High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [50]
The sieved-okra soup of The Kentucky House wife, the delicate roux-less gumbo of The Carolina House wife, and the simple boiled okra of The Virginia House-wife all point to the ubiquity of okra dishes on the developing Southern table. Others calling for ingredients such as field peas, benne (sesame), greens, and eggplant hint at a cross-pollination of culinary cultures. These dishes and others like them most certainly made an appearance in other less-sophisticated guises in the quarters before gracing the masters’ tables. Seasonings changed in African hands as well, and Southerners developed a taste for more highly seasoned food, as indicated by the frequent use of “seed pepper” and cayenne. The Big House kitchens were slowly having Africa’s way with the tastebuds of the South in what historian Eugene Genovese called “the culinary despotism of the slave cabin over the Big House.” The Africanizing of the Southern palate outlasted the reign of Baron Tobacco, King Cotton, and Empress Sugar and defined the taste of the American South.
MIND YOUR MANNERS
By the early nineteenth century, most of those enslaved in the Southern states knew of Africa only from grandparents or distant relatives. Yet Africa remained. It remained in the shapes of the ceramic ware that was used on tables. It appeared in the foods that were on their plates and, more subtly but perhaps even more pervasively, it appeared in their ways of being in the world: in their manners.
The West African way of being in the world, in general compass, was as filled with dos and don’ts as elsewhere, but they were situated in a tradition of hospitality and of welcome that was mirrored in the U.S. South as nowhere else in the country. The traditions of hospitality go so far back that they were remarked on by explorers and conquerors, travelers, and even slave traders.
Theophilus Conneau, a slaveship captain, even comments on it in his 1853 A Slaver’s Log Book; or, 20 Years Residence in Africa. He arrived in a Sousou village in Senegambia and was accorded a welcome by the chief, who gave him lodging and sent a crier out to inform the town that there was a white visitor in the village.
In a short time the hut was visited by all the matrons or female heads of families, one bringing a small quantity of rice, another two or three roots of cassava, this one a few spoons of palm oil, the other a handful of peppers or a little more rice. The oldest lady made herself important by presenting me with a fine capon fowl … The contribution was not forced but voluntary.
Conneau, impressed by this abundant hospitality, muses, “I found that even when a poor Black stranger demanded hospitality everyone in the town shared in the charity.” He concludes with great irony, “Why then, civilize this people and teach them Christian selfishness!” Indeed, hospitality was and remains an especial virtue in some countries of western Africa, where it is a religious as well as a civic and a personal duty to take in and feed the traveler and the stranger. It’s called teranga in Senegal among the Wolof and diarama among Mandinka. These notions of hospitality and propriety crossed the ocean with the enslaved Africans as well.
The film Gone with the Wind has influenced a generation’s ideas about the antebellum period in the American South. Some of the history is skewed and more representative of the time when the movie was made than the time it was to have taken place. The scenarist got one thing right, though. In the early section of the film, showing Tara before the war, Scarlett is confronted by Mammy, who admonishes her by saying “You can tell a lady by the way she eats in front of folks like a bird!” The notion of eating at home before going to another’s house to eat is African in origin. The practice was still common among blacks in the