All That She Carried

by Tiya Miles

  THREE HANDFULS OF PECANS

  Rose left her daughter supplied with the basic things that might momentarily keep a small girl alive. Chief among these items, more fundamental than clothing or the physical cover that the sack itself might provide, was a bountiful serving of particularly nourishing and naturally preserved food. The unusual specificity of the phrase “three handfulls of pecans” comes to us through Ashley’s story as stitched by Ruth onto the sack and captures a sense of sheer physicality in the act of measuring. We can imagine Rose in a kitchen testing the weight of the nuts in her hand, perhaps following a recipe she knew by heart, in Ashley’s presence.3 These words Ruth sewed connote the sense, too, of having been spoken aloud and repeated, even as the number three, perfectly exact and strangely parallel to our trinity of main-character women, seems to carry an echo. Rose’s inclusion of a material that could serve as food or as seed suggests her awareness of nutritional necessity as well as future possibility. Seeds surely have secret lives unto themselves inside their husks, but to humans, their use points to a time beyond the present. We plant seeds with the hope, in the knowledge, that they will grow into something not yet existing in this world. The nuts Rose packed were useful things and also signs with more than one meaning. Even as they nourished Ashley physically and emotionally, they symbolized her ability to take root anew and to grow.

  Here is a moment where we need to pull a thread in Ruth’s inscription in order to loosen the weave. It is possible that Ruth misremembered the specific kind of nut Rose stored and that rather than pecans, Rose packed a more common nut, like chestnuts. If so, we might note that while distinct, the chestnut was similar to the pecan in terms of planting and culinary properties. If Rose did pack pecans specifically, as Ruth recorded, she could not have come by her private stash easily. In the 1850s, when Rose filled the sack, pecans were available in Charleston from only a few outlets. The harvested and cured nuts were delivered to the wharf by boat in barrels. They were a recent fixture in Charleston, too, having first arrived in 1832 from Texas. The natural habitat of the pecan was not the coastal Southeast but, rather, westerly riparian zones of Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, and northern Mexico. It was a delicacy deemed an “exotic import” in antebellum South Carolina, second in exoticism only to almonds.4

  In Rose’s day, access to pecans would have been limited in the Southeast. She would have obtained them from the wharf in the city, perhaps through bartering with another enslaved person but, more likely, at the direction of Milberry Serena Martin. Pecans might have appeared on the Martins’ dinner menu on an evening when they were hosting guests. In expensive Charleston restaurants of the 1840s and 1850s, chefs served pecans as delicacies in a pastry course that included fruit and other nuts. In comparison to the “exotic” pecan, harvested and cured hundreds of miles to the west, the American chestnut was more accessible, grown locally in the Carolinas.5

  Pecans would have been all but out of reach for an enslaved mother in the Southeast whose worldly possessions consisted of not much more than a tattered dress. Though wild pecans were harvested in the southwestern and midwestern climes of the Mississippi River valley and its tributaries, in the 1850s pecan trees had not yet been widely cultivated or commercialized anywhere in the United States. The first pecan trees advertised for sale in Charleston did not appear in the print press until 1859.6 By the 1860s, pecan trees were growing on Boone Hall Plantation, northeast of Charleston, but only because they had been carefully transplanted there. The owner, John Horlbeck, acquired cuttings from Louisiana and had them planted near the avenue of oaks that led to Boone Hall’s grand entry. By the 1890s Horlbeck’s grandson, who had enjoyed the plantation’s nuts as a child, was pursuing the establishment of large pecan groves; his initiative helped turn the nut into a Lowcountry mainstay.7

  Since she lived far to the east of their natural habitat, Rose would have had to be deliberate about getting her hands on so many of these delicacies. Even the idiosyncratic spelling of the word “handful” on the sack as “handfull” highlights Rose’s feat of plenty (symbolically indicated by that extra l). Her access to this luxury food adds greater strength to the speculation that Rose worked in the Martin household as a cook. An image forms more readily now in our minds of Rose going marketing at the behest of the Martins while dressed in some checked or calico cloth, toting a basket on her head, in the custom of Black Charleston women, and returning from the crowded wharf with the basket full and a sack of pecans. Perhaps she had been instructed to use these nuts in some popular holiday dish, such as pecan-stuffed dates or fruitcakes.8 We can imagine that she surreptitiously set aside a quantity as well, hoping to later provide a measure of secret pleasure for herself or loved ones.

