High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [19]
As the road entered the town, through the trees I saw a huge stone beehive oven behind a massive pile of firewood. It was part of a new local bakery, where we were all to meet. I was curious about the gathering. It was not a powwow or tribal event; rather, it was a group of local families and their friends coming together for pizza night. Each family brought something to add to the meal—fresh tomatoes, homemade fennel sausage, cheese from one of the island farms, birthday cakes for celebrations, and, of course, wine. (One child even brought candy sprinkles to top his pizza.) Julie Vanderhoop, the daughter of a venerable Indian family, was the baker and had decided to use her oven and her culinary skills to bring the town together. Each Wednesday she provided the dough and made the individual pizzas that became the communal supper. Standing by the oven that she had fired up for her usual round of baking, she tested the heat and fed the round pizzas into the oven’s open maw with professional precision. The festive atmosphere of the gathering reminded me of some of the ceremonies and family occasions that I’d attended on the African continent. Mothers watched not only their children but also the offspring of others; all felt free to feed the children, and, when they got too rowdy, to gently discipline them as their own. That fall evening on Martha’s Vineyard, I was struck by the seamless way that the assembled folk came together over food—sharing, preparing, celebrating, and for the duration of the evening, melding into an extended family.
The majority of the Indians of the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, and the coastal Northeast—the first American points of European contact—have been either assimilated like the Wampanoag, decimated, or removed to make way for the expansion of the American nation long ago. My night in Aquinnah, however, offered a hint of what a similar community gathering might have been like in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and I left musing on the many cultural parallels shared by Africans and American Indians.
What did the Native peoples think of the pale folk who disembarked from ships with such different views about land and property and ownership? Equally, what must they have thought when, one day, they discovered others who were of darker hue? We have the European side of the record of first contact with the Indians, but what was the first contact between the peoples of color? Of the Indian and the African sides of the equation, we have little record.
The Massachusetts Wampanoag did not experience African captives early on. Their experience was with the early settlers. Up and down the eastern seaboard, however, there are spots of first encounter. Along the South Carolina-Georgia coastline, there is a sign posted on the highway indicating the turnoff to a place that is known as Ibo Landing. It is one of the other places where Africans, Indians, and Europeans met up in this country for the first time. The topography is not the oak-dimmed thicket of the New England forest on Martha’s Vineyard; rather, it is mangrove wetlands with twisting knots of tree roots sticking up out of its slow lapping waters. It’s all undulating grasses and deceptively calm waters rife with dangers: snakes, alligators, mosquitoes, fevers, and the unknown. The Indians there met different Africans, who came ashore in first encounters that were repeated from the bayous of Louisiana to the Tidewater of Virginia, the Piedmont of North Carolina, and the Florida coast. At each of these encounters, the African captives met up not only with those of Europe but also with those Native Americans. I like to imagine that on one or more occasions—at a stall on the outskirts of a market, walking along a dusty country road, foraging in the woods at the edge of a thicket—black man