African American Culture and Food

I recently read An African American Cookbook: Exploring Black History and Culture Through Traditional Foods and found it to be a fascinating and informative read. This cookbook not only provides recipes for delicious traditional African American dishes, but also delves into the rich history and cultural significance behind these foods.

 

COLLARD GREENS

COLLARD GREENS WITH HAM HOCKS

CABBAGE AND SMOKED NECKBONES

BOILED STRING BEANS WITH HAM

So, I was reading about the origins of the Underground Railroad, and I learned that it may have started right here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, around 1804. The story goes that a man named Col. Thomas Boude from Columbia Boro bought the services of a young indentured servant named Stephen Smith from a family in what's now Harrisburg. Stephen's mother missed him so much that she went to Columbia to be with him, and the locals there supported her, which apparently marked the beginning of the Underground Railroad in this area.

One thing that really stood out to me was the crucial role that free African Americans played in helping and protecting freedom seekers who came through Columbia. There were people like Thomas Bessick, who was originally from Maryland but lived in Columbia, and he would meet freedom seekers and guide them to trains that would take them to Philadelphia and to William Still, a famous Underground Railroad agent. Another guy, Robert Loney, would ferry freedom seekers across the Susquehanna River to safety in Columbia.

I also learned that Columbia had a pretty significant Black population between 1830 and 1860, around 1,000 people, which provided cover for freedom seekers. Many of them lived in a neighborhood called Tow Hill, and there was this incredible incident that happened there before 1850. A freedom seeker had been captured and was being taken to Lancaster, but a group of brave women from Tow Hill, led by Julia Miller and Mary Jane Turner, ambushed the party on the road and freed the freedom seeker, who was then able to continue on to Canada.

FETTUCINE AND MIXED FRESH VEGETABLES

PASTA PRIMAVERA

 

I often wonder if the move to monolingualize this country is a push for the homogeneity of our foods as well. Once we read American will we cease to recognize ourselves, our delicacies and midnight treats?

There are moments in our past when I have to wonder how did we celebrate, why, with whom? Not Christmas or Easter or Caledonia’s birthday so much as the first night north of the Mason-Dixon line before Sherman’s March, or dry pants and shoes at a clean table in the Rio Grande Valley, having outwitted the border patrol at La Frontera. When we are illicit, what can we keep down, what do we offer the spirits, the trickster, el coyote, who led us from bondage to a liberty so tenuous we sometimes hide for years our right to be?

Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, was reluctant to celebrate the Fourth of July, so we can assume that his famous Fifth of July speech was not followed by racks of barbecued ribs and potato salad. Actually, long before Douglass’s disillusion with Independence Day, African-Americans in Philadelphia, the Cradle of Liberty, were wrestling with authorities over who was free to do what. Why would they want to celebrate the American Declaration of Liberation while the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed the kidnapping of free slaves back to slave states on the word of any white man, was in effect? In Gary B. Nash’s Forging Freedom we learn:

While white abolitionists were withdrawing to the shadows free blacks in Philadelphia continued their political campaign to abolish slavery at both state and national levels, to revoke The Fugitive Slave Act, and to obtain legislation curbing the kidnapping of free blacks . . . Beginning in 1808, when Congress finally prohibited the slave trade, Absalom Jones and other black preachers began delivering annual thanksgiving sermons on New Year’s Day, the date of the prohibition of trade and also the date of Haitian independence in 1804. The appropriation of New Year’s Day as the black Fourth of July seems to have started simultaneously in Jones’ African Episcopal Church and in New York’s African Zion Church.

And so, black-eyed peas and rice or “Hoppin’ John,” even collard greens and pig’s feet, are not so much arbitrary predilections of the “nigra” as they are symbolic defiance; we shall celebrate ourselves on a day of our choosing in honor of those events and souls who are an honor to us. Yes, we eat potato salad on Independence Day, but a shortage of potatoes up and down Brooklyn’s Nostrand Avenue in July will not create the serious consternation and sadness I saw/ experienced one New Year’s Eve, when there weren’t no chitlins to be found.