  It is likely not coincidence that Rose procured these pecans after Robert Martin’s death, which occurred during winter’s social season. Pecans can remain fresh for up to twelve months when stored in cool, dry places. And Ashley was “inventoried” less than a year after Martin passed away. The timing was right for Rose to have had these special nuts on hand, and access to the kitchen would have made it more possible for her to store them. Maybe these nuts were the first item Rose collected in the sack, with the dress, the braid, and her whispered feelings pressed in on top of them. Rose may even have bought pecans in the very bag we are tracing, which is of a type originally manufactured for agricultural use. For Rose, these salvaged nuts were among the ingredients of a recipe for survival. By choosing to pack pecans for her daughter, Rose bears a link to another enslaved craftsperson who made history through the work of his hands: the first recorded cultivator of the commercial pecan tree, known simply as Antoine.

  METHODS OF FORCING

  Just as they longed for a Black population who could be depended on to produce crops, goods, services, ideas, and more unfree people in the form of slave babies, southern plantation owners, who had been experimenting with agricultural innovation since the mid-1700s, wanted a pecan tree that could be counted on for consistency. By the early 1800s, elite agriculturalists were tinkering with grafting (or budding), trying to create an engineered pecan that would produce a consistent form, taste, and shell. This approach involved taking shoots (“scions” or “graftwoods”) from the limbs of pecan trees producing ideal nuts and carefully merging them with branches of existing trees in desired locations, such as plantation acreage where they could be readily tended and harvested (“rootstocks”).9 The aim was for these hybrid trees to reliably produce the desired quality of nut—tasty, shapely, and easy to crack. The first experimenter credited with noteworthy results was Abner Landrum, a South Carolina plantation owner and physician already well known in his time for creating a method for glazing stoneware pottery without the use of lead. In the 1820s, Landrum made at least two attempts to graft pecans on his plantation in Edgefield, in the interior of the state. He explained his first unsuccessful trial as having been “made rather late in the season.” He did better on the next occasion, reporting,“I have this summer budded some dozens of pecan on the common hickory nut, without a single failure as yet; and some of them are growing finely.”10 Landrum was proud of his efforts and detailed an account of his method in the trade serial American Farmer, so meticulously that he apologized for the length.11

  The pecan tree had, up to this time, escaped the earnest attention of cultivators. This might have been a great first in southern agricultural history if Landrum’s method had been taken up and replicated. Landrum’s painstakingly recorded directions in American Farmer did not inspire followers, but his writing pulls back the curtain on a planter-scientist’s mind-set. Landrum’s account reveals an uncanny parallel between unconscious views of owning people and the domestication and commercialization of nature. Landrum sought to compel conformity and increase productivity through forced reproduction of his trees. We can presume he felt the same about his slaves, likely the ones tending his orchard. (An enslaved man named Dave Drake who worked in Landrum�
�s industrial-scale pottery studio on loan from Landrum’s nephew later became known for his distinctive craftsmanship. Drake’s over-sized glazed pots, often signed and embellished with lively lines of poetry, are highly valued as collectibles today.)12 In addition to the obvious point about the unpaid support staff sustaining an elite planter’s innovations, enslaved people seem to have hovered in the back of Landrum’s consciousness as he grafted trees. Landrum’s descriptive language is stridently violent, as he discusses his “method of forcing” trees as an “amputat[ion].” Consider, as you read these next lines, the objects of Landrum’s ministrations. Is he speaking of walnuts and pecans or of Black women, men, and children?

