All That She Carried
Page 21
Perhaps in the immediate aftermath of her seizure for sale, Ashley searched inside her sack and found her mother’s store of nuts. Perhaps the primal pang of hunger and the relief of satiation reminded the child that she felt and indeed was still alive. It is possible that in its inherent power to “cushion deprivation,” this delicacy carried her through those first lonely hours.62 We know from the testimony of formerly enslaved people that forging new kinship ties aided survival after forced relocation, and personal relationships were reinforced in and through the material realm. In addition to satisfying physiological needs, food forged social connections. If Ashley first saved herself by eating her mother’s packed pecans, she may have begun to regather her spirit by sharing the food she possessed with others. Migrant children dislocated by sale slowly entered new circles of kin where a Black food culture reminiscent of Africa, influenced by Europe and reflective of Native America, succored cotton plantation communities.63
The loose, oblong nuts felt smooth in Ashley’s palms, the sound of their jangle in the sack a soothing and muted music. Their sensual materiality—touch, sound, smell, and taste—must have been a balm for this girl, reminding her that she was loved despite being cast off, her own and every enslaved child’s private apocalypse. On the dirt floor of some dark cabin, Ashley may have curled up with her sack, taking comfort from the food her mother had packed for the journey. Surely Ashley drew spiritual strength, as well as life-sustaining energy, from those three potent handfuls. Rose did not leave Ashley alone with her grief. In the cup of Ashley’s hands, survival culture grew from seed, sprouting, blooming, and sustaining the next generations.
NEVER ALONE PECAN RECIPES
The foregoing pages have explored how African Americans survived enslavement through close relationship with their environments in the planting, foraging, and preparing of food. And as Alice Walker’s words at the top of this chapter promise, loved ones who have departed “never leave us alone with our grief.” Together, these two notions suggest that the making and enjoyment of food is a mode of company and, indeed, comfort passed down and adapted to new needs and circumstances. Even when our ancestors are long gone, we hold their signature dishes in our memories and on our tables. In continuation of that cultural ethos of cooking and eating together that traditional chef Ruth Gaskins called “real comfort,” and in honor of Ashley’s nuts and Antoine’s trees, we pause to collect recipes for sweet pecan treats from five historic Black cookbooks.64
African American boy selling pecans by the road near Alma, Georgia, 1937. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF33-T01-002339-M2 (b&w film dup. neg.). LC-DIG-fsa-8a08065 (digital file from original neg.).
African American woman trading a sack of pecans for groceries in a general store, Jarreau, Louisiana, 1938. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-031759-D (b&w film neg.).
Pecan Pie
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor’s recipe from when she was cooking at Pee Wee’s Slave Trade Kitchen; from her Vibration Cooking, or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl
Boil 1 cup sugar with 1½ cups cane or corn syrup for about 3 minutes. Beat 3 eggs and slowly add the syrup mixture. Add lots of butter and vanilla and about 1½ cups coarsely broken pecan nuts. Turn into unbaked pie shell and bake about 40 minutes.
Old Regional Recipes for Thanksgiving Pies: Pecan Pie
National Council of Negro Women, The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro
½ cup sugar
1 cup dark corn syrup
3 eggs
4 tablespoons of butter
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 cup broken pecan nuts
Cook syrup and sugar until mixture thickens. Beat eggs; slowly add hot syrup to eggs, beating constantly. Add butter, vanilla and nuts. Pour into unbaked shells. Bake in preheated oven (450 degrees F.) for 10 minutes, reduce heat to 300 degrees F. for 35 minutes. When cooled serve with whipped cream.
Pecan Crisp Cookies
Carolyn Quick Tillery, The African-American Heritage Cookbook
1 cup butter
1½ cups dark brown sugar
2 eggs
2¼ cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
¼ teaspoon lemon extract
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1¼ cups finely chopped pecans
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Place butter in a bowl and beat until fluffy. Gradually add brown sugar, beating after each addition. Sift together flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda; add to butter mixture and stir until well blended. Add extracts, cinnamon, and chopped pecans, stirring until blended. Drop by the teaspoonful onto a greased cookie sheet. Space about 2 inches apart and bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden. 2 dozen cookies.
Pecan Wafers
Ruth L. Gaskins’ Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes
Do not make these in very hot or humid weather or they won’t hold their shape.
½ cup shortening
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
4 tablespoons flour
½ cup chopped pecans
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon maple extract
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Cream shortening and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Stir in flour and blend well. Add nuts, salt and extract. Drop by teaspoons 5 inches apart on a greased and floured baking sheet. Spread out very thin with the back of a spoon. Bake for 8 minutes. Remove from cookie sheet immediately. Yield: 36 wafers.
