High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [42]
It was an affirmation of something that she had seen in the white columns and the carefully restored rooms. Where others might see only the degradation and pain of enslavement, she also saw triumph, transcendence, and art. No doubt she saw the pain. After all, she was a woman who had known her grandfather, who had been a house slave in Virginia and whose mother was sold South when he was two years old. No one I knew had a more intimate connection to enslavement than she did. My mother, who, like me, carried his blood in her veins, looked through the pain and the misery and the suffering and saw talent and artistry and ability and industry and amazing grace. Certainly she saw the enslaved—her grandfather, field hands, house servants, Big House cooks, and others—as victims of a horrific system, but she also saw them standing tall and proud in the dignity of their work.
No myth is more pervasive in the history of the United States than the myth of the plantation South—one that is celebrated by some and decried by others. In present-day consciousness our mental images hover somewhere between the happy tractable darkies of Gone with the Wind and the more embittered brethren of Roots. In the decades since the publication of Roots opened the floodgates of interest and historical exploration, the discoveries of new information and new ways at looking at chattel slavery in the United States seem to multiply daily.
Race-based chattel slavery is a keloid on the face of the United States, a thick scar that is our national birthmark. But like those that are tribal markings and symbols of rank on the African continent, America’s scar has deep meaning and signals a past that must be carefully examined. It must be looked at in all its horror and degradation, complicity and confusion, for it tells us where and what we have come from. What my mother showed me as she sat in a chair on the veranda of Houmas House is that it must also be examined in light of the creativity and talent and grace expressed by the enslaved under situations that ranged from the unpleasant to the unspeakable. The American ways with music, dance, gesture, language, and, yes, food all bear witness to that inheritance.
Slavery’s duration in the North did not equal its longevity in the South. During the colonial period, blacks made up 61 percent of the population of South Carolina and 31 percent of that of Georgia. But at the time of the American Revolution, fewer than 10 percent of the total population of enslaved in the United States lived in the North. Their numbers, however, continued to grow in the South. In 1680, slaves made up a tenth of the Southern population; by 1790, they made up a third of the population. Following the American Revolution, the slave population exploded in the South, and between 1790 and 1810 the population of enslaved almost doubled. By the late seventeenth century, however, attitudes were changing in the North. Slave labor, which had been largely involved in agriculture in the North, was being eliminated as inefficient in the rapidly industrializing area.
Vermont outlawed slavery in 1777. Pennsylvania banned it in 1780, and it was outlawed in Massachusetts in 1783. Gradual emancipation began in Rhode Island, a former leader in the slave trade, in 1784. New York state began to abolish slavery in 1799, although the pro cess did not end until July 4, 1827. New Hampshire became the last of the Northern states to end enslavement, in 1857. The Southern states were left with the “peculiar institution”—an economic system that increasingly put them at odds with the world and with their former slaveholding countrymen in the North. The slave system, though, continued to grow and prosper in the South.
Most Americans today base their ideas of the antebellum South on images created in popular culture that have little to do with the realities of history. Despite a national tendency to generalize slave-holding into