High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [76]
Oklahoma was another favored destination, and by 1900, African Americans in the state owned 1.5 million acres of land, worth eleven million dollars. The state had more than two dozen all-black towns. Soon Allensworth, California; Blackdom, New Mexico; Dearfield, Colorado, and other towns like them were magnets to families leaving the South. Many were also stopping points for those who wanted to journey farther west. They offered services to those who stopped in the vicinity and, most important, the company of like people.
The black towns, however, were not the only places where African Americans headed. Many settled in other small towns along the trails and served the cattlemen and cowboys. They lived in developing cities and in towns along the routes west, where many worked at livery stables and saloons and hotels, in jobs that they knew well from slavery. Still others clustered in cities, starting black neighborhoods in places like Denver, Colorado; Lincoln, Nebraska; Cheyenne, Wyoming; and St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri. They moved near like folk who shared similar history and similar tastes. In most neighborhoods, Southern foodways were maintained with discreet signs posted in black-owned shop windows advertising an arrival of possum or pecans or other foodstuffs from the South.
During the western migrations, many blacks used the domestic arts and particularly their culinary skills to create advancement for themselves and their families, especially women. Black women were valiant in the West; they worked singly or alongside men and ran restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouses. Western Black women were five times more likely to be married than their white counterparts and, according to the 1890 census, were also better educated and more likely than whites to attend school for six months or more. Most of the black pioneer women are nameless, but they are not always faceless. Photographs of the era show stalwart women dressed in their Sunday best greeting the uncertain future with broad smiles or sitting proudly in front of sod houses and log cabins in places like Deerfield, Colorado; Reno, Nevada; and Tucson, Arizona. In one image, a family is gathered on the banks of the Mississippi River, staring into the distance as though waiting deliverance. A child sleeps on a pallet, a youngster sucks her thumb, and on the ground surrounding them are cast-iron pots, a Dutch oven, and an ironstone pitcher—silent witnesses to the food and foodways that were journeying West with them.
The post-Emancipation culinary history of African Americans solidified the development of two different tendencies of African American food. One presented the basic African-influenced pork and corn fare of the newly emancipated. The other celebrated the more European-oriented offerings of the former free people of color and the mulatto elite and included dishes like those created by blacks to serve to elite whites. Together the styles signaled the development of a multiplicity of dishes that make up the presentday African American culinary lexicon and speak to the diversity of the African American experience in the United States. In the twentieth century northward migration would fix the culinary class divide and bring this all out into the open.
WRITING IT ALL DOWN
Cookbooks are so prevalent in today’s world that we take them for granted. We have only to reach up to our kitchen shelves or turn on the computer to have access to more recipes than we will ever be able to prepare. This, however, has not always been the case. The first American cookbook, American Cookery, was published in 1796 by Amelia Simmons, and the first Southern cookbook, The Virginia House-wife, by Mary Randolph, was published in 1824. These books, though, were only for the elite. Recipes were kept in family collections written down