by Tiya Miles
Enslaved girls like Jane and Ashley often did not have enough to eat. They dwelled in a world of deprivation even as they were compelled, as children and then adults, to grow, harvest, prepare, or clear away food for their owners. Children, mostly girls, could face punishment for mishandling food preparation or presentation. At the same time, artful dishes prepared with skill for an owner could be a source of satisfaction and pride for the maker. When Jane was six, her work in the rural kitchen started on the lowest rung, and she carried water several times a day for the enslaved cook.28 As Jane grew older and was called to the estate of her owner’s heir, she would become that Black cook herself. Jane excelled in “culinary affairs,” besting her older and more experienced cousin, Mary, in food preparation and cooking skills (leading to conflict between them). Perhaps she also excelled in the gardening that provided herbs and an array of vegetables for the master and mistress’s table.
Jane’s daily tasks began with rising early to feed the cows before building a fire and cooking the white family’s breakfast over it with bulky cast-iron pots and pans. Southern kitchens in the 1800s were often “dangerous, smoky, and hot,” with poor ventilation. The heavy labor was also exacting, as cooks wielded iron implements, gauged the heat and cooking times in imprecise open hearths, learned their owners’ preferences, and sometimes worked with unfamiliar ingredients.29 Jane suffered her “first whipping,” one she described as “severe,” for serving breakfast late one morning due to a slow-heating fire. For this, she was “flogged” five times by her master, as well as by her overseer. That is, Jane was beaten by two different men multiple times because the fire on which she cooked, for free and by force, did not heat fast enough. Her narrative recounts with remarkable restraint how she “became accustomed to scenes of severity” on that plantation.
Jane also became accustomed to scenes of lack. As a child, she had labored on a skeletal, protein-light diet consisting of a rationed “pint of corn meal…seasoned with salt, mixed with water and baked in the ashes.” It is no wonder that enslaved children suffered health consequences from poor and insufficient diets. They sickened and died at high rates, particularly under the age of nine, as rations tended to increase when a child turned ten and could do more labor for their owners.30 Years later, as a teen and young adult cook, Jane would have had greater access to foodstuffs, including the first chance at leftovers from the master and mistress’s table. But the enslaved people around her, especially those at work in the fields, would have had rations low in variety and nutrition, greater in volume but similar in makeup to the hominy she had received as a child.31 The fields of slavery in the nineteenth-century interior and westerly South made up a landscape of physical want.
On the coastal edges of South Carolina and Georgia, and during the first several generations of slavery’s reign, unfree people had greater opportunity to round out and improve on their diets. Slaveholders in this Lowcountry region organized enslaved people’s work by task, meaning that an owner or plantation manager typically made assignments based on age and expected capacity. Once a person completed her task (which, if she was strong and industrious, often took most but not all of the day), she could turn her energies and time toward personal matters, such as tending a vegetable garden, raising livestock, or piecing a strip quilt. Enslaved women farmed their own small patches of ground. Enslaved men regularly fished and hunted wild game, sometimes with firearms.32 In addition to growing food on “provision plots” assigned by owners and overseers, enslaved women finagled ways to access their owners’ rice stores.33 Children growing up enslaved under the coastal task system fared better than their southern interior counterparts, as their parents were able to procure a wider variety of foods.34 A formerly enslaved man from South Carolina described his diet to an interviewer: “The colored people were given their rations once a week, on Monday, they got corn, and a quart of molasses, and three pounds of bacon, and sometimes meat and peas. They had all the vegetables they wanted they grew them in the garden.” Another man, formerly enslaved on a South Carolina plantation, reminisced about the tasty meals that could be made from a combination of rationed, grown, and foraged resources: molasses and pone bread for breakfast, roasted corn, string beans, hog jowls, bread with buttermilk, and blackberry cobbler.35
Surviving in the Lowcountry, though, also required caution around gathering food. Enslaved people were often forbidden to eat the rice they planted, weeded, harvested, winnowed, and pounded, but according to oral history, Black women fashioned a work-around through the canny use of their garments:
