High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America Part 4

The railroads, as they grew, provisioned their pa.s.sengers and developed their own regional specialties. Long before "fresh" and "local" and "regional" became the bywords of a twenty-first-century culinary generation, the trains were creating menus that reflected their routes. Travelers could dine on ripe figs in California, Dunge-ness crab in Oregon, and fresh-caught trout in Idaho.

The railroads offered employment and another way for African Americans and their food to travel westward. By the end of the century, African Americans excelled in dining cars as cooks and as waiters, gaining secure jobs in difficult times and often receiving travel benefits for family members at reduced rates. In the later part of the nineteenth century, as train employees moved about the country and established themselves and their families at terminus spots like California's Oakland and Los Angeles and Was.h.i.+ngton's Seattle, they became the avant garde for the early-twentieth-century wave of black migration.

The success of Ford, like that of Mary Ellen Pleasant, was based on serving food to the white upper cla.s.ses. Those who worked in the Pullman cars also catered to the elite; they were praised for their taste and flair, but most of the menus served had little to do with the recipes of Africa or the plantation foods of the antebellum South and were inspired by the prevailing taste and ideas of grand dining in Europe. They and others like them lived and made their fortunes in the West's burgeoning cities, rode in railroad cars, and supped in fancy eateries.

Most blacks who journeyed westward were too impoverished to pay the rail fares. They went instead by wagon and cart and all too often simply on foot. The region also offered them jobs at small settlements that boasted a saloon or a boardinghouse, a general store, and perhaps a stagecoach post. This was the West of the homesteaders: the everyday, ordinary folk on whose backs the region was built. The black homesteaders were largely made up of former slaves and those seeking new land and opportunities, and their fragile existence on the plains was subject to Indian raids and outlaws, dust storms and droughts. Africa's tastes came to the West in the cast iron skillets and Dutch ovens of these black homesteaders who emigrated post-Emanc.i.p.ation. These new Westerners found themselves in small towns and enclaves and remote settlements where they depended on the protection of their neighbors and of the army in the form of the Buffalo Soldiers.

The legendary Ninth and Tenth Regiments of the United States Cavalry were founded by General Grant in 1866, the former in the Division of the Gulf and the latter in the Division of Missouri. White officers willing to command black troops were difficult to find, and many-like George Custer of Little Big Horn infamy-refused to lead the regiments. Other officers were less prejudiced and signed on, and so did black recruits in droves. The newly emanc.i.p.ated blacks arrived despite lower pay and rampant discrimination and racism. They were, for the most part, raw and untrained, but less than a year later the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries were on the trail west to begin their more-than-two-decade history of unbroken service. The Ninth served in Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Utah, and Montana. The Tenth, based at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, was responsible for Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona. The Buffalo Soldiers made up about 20 percent of the cavalry in the West and patrolled the Great Plains and in New Mexico and Arizona. Their duty in these outposts of the westward-moving country was to keep order, and that was a mighty task indeed, as they had to deal with Indian wars, border conflicts, and general lawlessness. The Native peoples counted them worthy adversaries and gave them the name Buffalo Soldiers for their tenacity and for the peltlike look of their curly hair.

Despite the soldiers' renown and exemplary record, discrimination from whites followed them constantly and even showed up in their company mess halls. The Buffalo Soldiers were the U.S. Army's stepchildren, and their commanders complained constantly about provisioning. Meals consisted of a monotonous pork diet and seldom deviated from the staples of coffee, bread, beans, mola.s.ses, corn-bread, and sweet potatoes. In the larders of the Buffalo Soldiers there were none of the staples common at other Western army posts. There was no canned pears, crackers, sugar, cheese, mola.s.ses, or sauerkraut. Post surgeon at Fort Concho, Texas, William Buchanan complained constantly to his superiors about the food, arguing that it was inferior to that offered at other posts: The bread was sour and the meat of poor quality. The canned peas provided were so old that they had deteriorated and the contents were poisoned by tin and solder. Buchanan was so incensed that he filed a written complaint with the post adjutant. The only rations to greet the soldiers returning to camp from the various battles and skirmishes of the Red River War were the same monotonous foods that might have fed an antebellum Alabama field hand: hog, hominy, and mola.s.ses. On some expeditions, the soldiers were gifted with good weather and could hunt and forage to supplement their substandard rations. Then, there might be venison or antelope ribs or wild turkey to break the routine, but generally, poor meals and poor horses and straw bed-sacks on bed irons in leaky barracks were the standard lot of the Buffalo Soldiers.

On occasions, though, when the commanders managed to obtain appropriate rations, there were festivities such as the one given by Commander Benjamin Grierson on Christmas 1876 for the entire garrison at Fort Concho. The regimental band played, and officers and men sat down to a meal of "sandwiches, turkey, buffalo tongue, olives, cheese, biscuits, sweet and sour pickles, candy, raisins, apples, and four kinds of cake-all washed down with gallons of coffee." The experience of the Buffalo Soldiers was another side of the tale of the movement west-one in which the racism of the country marched west, shadowing the footsteps of the migrants with their bundled quilts and flimsy carpetbags containing their meager belongings.

Kansas was a favored destination for those seeking to put down roots and establish themselves outside the South. The 1862 Homestead Act applied to other Western states and territories, but for blacks, Kansas was a known quant.i.ty; it had been a haven for fugitive slaves during the Civil War, and the name of the state continued to resonate in the minds and hearts of African Americans. The Homestead Act allowed any U.S. citizen regardless of race or gender who had never fought against the U.S. government to file an application and claim 160 acres of surveyed government land. The homesteader had to live on the land and develop it. After five years, the homesteader could file for his deed by submitting proof of residency and enhancements to a local land office. Following the Civil War, Union veterans could deduct their army time from the residency requirements. The local land office then forwarded the paperwork including a final certificate of eligibility to the General Land Office in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. There, claims deemed valid could also be acquired after living on it for six months, making minimal improvements, and paying the government $1.25 per acre.

