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By Root 468 0

to the South but was as old as the country itself. Indeed, urban enslavement was a part of the cultural landscape of the South and North from the nation’s beginning. For those raised on the conventional discussion of African enslavement meted out by twentieth-century history books, the South bears the brunt of the blame for slavery. Increasingly in the twenty-first century, this is being revisited, and the North and its participation in the history of enslavement is coming into clearer focus.

From its inception, urban enslavement in the North was no different from its Southern counterpart. Despite curfews and strict laws governing their presence on the streets and in the marketplace, those enslaved in towns and cities began to make their presence felt in the business of food. They became workers in taverns and eateries and sold prepared foodstuffs, vegetables, and other goods on the streets, usually at the bidding of their masters. Indeed many foreign visitors commented on the number of people of African descent on the streets and on their raucous behavior. It seemed that they treated the thoroughfares as their own assembly areas and did not hesitate to be insubordinate and unruly. After emancipation in the North, many former slaves continued to run taverns, eateries, and other dining establishments. On the upper end of the culinary spectrum, they served whites, set trends, and created fortunes from their labor. In both the South and the North, on the more humble end, blacks both free and enslaved and their descendants continued a tradition of street vending which had its roots in the African continent and displayed an entrepreneurial spirit that even enslavement couldn’t tamp down. Food provided a path to independence for many blacks, especially in the port towns on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

In the early 1800s, most African Americans were emancipated in the North, and many got work in taverns and ale houses, finding more opportunity in those realms than in others. In the North, free people of color occupied a sizable spot in the food market, but the tale of African Americans’ finding fortune and fame in the kitchen began even earlier, before the nation was declared. In Providence, Rhode Island, Emmanuel “Manna” Bernoon, a free black, opened that city’s first oyster and ale house, in 1736, the year of his emancipation. He would later own a catering business and a tavern. The state also gives us the story of Charity “Duchess” Quamino, who was born on the African continent—the sonorities of her name indicate that she may have been from the area today called Ghana. Captured at age fifteen, she was brought to the United States in 1753 and became the property of John Channing of Newport, Rhode Island. There she was put to work in the kitchen, where she remained for more than four decades, cooking for not only Channing but his son as well. In her free time, she began to cook for others. She established a catering business and became known as the best pastry chef in the prosperous town; her frosted plum cakes were renowned. Throughout this time she remained a slave, working under the aegis of her owners. She received her freedom only in the later years of her life. Bernoon and Quamino are examples of the possibilities of culinary entrepreneurship evidenced by both enslaved and free.

By the early years of the nineteen century, the African American presence was diminishing in northern cities like New York, where the population of blacks dwindled from 10 percent in the 1800s and 1810s to 7 percent in the ‘20s and ‘30s and continued downward. As the cities grew, the proportion of blacks in the urban mix decreased: African Americans were being subsumed by the increasing wave of northern Europe an immigrants. Nevertheless, they continued to dominate the street commerce and still remained major players in the culinary industries of the republic.

Philadelphia was a pivotal city for the growth of African Americans in the food-service industry. Blacks in culinary service had long been the norm there. It was, after all, a city that