The women had to go down to the low, wet places to get the rice. To do that, they would hitch up their skirts and tie them. When they got ready to “fan” the rice that was dry enough, they used a wide fanner basket, and they kept their skirts knotted. I guess you can see what’s coming. After pounding the rice to open the husks, they poured it into a flat basket made like a tray. Then they threw the rice up in the air to let the husks fly away. Each time it came back down, they “fanned” first one way and then the other, “some for you and some for we.” What was “for we” fell into the knots and folds. The rest fell back onto the basket. When they got home, the women untied those big skirts and let their families’ rice fall out.36
As the women threw rice into the air to separate the husks from the kernels, part of the intricate work of processing rice, they used their skirts as nets to catch some of the wayward rice as it fell back down into the baskets, then carried the rice caught in the “pockets” of their skirts to their cabins. Mamie Garvin Fields, a descendant of enslaved Carolinians who recounted this practice, noted that a cultural belief arose from it. Black girls were cautioned by elders never to “sweep at night” because they might overlook loose grains of rice in the darkness, thereby leaving behind evidence of forbidden food for an overseer or owner to discover.37 Another technique for the collection of falling grains was, reportedly, to catch the overflow in too-large shoes while one worked.38
Sustenance depended on persistence in hostile circumstances, a knack for gathering and growing foods wild and farmed, and an art for turning (often limited) raw foodstuffs into comfort foods laden with flavor. The ability of inspired cooks to work this magic turned slave-quarter cabins into havens of communion, if only for a few hours at the close of the day. When Rose packed nuts into the sack, thereby coating them with the oils of her palms, she passed on to her daughter a source of life-keeping energy, as well as cultural associations with mealtimes spent in the company of others.
Enslaved cooks drew from African traditions, using plants carried on slave ships (as food for the human cargo and crew) and plants accidentally transported as seeds. Cooks were resourceful in combining these African elements with ingredients found in Native American dishes and the cast-off edibles of white enslavers, including African yams, black-eyed peas, and peanuts; Indigenous corn varieties, pumpkins, wild greens, and pecans; and European meats and spices. To season meals in their cabins, they added salt, the sweetness of molasses, and, when obtainable, remnant parts of the pig. Blacks and the American Indians enslaved with them in the earlier centuries created “fusions” of local foods for meals inside their cabins as well as for the big-house or farmhouse table. African Americans learned to bake cornbread out of corn ground into meal from Indigenous co-laborers and family members. They adjusted their selection of fresh greens, a long-established ingredient in their West African ancestral homelands, to include native greens preferred by Indigenous people. Indigenous Americans, in turn, traded food with enslaved Blacks and developed a fondness for black-eyed peas, an African legume transported on the slave ships. The culinary creativity of enslaved people of African and Indigenous American descent shaped an exquisite multicultural, multinational cuisine that forms the basis of modern southern regional foods.39
The ability to procure a diverse buffet from the land decreased as slavery pushed west into “frontier” lands rece
ntly taken from expelled Native Americans and not yet fully settled by Euro-Americans. Even as far east as central South Carolina where Ashley lived (the “backcountry” to wealthy planters along the coastline), the task system gave way to the gang system already employed in the tobacco zone of Virginia and Maryland, and the quality of life for enslaved people diminished. Slaveholders in the cotton-producing central South prodded Blacks to do more with less, trading individually assigned discrete tasks for prolonged mass-organized gang labor. This consolidation of Black labor coincided with a plummeting quality of food as owners reduced rations, withheld costly meat products, and siphoned off time that could have been devoted to hunting, gardening, gathering, and cooking. Enslaved people in the Cotton Belt often labored while plagued by intense hunger.40 By the 1850s, when Ashley was sold, Blacks in the cotton South had little time or autonomy to procure their own vegetables, fruits, grains, or meats, leaving them dependent on the regular rations of the enslavers, whose interest in them was financial. Seeking to clear as much profit as possible, slaveholders often limited food distribution to a level just above subsistence, reserving poor-quality ingredients, including food reserved for animal feed, like cowpeas (black-eyed peas) and sweet potatoes, for their captive labor force.41 Their intent was to extract the maximum amount of labor while bestowing a minimal level of comfort.42 The pleasures of satiation, contentment, and enjoyment derived from the fruits of one’s work were withheld from unfree African Americans.