By 1877, the year the last of the federal troops were withdrawn from the South, racism and repression had become so onerous for former slaves that a committee was formed by Civil Rights leaders with members from all sections of the South. The committee, at its own expense, sent investigators throughout the region to report on conditions. Their reports were devastating: lynchings, whippings by former masters, and a horrifying litany of abuses of the privileges newly earned. The committee appealed to Was.h.i.+ngton, but its entreaties went unheard. Land was requested in the West or an appropriation to s.h.i.+p people to Liberia, but this request remained unacknowledged. Finally, black delegates from fourteen states met again in Nashville under the aegis of black congressman John R. Lynch of Mississippi and resolved to support migration, declaring that "the colored people should emigrate to those States and Territories where they can enjoy all the rights which are guaranteed by the laws and Const.i.tution of the United States." This declaration a.s.sisted what became known as the Exodus of 1879. Former slaves left in droves, with many of the newly formed African American churches sponsoring migrating groups. It is estimated that between twenty thousand and forty thousand African American men, women, and children made their way westward to Kansas in ten years. Their numbers were such that they swamped the facilities that had been readied for them and provoked a government investigation into the handling of the move and subsequent failure of the reception services. But move they did and endure they did. They called themselves Exodusters, building on the biblical imagery of an exodus to freedom that had pervaded many of the slave songs.

The Exodusters moved into a West of possibility. All-black towns, such as Nicodemus, Kansas, and Langston, Oklahoma, were being founded by the blacks who earlier had migrated to the area. Nicode-mus's secretary, Reverend S. P. Roundtree, published a broadside on July 2, 1877, addressed "To the Colored Citizens of the United States." In it, he advised them, We, the Nicodemus Town Company of Graham County, Kan., are now in possession of our lands and the Town Site of Nico-demus, which is beautifully located on the N.W. quarter of Section 1, Town 8, Range 21, in Graham Co., Kansas, in the Great Solomon Valley, 240 miles west of Topeka, and we are proud to say it is the finest country we ever saw ... Now is your time to secure your home on Government Land in the Great Solomon Valley of Western Kansas.

The town was named for Nicodemus, a legendary slave who had arrived in the United States on a slave s.h.i.+p and purchased his own freedom. The living wasn't as easy as the optimistic Reverend Roundtree predicted; the tidal wave of Exodusters had caused a breakdown in services, and the newly arriving folks had to live in dugout caves for the first year and contend with drought and crop failure. But the town grew and prospered, until the Missouri-Pacific railroad pa.s.sed it by later in the century, after which it began to languish. Zachary Fletcher, one of the town's original residents and its postmaster, built its first hotel, the Saint Francis Hotel and Livery Stable. By 1880 there were two hotels, a newspaper, a bank, a drugstore, and three general stores. And by 1887, Nicodemus had an ice cream parlor as well as a baseball team-poignant proof that the African Americans leaving the South just wanted one thing: their own piece of the American dream. In other parts of Kansas, the tidal wave of Exodusters also overburdened the existing infrastructure. Famine threatened, and aid was sought from as far away as England. Nicodemus survives until this day, but just barely-with a population of about twenty souls in 2004 and a designation as a National Historical Site.

Oklahoma was another favored destination, and by 1900, African Americans in the state owned 1.5 million acres of land, worth eleven million dollars. The state had more than two dozen all-black towns. Soon Allensworth, California; Blackdom, New Mexico; Dearfield, Colorado, and other towns like them were magnets to families leaving the South. Many were also stopping points for those who wanted to journey farther west. They offered services to those who stopped in the vicinity and, most important, the company of like people.

The black towns, however, were not the only places where African Americans headed. Many settled in other small towns along the trails and served the cattlemen and cowboys. They lived in developing cities and in towns along the routes west, where many worked at livery stables and saloons and hotels, in jobs that they knew well from slavery. Still others cl.u.s.tered in cities, starting black neighborhoods in places like Denver, Colorado; Lincoln, Nebraska; Cheyenne, Wyoming; and St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri. They moved near like folk who shared similar history and similar tastes. In most neighborhoods, Southern foodways were maintained with discreet signs posted in black-owned shop windows advertising an arrival of possum or pecans or other foodstuffs from the South.

During the western migrations, many blacks used the domestic arts and particularly their culinary skills to create advancement for themselves and their families, especially women. Black women were valiant in the West; they worked singly or alongside men and ran restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouses. Western Black women were five times more likely to be married than their white counterparts and, according to the 1890 census, were also better educated and more likely than whites to attend school for six months or more. Most of the black pioneer women are nameless, but they are not always faceless. Photographs of the era show stalwart women dressed in their Sunday best greeting the uncertain future with broad smiles or sitting proudly in front of sod houses and log cabins in places like Deerfield, Colorado; Reno, Nevada; and Tucson, Arizona. In one image, a family is gathered on the banks of the Mississippi River, staring into the distance as though waiting deliverance. A child sleeps on a pallet, a youngster sucks her thumb, and on the ground surrounding them are cast-iron pots, a Dutch oven, and an ironstone pitcher-silent witnesses to the food and foodways that were journeying West with them.

The post-Emanc.i.p.ation culinary history of African Americans solidified the development of two different tendencies of African American food. One presented the basic African-influenced pork and corn fare of the newly emanc.i.p.ated. The other celebrated the more European-oriented offerings of the former free people of color and the mulatto elite and included dishes like those created by blacks to serve to elite whites. Together the styles signaled the development of a multiplicity of dishes that make up the presentday African American culinary lexicon and speak to the diversity of the African American experience in the United States. In the twentieth century northward migration would fix the culinary cla.s.s divide and bring this all out into the open.

WRITING IT ALL DOWN.

Cookbooks are so prevalent in today's world that we take them for granted. We have only to reach up to our kitchen shelves or turn on the computer to have access to more recipes than we will ever be able to prepare. This, however, has not always been the case. The first American cookbook, American Cookery American Cookery, was published in 1796 by Amelia Simmons, and the first Southern cookbook, The Virginia House-wife The Virginia House-wife, by Mary Randolph, was published in 1824. These books, though, were only for the elite. Recipes were kept in family collections written down by generations of cooks or transmitted orally. And for most of the enslaved cooks, whether in the slave cabin or the Big House, oral transmission prevailed up until Emanc.i.p.ation and beyond. In most slaveholding sections of the country, it was illegal for enslaved blacks to be taught to read and write, and up to Emanc.i.p.ation and for decades thereafter, only the African American elite were fully literate. It is therefore remarkable that the first African American cookbook was published in the same decade that saw Emanc.i.p.ation.

