bantuspeaking African newcomers.

By 1810 probably more than 80 percent of the enslaved black population in the United States lived between the Delaware and Savannah rivers in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina or South Carolina and the regional varieties of culture and cuisine between the Chesapeake and the Carolinas were still distinct. After 1810 the enslaved population experienced a massive involuntary relocation that Berlin describes as the Second Great Migration - the first, presumably, being the transatlantic slave trade. After a concise but thorough review of the history, evidence, and statistical methods used to develop estimates of the volume of this forced internal migration, Steven Deyle, author of the most recently published book on the domestic slave trade concluded:

...between 1820 and 1860 at least 875,000 American slaves were forcibly removed from the Upper South to the Lower South and that between 60 and 70 percent of these individuals were transported via the interregional trade [as opposed to traveling with migrating slave owners].50

 

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This Second Great Forced Migration, otherwise known as the domestic or internal slave trade, resulted not only in the break-up of households, families, and kinship groupings and the geographical redistribution of the enslaved African American population but also in acceleration of the commingling of the previously distinct sub-regional styles of African American cuisine. Concentrating on foods and their preparation may be a useful way to trace the fusion and transformation of African peoples into African Americans and help us advance the task of answering the question posed by Sterling Stuckey in the preface to his Slave Culture (1987): "How was a single people formed out of many African ethnic groups on the plantations of the South?"51

Although there is little agreement on the actual numbers involved, there is no doubt that the clandestine importation of "illegal aliens" from Africa to the United States continued to occur after Congress outlawed the overseas slave trade in 1807 (effective 1 January 1808). As late as the 185Os such slave ships as the Clotilde and the Wanderer (which arrived in 1858) landed Africans in Alabama and South Carolina and Georgia, respectively. In the early twentieth century Charles J. Montgomery, a University of Chicago anthropologist with linguistic training, tracked down and interviewed seven survivors from among the 400 or so Africans obtained by the Wanderer near the mouth of the Congo River (Zaire) in West-Central Africa.52 He took down word lists including samples of African counting systems. Significantly, in light of our focus, the list contained words referring to such foodstuffs as corn (massa) and manioc (madeoka). Most interesting of all was the word for peanuts or groundnuts - goobas or nguba - which by the 185Os had become common currency in the regional dialects of both blacks and whites in many parts of the rural South.


Because of now widely recognized health disparities between African Americans and Euro-Americans, "soul food" has come to be viewed as "unhealthy" in some quarters. We sometimes forget that traditional diets in what was once an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural region emphasized fresh foods derived from plant sources. As we have seen in the discussion of African foodways during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, many of the foods that we have come to identify with Southern cuisine were either domesticated in Africa (black-eyed peas [cowpeas], okra, sorghum, pigeon peas, leafy greens and sesame) or had been adopted before the arrival of Europeans in Africa during the early fifteenth century (turnips, cabbage, eggplant, cucumbers, onions, chick peas, dates, figs, kidney beans, and lentils). Others, introduced into Africa after 1500 CE - like tomatoes, chili peppers, maize, and cassava - had become significant sources of nutrients for many Africans in the catchment areas for the slave trade well before significant numbers of them were being transported directly into the British colonies of North America.

While acknowledging that African American cooking "is certainly a derivative of African cuisine," Dance went on to say, "it largely developed as a result of the exigencies of life as a slave."53 This statement suggests the necessity of shifting the focus of the essay slightly at this point from pre-American diets, foodstuffs, and food preparation techniques to some of the dietary "exigencies of life as a slave" to which Dance referred. Having already discussed some of the continuities and discontinuities and the transformation of African foodways observable during the colonial and early national periods, the concluding section of this essay concentrates on the antebellum period - roughly from 1820 to 1860.