Enslaved people in the states farther to the west lived with a recalcitrant “caloric gap,” a deficit between calorie intake and calorie need. The result of this gap was suffering. They “labored too much and ate too little,” one environmental historian has contended, adding: “In the cotton belt, slaves were not just traded like livestock; they were livestock.” This metaphor emphasizes that Black people performed heavy labor in place of large beasts and were compelled to shift from an omnivore’s diet to a herbivore’s diet.43 The physical ache of hunger and physiological need for nutrition pushed the enslaved to desperate acts, which is why food was the most common item stolen on plantations, even though getting caught with the master’s hog or a buttered biscuit might lead to harsh reprisals.44
Meager, corn-centric rations stuck in the memories of formerly enslaved people decades after the Civil War. At the same time that slaveholders withheld food to shrink budgets, they also deployed food as a weapon, dividing the enslaved population into stratified groups who received either more and relatively better foods (such as house servants and Black “slave drivers”) or lesser foods (such as the mass of fieldworkers and their children).45 Aware of the power of psychological incentive, slaveholders nudged the enslaved toward desired behaviors in exchange for greater quantities or selective kinds of foods and made a spectacle of bestowing food on special occasions.46 The three-day Christmas holiday, a brief and eagerly anticipated respite for enslaved people, was often accompanied by master-class distributions of additional rations and sweets, such as “plum pudding, and gingerbread, apples, oranges, currants, and other fruits.” As the daughter of a Lowcountry planter reminisced, seeming to fondly recall her family’s largesse: “There was much feasting at Christmas, for a beef and several hogs were always killed and extra rations of sugar, coffee, molasses, and flour were given out, and great quantities of sweet potatoes.”47
But most seasons were not Christmas. For the other 362 days of the year, enslaved people in the Cotton Belt consumed a monotonous, grain-heavy diet (with the ubiquitous corn sometimes replaced by sweet potatoes) unless they could enrich their meager rations with supplements they procured or skills they gained for adding flavor over the cookfire. A woman formerly enslaved in South Carolina recalled “coarse rations” of cornbread and molasses.48 Another woman, this one from Georgia, complained that her “mean” mistress “never gave them anything but the coarsest foods” and only distributed “sour milk and stale bread.”49 Eliza Potter, the free Black woman who worked in wealthy white southern homes as a hairdresser, reacted in shock at the stinginess she witnessed among a family of New Orleans slaveholders: “I went out every morning to see the slaves at breakfast in the quarters, and to my astonishment, I did not see any of them have anything for the whole week but a pint cup of buttermilk and a slice of bread, those who could not take buttermilk, had a cup of coffee, made of browned corn, sweetened with molasses. I never saw meat of any kind given to them while I was there.”50
Enslaved people’s constant struggle to stay fed linked them closely to their environments. For them, wild and salvaged edibles—like pecans, as slavery moved westward—were lifelines.51 Children on the plantations became accustomed to scavenging for food, and these quests to satiate appetites could sometimes turn into play. As the son of an enslaved seamstress in South Carolina remembered, he and the other children ran through the woods in the summertime collecting “grapes, muscadines, strawberries, chinquapins, hickory nuts, calamus root, slippery elmer (elm) bark, wild cherries, mulberries, and red and black haws.” Another man from a South Carolina plantation recalled how the children ran through patches of plums and blackberries “hunting” for strawberries. But foraging for flavorful plants was not without risk. A third Carolinian recounted the memory of arising late one night from his “pallet on [the] floor, goin’ out in [the] sugar can patch and gittin’ a big stalk of [the] cane.” The son of his owner caught him and meted out ten lashes in punishment, treating the abuse like a game. Although the strikes by the young white man against the Black boy were not “soft a-tall,” the punished boy “didn’t cry out on [the] night wind.”52 While performing her services among the elite in New Orleans, Eliza Potter became sickeningly aware of the penalty that could be incurred when hungry enslaved people helped themselves to the plantation’s bounty: “Their slaves have nothing provided for them to eat, drink or wear; they work hard all the day, and at night they plunder what they can from some of the rich plantations. If they are not caught, they are smart; and if they are, they are punished.”53