Abby Fisher's 1881 What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc. was long thought to be the first African American cookbook. Then, in 2000, Michigan antiquarian book dealer Jan Longone acquired a slim volume that changed the trajectory of the study of African American food history. Longone found what seems to be the sole surviving copy of a book by Malinda Russell, a free woman of color. The book, A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen, was published in 1866 in Paw Paw, Michigan.

Malinda Russell proclaims herself to be a free woman of color on the back cover of her cookbook, no doubt to set herself apart from the recently emanc.i.p.ated. However, the life that she details in her introduction lets readers know that while freedom was essential, in itself it was no guarantor of financial or physical comfort. Her life exemplified many of the hazards of westward migration. Born to a free woman who died while she was young, Russell tried to migrate to Liberia at the age of nineteen but was duped out of her savings and forced to make her way in the world. She turned to cooking to earn a living. She made her way through Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, working at various jobs. She worked as a nurse, a laundress, owner of a boardinghouse, a cook, a baker, and a caterer. She was married and widowed and became the mother of a disabled child. A tireless worker, she managed to acc.u.mulate another nest egg, but it too was stolen from her. Russell left the South, "flying a flag of truce out of the Southern borders, being attacked several times by the enemy," and made her way to Paw Paw, Michigan, where she again tried to recoup her funds. The cookbook that has become known as the first African American cookbook was, at its inception, one western migrant's innovative way of trying to earn some cash.

Russell, in her introduction, pays homage to the African American tradition of Southern cookery and declares that she learned her trade from "f.a.n.n.y Steward, a colored cook of Virginia." She equally states that she cooked "in the plan of the Virginia Housewife." Indeed, her 265 recipes mirror the brevity and style of Randolph's book and often are only a sentence in length. Not surprisingly, for one who had run a bakery, they include a preponderance of puddings and cakes. Although Russell spent considerable time in Virginia and claimed to have learned her culinary skills there, few recipes reflect the Southern palate. She offers fried oysters instead of fried chicken and charlotte russe and floating island instead of more traditionally Southern desserts. There is a sweet potato sliced pie and even one dish for okra, which she calls "ocher," but in general compa.s.s, her dishes reflect a cuisine more representative of the Middle American diet.

My grandmother would have said that Russell and Abby Fisher were as different as chalk and cheese. Fisher, the author of the work that had long been thought to be the first African American cookbook, was born into slavery around 1822. Little is known about Fisher other than that she married Alexander C. Fisher, from Mobile, Alabama, and that by 1880 they had migrated to San Francisco, where Mr. Fisher listed his occupation in the census as a pickle and preserve manufacturer. Abby Fisher's book was published the following year. In her one-paragraph "Preface and Apology" to the work, she indicates that she and her husband were "without the advantages of an education." In this she was like the millions of other enslaved who entered Emanc.i.p.ation without formal instruction. Some acquired the ability to read and write post-Emanc.i.p.ation, but thousands remained marginally literate at best.

The book's t.i.tle, What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, implies that people were interested in knowing just what Mrs. Fisher did know about old Southern cooking, and Fisher declares that she had been frequently asked by her lady friends and patrons-nine of whom are listed by name and address-to reveal some of her knowledge and experience of Southern cooking, pickles, and jelly making. She explains that she had more than thirty-five years' experience in the art of cooking "Soups, Gumbos, Terrapin Stews, Meat Stews, Baked and Roast Meats, Pastries, Pies, Biscuits, making Jellies, Pickles, Sauces, Ice-Creams, and Jams, preserving Fruits, etc." Her recipes are set out in careful detail "so that a child can understand it and learn the art of cooking." Most cookbooks of the era leave much unstated, a.s.suming knowledge on the part of the cooks, but Fisher is meticulous and exacting in her instructions. She suggests that cooks not only sift but also brown the flour for her fruitcake recipe and that they beat whites and yolks separately. She advises readers that two pounds of sweet potatoes will make two pies. Her oyster gumbo recipe is thickened with file (a sa.s.safras powder) which she calls gumbo and in true Creole fas.h.i.+on (as one who spent time in Mobile would know) she reminds her readers to "have dry boiled rice to go to the table with gumbo in a separate dish. Serve one tablespoon of rice to a plate of gumbo."

Like Russell, Fisher celebrated the culinary legacy of Southern black cooks. But while Russell briefly acknowledges it in her introduction as the genesis of her culinary training, Fisher presents it on the plate, with detailed recipes for many traditional Southern and African American favorites as stuffed ham, corn fritters, and watermelon-rind pickles. Fisher and Russell, however, are more than simply the authors of the first African American cookbooks. In the pages of their works, they preserve the culinary cultures that created them and had enabled them and so many like them to survive and prosper during the western migrations. In this, each moved forward the African American quest for acceptance in American society and the growing culinary diversity of African American life.

CHAPTER 8.

MOVIN' ON UP!