Nut Butter Balls
Edna Lewis, In Pursuit of Flavor
Nut Butter Balls are the cookies everybody likes and they’re easy to make, too. [Lewis explains that she uses either pecans or walnuts but prefers pecans.] Makes about 4 dozen balls.
6 to 7 ounces pecans
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter (softened)
¼ cup granulated sugar
Pinch salt
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups vanilla sugar65
Put the nuts through a nut grater and measure—you will need 1½ cups. Handle lightly so as not to pack down. Sift the flour once. Beat the butter and sugar together until the texture becomes creamy. Add the salt and flavorings and mix well again. Beat at a low speed, gradually adding the flour. When the flour has been mixed in, add the nuts and beat until the batter lightens and becomes a grayish color—about 4 minutes. Spoon the dough into a bowl, cover, and put in the refrigerator overnight to chill.
The next morning, preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Remove the bowl from the refrigerator and shape the dough into 1-inch balls, using a melon scoop. Place the balls on ungreased cookie sheets and bake for 12 minutes. Check the balls to be sure they are not browning. If they seem soft, let them bake for another minute or two, but do not let them brown or they will be dry. Take the balls from the oven and leave them on the cookie sheets for 5 minutes or more before removing them with a spatula to a wire rack. Let them cool about 15 minutes or more. Then roll them in the vanilla sugar and let them cool before storing them in a clean, dry tin.
Or perhaps, we might say, store them in a sack.66
Skip Notes
* I was reminded of this regional difference in pronunciation of the word “pecan” as PEE-can or pe-KAHN through an exchange on Facebook about my own pecan tree seedling. The seedling had its roots in an environmental history workshop during which I presented a previous version of this chapter. The environmental historian Ian Miller suggeste
d that I contact the director of Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum to see pecan trees and ask a specialist whether they could be started from the nut. My visit to the arboretum was scheduled for March 2020, just as COVID-19 was beginning to spread across the Northeast and our campus closed down. In the midst of this research setback, which paled in comparison to rising national anxiety about larger health and economic threats, arboretum director William “Ned” Friedman did a remarkable thing. He planted pecan seeds for me and dropped a pot off in front of my house weeks later, after they had germinated. As my seedling (nicknamed “my little pecan baby”) soaked in the sun and grew, I shared a photograph on Facebook, which prompted discussion about the pecan’s regional origins and whether it could survive in a backyard outside Boston. I also gained what felt like a pandemic pen pal in the arboretum’s director. He wrote about our pecan seedlings and sent photographs marking the parts of the plant and illustrating its deep taproot.
THE BRIGHT UNSPOOLING
In the dark at the start of the world: Theseus wandered the labyrinth, dispersing behind him red thread from his beloved. It was only this bright unspooling that allowed him to find his way back, to follow the line that ran through the maze like a seam.
—Natalie Shapero, “The Nature of the Rows: Blanket,” Habitus, 2017
It was as if I, with all my story-tellers gone, was now authorized to be one.
—Faith Ringgold, We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold, 1995
In the 1920s when Ruth Middleton sewed her family’s story, she stood as inheritor to mother loss and mother love. As a Black daughter just two generations removed from the slave trade, she bore a familial and, some would say, spiritual duty to mark the memory. Ruth fulfilled this sacred duty in a way that captures and mirrors the journey of her ancestors. Even as the words she inscribed tell a story, the open space on the surface of the material calls attention to the chapters we cannot know. Ruth’s stitchery is concentrated toward the bottom of the sack and mostly achieves an even spacing of regular lines. But between line five, which marks the quoted speech to come with the words “Told her,” and line seven, which reveals the lifelong separation of mother and daughter, a noticeable gap appears. It is as though the arrangement of words on the sack part in the middle, creating a physical space on the surface that echoes a hole in the historical record. So many African American ancestors seem to vanish, or at least to fade from transparent view, behind what genealogists sometimes call the wall of slavery. The same is true for Ashley, who appears in the blink of a paper eye and then disappears again until Ruth Middleton picks up the thread. How do we know that Ashley lived when the documented trail of her life goes dark after she is named in an 1853 property inventory? We learn of Ashley and her sack, of her survival and resilience, solely because a female descendant heard the story and held it close. Ashley’s passing of the tale along to Ruth is the evidence of her perseverance.
A chronicler with a needle and cloth rather than a pen and paper, Ruth Middleton stood at the edge of history’s gap, her sewn testimony the only bridge stretching back to her foremothers’ experience. Although Ruth named Rose and Ashley as lineal ancestors, the thread connecting Ashley to Ruth in formal paperwork is even thinner than that connecting Rose to Ashley. A cavity opens between the 1850s and the 1920s, between an enslaved southern grandmother and her free northern granddaughter. Within that chasm a maze of cataclysmic events arises, more than enough for a lone person—or a narrative thread—to get lost in. The Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, and the Great Migration proved epic in scale in the lives of African Americans as well as in the life of the country.
