All That She Carried

by Tiya Miles

  27. Jill Radsken, “Second Life for Slave Narrative,” Harvard Gazette, August 8, 2018.

  28. Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 35.

  29. “Dangerous”: Maurie D. McInnis, The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 253. David S. Shields, Southern Provisions: The Creation and Revival of a Southern Cuisine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 27. Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 4, 25.

  30. Jane Clark, narrative recorded by Julia C. Ferris, read at the banquet of the Cayuga County Historical Society, February 22, 1897. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (1995; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 59.

  31. Jane Clark, by Julia Ferris.

  32. Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 100. Philip Morgan’s study of enslaved people’s property ownership in the Lowcountry lists foodstuffs as the most common kinds of possessions claimed in the Southern Claims Commission post–Civil War testimony. Items included, in order of prevalence: hogs, corn, rice, and fowls; Philip D. Morgan, “The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Low Country,” Journal of Southern History 49, no. 3 (1983): 409. This dietary variety also seems to have been the case for coastal Virginia; see Patricia Samford, “The Archaeology of African-American Slavery and Material Culture,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53, no. 1 (1996): 95–96. Although the task system is often held up as a preferable labor arrangement for the enslaved (and it was, with regard to personal time management and property acquisition), Leslie Shwalm points out that task assignments were sometimes made without concern for ability, despite the special needs of pregnant and postpartum women, and, more nefariously, to put Black women on work details in places that made them sexually vulnerable to white men. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 41–44.

  33. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 14.

  34. King, Stolen Childhood, 67.

  35. Henry Brown, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 1, Abrams-Durant, 1936, pp. 120–21, loc.gov/​item/​mesn141/. Ed McCrorey, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 3, 1936, p. 147, loc.gov/​item/​mesn143/.

  36. Mamie Garvin Fields with Karen Fields, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (New York: Free Press, 1983), 59.

  37. Fields, Lemon Swamp, 59.

  38. Adrian Miller, Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 26. Miller does not provide a source for the “oversized shoes” rice-collection method. For an overview of his sources, which included historical documents, Federal Writers’ Project ex-slave interviews, historical cookbooks, soul food restaurant visits, and consultations with cooks, see p. 5.

  39. Drew Swanson describes a “fusion” diet on a coastal Georgian plantation, made up of “Native American, African, and European Influences.” Drew Swanson, Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 74. Adrian Miller describes soul food as “a cuisine 400 years in the making, melding African, European, and Native American influences,” which was claimed as “Black” in the 1960s as part of the cultural solidarity ethos inspired by the Black Power political movement. Miller, Soul Food, 45. Shields, Southern Provisions, 7, 30, 31. Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 17, 24, 112–13, 149, 180. Rayna Green, “Mother Corn and the Dixie Pig: Native Food in the Native South,” Southern Cultures 14, no. 4 (2008): 114–26, 117. Miller, Soul Food, 113, 150, 188, 259. Francis Lam, “Edna Lewis and the Black Roots of American Cooking,” The New York Times Magazine, October 28, 2015.

  40. Walter Johnson has asserted that the narratives of the formerly enslaved “contain more information about food than any other topic other than beatings and escapes.” Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 178.

  41. Kathleen M. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 48–49. Shields, Southern Provisions, 7–8.

  42. Drew Faust discusses this dialectic between labor and comfort on James Henry Hammond’s South Carolina cotton plantation. Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 75.

  43. Thomas Andrews, “Beasts of the Southern Wild: Slaveholders, Slaves, and Other Animals in Charles Ball’s Slavery in the United States,” in Rendering Nature: Animals, Bodies, Places, Politics, ed. Marguerite S. Shaffer and Phoebe S. K. Young (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 26, 24, 27.

  44. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange, 116, 127.

  45. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We, 34.

  46. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 179. Miller, Soul Food, 26–27.

  47. Joyner, Down by the Riverside, 102. Daughter of Robert F. W. Allston quoted on p. 101.

  48. Miller, Soul Food, 19, 22, 24. Jessie Sparrow, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 4, Raines-Young, 1936, pp. 138–39, 194, loc.gov/item/mesn144.

  49. Sarah Byrd, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 4, Georgia, Part 1, Adams-Furr, p. 2, image 174, loc.gov/​resource/​mesn041. Also quoted in Hilliard, Masters, Slaves and Exchange, 47.

  50. Eliza Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 187–88.

  51. As environmental historian Drew Swanson notes: “Food sheds light on the shaping power of local environments”; Swanson, Remaking Wormsloe, 75. Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens, 2, 63.

  52. Jim Henry, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 2, 1936, pp. 266–67, loc.gov/​item/​mesn142/. Anderson Bates, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 1, 1936, p. 42, loc.gov/​item/​mesn141/. Ed McCrorey, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 3, p. 147.

  53. Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience, 182.

  54. “Protein”: Wells, Pecan, xxiv. McWilliams, The Pecan, 7. “Designed”: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 14.