Resilience, Resistance, and Entrepreneurs Large and Small

Chicago, Illinois- I've always been more a Langston Hughes type than a Carl Sandburg person: one who is more at home in the urban enclaves of New York City than anywhere else. The hog butcher to the world ethic of the Second City was really not for me. Then, in the 1970s, when I was travel editor for Essence Essence magazine, I made my first trip to the Windy City. The South Side of Chicago was still the South Side in those days, and friends made sure that I visited a series of clubs and joints, including Flukey's, a local club of some fame. Entering it was like opening a door into the past: The walls were hung with red flocked wallpaper, a long mahogany bar lined one wall. It looked like nothing so much as a nineteenth-century brothel. It was a time of wide-brimmed hats and swaggering men wearing platform shoes who flashed, made deals, and strutted like brightly colored peac.o.c.ks. The barmaids called everyone "Baby" and "Sugar" and seemed to have been imported directly from some sweet home Down South. As the evening was softened more and more by bourbon and ginger ale, I began to realize that the crowd was made up of folks that shared common history, common roots. People circulated and exchanged news of the Mississippi hometowns that they shared. They asked about friends and families and pa.s.sed around the copies of the local paper that the most recent traveler had brought back from down home. Now gone, Flukey's was an atavism, a bar like many others that must have existed in the days of the Great Migration, when folks who came from the same hamlets and small towns of the South cl.u.s.tered together. Flukey's gave me a real feel for the geography that led folks straight from Mississippi to Chicago. For them the Mississippi provided a way out of the Delta, due north: Natchez, Vicksburg, Memphis, St. Louis, and on into Illinois and Chicago. magazine, I made my first trip to the Windy City. The South Side of Chicago was still the South Side in those days, and friends made sure that I visited a series of clubs and joints, including Flukey's, a local club of some fame. Entering it was like opening a door into the past: The walls were hung with red flocked wallpaper, a long mahogany bar lined one wall. It looked like nothing so much as a nineteenth-century brothel. It was a time of wide-brimmed hats and swaggering men wearing platform shoes who flashed, made deals, and strutted like brightly colored peac.o.c.ks. The barmaids called everyone "Baby" and "Sugar" and seemed to have been imported directly from some sweet home Down South. As the evening was softened more and more by bourbon and ginger ale, I began to realize that the crowd was made up of folks that shared common history, common roots. People circulated and exchanged news of the Mississippi hometowns that they shared. They asked about friends and families and pa.s.sed around the copies of the local paper that the most recent traveler had brought back from down home. Now gone, Flukey's was an atavism, a bar like many others that must have existed in the days of the Great Migration, when folks who came from the same hamlets and small towns of the South cl.u.s.tered together. Flukey's gave me a real feel for the geography that led folks straight from Mississippi to Chicago. For them the Mississippi provided a way out of the Delta, due north: Natchez, Vicksburg, Memphis, St. Louis, and on into Illinois and Chicago.

I've been back to Chicago many times since then. On one memorable occasion my friend Marvin Jones, who is a chef, took me on a Chicago barbecue crawl. We made our way into corners where I'd have never dared to venture alone. I can still recall waiting in a line of folks in a narrow corridor, smelling the mix of smoke and char and the sweet pungency of the cooking meat in the air. We'd managed to get in line before the small joint ran out of barbecue and closed for the night. We feasted: sucking on the bone tips of the ribs and scarfing down the chopped pork barbecue off paper plates. The taste of the 'cue was sweet-tart with the red sauce that I'd had in some of my favorite Memphis spots. Memphis was a stop on the way north to Chicago, and some of the people simply settled there; others stayed only long enough to make more money and continue the journey north to Chicago. Connections between the two cities and the Mississippi Delta still run deep.

Chicago had long been a beacon for blacks leaving the South. Its big-shoulder ethos appealed to those who had little more than the strength of their backs and the acuity of their wit. Founded by black trading-post owner Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, Chicago has always been a town of black entrepreneurs. None was more successful than John H. Johnson, who founded the Johnson Publis.h.i.+ng Company there in 1942. Johnson migrated from Arkansas, and his success was the larger-than-life version of the smaller stories of entrepreneurial success that played out in the first half of the twentieth century. The tale of how he began publis.h.i.+ng Negro Digest Negro Digest and then and then Ebony Ebony and founded his empire, which became the largest black-owned publis.h.i.+ng firm in the world, is the stuff of legend. No trip to Chicago for me is complete without a visit to the offices of Johnson Publis.h.i.+ng, where my friend Charlotte Lyons has been food editor of and founded his empire, which became the largest black-owned publis.h.i.+ng firm in the world, is the stuff of legend. No trip to Chicago for me is complete without a visit to the offices of Johnson Publis.h.i.+ng, where my friend Charlotte Lyons has been food editor of Ebony Ebony magazine for more than three decades, following in the steps of the first black food editor, Frieda DeKnight. magazine for more than three decades, following in the steps of the first black food editor, Frieda DeKnight.

When first built, the headquarters of Ebony Ebony were not only the pride of the Johnson family who had founded the publis.h.i.+ng giant but also a testimonial of accomplishment for African Americans all over the country. As recently as 2008, I was tickled to note some church ladies-hats firmly planted on heads and hands snuggly in gloves-had made Johnson Publis.h.i.+ng headquarters a stop on their Chicago tour and come just to visit the building and see where the magazine that had been so much a part of their lives was produced. The building is pure 1960s top of the line-exotic woods, art-hung corridors, executive offices with vast views of Grant Park across the street, its own archives and library. It reflects a pride in owners.h.i.+p that is part of the entrepreneurial feeling among African Americans, nowhere more so than in Chicago. were not only the pride of the Johnson family who had founded the publis.h.i.+ng giant but also a testimonial of accomplishment for African Americans all over the country. As recently as 2008, I was tickled to note some church ladies-hats firmly planted on heads and hands snuggly in gloves-had made Johnson Publis.h.i.+ng headquarters a stop on their Chicago tour and come just to visit the building and see where the magazine that had been so much a part of their lives was produced. The building is pure 1960s top of the line-exotic woods, art-hung corridors, executive offices with vast views of Grant Park across the street, its own archives and library. It reflects a pride in owners.h.i.+p that is part of the entrepreneurial feeling among African Americans, nowhere more so than in Chicago.

It is not without reason that the first black president of the United States was based in Chicago, for the city and the opportunity that it has traditionally offered African Americans embodies an ongoing African American quest for acceptance and equal success even in the twenty-first century. In the late years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, Chicago and other Northern cities must have glowed like beacons of possibility and opportunity for African Americans. Those, like John Johnson, who left the South to establish themselves in the North brought with them more than their dreams of a better life; they brought their willingness to work, their sense of family and community, and the resourcefulness and the resilience that would transform the food of their Southern homes into businesses large and small.

Escaping slaves had followed the drinking gourd, located the north star, and made their way north to freedom for centuries. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century and for much of the first half of the twentieth, their emanc.i.p.ated descendants followed the same routes as their ancestors. Tattered clothing and knapsacks filled with meager belongings were replaced by scratchy new store-bought finery and flimsy cardboard suitcases, but the essential baggage that came in the hearts and heads of both enslaved and free was hope. Hope didn't change. It remained a constant-the hope for a new place to live free, the hope for a place with jobs that would allow a person to support a family, the hope for a place in a country where they could be themselves and be at peace.