  “It seems to be a prevalent opinion,” Landrum protests, “that buds cannot be separated for any length of time, from the parent tree without ceasing to vegetate. I kept some cuts of the almond, peach, and apricot, nearly a month in moist earth, and budded them with success.” The “wild plum,” he continues, “will be found an excellent stock for an extensive tribe of delicious fruits.” (Those who have read or will read Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad may shudder, as I did, at Landrum’s reference to his plums, as this is the language a cruel enslaver uses in the novel to describe the Black women he owns and routinely assaults.)13 This “art,” Landrum insists, “enables us to collect from all quarters of the world (climate not forbidding) the most choice fruits, and plant them on stocks hardy and mature, capable of affording as much fruit in two or three years as the seed would yield in a dozen or more.”

  Abner Landrum speaks of fruit trees on the surface, but his words referencing “tribes,” “collect[ing] from all quarters,” and “hardy” stock echo the transatlantic slave trade, which pillaged African peoples of various ethnicities, as well as the forced “breeding” of Black women and the separation of African American parents and children. Grafting, Landrum believed, could “produce a paradise of fruits and flowers” where “thorns and briars now grow,” and those who accomplished this transformation were bound for “glory.”14 Landrum seemed to uphold the work of forcing new life and the planter’s wish for order and productivity as nearly divine. His thoughts, in fact, lead us back to a needle we threaded in a previous chapter, in which elite white southern culture subscribed to a hierarchical order ordained by God with propertied white men at the apex.

  It seems an irony, then, that it was not Landrum or some other wealthy planter-scientist who invented a successful pecan-grafting method that stuck. That innovation sprang from the hands of an enslaved man most of us have never heard of. In the 1840s, a Louisiana doctor tried to graft a pecan tree on Anita Plantation. When the merger did not take, he carried the cuttings (or perhaps sent an enslaved person to carry the cuttings) to his neighbor across the Mississippi River, the owner of the now-iconic Oak Alley Plantation. A man named Antoine enslaved at Oak Alley possessed considerable and unusual skills as a gardener. His owner passed the challenge of growing the cuttings on to Antoine. In the winter of 1846, Antoine hand-grafted 16 trees, which he extended into a healthy orchard of 110 trees.15 Would that we could read a detailed account of Antoine’s artisanal method in a nineteenth-century agricultural trade journal. Perhaps we would find, in language or technique originating from his experience as chattel, a difference in how he perceived or treated the trees.16

  After Antoine’s trees reached maturity, in the years following the Civil War, they produced plentiful nuts that sold for fifty to seventy-five dollars per barrel. Still, the plantation’s new owners (the property had changed hands more than once) felled many of those trees to free the land for a more lucrative sugarcane crop. In 1876, the then owner of Oak Alley, Hubert Bonzano, exhibited nuts from Antoine’s remaining trees at the Centennial Exposition, the world’s fair held in Philadelphia and a showcase for inventors like Alexander Graham Bell. The nuts received a commendation from a Yale botanist and professor, who praised them for their “remarkably large size, tenderness of shell, and very special excellence.” This singular notice bestowed a name on “the first vegetatively propagated pecan cultivar.” It was called the “Centennial” and became the first pecan variety used in a commercial orchard, making Oak Alley the “birthplace of commercial pecan production.” Antoine, who is but a shadow in the historical record, received no glory or remuneration for his botanical feat. Even the “mother tree” from which the first of Antoine’s grafted shoots came has disappeared from the landscape. In 1890, a levee breach created a sudden sinkhole that carried “Mother Centennial” down into the bowels of the earth.17

