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palenques and the life of Estebán Montejo. The Surinamese have the Djuka, and there are black Carib groups in Dominica and on the Mosquito Coast. African Americans in the United States, though, know little of our own Maroon communities. The term “Maroon” comes from the Spanish word cimarrón, which is defined as a “wild savage” and itself comes from the Spanish word cimarra, meaning “wild place.” In the Caribbean, “Maroon” has come to mean any of the descendants of those slaves who freed themselves by escape or guerrilla fighting and established isolated communities that survived in the mountains or forest country.

Some groups of the Seminole Indians are prime examples of Maroon communities in the United States. The Seminole are a Native American people originally from Florida, and they get their name from the Creek word simano-li, an adaptation of the Spanish word cimarrón. The Seminole tribe was formed in the eighteenth century of many different elements, including Lower Creeks from Georgia, Mikasuji-speaking Muskogees, and escaped African American slaves from South Carolina and Georgia, who banded together in the Florida Everglades. During the removal, some three thousand Seminoles were moved to Oklahoma and established a second, western branch of the tribe. The Seminoles of Oklahoma are divided into fourteen bands, including two “Freedman Bands,” also known as the Black Seminoles, since they are descended from escaped slaves.

In the mid-1990s, the western group was the subject of one of the Smithsonian Institution’s Folklife Festivals, and representatives of the Oklahoma Seminoles brought their food with them to the Mall in Washington, D.C. The food was an enduring witness to the conjoining of African and Native American culinary aesthetics. On the tables around the Mall were dishes like tetta poon, a sweet potato pone prepared with grated sweet potatoes, brown sugar, allspice, and the addition of the North African/Hispanic flavoring cumin. The word pone comes from the Algonquian apan. There was sufkee, a hominy dish in which the kernels are soaked overnight, then boiled and crushed in a mortar (or on the Mexican metate) and served hot, topped with cinnamon and sugar. There was also tolie, a variation of the cornmeal gruel that is universally known. It’s called cococoo in Barbados, amala in Nigeria, and polenta in Italy. There was also a dish of pinto beans, cooked long, low, and slow with salt pork, that would certainly have been a mainstay in many an African American household in centuries past and is still right at home on the table today.

Maroon foods like tetta poon, sufkee, tolie, and even the pinto beans combine the tastes of Africans and Native Americans. They make good use of the techniques of cooking on live fire that both Africans and Indian peoples shared: grilling, roasting, boiling, baking in the ashes. They also share methods of seasoning, such as the use of smoked meats and fish as ingredients in stews for added flavor. These techniques and methods point to parallel culinary threads that still unite the two groups over time and across history. At the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall, the complicit smile survived, and its story of connection and respect is a tale that continues to be told on the plate.

CHAPTER 4

THE TIGHTENING VICE

Indenture to Enslavement and the African Hand in the Food of Colonial America

Lower Manhattan, New York—

Dusk is my favorite time to wander in downtown New York. On late fall days, I love the way that the dying light softens the bustle of traffic and mutes the twenty-first century into something quieter and more evocative of earlier times. Peeking up at windows through myopic eyes, I imagine lamps being lit and dinner being spread on finely polished mahogany tables, and I wonder who lived in these houses in the eighteenth century and who served them. On these strolls, I am invariably struck by how young a country America is. In Europe, the eighteenth century barely gets a nod next to buildings that hark back to the Middle Ages, aqueducts that go