They headed north out of a South that was increasingly hostile. Reconstruction ended in 1877 and the protections that the government attempted to put into place to protect the newly freed African Americans ceased. The promise of Reconstruction, with its more equitable tax system and attempts to integrate blacks into the American fabric of life, was over. The end of Reconstruction led to the imposition of a series of Jim Crow laws in the South that required the segregation of whites and black on public transportation and, later, in schools, public places, and restaurants. Slavery was gradually transformed into sharecropping. The white supremacist organizations that had been formed at the end of the Civil War grew. The Ku Klux Klan, which originated with Confederate veterans at the end of the Civil War, was rekindled, and a second Klan was founded in 1915. Violence escalated. Between 1889 and 1932, 3,700 lynchings of blacks were recorded in the United States. For many in the South, the rights won by the Civil War disappeared slowly into bleak lives of hardscrabble subsistence farming. The South held little for them; it was time to leave.

In 1910, seven eighths of African Americans in the country lived in the South below the so-called Cotton Curtain. By i925, one tenth of the black population of the country had moved to the North. Between 1916 and 1918 alone, almost four hundred thousand African Americans-almost five hundred a day-stepped out onto dusty roads, pointed their faces toward the horizon, and headed north. They headed toward metropolises where there were jobs in the factories created by increasing industrialization. They arrived in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and New York and began to make their presence felt by creating neighborhoods and communities where they supported and sustained one another in their churches, their shops, their restaurants, and their gathering places.

Initially, Northern companies sent agents down to recruit labor, but as the trickle turned into a tidal wave, agents were no longer necessary. People did their own recruiting. Males who had journeyed northward to seek their fortunes found a toehold and sent for brothers and then families, and neighborhoods were established. The jobs were not the gold-paved streets of the blues or the easy money of the grapevine rumors, but segregated jobs that paid blacks less than whites and placed them in compet.i.tion with the new waves of European immigrants. There were jobs in manufacturing and industry, and for those with specialized skills, there was the ability to make money in areas offering services not performed by whites for blacks even in the North. Doctors, dentists, and undertakers also came north, formed the nuclei of the new communities, and prospered.

The black press grew and fueled the northward migrations with its own columns and connections. Papers like the New York Amsterdam News New York Amsterdam News, the Pittsburgh Courier Pittsburgh Courier, and the Chicago Defender Chicago Defender were so much a part of the migration that some Southern cities banned them, feeling that they were luring away the blacks who had formed the basis of the Southern unskilled job pool. Yet still they came, following routes as worn as those of the Underground Railroad. Those from the Mississippi Delta headed due north to Chicago. Folks from Georgia, Alabama, and Upper Mississippi headed to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit. Those from the Carolinas and Virginia made their way to Was.h.i.+ngton, Philadelphia, and New York. In the early years of migration, Chicago was a singular magnet. Between 1910 and 1920 Chicago's black population grew by 148 percent. The city's industrial expansion required strong backs and broad shoulders and people willing to get in and work, and Southern blacks responded. By the 1920s, however, the true mecca for many heading north from the sharecropping fields of the South was New York City, with its growing beacon for the black world: Harlem. were so much a part of the migration that some Southern cities banned them, feeling that they were luring away the blacks who had formed the basis of the Southern unskilled job pool. Yet still they came, following routes as worn as those of the Underground Railroad. Those from the Mississippi Delta headed due north to Chicago. Folks from Georgia, Alabama, and Upper Mississippi headed to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit. Those from the Carolinas and Virginia made their way to Was.h.i.+ngton, Philadelphia, and New York. In the early years of migration, Chicago was a singular magnet. Between 1910 and 1920 Chicago's black population grew by 148 percent. The city's industrial expansion required strong backs and broad shoulders and people willing to get in and work, and Southern blacks responded. By the 1920s, however, the true mecca for many heading north from the sharecropping fields of the South was New York City, with its growing beacon for the black world: Harlem.

The Harlem they arrived in had not always been black. In the federal days and well into the nineteenth century, blacks in New York City had lived downtown and then in the area now known as Greenwich Village. As the city grew, they moved north. By the late nineteenth century, the majority of the black population had moved uptown to the upper Twenties and lower Thirties, to an area called the "Tenderloin." Following that, folks moved as far north as the San Juan Hill neighborhood, near West Fifty-third Street, where they had the opportunity to live in bigger and better-built apartments. Finally, around the turn of the twentieth century, the move uptown began. Harlem, originally spelled "Haarlem," was a suburb for the Dutch and German bourgeoisie that had been overbuilt. Landlords had difficulty finding tenants for their new buildings. The move of blacks into the neighborhood began slowly at first, centered on one or two buildings east of Lenox Avenue; then gradually the line moved west. It met with resistance and with reprisals and created bitter battles. When the tipping point was reached, white flight resulted and left Harlem wide open to new black tenants.

In Harlem, as in other northern communities around the country, the newly arrived had to survive on what African American writer Ralph Ellison called "s.h.i.+t, grit, and mother wit." They found their way and soon established their bailiwicks, as-like many of the developing black neighborhoods around the country-Harlem divided itself between the sacred and the profane: The Sunday saints were firmly on one side of the divide, and the Sat.u.r.day-night sinners, with their bars and clubs, were equally firmly on the other.

Herlem soon offered a vibrant network of African American churches of myriad denominations that became the mainstay of the new communities, offering guidance in negotiating the complex byways to employment and serving as gathering places for the newly arrived by providing contact with others in like circ.u.mstances. Church functions became the social bedrock for those on the ecclesiastical side of the community divide. Births, weddings, funerals, and all of life's stages were accompanied by the resounding "Hallelujahs" and "Amens" of fellow brothers and sisters. Southern churches partnered with their Northern counterparts and pushed the move north as well by forming migration clubs-groups that monitored newspapers for jobs and cut through much of the red tape for those who were unskilled, often illiterate, and unable to negotiate the bureaucracy. Letters from the faithful in the North encouraged the journeys of those remaining in the South, and the umbilicus was maintained between Up North and the folks left back home.

