Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [28]
What Tom Sawyer (and Twain) found a fun midnight lark might be, to a slave, a dangerous expedition requiring courage and skill, a way of supplementing inadequate rations of corn and low-quality meat. Maria Franklin, once a graduate student at Flowerdew, now professor at Texas-Austin, points out that in Virginia “blacks understood the advantage of familiarizing themselves with their untamed surroundings—landscapes that remained wooded and natural—for they facilitated secrecy and anonymity. Before long, enslaved Virginians acquired an in-depth knowledge of their environment, and the flora and fauna sustained by it.” That’s one reason that raccoon and possum, as relished by Twain as muskrat was by Jim Deetz, eventually gained a reputation among some whites as slave foods. Raccoons are night creatures, emerging at dusk from their dens—perfect prey for people who had to hunt and trap and fish for what they could in the few unwatched hours they had.
Maryland and South Carolina slave Charles Bell found that secretly trapping and hunting game in a nearby swamp was the best way of ensuring his family’s health. Bell worked hard to “procure supplies of such things as were not allowed me by my master,” first among which was meat. By walking several miles through the woods after dark, he managed to catch enough raccoons, opossums, and rabbits for two or three meals a week; he scorned men like the head of family who, having come in from the fields, “seldom thought of leaving his cabin again before morning.” In the spring, when the raccoons were thin and worthless, Bell turned to fishing, working to feed his loved ones however the season best permitted. It’s not surprising at all that so many plantation raccoon hunts, like that on the modest Quarles farm, were led by slaves: people whose days were not their own, for whom a successful nighttime hunt could mean more meat than they’d be rationed in a week.
Of course, eating raccoon wasn’t restricted to the South; in his 1839 A Diary in America, visiting Englishman Frederick Marryat noted the profusion of “rackoon” in the New York game market, and in 1867 De Voe occasionally saw it sold there “both alive and dead.” But the growing white perception of raccoon as slave food could be self-fulfilling; once the stereotype took hold, some whites who had enjoyed the meat might refuse to eat it. At Virginia’s Rich Neck Plantation, for instance, black households ate four times as much raccoon after 1765 as they had before, while the species vanished almost entirely from white tables. Whites may have abandoned the food because of its racial associations, with poor whites in particular coming to see eating raccoon as a kind of symbolic barrier between themselves and enslaved African Americans.
None of this is to say that slaves hunted raccoon only when forced to by hunger. Early European travelers to West Africa were often amazed at the variety of wild game eaten there; Francis Moore of the Royal West Africa Company wrote that “there is scarce anything [the people] do not eat: large snakes, guanas, monkeys, pelicans, bald-eagles, alligators, and sea-horses [hippos] are excellent food.” Once in America, the long experience of many Africans with hunting and eating a variety of game may have helped them to see the potential food value of raccoon and other wild species. Benin, for example, has an obvious raccoon analogue called the grasscutter (or greater cane rat), which is two feet long, prefers wet areas like riverbanks, will happily take to a new plantation cut into the forest, and is popular enough to eat to be raised in cages for sale. It’s sometimes served with yam porridge, or teligbo, paralleling the matching of dark, shredded meat with sweet potatoes that culinary historian John Martin Taylor says is common throughout