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Blacks enslaved by the Dutch in rural areas also worked in the grist mills and taverns and performed domestic chores. At Philipsburg Manor and other grand houses throughout the colonies, enslaved blacks also worked in the kitchens and served Brueghelian burghers’ feasts that would be written about by Washington Irving a century later—tables filled to overflowing with ripe melons, hearty roasts, juicy stuffed birds, and an array of cookies and cakes that harked back to the delights of the Netherlands. Afro-Dutch kitchens in New York and New Jersey served ollycakes (doughnuts), koolsla (cole slaw), and koekjes (cookies), and enslaved blacks observed holidays like Pinkster Day (the Dutch Protestant celebration of Pentecost) with gingerbread and rum. Some of these traditions lasted among the Afro-Dutch descendants of New York and New Jersey well into the twentieth century.

It was not all koekjes, gingerbread, and rum for blacks in Dutch New Amsterdam. The African American population, whose burial ground wasn’t discovered in lower Manhattan until centuries later, was worked literally to death. Forensic evidence from the skeletal remains in the African Burial Ground shows necks snapped from carrying large loads, teeth eroded from insufficient nourishment, and other injuries sustained from heavy lifting. Death, no doubt a relief, came at a young age; the median age of the remains is forty. Some sustained their fatal injuries while toiling as day laborers and dockworkers. Others worked as servers and cooks in the taverns and eating houses around the docks. Still others sold goods on the street in a manner that must have reminded them faintly of haggling and huckstering on the African continent. The African presence transformed the dusty streets of the nascent New York City into a marketplace ringing with the cries of women selling foodstuffs, from fresh vegetables and fruits to savories and sweets that they’d prepared, from baskets and trays on their head.

Florida reflected Spain’s racial history, with its centuries of contact with the African continent. The French, who controlled the middle of the continent, had a more liberal attitude to race and intermarriage. The Dutch had a brief tenure in New York and New Jersey. However, the European nation that established the prevailing racial and cultural attitudes for the thirteen colonies that would become the United States was England.

The British had attempted to establish American colonies early on in the sixteenth century in direct competition with the king of Spain. Their contacts with the Native peoples in the Roanoke Colony were well documented by artists like John White and diarists like Thomas Hariot. The expedition failed, however, and the British did not establish a permanent foothold on mainland America until the seventeenth century, with the founding of the Jamestown Colony. There, in late August 1619, a ship entered port. John Rolfe (of Pocahontas fame), the colony’s outgoing recorder, wrote to the London-based sponsor of the colony, the Virginia Company, that “a Dutch man of war … brought not anything but 20 odd Negroes which the Governor and Capt. Merchant brought for victualle.” The captured slaves were traded to the Jamestown colonists in exchange for food, including a chest of Indian maize. Rolfe, though, was inaccurate in his recording of the arrival of the original Africans in British America. In fact, the ship, the White Lion, may not have been a Dutch man-of-war, as Rolfe claimed, but instead an English corsair ship, carrying expired Dutch letters of marque, that had been on a raid in the Caribbean, where it had captured a Spanish vessel with African slaves bound for Mexican silver mines.

The Africans who arrived in the Jamestown Colony were from Angola ports, in southwestern Africa, where traditionally Bantu women were farmers and Bantu men tended cattle. The Africans entered the British colony not as slaves but as bound laborers. In the first half of the seventeenth century, there was