In the brief compass of ten pages in his magisterial Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) Eugene D. Genovese, under the heading "Kitchens, High and Low," offered a welter of astute insights into the role that slave diets and black cooks played in the shaping of what came to be known as Southern cooking. He began his discussion by citing the rather crude observation about food in Washington, D.C made by the Ohio abolitionist senator, Benjamin F. Wade. In 1851 Wade complained that food in the nation's capital "is all cooked by until I can smell and taste the ." Genovese commented that "Southerners themselves [referring apparently to white Southerners] have tended to discuss the subject [southern cooking] with greater respect, not to mention delicacy." He suggested that southern cooking "has undeniably been our most impressive regional cuisine" but noted that the praise heaped upon it had all too often been given to "Old Missus."54

 

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What foods did the slaves eat? How did they prepare their foods? To what extent were they dependent on rations doled out by slave owners? Was there much variety in their diets? Were their diets nutritionally adequate to the amount and vigor of the work required of them? How did the food preparation techniques of black cooks preparing food for white consumption influence the palate of white Southerners?

At a very general level, discussions of slave diets usually revolve around how much slaves got to eat or how varied their diets were. The launching pad and reference point for much of this discussion over the last three decades was the brief discussion of "Food, Shelter, and Clothing" in Time on the Cross (1974) by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. At one point they stated: "slavery provided a better diet for blacks than did freedom for most whites." While acknowledging the possibility that this was so, Richard Sutch, a stringent critic of Fogel and Engerman, suggested that if it was so it was not necessarily because the rations provided by the slaveowners were adequate or nutritionally balanced. By going beyond rations, slaves struggled mightily and intelligently to make their diets nutritious.55 In their characteristically provocative fashion Fogel and Engerman made the bold statement that "the belief that the typical slave was poorly fed is without foundation in fact."56 They then proceeded to try to explain how such an erroneous view could have developed. A major factor, they believed, may have been "a misinterpretation of the instructions of masters to their overseers." These instructions often mentioned only corn and pork in the typical daily amount of two pounds of corn and one half-pound of pork per adult. Ascertaining the quantity of food slaves consumed, to say nothing of its nutritional adequacy or balance, requires going beyond food allotments recorded in these written instructions. Furthermore, Fogel and Engerman argued that other food items which the slaves may have received did not usually appear in these minimalist (usually handwritten) instructions to overseers. So why were rations of corn and pork such central items of the plantation routine that they were almost religiously mentioned in written instructions to overseers and these other food-related items were seldom mentioned? Simply put, Fogel and Engerman offer two reasons:

1) While corn and pork did not constitute the totality of the slave diet, they were the core of the diet on most plantations because corn and pork could be stored and made available fresh for distribution year around, whereas vegetables were less easily stored and, hence, were primarily available on a seasonal basis.

2) While beef, chicken, dairy products, and Irish potatoes had to be consumed soon after they were slaughtered or harvested (because they were difficult to preserve for later use) pork and corn were kept in store for the full year.

These are both valid points worth considering, but focusing on "plantations" (meaning the larger sized slaveholdings in a small selection of the Parker-Gallman sample for example) and on explaining the presence or absence of certain items from the written instructions of the masters to their overseers is problematic. This is what I call the Phillipsian fallacy (after the distinguished early twentieth-century historian of slavery, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips). Twenty slaves was usually the threshold that distinguished "planters" from farmers who owned some slaves. Considering that roughly half of the enslaved black people lived in units smaller than twenty, the typicality of assertions derived from examining a very small number of very large plantations is not to be taken for granted.

