This week I wanted to dedicate more time to my menu project, so I did the same amount of reading but cut my writing down to shorter summaries. I used the extra time to work on gathering more family history information and writing my narratives.
In chapter twelve Chesapeake Gold, Twitty explores the agriculture and food history of his ancestors in the colonial Chesapeake region and the Tobacco Belt. He gives an explanation of the involvement needed to grow tobacco, a “thirteen month crop” that gained popularity among Americans due to it’s prevalence as a plantation crop in what is now Maryland and Virginia. Growing tobacco is described to be an involved and multi-stepped process, involving burning the ground, sowing minuscule seeds (10,oo to a teaspoon), covering the growing seedings, plucking and transplanting over and over, work done by thousands of enslaved people in the Chesapeake region.
Twitty also describes the nutritional access of the enslaved people working these plantations. How does this parallel to the germination and seed transfer of plants? How about the transfer of genetics horizontally vs vertically?
“Freedom comes in as many forms as resistance; each garden, animal, or fish trap, and hidey hole, represents a fight against a monotonous diet mean to instill a sense of inferiority and difference. No human could live on that kind of diet and survive, let alone pass on a culture to the next generation. Yet nearly every enslaved person in the Chesapeake was faced with the plebeian corn-based ration system in one form or another. Without their creative ingenuity and the flow of food and recipes from the Big House and the slave quarter, the world of Southern cuisine as we know it would not have existed. As they were forcibly moved across the Upper South into the northern parts of the Cotton Belt, food ways born in the Chesapeake went with them.” (pg.227)
In Twitty’s thirteenth chapter The Queen, I got to learn the history behind rice agriculture and its ties to slavery in the United States. The aforementioned queen is the rice crop, as Twitty describes; “If cotton was the king of the antebellum South, rice was her queen for the three centuries of her engagement with slavery.” (pg.241) Twitty explains the role of enslaved Africans in the rise of this crop, the nearly 9000 estimated enslaved people brought to South Carolina between 1720 and 1730 to accommodate the rise in this very intensive and dangerous crop venture.
“The landscape around here has gone deeper into interpretive education and further away from romance. Sugarcane, guinea hogs, water buffalo– yes, water buffalo, Sea Island cotton, indigo; it’s all here. So are the beautiful African-inspired sweet grass baskets that fanned the rice, and the standing mortar and pestles. I try my hand at it; I have a lot of broken rice but I fan it and separate out the chaff. I would have been a poor worker, but as Jeff says to me “The middling [broken pieces] would have been your dinner” (pg.241)
The two main dangers in the rice fields were illness from venom and illness from infection, the layer of water atop the soil of the field hiding the many animals lurking (including gators, snapping turtles, and venomous snakes), and venomous or not the parasitic, bacteria-filled water often lead to disease and death. Yellow fever, malaria other insect-derived illnesses, and skin conditions from standing in field water ran rampant amongst slave populations on rice plantations. The high-intensity work needed for this crop also meant that more enslaved people were being brought to the South, this increase in population created even closer quarters, making diseases easier to pass amongst each other. Twitty also highlights Colonel Joshua Ward, the richest slaveowner to ever live who’s plantation held 1130 enslaved people and produced 3.9 million pounds of rice per year. Ward lived in Georgetown County, the hotspot of the rice plantation industry, notably producing 44.6% of South Carolina’s rice crop and 33.3% of the nation’s rice crop in 1850.
Throughout this chapter, there were many references to African women’s role in rice plantations, agriculture, and cooking, and with the title being The Queen I knew that there must be some underlying message of femininity and feminism within the lessons on rice history. Duties relating to the rice crop were split by gender, with the men being responsible for clearing the fields, women being responsible for selecting seeds, planting, and weeding the fields, and everyone participating in harvesting. This schedule places women at the forefront of rice production, becoming responsible for the lifecycle renewal of rice varieties, the selection of seeds in part determining the results for the year as well as the constant defence of the plants. Women are also described as having a leadership role within men’s duties of preparing the fields, providing “constructive criticism”, speaking as those who hold the knowledge actually about growing the crop. It blows my mind that while men prepared the fields and harvest, women were responsible for the actual seeding, growing, and cultivation of the plants. And they harvested!
“Contemporary food media have celebrated this renaissance without ever acknowledging the 360-degree change from the roots of rice culture in the American Southeast. At its birth it was all black and depended on the skill and knowledge of black women — women like my sixth great-grandmother and anonymous Mende woman“ (pg.241)
Twitty also highlights the cooking element of rice plantation history, including the act of pounding rice, another of an enslaved woman’s responsibilities, and many of the dishes common in the South during the height of rice plantations, things like Jollof rice, and many variations on rice and beans; as Twitty says “Every culture seems to have their answer to rice and beans — a cheap and filling meal.” (pg.247)
Food for thought: a comparison between nature and nurture in food, cooking, and taste; and vertical vs horizontal gene transfer. Our nature being what we are born with, what is unchangeable about ourselves, is comparable to our verticle gene transfer, the genetic material passed down to us from our biological parents. Nurture being the traits and characteristics we have developed through interaction and experience, being comparable with horizontal gene transfer, a method of gene transfer outside of reproduction (often through the exchange of bacteria) between two living organisms. Horizontal gene transfer is a topic in agriculture due to its ramifications in GMO crops, notably the risk of a gene in Monsanto Groups GMO corn known to prevent its non-GMO counterparts’ seeds from reproducing.
Personal Menu Project
Inspired by Twitty who spends a lot of his book tracing ancestral bloodlines, I spent several hours this week talking to my mom about her side of the family. This was the most in-depth talk we’ve ever had about family history, and I decided to put it together into a family tree. After all of this, I still haven’t finished adding my mother’s cousins, their partners, and children, and I haven’t even started my father’s side of the family. There is also a section of my mother’s cousin’s children (I don’t know what to refer to them as) that the software I am using condensed for space, I am trying to find a way to either link it or upload it with all the sections. This probably took six or seven hours (I also collected and recorded maiden names and birthdays that do not appear in the screenshot) and I am planning on finishing it by the end of the quarter. My Grandma Heather has studied family ancestry, so I’m hoping to speak with her as soon as possible to find out more.
I also spent more time than usual on my writing this week, I’m planning on making that the norm as I get to the end of the quarter. I definitely want to keep this project going so I’m trying not to pressure myself to be perfect in my writing, I’d rather work on getting more writing on the page.