  55. Pecans grew wild around the Mississippi River and the Guadalupe River and its rivulets. Although wild pecans did not originate in the Southeast, the trees are prevalent now in the region where Ashley and Rose lived. McWilliams, The Pecan, 3. Wells, Pecan, 1, xiv, 9. Shields, “The Big Four Pecans & 3 Others of Note.”

  56. “Natural food”: Grant D. Hall, “Pecan Food Potential in Prehistoric North America,” Economic Botany 54, no. 1 (2000): 103–12, 110. Thomas R. Hester, Stephen L. Black, D. Gentry Steele, Ben W. Olive, and Anne A. Fox, From the Gulf to the Rio Grande: Human Adaptation in Central, South, and Lower Pecos Texas, Karl Reinhard Papers/Publications 59 (1989), chapter 6, Digital Commons, University of Nebraska–Lincoln. This archaeological survey submitted to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers quotes from Thomas N. Campbell, The Payaya Indians of Southern Texas (1975) on Payaya encampments near streams where pecans grew.

  57. Bruce W. Wood, Jerry A. Payne, and Larry J. Grauke, “The Rise of the U.S. Pecan Industry,” HortScience 25, no. 6 (June 1990): 594, 721–23. McWilliams, The Pecan, 8,
10.

  58. Wells, Pecan, 16, 20.

  59. Wells, Pecan, 3, 4. McWilliams, The Pecan, 7. Hall, “Pecan Food Potential,” 106–7. Rosengarten, Book of Edible Nuts, 171. See also Art Slemering, “Palate-Pleasing Pecans Are a Versatile, Native American Food,” Kansas City Star, November 28, 1986, F1. “Native Americans Used Pecans Well,” Philadelphia Tribune, December 3, 1991, 2C. For a poetic discussion of Native place-names and national memory, see Savoy, Trace, 69–87.

  60. Hall, “Pecan Food Potential,” 107–8. McWilliams, The Pecan, 16–17.

  61. Rosengarten, Book of Edible Nuts, 189. Nelson, “A Paean to the Popular Pecan,” F1, F14.

  62. “Cushion”: King, Stolen Children, 70.

  63. As strangers coming into already deprived and stressed populations, enslaved children were not necessarily and automatically welcomed into new plantation communities. Integration and acceptance took time and was often preceded by long periods of loneliness. See, for instance, Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 88. Dylan C. Penningroth, “My People, My People: The Dynamics of Community in Southern Slavery,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 168. Edward E. Baptist, “ ‘Stol’ and Fetched Here’: Enslaved Migration, Ex-Slave Narratives, and Vernacular History,” in Baptist and Camp eds., New Studies, 250.

  64. Alice Walker, Foreword, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” by Zora Neale Hurston (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), ix. Ruth Gaskins, A Good Heart and a Light Hand: Ruth L. Gaskins’ Collection of Traditional Negro Recipes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), vii.

  65. Edna Lewis’s recipe includes this direction for making vanilla sugar: “Just bury a split vanilla bean in a cannister of granulated sugar. It needs to ripen at least 1 week before using.” Edna Lewis, In Pursuit of Flavor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 304.

  66. Recipes: Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Vibration Cooking, or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl (New York: Ballantine, 1970), 91, 94. National Council of Negro Women, The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro (1958; repr., Boston: Beacon, 2000), 119. Carolyn Quick Tillery, The African-American Heritage Cookbook: Traditional Recipes and Fond Remembrances from Alabama’s Renowned Tuskegee Institute (Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1997), 200–201. Ruth L. Gaskins, A Good Heart, 77. Lewis, In Pursuit of Flavor, 304.

  Chapter 7: The Bright Unspooling

  1. Based on his tracing of Rosa Clifton’s family, working backward, Mark Auslander speculates that Ashley’s name may have become Sarah Clifton (in Orangeburg County, S.C., in 1880) or Dosky/Dasky Clifton (in Columbia, S.C., in 1870 or 1880). Although this linkage between Ashley and these two named women is tentative, it further suggests that Ashley remained in central South Carolina. Using census records, Auslander found that the extended Black Clifton family was spread out across Barnwell County and Orangeburg County, about fifty miles away from the Martins’ Milberry Place Plantation. Mark Auslander, “Clifton Family and Ashley’s Sack,” Cultural Environments blog, December 30, 2016, culturalenvironments.blogspot.com/​2016/. Auslander, “Slavery’s Traces: In Search of Ashley’s Sack,” Southern Spaces blog, November 29, 2016, 12–13, southernspaces.org/​2016/​slaverys-traces-search-ashleys-sack. In 2017, Auslander announced a search for descendants through the Clifton family line in local Orangeburg County media; Dionne Gleaton, “Ashley’s Sack: ‘National Treasure’ of Slavery Era Has Local Ties,” Orangeburg, S.C., Times and Democrat, June 20, 2017.

  2. “Fragile”: Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 3.