Focusing too intently on the food consumption patterns of adults in bondage, regardless of the size of the units in which they were held, results in understating the devastatingly poor nutritional patterns and health status afflicting enslaved children. Some of the nutritional woes of slave children, in turn could be traced to mothers suffering from one or another nutritional deficiency. What is called Protein-Calorie Malnutrition in early childhood was characterized by R. Cook as "the first and most important of two universal problems of malnutrition." The needs of young children, for protein, said Cook, are much greater relative to their size than the needs of adults or of school age children. One of three forms of PCM is kwashiorkor. Although the first clinical descriptions of the disease were not made until the early 1930s by Dr. Cicely Williams, it appears to have existed among young rural black children during the slavery era. Interestingly, the name of the disease derives from a word in the Ga language of Ghana and it means "the sickness which the older child gets when the next baby is born." Also, leaving aside favorable assessments of the "adequacy" of the diet of adult slaves as reflected in comparisons of completed adult heights of United States slaves with European peasantry, northern white urban dwellers, and southern white farmers, enslaved African Americans experienced and witnessed staggering levels of infant mortality compared to any other group with which one might choose to compare. According to Richard H. Steckel, newborn slave children weighed, on average, less than 5.5 pounds and infant mortality rates were in the range of 30 to 35 percent!57 Risk factors associated with neonatal deaths (birth to one month) have primarily to do with circumstances of the mother during the pregnancy and post neonatal deaths (one month to one year) are affected by breast-feeding and weaning practices, diet and other aspects of infant care.

Attempts to gain perspective on diet and nutrition among American-born African Americans enslaved in the American South have resulted in numerous comparisons with other groups including enslaved African-born people, slaves in the Caribbean and Brazil, their adult English contemporaries, their white southern contemporaries, and even contemporaneous Russian serfs. As previously suggested by John Komlos' effort to extend the record of slave heights back into the eighteenth century using advertisements for runaway slaves in colonial newspapers, one of the central bodies of evidence used in these various comparisons has been the height that adults slaves achieved. Economic historians consider height to be closely related to nutrition. Southern slaves were an inch shorter than American whites generally, suggesting that whites had only a slight nutritional advantage over their enslaved black contemporaries, but Southern slaves averaged more than two inches taller than Trinidad-born slaves and nineteenth-century Englishmen. But the relative nutritional position of enslaved southern blacks does not look so rosy when regional differences among whites are considered or when they are compared with free whites in their own region. Southern white males had a height advantage over Northern white males and a very robust height advantage over their enslaved southern black male contemporaries.58

Kenneth F. Kiple's sophisticated, if also rather technical discussion of slave diet, points out that determining nutritional adequacy is more complicated than ascertaining the gross amount of caloric intake. Starting with caloric intake, Kiple, too, articulated the consensus among scholars alluded to by Fogel and Engerman: "Today most scholars agree that by the nineteenth century the majority of slaves enjoyed a sufficient intake of calories."59 Balanced nutrition requires a sufficiency not only of protein from animal and other sources but adequate intake of a whole series of vitamins and minerals. In some instances deficiencies of certain specific vitamins and minerals can cause illness and in severe instances even death. As Nevin S. Scrimshaw put it, "even relatively mild degrees of specific nutritional deficiencies reduce resistance to most infections and increase their prevalence and severity."60 Bleeding gums were frequent among the enslaved suggesting a low yield of Vitamin-C from the diet due in part to the reduced yield of Vitamin-C from vegetables that were boiled or simmered extensively and oxidation from cooking in iron pots. To the extent that eye afflictions were prevalent in the slave population deficiencies in Vitamin-Á and, perhaps riboflavin may have been common. Pellagra-like symptoms suggest deficiencies in niacin and so on. To the extent that there was a higher incidence of lactose intolerance among the slave population than among some other populations is the extent to which other sources of complete protein and calcium would have been necessary.61 The combination of having darker complexions and seasonal cycles of overcast weather and indoor work may have militated against the bodily production of optimum levels of Vitamin-D although, historically, this probably became a more severe problem for the darker complexioned African Americans of the post-slavery era who migrated en masse to the cities of the North and Midwest beginning with the First World War. Vitamin-D is also considered to be critical for the absorption of calcium and magnesium. Recent research has suggested that sunshine and calcium may help guard against colorectal cancer and a deficiency in Vitamin-D intake has been implicated as a possible risk factor in several other types of cancers.62

In light of the earlier discussion of why sweet potatoes may have been a judicious substitute for yams in slave diets and recipes (what I have called the yam niche) Fogel and Engerman make the extremely telling assertion that "while both slaves [in 1860] and free men [in 1879] ate large quantities of potatoes, slaves consumed virtually nothing but sweet potatoes, although most of the potatoes consumed by free men [again in 1879] were white." Sweet potatoes are high in calcium and rich in Vitamin-A.

