High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [44]
In almost all cases, the enslaved supplemented their rations by hunting and trapping. The nocturnal habits of the opossum made it a prime target for the enslaved, who had to hunt after the work of their daylight hours. There was also fishing for catfish, porgies, mullet, and other denizens of the creeks and rivers to supplement the rations. Foraging in nearby woods allowed the enslaved to add wild greens like watercress to their diets, as well as such items as ramps, chives, and wild garlic. In more than a few cases, there was also pilfering and poaching from their master or the masters of others. Theft from masters’ fields was so prevalent that the enslaved on one Mississippi plantation even created a song about it.
Some folks say dat a nigger won’t steal,
I caught two in my own corn field,
one had a bushel,
one had a peck
an’ one had rosenears [roasting ears]
strung round his neck.
On some plantations that followed a more Caribbean model, the slaves were given provision grounds to raise their own crops, including vegetables like okra, chili peppers, and eggplant, which harked back to an African past. The slave gardeners were so successful that they occasionally sold produce back to their masters. At Monticello, Jefferson purchased items from his slaves and duly noted them down in his account books. Slave gardeners raised plants that they liked to eat and items they knew would sell, so it is telling to find on the listings of things grown in the provision grounds such crops as watermelon, cabbage, and greens—foods that even today remain totemic in the cooking of African Americans. They also raised cucumbers, white potatoes, and squash. Gardening was done in the little free time that the enslaved had after their daily work of running the plantation had been completed. This free time was usually on Sunday—a day of little work—or on weekdays after the sun went down. The oral history record suggests that animal fat and tallow were burned in old iron cooking pots to illuminate the gardens and enable the slaves to work after their day’s labor. Alternately, they worked by the light of the moon. The quest for food, and enough of it, was a daily obsession for many of the enslaved, if the numerous mentions of food and eating found in the slave narratives of the antebellum period are to be believed. Slave rations were never fixed by national law in the United States, as they were in the French territories, where, the Code Noir (Black Code) of 1685 legislated the amount of cassava meal, beef, or fish to be given to all adult slaves over eighteen years of age. The lack of such uniformity in the United States meant that amounts were often established by individuals who were more interested in controlling costs than providing nourishment. George Washington, deemed a benign if not beneficent master, fed his slaves adequately. However, during the 1790s, after the revolution, he reduced their rations and estimated that eleven pounds of corn, two pounds of fish, and a pound and a half of meat were sufficient weekly rations for each of the twenty-three slaves on one of his farms. Not a lot when compared with those rations remembered by John Thompson, who had been enslaved on a plantation in Maryland: “The provision for each slave, per week, was a peck of corn, two dozens of herrings, and about four pounds of meat.”
Even these amounts were lowered by the antebellum period on some plantations. James W. C. Pennington, enslaved to a wheat planter in Washington County, on Mary land’s western shore, gave a more detailed account of his rations in his 1849 narrative:
The slaves are generally fed upon salt pork, herrings, and Indian corn.
The manner of dealing it out to them is as follows—Each working man, on Monday morning goes to the cellar of the master