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By Root 490 0

no general regulation about the status of Africans, and enslavement was not necessarily hereditary. Many of the laborers in the colonies, black and white, were indentured and had signed themselves up to work for a limited time period. Indentured servitude was seen by some as a way of paying off debts or of gaining a foothold in the new colony. The race-based chattel slavery that would mark the country for centuries became the rule of law only later in the seventeenth century. The first Africans used their agricultural know-how to create their own fortunes. Angolan-born Antonio, one of the original group, served his indenture for fourteen years, then married a slave working in the same household, took the name Anthony Johnson, and became a farmer and substantial landowner in eastern Virginia. Others engaged in diverse occupations, but more than one of the group became a link in the food chain of the fledgling colony in one way or another, whether working in the fields or serving in a tavern.

There are no written remembrances of the arriving Africans’ first encounters with the Native peoples of the region, but if John White’s amazing watercolors of North Carolina Algonquians are to be believed, they found many cultural similarities between the lives they knew on the African continent and the Native American ways of life that they found. On the African continent, while each tribe or group has its own culinary specificities, there are generalities among the culinary habits of the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Mande, the Wolof, and the Bantu peoples. The same can be said of the foodways of the Choctaw, the Chitimacha, Tunica, and Algonquian peoples and other eastern seacoast tribes. Africans and Indians both shared a common culture of farming supplemented by hunting and gathering. Equally shared was the notion of foraging for food. Both groups also knew the frightening privations of periodic famines while waiting for crops to mature or when the crops failed.

As in many agricultural societies, daily life was organized around the hunting and gathering of food, especially in the months before crops were ready for harvest. From February to May, the Algonqui-ans, who lived in the Virginia area, were dependent on the sea, and its bounty was nothing short of miraculous. The coastal regions offered fish in great variety and abundance. Captain Smith reported from Virginia in 1608 that he saw a massive school of fish “lying so thicke with their heads above the water” that his boat could scarcely get through. Hariot recorded sturgeon, herring, trout, alewife, mullet, and abundant shellfish. The fishing seasons were different, and the species certainly differed from those on the West African coast, but the Africans from the continent’s coastal areas certainly knew of fishing and of sun-drying and smoking fish and shellfish—and those culinary techniques continue to be used even today by coastal and river peoples.

The Algonquians were also dependent on hunting in the early months of the year, as their crops of corn were planted in late winter and early spring and not ready for harvesting until later in the year. Game was abundant; Hariot recorded eighty-six different types of fowl. The careful observation of prey and the use of decoys were common points shared by African and Indian alike. The Seminole used homemade wild-turkey calls, and many groups used the skins of animals to create decoys for hunting. The Choctaw and Chickasaw of Alabama and Mississippi were also recorded as using different types of disguises, and their methods were sophisticated indeed. In 1753, Dumont de Montigny spoke of deer decoys used by the Natchez of the Mississippi Valley in Mémoires historiques sur la Louisiane.

When a savage has succeeded in killing a deer, he first cuts off the head as far down as the shoulders. Then he skins the neck without cutting the skin and having removed the bones and flesh from it, he draws out all the brains from the head. After this operation, he replaces the bones of the neck very neatly and fixes them in place with the aid of a wooden