 

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When we turn from a critical look at evidence derived from slave heights, fertility rates, archaeological evidence, and manuscript census returns describing atypically large plantations to examine anecdotal evidence derived from published slave narratives and interviews with former slaves, we find that each of these bodies of evidence also poses methodological and interpretative difficulties. T. Lindsay Baker draws almost exclusively on the WPA Slave Narratives to analyze Texas African American foodways and Josephine Beoku-Betts draws heavily from the Slave Narrative Collection - largely conducted by white interviewers - in discussing slave diets and food preparation in the South Carolina Lowcountry, but caution is necessary when considering the former slaves' evaluation of their diets.63 In a quantitative analysis of the WPA Narratives which takes the race of the interviewer into account, Paul D. Escort found that ex-slaves interviewed by whites recalled having received much better diets under slavery than those interviewed by African Americans. Six hundred seventy-one former slaves included in Escort's analysis rated the food they had received as slaves. While a higher proportion of those interviewed by blacks rated the food "same as master" (11.5 percent versus 6 percent), over twice as many of those interviewed by blacks characterized the food they received as inadequate (19 percent versus 9 percent). The widest discrepancy between the former slaves interviewed by blacks in the proportion who rated their food as good, 72 percent of those interviewed by whites compared with only 46 percent of those interviewed by blacks.64 Generally Escort found that "former slaves were more likely to reveal to black interviewers than to white ones negative feelings about their treatment and masters and their willingness to act upon those feelings." Thus in the hypothetical and counterfactual scenario in which the majority of the WPA interviewers had been black, the former slaves' ratings of food may have quite different and quite a bit less positive than the actual available responses in interviews which, overwhelmingly, were conducted by white interviewers.

A major health problem for African Americans today is hypertension and cardiovascular disease. One of the first things that a person with hypertension is told is to lay off of salt. There is some evidence that salt may not have been as readily available during slavery days as it is today when most pre-packaged and processed foods contain staggeringly large amounts of sodium. An account of "Slave Days in Florida,1' in The Florida Negro suggests that salt was at a premium:

One commodity seems to have given both master and slave great cause for worry - salt; the master, because of the expense and trouble often necessary to secure it, and the slave because he so frequently went without it.

In many cases it was obtained from boiled sea water; so great would have been the cost of purchasing it that one plantation owner near Monticello used to take a team and a slave and travel 40 miles to the Gulf and there boil down a week's supply. The process was slow and laborious.65

Margrett Nickerson, who had been a slave on William A. Carr's plantation in Leon County, Florida, remembered: "We done de cookin' in de fiahplace in iron pots, an' de meals wuz plenty of peas, greens, cornbread, burn'co'n fur coffee. Sometime de marster bot coffee fur us; we got water fum de open well. Jes 'fore de big gun fiahcd dey fetched my pa fum de bay whar he wuz makin' salt; he done hear dem say de Yankees is comin' an' he sure wuz glad."66

Without doubt corn and pork were staples of the diets of slaves. The corn was often served in a corn meal mush: "Supper usually consisted of corn meal in some form, meat-white salt pork-on some occasions, coffee of parched corn, and sometimes potatoes or some green vegetable.. .The corn meal might be mush or bread." If it was mush, "it would be boiled with whatever scraps of meat or vegetable might be available, in a large pot out of which the whole family was served. If cornbread, it would have to be baked in the top of an iron spider, a large pan with a compartment over it in which coals could be heaped."67

