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By Root 450 0

with a number and the slave’s profession and signaled the legality of his or her presence and served as a license to sell goods and services. By 1806, the annual badge fee for sellers of fruits, cakes, and other items was a whopping fifteen dollars, higher than the cost of a badge for fishermen, washerwomen, and even porters. The higher fee was designed to strictly regulate fruit vendors, as they had more freedom of movement and could carry money. (The fee was reduced to five dollars in 1813.) Owners had to register their slaves, and the city kept track of the master’s name, address, and the number of slaves hired out, as well as each slave’s age and job.

Charleston’s vending system was not unique. In New Orleans and other port cities, slaves were hired out by their masters to work in building trades, as cooks and seamstresses, and as vegetable sellers. In July 1846, the New Orleans Daily Picayune mentioned “Green Sass Men” who traveled through the neighborhoods selling small quantities of figs, melons, and other produce from used champagne baskets balanced on top of their heads. They were older slaves who had been sent into the city by their masters to sell surplus produce from outlying farms. This peddling was strictly regulated. In an 1822 ruling, the Conseil de Ville (Town Council) required that peddlers have licenses from the mayor in order to sell merchandize on public squares or streets. Slaves could not be given licenses, but free people of color could purchase them and specify a slave to do the actual selling. The record books are filled with licenses for vendors and journeymen butchers, including the name of the license holder and that of the slave who actually did the work, as well as the street for which the license was granted. Peddlers of bread, vegetables, milk products, and fodder were, however, exempted from the provisions of the law.

Further regulations in 1831 continued the ban on slaves’ selling items without the written permission of their owners specifying the articles to be sold. Anyone caught disobeying the law was subject to “twenty stripes for the first offense and forty stripes for the second, or any subsequent offence.” Etienne de Boré, a large sugar planter whose plantation was in the area that’s now Audubon Park, purchased licenses for his slaves, and in return made thousands of extra dollars. (One year, de Boré made more than six thousand dollars from his vendors.) It is not recorded if the slaves received any part of this money for their work.

In New Orleans, street vendors became so typical of the city that they became archetypes: the praline seller, the cala vendor, and others. They were drawn by visiting artists and featured in newspaper articles of the day. Artist Léon Frémaux was one of the first to capture the images of the peddlers. His drawings and watercolors, made as early as the mid-1850s, depict those who would become representatives of the city. In one, a vendor sells vanilla ice cream from a freezer balanced on his head. Another depicts a cala (rice fritter) seller with her fritter batter and her bowl precariously perched atop her tignon (head tie). She carries a small brazier and a cloth-covered basket of the final product, which Frémaux opines are “coarse and greasy.”

The cala is a classic New Orleans dish. It was sold on the streets, but especially in front of St. Louis Cathedral, where those leaving Mass, in the days when Communion was only taken after fasting, could purchase a nibble to tide them over until they could have a more substantial meal. The cries of the cala vendors are recorded in the classic collection of Louisiana folk tales Gumbo Ya-Ya, by Lyle Saxon, Robert Tallant, and Edward Dryer, who also state that cala could be found in two versions: a rice version and a cowpea version. Both have their origins in Western Africa: the rice version in Liberia and the black-eyed pea version among the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria. Both versions point to the intriguing fact that the street foods sold by African American vendors often had culinary connections