The Sat.u.r.day-night sinners also created their own Northern world: one where the juke joints and Sat.u.r.day-night stomps of the South were transformed into blues clubs and jazz dens of the North. It was a time of progress but also a time of homesickness and uprootedness-when a pigfoot and a bottle of beer could bring relief from the travails of the Northern world that was not the promised nirvana. The Northern migrants found sustenance and like company in the small eateries that were being formed in newly nascent black neighborhoods. Often run by women who catered out of their rooming houses or apartments, these spots grew into small mom-and-pop restaurants known to those in the neighborhood for providing fried chicken and okra, hog maws and collard greens-in short, the comfort food the displaced Southerners craved.

Whatever side of the divide the migrants to New York occupied, all were subjected to higher rents than those living in other sections of the city. The Harlem apartments to which they were flocking had been hastily subdivided with flimsy walls and narrow hallways. Many were railroad flats with one room leading directly into the next and no privacy for those who lived there. Coldwater flats were the norm, and often the toilets were shared with others who lived down the dark hallways. Bathing facilities, if they existed beyond a galvanized tub, were in the kitchen, and often the bathtub might do double duty as a bed for an additional tenant to supplement the rent. Kitchens used coal stoves, with only the most modern landlords slowly changing over to piped-in gas in the 1920s and 1930s. Whatever refrigeration existed was provided by the ice man, who hauled blocks of ice up tenement steps for use in iceboxes, where it chilled food until it melted and had to be replaced again a few days later.

Blacks, though, were anxious to establish a foothold; they accepted the conditions and worked to make a good life amid the decay. Small entrepreneurs again turned to the skills they'd acquired doing domestic work and day labor in the South and used them to develop small businesses, which they grew into larger enterprises. In the creation of these small enterprises, they evidenced the same resourcefulness that had enabled generations to survive enslavement. Patsy Randolph used the castoffs of others to create pickles, pepper sauces, spices, and relishes, which she then sold. According to Frank Byrd, who cataloged some of Harlem's ways for the WPA: The biggest seller of this entire lot, incidentally, happens to be pickled watermelon rind. Her profits on this Southern delicacy amount to something well over ninety-five percent because the rinds cost her absolutely nothing. She has obtained the permission of store owners who sell individual five-and ten-cent slices at their street stands to collect all the rinds she wants from their baskets. At the height of the summer season, she takes these rinds home, prepares and packs them in fruit jars, and sells them to a highly appreciative buying public that has long since been accustomed to this fine "downhome" dish that adds a tasty flavor to meats, especially roast pork or the more widely favored pork chops.

Others also improvised and took to the streets as vendors selling Southern favorites like the individual described by author Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man Invisible Man. Although his book is a work of fiction, Ellison, like Byrd, had conducted interviews for the WPA with Harlem denizens of the 1920s and 1930s and based the character on reality. Echoing the thoughts of more than one Harlem migrant, he wrote: Then far down at the corner I saw an old man warming his hands against the side of an odd-looking wagon, from which a stove pipe reeled off a thin spiral of smoke that drifted the odor of baking yams slowly to me, bringing a stab of swift nostalgia. I stopped as though struck by a shot, deeply inhaling, remembering, my mind surging back, back. At home we'd bake them in the hot coals of the fireplace, had carried them cold to school for lunch; munched them secretly, squeezing the sweet pulp from the soft peel as we hid from the teacher behind the largest book, the World's Geography World's Geography. Yes, and we'd loved them candied, or baked in a cobbler, deep-fat fried in a pocket of dough, or roasted with pork and glazed with the well-browned fat; had chewed them raw-yams and years ago.

Ellison's evocation of the world-conjured up for the lonely northern migrant by the aroma of roasting sweet potatoes-was reenacted day in and day out on the streets of Harlem and other Northern metropolises where traditional Southern foods were offered to the newly arrived by a multiplicity of vendors selling from stalls and carts along the main thoroughfares of the black neighborhoods.

Life in crowded, less-than-welcoming apartments made Harlem residents take to the streets and provided the uptown neighborhood with a life and vibrancy that was commented 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 doc.u.mented 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: 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 ac.u.men and to her financial abilities. His is the abbreviated version. Lillian Harris Dean, Pig Foot Mary's real 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 ama.s.sed a small fortune selling pigs' feet, chitterlings, and other black Southern cla.s.sics like fried chicken, yams, and roast corn. 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 ama.s.sed a small fortune selling pigs' feet, chitterlings, and other black Southern cla.s.sics like fried chicken, yams, and roast corn.

Fried chicken had traditionally been a.s.sociated 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 ba.n.a.l. 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 fict.i.tious yam vendor, Pig Foot Mary, and others like them carved out careers and in some cases acc.u.mulated 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 of traditional African American food-ways from the South.

While in Chicago and Detroit African Americans often lived next door to others from the same Southern region or adjacent Southern states, in New York the lure of jobs had reached beyond the borders of the United States. Migrants to the Big Apple met up with black immigrants from other parts of the globe who had also answered Harlem's siren song. They came from English-speaking Jamaica, Montserrat, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago and from French-speaking Martinique and Guadeloupe, and Papiamento and Dutch-speaking Aruba and Curacao. They too followed the lure of available jobs, arrived in Harlem, and brought their foods to add to the mix. Alongside yam sellers and cobbled-together cook stands selling pigs' feet and fried chicken, Caribbean street vendors also hawked tropical fruits with their multilingual calls.

Yo tengo guineasYo tengo cocoasYo tengo pinas tambien They brought the rhythms of the islands to their cries as they roamed the streets selling the bananas, coconuts, and pineapples of their tropical climes. A 1928 article in the New York Times New York Times asked the question "What Tempts Harlem's Palate?" Author John Walker Harrington discovered that asked the question "What Tempts Harlem's Palate?" Author John Walker Harrington discovered that Harlem is the cosmopolis of colored culture, of gaiety, of art, and the capital of Negro cookery. Harlem's visitors come from the Southern United States, the West Indies, from South America and even from Africa. In what it eats, Harlem shows itself less a locality than an international rallying point. It is haven where food had the odd psychology, where viands solace the mind as well as feed the body.