Some recipes for corn pone or hot water cornbread have been passed down across generations. Sandra Y. Govan, whose mama's recipe for corn pone is reprinted in Daryl Cumber Dance's anthology, From My People (2002), succinctly describes the chain of transmission of the recipe across four generations of women in her family reaching back to a great grandmother who had been a slave:

I acquired my taste for this special treat while watching my mother mix and make the bread and listening to her tell stories while she cooked of growing up on her family's farm in Ruston, Louisiana. She acquired her taste from watching her grandmother, who had been a slave, bake the bread on an open-hearth fireplace skillet.68

There has been considerable discussion of what the slaves ate during the period between 1820 and 1860, how much they ate in terms of volume or caloric intake, how much variety there was in their diets, and how nutritionally adequate their diets were. These discussions have led to explorations of the links between nutrition and height, fertility, and patterns of disease.

The exigencies of the Civil War probably meant food shortages for both enslaved African Americans and free white civilians in the Confederate states of America but little systematic study of the impact of the war on southern diets has been conducted. How the transition from slavery to freedom affected the diets of the freed people and their progeny is also beyond the scope of this essay. Because most African Americans remained in the rural South through the early twentieth century and continued to do physically demanding agricultural labor, the energy they expended and hence their caloric and nutritional needs are not likely to have diminished in comparison to slavery days. And while, quite naturally, some changes in foodstuffs and food preparation techniques occurred, there was a good deal of continuity in both during the remainder of the nineteenth century. For example, my own maternal grandmother, who was born in about 1886 in Albemarle County, Virginia, and lived there all 72 years of her life, was during most of my early childhood, still using an outhouse, pumping water from a well and cooking on a wood burning stove. With the Great Black Migration to cities of the North, Midwest, and later the West, geographically mobile black southerners would become the carriers and ambassadors of Southern foodways generally. At some point along the line - many would say that not until as late as the 1960s - what black migrants once called simply "Southern food" or "down home cooking" was transformed into "soul food" and, according to such scholars as Stacy Poe, became an integral component of an emergent black urban identity.69

 

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Theresa A. Singleton, an archaeologist concerned about how we interpret objects found during excavations, identified two aspects of culture, what she calls "value culture" (customs, beliefs and values "presumably influenced by an African heritage") and "reality culture." The latter, which Singleton defined as "those aspects of slave life largely influenced instead by external forces, especially social control inherent in a slave society" closely resembles what Daryl Cumber Dance characterized as "the exigencies of slavery." Singleton says that food-related objects found at archaeological sites can often be understood from both perspectives. She believes that what foods slaves ate was "determined to a large extent by a reality culture where the boundaries of what they are were set by a combination of what food the slave owner provisioned and what they were able to forage." But she also considers foodways associated with the preparation and serving of food to be aspects of "value culture."70

To conclude, much assertion and counter-assertion exists about what enslaved African American Southerners ate, how much they ate, how it was prepared, and when it was consumed but very little systematic work has been undertaken. The time has come for someone or a team of researchers to examine systematically all slave testimony (fugitive slave narratives, autobiographies, newspaper and magazine articles, and interviews) and prepare a compendium of what enslaved blacks had to say about their diets under slavery. This effort should include indications of the size of the unit on which the slave narrator lived to the extent that is possible.

This the essay was meant to be merely an extensive prolegomena to that sorely needed history of slave diet and nutrition. Only when we have sketched regionally specific profiles of what the African ancestors of African Americans ate and how they prepared it and what their American-born descendants ate and how they prepared it can we produce a nuanced depiction of the relative roles of African influences and the constraints of slavery and poverty in the development of African American and southern cuisine.

 

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ootnote

NOTES

1 Philip D. Curtin (1969: 70). Elsewhere I have explored in considerable detail what food crops Africans ate in the various regions that supplied captive laborers for the Western Hemisphere. see Robert L. Hall (1991), and idem (forthcoming 2007).

