High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [22]
When there was abundance, a repertoire of recipes could be made; there were pumpkin preparations and multiple uses for corn. There were stews thickened with pounded sassafras leaves, an addition that is still used and known as filé in some of Louisiana’s gumbos. The slippery stews must have had a familiar mouthfeel to those raised on the okra-based gumbos of Senegambia and the Bight of Benin. Early explorers even mention a dish of chestnuts and corn that was pounded, kneaded, wrapped in “green corn blades,” and boiled, which may be the first indication of something like tamales in the delta! The dish was also much like the fermented-corn akassa of the Bight of Benin and other West African dishes wrapped in leaves, like the dukonoo of the Twi of Ghana.
As the French presence grew, so did the number of Africans and their descendants. Many did not come directly into the region from the continent but arrived via the Caribbean colonies held by the French. By 1750, 20 percent of the population in the Illinois French settlements was black, and that number almost doubled by the 1770s. One of those arriving from the French colonies in the Caribbean was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the son of an African woman and a white sailor from St. Domingue. He arrived in the Louisiana Territory in the latter third of the eighteenth century. He made his way up the Mississippi River, purchased a homestead and land in Old Peoria, Illinois, and married a woman of the Potawatomi Indian Nation, joining the tribe in order to do so. Du Sable displayed the same cultural fluidity as Estebanico and was reputed to have spoken several Indian languages as well as English, Spanish, and his native French. By the mid-1770s, he’d created the first permanent settlement in an area that was known by the Indian name of Eschikagou, which meant “stinky place” or “swampland.” In 1782, he built up a trading post in the area, which became the main supply source for French trappers and local Indians. The post was successful and grew in scope with du Sable “wholesaling” food items to other trading posts in Detroit and as far away as Canada. At its apogee, du Sable’s trading post had a mill, bakery, dairy, poultry house, and smokehouse. There were also workshops, two barns, and stables. Du Sable’s trading post flourished, and he operated it for two decades, until 1800, when he retired and moved to Peoria and then to Missouri. He sold the post to Jean La Lime for six thousand livres (about $1,110) and left the area that is now Chicago as a rich man. By the time du Sable sold his trading post, blacks in the French Illinois colonies made up 39 percent of the total population, and elsewhere in the nascent nation, African faces became a part of the daily experience of settlers and Indians alike.
The Dutch arrived in New York state and New Jersey in 1609 when Henry Hudson sailed by what is now Manhattan Island. In the Dutch colonies, Africans worked on plantations like Philipsburg Manor, in the Tarrytown, New York, area, growing and preparing provisions that were then exported to other locations throughout the colonies. The butter that was churned by slaves on this plantation was sent as far south as the Caribbean in a north-to-south commerce route that linked the northern colonies of the mainland to the more prosperous Caribbean ones. Many plantation owners in the northern colonies became wealthy by provisioning their Caribbean counterparts, who lived on islands where most of the land was given over to the more lucrative cultivation of sugarcane. At Philipsburg and other northern plantations, therefore, enslaved blacks grew food not only for their masters’ tables and to provision themselves; they also raised foodstuffs that would be exported