Harlem markets were culinary melting pots of the foods of the African diaspora. The roots and tubers of the Caribbean, like tania, eddoes tania, eddoes, and ca.s.sava, as well as the true yam from Africa, turned up in market stalls next to the sweet potatoes that had claimed their name in the American South. Harrington also noted "crystal fines, as Harlem calls them. They are like a combination of thin-necked squashes and puffy cuc.u.mbers, and are covered with fibers of soft whitish filaments... Duly shorn and cut into strips, these strange looking vegetables give body to soups and stews-particularly to gumbo." He was speaking of a form of the vegetable known as chayote chayote in Mexico, in Mexico, chocho chocho in Jamaica, in Jamaica, christophene christophene in the French-speaking world, and mirliton in New Orleans and which made its way into the soups and stews of Harlem's culinary melting pot. in the French-speaking world, and mirliton in New Orleans and which made its way into the soups and stews of Harlem's culinary melting pot.

The Southern foods of black Americans were the mainstays for many in the marketplace. Harrington also observed, "What broccoli is to Park Avenue, the select collards are to the colony of Upper Manhattan." The leafy greens had primacy of place in the uptown markets. Pork, he noted, is the "leading article of flesh diet," adding that "every part of the hog finds its way into the Harlem kitchen" and remarking on its use as a seasoning piece of meat in many of the dishes described. Braver than many, he sampled chitterlings, the small intestine of the pig, and said that "their savory odor is their chief lure to those who like them." Unclear to Harrington, the pungent odor of cooking chitterlings made them anathema in many an African American household, and the scrupulous processing their preparation entailed meant that they were only eaten in homes or restaurants where cleanliness reigned. Chitterlings and dishes like hog maw (the stomach of a pig) and Pig Foot Mary's pigs' feet defined African American food preferences harking back to the rural South. They were culinary throwbacks to the meals improvised by the enslaved from the less n.o.ble parts of the pig, which were their dietary standbys. In the markets and kitchens of Harlem of the 1920s, they met up with parallel dishes from the Caribbean featuring less n.o.ble parts of the pig and similar African-inspired tastes.

Throughout the period, street markets flourished alongside vendors of cooked foods, with small entrepreneurs hawking their wares and providing curbside service for housewives and those who wished to avail themselves of a Pan-African bounty.

Harrington wrote: On Sat.u.r.day afternoons and nights the broad sidewalks of Lenox Avenue become groves and gardens and broad fields. Out of huge barrels loom red sugar cane, six or eight feet high, which later, cut in short lengths, is eaten as a stick candy by children. Plantains and bananas in all shades of green and yellow and dark red are ranged in inviting "hands." Pyramids of tanyans and eddoes loom: bushels of collards and stacks of gigantic yellow and reddish yams tempt the affluence of payday.

Ironically, this multicultural cornucopia was not the fare that most whites who journeyed to Harlem experienced. Harrington was writing in the heyday of whites "slumming" uptown in Harlem's clubs and nightspots, and his opening question-"What Tempts Harlem's Palate?"-reminded readers that the fare available in the markets was not to be found on the menus at the hot spots that made the Harlem of the era famous.

Blacks who arrived in Harlem in the 1920s arrived in a city in the throes of Prohibition. The January 16,1920, enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment slowly transformed uptown into a place of speakeasies and cabarets and created a vibrant nightlife that came to define the era. Connie's Inn, the Nest Club, Small's Paradise, and the legendary Cotton Club were among the most famous, but Harlem could boast something for virtually every taste, no matter how exotic. From 129th Street to 135th Street between Lenox Avenue and Eighth Avenue alone there were a dozen or so formal clubs and speakeasies offering elaborate floor shows with chorus girls and bands led by notables like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. There were also numerous smaller and often-illicit ones offering jazz, blues, transvest.i.te drag shows, and all manner of entertainment. The most famous, like the Cotton Club, were strictly segregated establishments. Other than the performers, kitchen workers, and staff, no blacks were allowed in the clubs, whose atmosphere was bathed in a faux exoticism designed to evoke plantation days, with scantily clad bandanna-wearing light-skinned women as dancers or tropical fantasies complete with palm trees and jungle decor. Club owners were white, and kitchen staffs black. The menus they cooked were varied and created to appeal to a variety of downtown tastes. The black dishes that they served were invariably as falsely exotic as their decors. Cultural commentator Harrington queried: If the Negro is to win New York with the fare he likes, as he has won the rest of the world to his jazz and his spirituals, what shall we be eating one of these days? Not the menu of his night clubs and cabarets. Harlem's exhibition restaurants for white folks have mammies who fry chicken southern style and bake beaten biscuits. But such viands are like Chinese chop suey-all for customers of other racial strains.

At the Cotton Club, the menu offered steak and lobster or shrimp c.o.c.ktails, a selection of Chinese food like moo goo gai pan moo goo gai pan, Mexican food, and a smattering of Southern black dishes like the "mammyfried" chicken decried by Harrington and barbecued spare ribs. Slumming "negropolitans," as upper-crust whites from downtown were known by tart-tongued black writer Zora Neale Hurston, dining in the famous clubs may have felt a frisson of delight and a kins.h.i.+p to black food as they sampled fried chicken and barbecued ribs alongside the lobster and the ersatz international foods purveyed by the white club owners. However, their ignorance of Harlem's true foods equaled their ignorance of Harlem's true life. The Harlem denizens they a.s.sumed to know had very different lives and daily diets more firmly rooted in the African American culinary culture of the Southern United States, with its emphasis on pork, chicken, and corn.

The Harlem residents relaxed from the drudgery of their jobs as laborers and domestics not at the notable local clubs, where Jim Crow policies meant that no blacks were allowed, but at rent parties. As with the entrepreneurial zeal that created yam sellers and street vendors, rent parties were born of resourcefulness and created by financial necessity. Given on Sat.u.r.day or Thursday nights, the traditional days off for maids and other domestics, the fetes were designed to augment slim incomes while providing cheap entertainment for those who would not have been allowed to cross the thresholds of the famous clubs even if they could afford to. Rent gouging of newly arrived blacks meant that rents in Harlem averaged fifteen to thirty dollars a month higher than those in other areas of Manhattan. An individual who couldn't "make the rent" on an apartment would hold such a s.h.i.+ndig, print up handbills, and set up shop. The handbills often featured rhyming couplets: You don't get nothing for being an angel child,So you might as well get real busy and real wild Or If you can't do the Charleston or the do the pigeon wing,You sure can shake that thing.

