High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [59]
As early as the late eighteenth century, “Humanitas,” a social commentator in the New York press, complained of the nuisance created by noisy street vendors, or hucksterers. He grumbled that the oyster stands and numerous tables of eatables made walking down the streets all but impossible. Indeed, in certain areas of the city, from early morning until late at night, cries such as “He-e-e-e-e-e-ere’s your fine Rocka-a-way clams” and “H-a-u-r-t Ca-irrne” [hot corn] were common and created a distinctively African American soundscape.
Throughout the country, newspaper articles criticized the auditory nuisance of the black vendors. Nowhere was this criticism livelier than in Charleston, South Carolina, where street vendors had been a fixture in neighborhoods since the city’s inception. African American vendors approached their task with a cacophonous zeal and were often argumentative, insubordinate, and rude. On March 26, 1823, a letter to the editors of Charleston’s Post and Courier, signed by “A Warning Voice,” noted:
The public cries should be regulated. The negro should be taught to announce what he has to sell and to suppress his wit. A decency and humility of conduct should pervade all ranks of our colored population.
For centuries, Charlestonians’ victuals came to them from street vendors, who brought their wares in baskets that they carried on their heads or over their arms. Indeed, each vendor had a specific cry that extolled his or her wares, like the cries so evocatively captured in the twentieth century by George and Ira Gershwin in their folk opera Porgy and Bess at the beginning of act 3:
Oh dey’s so fresh an’ fine
An dey’s just off the vine
Strawberry, strawberry, strawberry.
Street cries were typical in most major cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Old etchings show various Parisian street vendors like the chocolate seller, the chestnut vendor, and the notions peddler, who had their distinct cries—as did Ireland’s Molly Malone, who sold her “cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!” Charleston’s street cries, like those in New York, offered an African twist on an Old World theme. In regions of the continent’s West Coast, market women have long had not only the power of the purse but have wielded considerable political power as well. In earlier times, they were the region’s economic foundation. It is certain that their verbally challenging manner of vending arrived in Charleston, where the majority of street vendors were of African descent. Freedmen, the newly emancipated, and the enslaved all brought with them a wit, a verve, and an aggression to marketing their wares that was all their own. By the end of the seventeenth century, a visitor commented on the city’s African appearance and the fact that blacks outnumbered whites:
How strange the aspect of this city! Every Street corner and door sill filled with blacks; blacks driving t[he] drays & carriages, blacks carrying burdens, blacks tending children & vending articles on t[he] sidewalks, blacks doing all.
The cultivation of the Lowcountry’s major agricultural products—rice, indigo, and cotton—was based on a task system, allowing the enslaved to use the time after their tasks were accomplished as they wished. Many of the enslaved raised vegetables on small plots of land to supplement their rations and to trade with their masters for privileges and even cash. By 1800, the Charleston city council had ordinances on the books regulating the age of slave vendors (they couldn’t be under thirty years of age) and the goods sold (“milk, grain, fruit, victuals, or provision of any kind”). Although slaves worked out of their master’s home in urban areas throughout the South, in Charleston, slaves who were hired out wore a metal badge at all times. The square piece of copper, brass, zinc, or tin was inscribed