  3. Richard Zuczek, State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 15–16. Richard Mark Gergel, “Wade Hampton and the Rise of One-Party Racial Orthodoxy in South Carolina,” in South Carolina in the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras, ed. Michael Brem Bonner and Fritz Hamer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016), 198.

  4. Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 17–18; Edgefield Appeal quoted in Zuczek, 18. Dan T. Carter, “Fateful Legacy: White Southerners and the Dilemma of Emancipation,” in Bonner and Hamer, eds., South Carolina in the Civil War, 142, 145, 149. Martin Abbott, “The Freedmen’s Bureau and Its Carolina Critics,” in Bonner and Hamer, eds., South Carolina in the Civil War, 153, 154.

  5. “Armed bands”: Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 12–13, 19, 30, 34, 55, 79, 138. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 342–43. Edward L. Ayers, The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017), 371–72. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 267–72.

  6. Fields, Lemon Swamp, 200.

  7. Fields, Lemon Swamp, 200–202.

  8. On her marriage license application, Ruth gives her mother’s name as “Rose.” She also gives her birth year as 1897. Census records indicate circa 1902 for her year of birth. Although 1897 and ca. 1902 are within the same range and could easily reflect minor mistakes in memory or recording, it might also be the case that Ruth purposefully aged herself by five years for the marriage application. Arthur Middleton and Ruth Jones Application of Marriage 387059, June 25, 1918, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Marriage License Bureau, Philadelphia. Through the “naming of offspring for beloved kin,” as Tera Hunter observed, African Americans in this period of tumult made clear “the significance of family.” Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 38.

  9. John Hope Franklin, Sidney Hillman Lectures, 1961, quoted in Kendra Taira Field, Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation After the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 2. Franklin dates this period, also referred to as the “nadir,” from the end of Reconstruction to 1923. Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York: Dial, 1954). Field, Growing Up, 176.

  10. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 111, 217, 232.

  11. City Directories, Columbia, S.C,. 1906, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1915, 1917, 1922, digital.tcl.sc.edu/​digital/​collection/​sccitydirec/​search. Ancestry.com. 1910 United States Federal Census, Lehi, Utah, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, 20060. Ancestry.com. 1900 United States Federal Census. Provo, Utah, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, 2004. I am grateful to genealogist Jesse Bustos-Nelson, who identified Rosa and Austin in the Columbia city directories. For a sense of the kind of work, often exploitative, that Blacks might do on university campuses in this period, see the Universities Studying Slavery Roundtable, Public Historian 42, no. 4 (2020).

  12. Auslander, “Slavery’s Traces,” 6. Arthur Middleton and Ruth Jones Application of Marriage 387059, June 25, 1918, indicates that both of Ruth Middleton’s parents were dead by 1918. After 1912, Austin Jones no longer appears in the Columbia city directories.

  13. Italics added for emphasis.

  14. Storytelling or personal narrative is often used today as a therapeutic tool in the treatment of trauma and emotional distress. Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, Emotions in History series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 201. The impact of storytelling on processes of healing is also suggested by the power of testimony in social repair work such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that followed the end of South African racial apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that stemmed from Canada’s reckoning with its abuse of First Nations (Indigenous) children in state-run residential schools. The synergis
tic relationship between telling and healing may stem from the “structural similarity between emotion and narrative”—that is, the parallelism between how we experience feelings and how we experience stories. Scholars of cognition explain that we respond with emotion when we experience a rise of feeling in reaction to change—the disruption of our expectations or momentary state of being. Similarly, the form of a narrative follows a set of reactions or events unwinding over time in response to a “break with normality.” Upon recognizing this shift (the “complication” of the regular flow of events), the protagonist of a narrative begins journeying toward a desired restoration of normalcy but instead finds herself changed, and her life changed, as a result of how the narrative has unfolded. Tilmann Habermas and Verena Diel, “The Emotional Impact of Loss Narratives: Event Severity and Narrative Perspectives,” Emotion 10, no. 3 (2010) 312–23. The momentum of narration mirrors the motion of emotion, then, which makes storytelling an effective means of examining and reorienting feelings. This effect operates in the processing of past traumatic happenings. Habermas and Diel found in two studies on the impact of oral stories of emotional loss on listeners that women tended to be more sympathetic and empathetic listeners to the emotional plight of storytellers. (Study 1 included 162 participants; study 2 included 216 participants.)

  15. Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 72.

  16. Tilmann Habermas and Nadine Berger found that the way people tell stories about emotional events changes over time. As the same event is retold by the speaker, and as the speaker moves toward greater distance and approaches closure, stories become more compressed—shorter, less descriptive—and at the same time more evaluative—distant and impersonal. In the middle of this process (after the first telling but before the story has been told multiple times), the story is narrated at greater length, as the teller struggles to interpret and integrate it. Tilmann Habermas and Nadine Berger, “Retelling Everyday Emotional Events: Condensation, Distancing, and Closure,” Cognition and Emotion 25, no. 2 (2011): 206–19.