As the parties became more prevalent, hosts and hostesses often advertised the Southern culinary specialties that would be sold.

Ribbon Maws and Trotters a Specialty Fall in Line and Watch Your Step, For there'll be a lot of browns with plenty of pep at A Social Whist Party Given by Lucille & Minnie 149 West 117 Street, N.Y. GR. Floor, W, Sat.u.r.day Evening, Nov. 2nd 1929 Furniture was cleaned out, chairs borrowed from a local funeral parlor, and voila. The lights were turned down low, with a red or blue bulb added for atmosphere. A pickup band of out-of-work musicians was usually available, and a spread of Southern fare was set out. Items such as pigs' feet, Hoppin' John, ham hocks and cabbage, okra gumbo, sweet potato pone, and the tomato-infused rice that is called "mulatto rice" in Savannah might be served along with the ever-present fried chicken. Soon, someone was guaranteed to start singing, and a good time was had by all. A nominal fee was charged, and if the tenant was lucky, at evening's end there would be enough in the till to pay the rent for another month. Harlem Renaissance poet and writer Langston Hughes recalled: The Sat.u.r.day Night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any night club, in small apartments where G.o.d knows who lived-because the guests seldom did-but where the piano would often be augmented by a guitar, or an odd coronet, or somebody with a pair of drums walking in off the street. And where awful bootleg whiskey and good fried fish or steaming chitterlings were sold at very low prices. And the dancing and singing and impromptu entertaining went on until dawn came in at the windows.

The rent parties were another side of the entrepreneurial impulse. Some grew into regular events and even grew into mini clubs and clandestine temporary restaurants.

Harlem, like much of the African American world of the time, also had its cla.s.s divide. While the ma.s.s of people worked daily at small jobs and menial tasks as domestics and laborers, there were also those exceptional people who had growing power, prestige, and wealth. The black political views of how the African American community little more than fifty years from enslavement would grow and prosper were divided between the ideas of two men: W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton.

A seminal figure of the period, Du Bois was a Northerner who grew up in Ma.s.sachusetts. He was educated at Fisk University, one of the historically black inst.i.tutions of higher learning that had sprung up in the South post-Emanc.i.p.ation. Later, he became the first black man to be awarded a Harvard doctorate and also pursued graduate study in Germany. Du Bois argued that the "Talented Tenth," the educationally and socially advantaged 10 percent of the Community, would rise and "pull all that are worthy of saving up to their vantage ground" and held that a liberal arts education for that segment of the population was the key to African American success.

At the opposite cultural pole of the black world was Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton, the other great black statesman of the period. His work provided contrast to that of Du Bois, as did his life. Was.h.i.+ngton had been born enslaved in Hale's Ford, Virginia, and received his freedom as a result of the Civil War. The differences in their birth defined the differences in their philosophical positions. Was.h.i.+ngton felt that agricultural and technical education would give blacks the tools with which to seek jobs in the workforce and that economic acceptance would lead to eventual social acceptance. In this, Was.h.i.+ngton espoused the growth of inst.i.tutions such as Hampton Inst.i.tute (founded in 1868 as Hampton Normal and Agricultural Inst.i.tute) and Tuskegee Inst.i.tute (founded in 1881 as Tuskegee Normal and Technical Inst.i.tute) where students were taught trades. Was.h.i.+ngton was the president of Tuskegee Inst.i.tute, the home school of the mult.i.talented scientist George Was.h.i.+ngton Carver, whose research established myriad uses for several traditional African American foodstuffs, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes. Tuskegee did not offer the liberal arts curriculum espoused by Du Bois, but rather had courses of study leading to a bachelor of science degree in home economics, mechanical industries, physical education, agriculture, commercial dietetics, and education, as well as certificated courses in nurse training and special trade courses. As Was.h.i.+ngton put it, "we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life."

The debate between Du Bois and Was.h.i.+ngton defined the cla.s.s divisions between the citizens of all the new black neighborhoods springing up across the country. At the top of the social spectrum sat Du Bois's Talented Tenth: educated, cultured, adept in European mores, and often disdainful of the uneducated ma.s.ses who represented the other ninetieth percent of black society. They too entertained, but not at rent parties; they socialized at teas and debutante b.a.l.l.s, soirees, literary talks, luncheons, and c.o.c.ktail parties. Their foods, like their social style, emulated that of Europe, though they might enjoy fried chicken on occasion, as did Du Bois. They had no need of rent parties, and the pungent funk of boiling chitterlings or ribbon maws would never poison the air of their well-appointed abodes. Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West described the fare at one of the c.o.c.ktail parties of the elite: "c.o.c.ktails, little sausages on toothpicks, black and green olives, cheeses with crisp little crackers, two-inch sandwiches, went in continuous file around the room."

There were few who crossed the great cla.s.s divide. In Harlem, however, A'lelia Walker was neither patrician nor proletarian. In the community of artists and writers who created the Harlem Renaissance, she stood out. The daughter of Madame C. J. Walker, the first female black millionaire, who had made her fortune from hair products, A'lelia inherited her mother's sizable fortune and became the Harlem "hostess with the mostess." She entertained a Harlem high society that she virtually created, inviting blacks and whites, artists, gangsters, and businesspeople into her home. Her Harlem gatherings became legendary. She understood the culinary and cultural cla.s.s divisions and the insidiousness of Harlem slumming. At one gathering, she is alleged to have fed her white guests pigs' feet, chitterlings, and bathtub gin and her black ones caviar, pheasant, and champagne.

Dubbed the "Mahogany Millionairess," Walker gloried in her money and spent it lavishly. In a fit of entrepreneurial zeal, she had a floor of her Harlem brownstone designed as a club and a meeting place for artists and those who followed them. She named it the "Dark Tower," after the column in Opportunity Opp