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By Root 496 0

on by most observers. Food vendors and street stands were a large part of the urban landscape. Indeed, it seemed to Frank Byrd and Terry Roth, who documented the Harlem street vendors of the period, that the cook-shack, pushcart, and horsecart vendors gave Harlem streets a “sprightlier” air than those in the downtown precincts. Vendors sold pigs’ feet, fried chicken, and hot corn and other vegetables using syncopated rhythms and humorous rhymes. In this and in many other ways, they were direct descendents of the vegetable hawkers of Charleston and New Orleans and even of the black street-food sellers who had dotted the downtown New York streets in the colonial period and the early years of the nineteenth century.

Uptown, though, African Americans had a monopoly on street food and made their livings selling the foods they knew best: items that harked back to days of enslavement. Pig trotters were one part of the hog that lay unequivocally in the realm of African American food in the South. They were not elegant to eat and not meaty, but they offered an abundance of bones to be sucked of their skin, gristle, and small pieces of meat. They were also the trademark of one of the most successful Harlem food vendors. Harlem Renaissance writer James Weldon Johnson celebrated her entrepreneurial skills in an article in the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic:

“Pig Foot Mary” is a character in Harlem. Everybody knows “Mary” and her stand and has been tempted by the smell of her pigsfeet, fried chicken and hot corn, even if he is not a customer. “Mary,” whose real name is Mary Dean, bought the five-story apartment house at the corner of Seventh Avenue and One Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street at a price of $42,000.

Johnson’s story of Pig Foot Mary spoke to her entrepreneurial acumen and to her financial abilities. His is the abbreviated version. Lillian Harris Dean, Pig Foot Mary’s real name, arrived in Harlem in 1901, a migrant from the Mississippi Delta area and became a local legend. As the story goes, she began working as a domestic. When she’d earned five dollars, she spent three on a baby carriage and a wash-boiler and the rest on pigs’ feet. Then she set to work from the makeshift cart. Her hot pigs’ feet were an immediate success, and she remained at her stand, located at the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue (now Malcolm X Boulevard), for sixteen years. Her daily working uniform was a freshly starched gingham dress, once seemingly her only property, but soon she purchased a cook cart, married the owner of the adjacent newsstand, went into real estate, and eventually purchased not only the building mentioned by Johnson in his 1925 article but also others around Harlem. When she died in 1929, she had retired to California to live comfortably on the $375,000 that she had earned. Illiterate and initially alone, she had amassed a small fortune selling pigs’ feet, chitterlings, and other black Southern classics like fried chicken, yams, and roast corn.

Fried chicken had traditionally been associated with African Americans, and it generated racial stereotypes that persisted well into the twentieth century of chicken-loving African Americans and their “Gospel” bird. The reality is perhaps a bit more banal. Fried chicken is a dish that could be consumed hot or cold and while on the go, and it was no doubt practical for those whose apartments provided scant cooking facilities. The sweet potatoes, mistakenly called yams, of which Ellison spoke so eloquently were another remembrance of things Southern. Other food vendors sold roast corn. Roasted ears had traditionally been offered on roadsides on the African continent and throughout the Caribbean and had been a street-food standby in New York City almost from the city’s inception. Ellison’s fictitious yam vendor, Pig Foot Mary, and others like them carved out careers and in some cases accumulated wealth. Often their fortunes were made by selling dishes that amply demonstrated the cultural resilience of some iconic black foods. Inadvertently, they also aided the northward movement