High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [40]
None was better known than the slave-run market in Alexandria, Virginia. This informal market was held on Sunday, a day on which many slaves were given a measure of leisure time on some plantations. It took place very early in the morning and all commercial activity was over by nine A.M. Slaves stayed up all night and walked for hours to reach it to trade their goods. Like all markets, the slave-run markets were more than simple commercial gathering places; they were also places for meeting and for exchange of news and information. Slaves traded not only eggs and chickens but also snippets of information that aided their survival. They learned which master might be selling off slaves, which plantation had a runaway, and even when the Underground Railroad was passing through. There was also news about friends and family members on neighboring plantations and time to savor communion with other blacks, both enslaved and free, from the surrounding area and the city of Alexandria itself. Witnesses describe the scene of slaves sitting under shade trees with baskets of berries that had been foraged or with chickens or eggs. It must have seemed an African scene transported to the New World, an atavism of a now-forgotten homeland: men in their homespun trousers and women dressed in their Sunday best with their neatly braided hair tied up in fresh head ties.
The market provided not only a place for garnering a few coins to pay for additional food or a bit of tobacco or something else to alleviate the monotonous drudgery of enslavement; it was also a place where folks could smile and court and even listen to music if someone had brought along a fiddle. It was a spot where for a few brief moments, the yoke of enslavement was lifted, and blacks could be themselves among themselves.
CHAPTER 5
IN SORROW’S KITCHEN
Hog Meat, Hominy, and the Africanizing of the Palate of the South
River Road, Louisiana—
As you fly into New Orleans, you can occasionally see, depending on the approach, Louisiana’s River Road, surrounded by neat pie slices of acreage running from the Mississippi River inland. From the air, the slices make a lush green tapestry, with the dwellings raised like crochet knots. I’d been to the South many times before I came there with my mother for the first time. I’d seen the row of brick slave cabins that marched parallel to the mighty live oaks at Boone Hall outside Charleston and listened intently as docents at Drayton Hall verbally brought to life the look of the back of the house where slave and master lived out their lives in proximate and intertwined worlds. Middleton Place plantation had been another stop on my Southern journeys; there I’d explored the farmyard, watching the docents exhibit their skills with the intensity of one trying to recapture a lost thread. I knew that the hands that made the wrought iron work in Charleston and New Orleans had been black and recognized the high, small windows on ground-floor locations that signaled a slave depot. I once startled newly made friends in New Orleans by informing them of their home’s history as a slave-trading location. I’d investigated hearth cooking and run my hands over the walls of kitchens that had been manned by slave cooks and surreptitiously taken off my shoes to feel under my feet the dirt of the plantation yards that stretched beyond the Big House. I’d seen the slave cabin at Tullie Smith Farm at the Atlanta History Center and reproductions of others in museum exhibits around the South. I’d read much about the antebellum period and as a Northerner, born and raised, I had tried to understand the culture of enslavement and the people who created it and willed myself to form a mental link with my own ancestors who had been transformed by it. I could rattle off dates, facts, and anecdotes with fair facility. Nothing, however, brought home the depersonalizing realities of enslavement to me like my mother