2 Robert L. Hall (1975).

3 See Christopher Ehret (1979).

4 Richard B. Sheridan (1972: 16 no).

5 There are numerous lists of "foods brought from Africa" or "foods coming from Africa." For example, Cathleen Baird Huck listed the following nineteen foods "coming from Africa" or trees " brought to the Americas from Africa": 1 ) yams, 2) millets, 3) sorghums, 4) rice, 5) cow peas or black-eyed peas, 6) okra, 7) gourds, 8) watermelons, 9) fluted pumpkins, 10) groundnuts, 11) malaguetta, 12) Benin pepper, 13) oil palm, 14) raffia palm, 15) kola shea butter, 16) locust bean, 17) akee, 18) baobob, and 19) silk cotton. see Huck (1994: 4-7).

6 Judith A. Carney (2001: 378).

7 Ann Brower Stahl (1986).

8 Although this essay is not the place to delve deeply into the nexus between yam cultivation, the incidence of the sickle cell trait, and resistance to malaria, the physical anthropologist, Frank B. Livingstone, noted that "The cline in the frequency of the sickle cell trait coincides with this spread of yam cultivation" : in idem (1958), reprinted in M. F. Ashley Montagu, ed. (1962), quoted material on p.290.

9D. G. Coursey( 1976: 402).

10 Some scholars, Patrick Manning for example, are convinced that the vernacular names by which yams and other food crops are known in Africa may constitute tools for the understanding of history by helping to determine when various populations adopted new food crops. This, in turn, illuminates both population fluctuations and the degree of Africa's involvement in the world economy at any give time. see his comments in Nuala McGeogh and Joseph Souza (1989).

11 William Smith (1744). For a view of the use of yams among the Yoruba of present-day Nigeria, see William R. Bascom (1977).

12 cited in Daniel C. Littlefield (1981: 17 n. 27).

13 Peter H. Wood (1974); John M. Vlach (1978), esp. p.8; Karen Hess (1992); Judith A. Carney (2001).

14 See James C. McCann (2005), esp. chapter 2, "Naming the Stranger: Maize's Journey to Africa," pp.23-48.

15 Elizabeth Isichei (1983); Bascom (1977: 82-85). The paper from which this segment is extracted appears in full in Bascom (1951).

16 Nicholas Owen (1930), cited in Oliver Ransford (1971: 17).

17 Thomas Marc Fiehrer (1979: 26). A broader term is used by Dan Rose in idem (1974:202-216).

18 John Barbot and John Casseneuve, "An Abstract of a Voyage to Congo River or Zair, and to Cabinde, in the Year 1700," and John Barbot, "A Supplement to the Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea," in Churchill's Voyages, vol. 5, both reprinted in Elizabeth Donnan (1930-35:1, p.463; II, pp.14-15), respectively.

19 Charles W. Joyner (1984: 239, 106).

20 Journal of the ship Mary, 20 June 1796; the ship sailed from Providence, Rhode Island, on 22 Nov. 1795, intending to secure a cargo of slaves in Africa and carry them to Georgia, one of the few states where the overseas slave trade was still legal (Georgia did not abolish the trade until 1798). Excerpts from the journals were published in Donnan (1930-35, III: 363-371).

21 George Pinckard, M.D. (1806), quoted in George Francis Dow, ed. (1927: xxviii, xxiv). What Dr. Pinckard perceived as indolence could easily be seen by others as efficient use of human effort, or as a form of resistance.

22 Joseph G. Brand et al., (1980: 105).

 

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23 See Ira Berlin (1981: 122-136). The period between 1968 and 1977 witnessed the beginning of a veritable revolution in writing about slavery that has continued unabated over the ensuing decades. For a review of the earlier literature to 1977 see Stanley L. Engerman (1979); some of the works reviewed by Engerman contained references to the feeding of slaves. see also Randall M. Miller and John David Smith, eds. (1988, and repr. ed. 1997) for many succinct articles (most having judiciously selected suggestions for further reading), written by leading specialists in the field of slavery studies; most relevant here is the lengthy entry on "Diet" by Kenneth Kiple, pp. 186-191. Excellent published book-length syntheses of a massive revisionist body of work include Peter J. Parish (1989), Peter Kolchin (1993). For a brief encapsulation of my view of the slave trade to North America, including an estimate that "over 500,000 Africans were imported into what became the United States between 1565 and 1807," see entry "Slave Trade," in John Mack Faragher, ed. (1990: 395-396).