TRACING ASHLEY, ROSA, AND RUTH IN SOUTH CAROLINA
After 1853, then, Ashley is visible to us only in the shadowy form of a girl, young mother, and old woman. Like four million others who had survived stolen lives and loves, she persevered as the Civil War sparked, burned, and smoldered. Given that her descendants were born in central South Carolina, it seems that Ashley remained there throughout her lifetime. After being sold, she may have changed her name or been assigned a new name by mandate of a subsequent master or mistress.1 Such a change would not have been unusual for an enslaved person transferred into new ownership. If Ashley was around nine or ten at the time of her sale, she would have been nearly twenty by the end of the war. That prolonged conflict between Union and Confederate forces created hardships for enslaved people even as it bestowed the hope and promise of freedom. In early 1865, the battle returned to the state where the first shots had been fired at Fort Sumter nearly four years prior. Blacks as well as their owners in South Carolina experienced material deprivation, dislocation, and terrorization after William Tecumseh Sherman marched troops across rice and cotton lands, burning a path of destruction from the Georgia interior to the seaside and then turning his sights on Columbia. Following the upheaval of war, freedom for African Americans was “fragile,” an uncertain condition of new “privileges” bound with “terrible disappointments.”2
Even as both sides lay down their arms in the late spring of 1865, wartime tensions carried over into fraught questions about the reformation of southern governments, the place of former Confederates, and the status of freedmen and freedwomen. With former modes of governance and elite control in chaos, South Carolina planters maneuvered to shore up their political power at the state and local levels, protect their landed property from the threat of federal confiscation, and regain control over a free but still subjugated Black workforce. Within one year of Robert E. Lee’s surrender in Appomattox, Virginia, state leaders in Columbia, South Carolina, held a state constitutional convention (required by the federal government as a condition of capitulation). State representatives at the convention established a harsh set of new laws—known as Black codes—strictly limiting the actions of African Americans. These codes outlawed the right of Blacks to sell items of their own production without written permission of an employer or judge, gave every white man the right to apprehend and arrest a Black person accused of a misdemeanor, and mandated a workday that mirrored the long hours of slavery.3
The federal government under the leadership of President Andrew Johnson refused to confiscate Confederate property, resulting in southern elites’ retaining or regaining much of their land, among the best soils in the South. Although the Freedmen’s Bureau (a federal agency instituted to aid freedpeople’s transition to independence) attempted to oversee labor contracts between formerly enslaved women and men and their employers (in many cases, former owners), the bureau had neither the staff, the budget, nor the enforcement capacity to do this work effectively. Unfair labor contracts with echoes of slavery (such as requirements for long workweeks and few breaks throughout the day, prohibitions against visiting and talking with fellow employees, and financial penalties for leaving the workplace without permission) became another means of planter control and freedpeople’s subjugation. Armed groups of white men sprang up to enforce the new form of labor extraction just as slave patrols and the city guard in Charleston had monitored the movements of Blacks before the war. White vigilantes wielded violence as the primary tool of intimidation and social control, threatening, beating, and murdering Blacks with impunity to compel their labor. In the inland town of Edgefield, a group of Black men appealed to a Freedmen’s Bureau agent in 1865, exclaiming, “There is no safety in our lives, we hear of men being found dead in different places we apply to you to help us.”4
Without land of their own and compelled to do backbreaking labor at the behest of a white ruling class, freedpeople like Ashley were, in many ways in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, just as much at the mercy of the planter elite as they had been before. After the 1866 election, a majority Republican Congress took the reins of Reconstruction (the federal plan to rebuild and remake society following the war) from the conservative president, Andrew Johnson. They aimed to protect the newly freed population through the imposition
of federally designed districts and a federal military presence.
But it would be hard to roll back the powers the South Carolina elite had already grabbed immediately after the war. South Carolina’s former slaveholders had worked their way back into local political power on the watch of a moderate provisional governor (Benjamin Franklin Perry) appointed by a “hands-off” president (Johnson). The planter elite saw their bid for control backed up by a surge of white vigilante violence. White men across social classes orchestrated and carried out acts of terror and retribution against Black individuals, families, and communities under the banner of discrete patrol groups, loosely formed “guerrilla” units, “armed bands on horseback,” the Ku Klux Klan, and rifle clubs. Posses of men in support of white dominance and Black submission patrolled rural plantation areas to keep Black people working on the grounds of their current employers and prevent the ability of workers to move to different and preferred places of employment. After the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed Black men the vote in 1870, armed supporters of the Democratic Party targeted Black voters (who largely supported the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln), Republican organizers, and polling places across the South.5