High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris

Author:Jessica B. Harris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Europe, Social Science, Food, Food habits, Cooking, African American Studies, Regional & Ethnic, United States, General, Western, African American cooking, Ethnic Studies, America, African Americans, History
ISBN: 9781596913950
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2011-01-04T01:49:49+00:00

Pre-and post-E mancipation African Americans longed for a place where the past didn’t hang over their heads like live oaks dripping Spanish moss. They wanted out of the South, and the new lands of the West beckoned. The country was moving westward and the region loomed large in the national consciousness as a place where adventurers of all races could find a stake and be evaluated on their merit and their hard work, not on their family lineage or the color of their skin. This look westward occurred at a time of increasing racism. The early de cades of the nineteenth century were marked by the removal of Native peoples from the Southeast into the area of the country that would become known as “Indian Territory.” They were an era of anti-black violence that lasted up until the Civil War and was characterized by race riots and repression. The West was a place where the past was eradicated and new beginnings could be made. Texas would become the gateway to the West in the final de cades of the nineteenth century, but in fact, the migration from East and Southeast to West started earlier.

One unlikely starting point was the city of Philadelphia. In 1800, the City of Brotherly Love had the largest free black population in the country and was home to more than four thousand free blacks. In 1833, while Robert Bogle was catering to Philadelphia’s upper crust, he and his fellow free African Americans in the city were searching for a way out of the problems of continuing racism in the United States. The third annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Color proposed moving to western Africa, but after lengthy debate, it settled on immigration to Texas as a solution. Texas in 1833 remained a part of Mexico, a country with its own long history of enslavement of Africans. (Between 1521 and 1824, the date of the abolition of the foreign slave trade in Mexico, approximately two hundred thousand Africans were transported there.) Emancipation, though, had come early to Mexico, decreed in 1829 by mixed-blood president Vicente Guerrero. For free blacks at the Philadelphia convention, the neighboring country’s abolition of slavery must have seemed attractive indeed, and hundreds migrated to the northern area of what is now Texas. But their expectations and hopes were dashed in 1836, when Texas became an independent slaveholding republic, a profile it kept through 1845, when it became a pro-slavery part of the United States. It remained slaveholding right up until Emancipation and was one of the last states to formally announce the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1865.

Another group of African Americans also arrived in the West in the early 1830s. They, though, traveled with the Native Americans and were blacks who had melded with members of the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Muskogee-Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole) either as family members or as their slaves. They were a part of the forced marches to Indian Territory on the harrowing series of journeys known as the Trail of Tears.

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