24 On the transition to a majority black labor force in early colonial Carolina, see Russell R. Menard (1987). Observations made by Richard S. Dunn suggest that even more refined geographical distinctions could be made within the broad sub-region generally termed the "Chesapeake." Willing to view the Chesapeake as "a single region - geographically, economically, and psychologically - "during the period before the American Revolution, Dunn argues that such singularity "began to fragment in the years following the Revolution," adding that there was "a growing divergence between developments in the upper and lower Chesapeake, between black life in Maryland and black life in Virginia"; Dunn (1983: 52). Although this divergence may have had dietary and nutritional implications for enslaved African Americans, I will not pursue that issue here.

25 Wood (1974).

26 David Richardson (1991).

27 David Eltis et al. (1999:27).

28 Allan Kulikoff (1986); Douglas B. Chambers (2005) and see especially his Appendix A, "New Virginia Slave Trade Statistics, 1676-1775," pp. 193-197.

29LorenaS.Walsh(2001).

30StacyG. Moore (1989).

31 Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls (1989: quote on p.211).

32 Diana C. Crader (1984); see also idem (1990). It should be noted that most of the faunal remains excavated from Chesapeake sites have been located either at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello or George Washington's Mount Vernon, and are often domestic - or house-slave sites.

33 Elizabeth Reitz et al. (1985).

34 John Komlos (1994: 103). If there is a caveat in this regional comparison, it is that African captives from West/Central Africa (the Congo-Angola region) tended to be shorter, on the whole, than Africans shipped from other parts of the Atlantic coast, particularly those from Upper Guinea (Mande, Wolof, Fulbe). Given the relatively small proportion of persons shipped to the Chesapeake who were derived from West-Central Africa and the relatively large proportion of Africans arriving in the Carolinas from the Congo-Angola area, the different mix of origins may have contributed to the shorter average heights of runaways from the Lower South.

35 Philip D. Morgan (1998: 138).

36 For a good modern eyewitness account of how sinapou is still used for "chemical fishing" by the Djuka, see S. Alien Counter and David L. Evans (1981: 159-161). The bush-dwelling Djuka Maroons call the plant neku. The plant, found in both Africa and South America, stuns the fish by temporarily blocking their breathing apparatus but has no toxic effect on humans who might later consume fish caught in this manner.

37 Morgan (1998: 141).

38 C. Bryant( 1783).

39 Elise Pinckney( 1972: 28).

40 Luigi Castiglioni ( 1983: 171 -172).

41 Chambers (2005: 40).

42 Anthony Stokes (1783), quoted in Betty Wood (1985: 237 n43).

43 Mark Wagner (1981).

44 George Krapp( 1926: 281).

45 Jessica B. Harris (2001).

46 Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat (1993: 65).

47 While it is possible that between 1 Dec. 1774 and the summer of 1775 Georgia may have continued to import Africans, most scholars as early as W. E. B. Du Bois have accepted the notion that the prohibition of the Continental Congress (the Association) was observed.

48 Stephen J. Goldfarb ( 1994: quote p.23).

49 Ira Berlin (1998: xxiv).

50 Appendix A, "Total Slave Migration, 1820-1860, and Percentage of Migration Attributable to the Interregional Slave Trade," in Steven Deyle (2005: 283-289, esp. 289).

51 Sterling Stuckey (1987: viii).

52 Charles J. Montgomery ( 1908).

53 Darryl Cumber Dance (2002: 422).

54 Eugene D. Genovese (1974: 540-549).

 

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55 Richard Sutch(l 976).