  The pecan trees grafted by an unfree man would lay the foundation for distribution and commercialization. After the Centennial was commercialized, though, the pecan industry was sluggish to develop. For the better part of the century, pecans were accessible to people mainly through foraging, trading, or purchasing the wild nuts. The tree escaped widespread cultivation and commercialization until the late 1800s and early 1900s, “much longer,” the environmental historian James McWilliams contends, “than any other native edible plant.” The pecan, he insists, “continued to stand tall on its own terms.”18 For this was a tree with an especially deep tap root invisible above the soil surface, a tree with unpredictable verve and a “strength that remains hidden from view.”19 The plant’s durable root system, versatility, and fierce adaptability enabled it to thrive from Texas to Georgia, from Louisiana to Illinois, and to withstand the heavy foraging of human and non-human creatures as well as to resist attempts at domestication for decades. Pecan trees can live for hundreds of years, and their species “preceded hate,” as geologist Lauret Savoy has profoundly observed about the American landscape writ large.20

  Indeed, we might conceptualize the wild pecan as a deeply democratic type of tree. Indigenous people who have long collected, planted, and prepared pecans seem to have valued the tree in this fashion. Caddos of the southern plains tell a traditional story about a “mother to all the pecan trees.” The old woman of the tale possessed all the pecan trees and horded the nuts in her home, stingily rationing them out to the people. Coyote, a trickster figure and a stranger to the village, kills the woman, “and ever since then the pecan trees have grown everywhere and belong to all of the people.”21 In the mid-1800s, the Cherokee Nation and the Chickasaw Nation passed legislation to ban the cutting down of pecan trees, followed by the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, which in the 1920s fined perpetrators for “mutilating a pecan tree.”22

  We know that enslaved people and their descendants across the South loved the nuts that dropped from those trees. They may have enjoyed the pecan’s unique earthy flavor, so influential now to a regional food culture that the pecan is the base for the “South’s most popular pie” and the French-inflected pecan praline, a famous southern delicacy.23 The pecan appears in all manner of Black southern recipes, both sweet and savory, from delicate wafers to turkey stuffing. We will return to food and ways of preparing it in due course. For now, let us dwell on the trees themselves. We can surmise, from Antoine’s artisanal work as a horticulturist and from the unknown, unsung work of many other enslaved gardeners and foresters, that Black people also felt a fondness for pecans as trees. They may have recognized the tree’s toughness in the face of assault, its adaptability to a range of habitats, and its tenacious ability to put down roots, no matter the quality of the soil. They may have looked to the wild pecan tree as an example of how to live long with steadfastness and dignity, even in inhospitable circumstances, and even when, as was the case with Antoine’s Mother Centennial, a maternal anchor has been lost.

  The lone surviving pecan tree from Antoine’s originals, Oak Alley Plantation, Louisiana. Reproduced in Lenny Wells, Pecan: America’s Native Nut Tree (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), 41.

  “I used to know every pecan tree,” Mary Yelling, the descendant of enslaved people, said about her hometown of Spring Hill, Alabama, in an oral history interview.24 Might Ashley h
ave said the same, or her daughter, or hers, of the wild pecan groves that would later spread across the South Carolina interior? Might she, with nuts in hand that also were seeds, have planted pecans in some secret spot near the Savannah River? Is it too far a stretch to see Ashley as a grafter, too, attaching the shoots of her new forced life onto the strong roots of memory that kept her lost mother close? Imagine Ashley: a long-term survivor like a wild pecan tree, fiercely resilient, roots holding fast to the ever-changing ground.

  SURVIVAL FOODS

  It took an online foray into the subculture of “prepper” communities for me to learn that “survival food” now refers to items that might be packed into an emergency kit in case of disaster.25 The term has another meaning, though, one not entirely unrelated: the foods that enslaved people used to “sustain themselves” when they possessed few ingredients of high nutritional value.26 How did enslaved people find, grow, and prepare the foods that kept them alive and even provided emotional comfort? How did nine-year-old Ashley maintain a diet? What did she manage to eat? And what did she think of the plants and animals that sustained her? Ashley began her journey to a new plantation with three handfuls of pecans. This is all we know. As with the dress, we must turn, then, to the accounts of other enslaved people to paint a composite picture of their foodways. Jane Clark, the woman we encountered in a previous chapter who escaped her owner’s house with two packed pillowcases in tow, has a story that offers a view into an unfree child’s experience of food, hunger, and cookery.27