Ashley, along with those whose voices fill the pages of slave narratives and interviews, probably had to forage for food and risk correction for doing so, as her mother likely did to provide her with a cache of pecans. Under these unforgiving circumstances, the nuts must have felt like manna from heaven. Here was a way to beat back hunger’s ache, at least for a spell, and to remember her mother, who had cared enough to plan for her sustenance. High in nutritional value, pecans would have been especially satisfying to a famished child. The “protein, fiber, healthy fats, nutrients, vitamins, and antioxidants” stored within these nuts turn them into miniature energy packets, points out one environmental historian. Robin Wall Kimmerer, a Potawatomi botanist, captures the special essence of pecans in language perhaps more resonant with Rose’s and Ashley’s sense of their circumstances. “They are designed to be food in the winter,” Kimmerer writes about these nuts, “when you need fat and protein, heavy calories to keep you warm. They are safety for hard times, the embryo of survival.”54
Across regions that now make up central-southern and midwestern landscapes (Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Illinois) and northern Mexico, pecan groves overflowed with “a natural food resource so nutritious and so prolific” that ancient Indigenous peoples chose those areas as camping grounds.55 Native Americans have gathered and prepared this food for thousands of years, traveling hundreds of miles to visit fruiting groves in season, planting trees from seed, and trading the nuts in a complex web of intercontinental exchange. Payaya people camped near the groves in the late 1600s through the early 1700s.56 In the 1700s and 1800s, Comanches, Caddos, and Kickapoos sometimes settled close to pecan groves, fermented pecans into a drink used for ceremonial purposes, and ground pecans into a fine meal as an additive for breads, corn dishes, and meats.57 Comanches and Kiowas used ground pecan leaves and bark as medicines to treat ringworm and tuberculosis. Apaches near the Rio Grande and Cherokees along the Arkansas River (having rel
ocated there during the period of federal Indian removal in the early 1800s) gathered and traded pecans.58 Of course the word “pecan,” like so many other American words in English, derives from a Native language (in the Algonquian linguistic family) and reveals a substrata of cultural exchange over centuries. Indigenous people used the term pakan for “hard-shelled nut.” French settlers learned the word from Natchez people in Mississippi in the 1700s and spelled it pacanes.59 From this we take our “pecan,” which is pronounced differently in the South and the North, depending on which syllable is emphasized.*
First leaf. This close-up view of a pecan seedling, planted and labeled by the biologist and Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology William Friedman, director of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, shows the plant’s unusually long root. Used by permission of William Friedman.
Beyond imagining. This pecan seedling was planted by William Friedman as an accompaniment to the writing of this chapter during the spring of 2020. He said about the process: “For me, there is something almost beyond imagining when watching a plant germinate and thinking of its potential. To think, these little one-inch seedlings will eventually tower a hundred feet in the air and live for centuries!” Photograph by William Friedman. Photograph and quotation used by permission.
In autumn, the fingering branches of the pecan tree spread and droop toward the ground, dropping showers of amber nuts beneath its canopy. The nuts are easily gathered and store well.60 The same benefits that attracted Native peoples made this nut important to enslaved African Americans on plantations and farms in the nineteenth-century Cotton Belt, a population in desperate need of a food that was plentiful, free, portable, nutritious, and filling. The rich taste of the pecan, which endears it to bakers of cakes, pies, and cookies, would only have added to its allure for people deprived of sensory satisfactions.61 Wild pecans sustained Indigenous Americans for millennia and African Americans for generations.