High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [52]
On my periodic trips back to New Orleans, I became entranced by that city’s urban landscape and by the outbuildings found behind many of the large French Quarter homes. Many were kitchens, situated away from the main houses to protect it from fire. There were also garçonnières, where the young man of the house took up residence after reaching an age when he might be counted on to sow some wild oats. In one notable building in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, there is even a pigeonnier—a pigeon roost where birds were kept to provide squab for the table. A large number of the outbuildings that dot the skyline of the French Quarter, however, have a more somber history. They are slave quarters—buildings where the urban enslaved lived and worked in close proximity to their masters. It was their labor that underpinned the grand lifestyle of those who dwelled in the front parlors.
Like those of many Americans, my mental images of the physical landscape of slavery had been confined to rows of cabins on plantations that grew cotton or rice, tobacco or indigo. They did not include small bedrooms above hot kitchens in back of brick-fronted town houses in major urban areas. My continuing visits to New Orleans and subsequent trips to Charleston, Savannah, and other cities made me think about the phenomenon of urban enslavement both in the South and in the North. In New Orleans, I heard the tales of one harsh mistress who kept her slaves chained in the attic, where they were discovered only after a fire broke out, and climbed up numerous rickety wooden stairs to the small outbuilding rooms. I also listened to docents describe the kitchen work while gazing into the massive hearth in the outbuilding kitchen in Charleston, South Carolina’s Heywood-Washington House and saw the brass and tin badges that slaves had to wear when they went off to work for hire. The small yards and the outbuildings and the differently shaped metal badges are another side of the tale of enslavement in the country, one that is being rediscovered daily and told anew.
While rural plantations provided some distance between the master and the majority of the enslaved in the pursuit of their daily lives, there was no such cordon sanitaire in urban slavery. Master and slave lived proximate lives in towns and cities, which were beginning to grow into the urban landscape that we know in our historic towns today. It’s been more than two decades since I first saw the small rooms over the kitchen in the Hermann Grima House, and while the urban landscape remains the same, the world has changed. Today the slave quarters over the Grima House kitchen remain, but the upstairs rooms are open to the public and also interpreted by docents, along with the tale of the enslaved who manned the stoves, hauled the water, tended the gardens, fed wood into the oven and the potager, served the meals, and cleaned up afterward. Today, their story is told alongside that of their owners. Their story of urban enslavement is the other side of the black-white diptych of life in America’s growing urban areas. It adds another facet of pain to the story of enslavement in the U.S. North and South.
Even as the South and North grew increasingly divided over the institution of slavery, they shared a strange communality in the proximity of the lives of blacks and whites in urban areas. Most urban slaves were the city equivalent of house slaves on the rural plantation and were responsible not only for preparing the meals and serving them but also for all the house hold chores. Other urban slaves worked both within and outside the master’s home. Many of them had daily jobs to which they hurried each morning and from which they returned in the evening to finish other chores. They dwelled in the small cramped quarters above kitchens and in outbuildings in towns large and small. This phenomenon was not unique