56 As was pointed out by Robert H. Abzug in his introduction to a festschrift volume honoring Kenneth M. Stampp and his The Peculiar Institution (1956), it was one of the first thoroughly researched full-scale reinterpretations of slavery since Ulrich Bonnell Phillips's American Negro Slavery (1918), and furthermore was "researched mostly in segregated archives." These were, therefore, archives to which black would-be scholars of slavery in Stampp's generation were either denied access or, if they had access, it was under racial restrictions. see Abzug (1986: 2). It may appear churlish of me to observe that Stanley L. Engerman, in the diet and nutrition portions of his summary of new evidence on the realities of slavery (published in 1979 but treating publications through February 1977), in the rare instances when the work of black scholars of slavery such as Leslie Howard Owens (1976) were cited, their views were treated as marginal, not in keeping in the consensus view, or often discounted as in "for a dissenting view see..."

57 Richard H. Steckel (1986).

58 On slave heights see Robert A. Margo and Richard H. Steckel (1982), and Gerald C. Friedman (1982).

59 Kenneth F. Kiple (1988: 186).

60 Nevin S. Scrimshaw (1989: quote p.l 1).

61 The argument that the average daily amount of milk consumed by adult slaves was smaller than that of the adult white males is made in Nicholas Scott Cardell and Mark Myron Hopkins (1978).

62 This is not the place to pursue fully what I call the Vitamin-D factor in the health of African Americans and others. I am exploring this matter in a paper in preparation entitled, "Disease in the African Diaspora: The Role of the Atlantic Slave Trade." A suggestive study by Cedric Garland of the University of California at San Diego School of Medicine and his brother Francis Garland at the Naval Health Research Center found that people living in southern and western states with higher levels of exposure to sunlight had a significantly lower death rate from colorectal cancer than those living in the less sunny states. And a study of male employees at Western Electric Company's Chicago facility found significantly higher rates of colorectal cancer (19 years after the original dietary data were collected from 1957 through 1959) for men with the lowest dietary intake of Vitamin-D and calcium compared with men having the highest dietary intake of those substances (38.9 per 1,000 versus 14.3 per 1,000 respectively). see Garland and Garland (1980).

63 T. Lindsay Baker (1996); and Josephine A. Beoku-Betts (1994). Charles W. Joyner (1971; Finkelman v.15 1989) also drew extensively from the WPA Slave Narrative Collection.

64 PaUlD. Escort (1979: 10).

65 Gary W. McDonough, ed. (1993: 22).

66 Ibid.,p31.

67 Ibid., pp.20-21.

68 Sandra Y. Govan's recipe for corn pone in Dance (2002: 447).

69Tracy N. Poe (1999).

70 Theresa A. Singleton (1991: esp. p.158).
References

PUBLISHED WORKS CITED

Abzug, Robert H. 1986. Introduction. In New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp. Eds. Idem and Stephen E. Maislich. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, pp. 1-7.

Baker, T. Lindsay. 1996. More Than Just 'Possum'n Taters: Texas African-American Foodways in the WPA Slave Narratives. In Juneteenth Texas: Essays in African-American Folklore. Eds. Francis Abernathy, Patrick Mullen, and Alan Govenar. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, pp.95-128.

Barbot, John and John Casseneuve. An Abstract of a Voyage to Congo River, or the Zair, and to Cabinde, in the Year 1700." In Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. Ed. Elizabeth Donnan. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., I, p.463.

Barbot, John. 1930-35 (1700). A Supplement to the Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea. In Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols. Ed. Elizabeth Donnan. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., II, pp. 14-15.

Bascom, William R. 1951. Yoruba Cooking. Africa 21,2, pp. 125-137.

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AuthorAffiliation

Robert L. Hall, Associate Professor, African American Studies and History and Chair, Department of African American Studies, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts.
Word count: 13649

Copyright Southern Quarterly Winter 2007

 

[2Quik4UHoes]

you coulda put this in my thread doe...