Receipts: Booker T. Washington’s “slave” food memories

By Fresh & Fried Hard

This article was originally published by Fresh & Fried Hard. You can subscribe to read more of their content on Substack.

There’s something insightful about first-person accounts, Washington allows us to speculate how his earliest food memories influenced his style of leadership.

I’ve always found Booker T. Washington to be an intriguing personality. One of my family lines is rooted in the Appalachian sub-region of SW Virginia and West Virginia like Washington’s. I lived in SE Ohio, where he married Olivia Davidson, his second wife. (Also, Tuskegee is located in a sub-region of Appalachia in Alabama, where I have kin.)

Some would say he was controversial and someone who practiced “respectability politics.” I can’t disagree with the latter part. He was most definitely a “pull up your pants” and “get off my lawn” and “God helps those that help themselves” kind of guy.

Tuskegee Institute was developed on his self-determination principles and he made certain that the students were fully invested in their own education at the institute. They literally made the bricks, constructed buildings, worked the land to grow the food they ate and sold… They carried their own weight. That was one of his chief selling points to white donors, who donated heavily to Tuskegee. It is safe to say Washington argued that it was best to labor at an institution made for Black folk than to labor at an institution that wouldn’t admit Black folk as students. He was all for acceptability and respectability. Yes, indeed.

I don’t want to diminish that there were extraordinary things going on at Tuskegee. Some of the world’s leading scholars in the sciences (George Washington Carver) and the arts and humanities either worked at Tuskegee or were alumni. There were also the entrepreneurs who graduated from Tuskegee; people who embodied Washington’s belief that Black people should own businesses.

In many ways, he used his own life as a blueprint to establish Tuskegee.

While researching his mother, Jane Ferguson, I was led back to his autobiography Up from Slavery, which is excerpted below. Born into slavery, Jane Ferguson worked as a cook on the plantation of James Burroughs. After emancipation, she worked as a cook for the Ruffner family in Malden, West Virginia until her untimely death in 1874.

While Jane Ferguson’s claim-to-fame is Booker T. Washington, she was a pioneer in her own right. After moving to Malden, she became the town’s first Black homeowner despite receiving threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Through her church, African Zion Baptist Church, she worked with members of the congregation to assist others transitioning from enslavement to freedom.

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Before reading the following excerpts, consider this:

Washington only provides us with insight into his experiences, which is good. It keeps us from generalizing all experiences. His experience is not reason to believe all enslaved people experienced the same.

Chapter 1: A SLAVE AMONG SLAVES

“I cannot remember a single instance during my childhood or early boyhood when our entire family sat down to the table together, and God’s blessing was asked, and the family ate a meal in a civilized manner. On the plantation in Virginia, and even later, meals were gotten by the children very much as dumb animals get theirs. It was a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there. It was a cup of milk at one time and some potatoes at another. Sometimes a portion of our family would eat out of the skillet or pot, while some one else would eat from a tin plate held on the knees, and often using nothing but the hands with which to hold the food. When I had grown to sufficient size, I was required to go to the “big house” at meal-times to fan the flies from the table by means of a large set of paper fans operated by a pulley.”

Takeaway:

1. He didn’t eat a ‘traditional’ family dinner while enslaved.
2. Food was sparse even with his mother being the cook.
3. The fan he is describing is a punkah. They were common in the antebellum South and in some northern cities.

“Of course as the war was prolonged the white people, in many cases, often found it difficult to secure food for themselves. I think the slaves felt the deprivation less than the whites, because the usual diet for the slaves was corn bread and pork, and these could be raised on the plantation; but coffee, tea, sugar, and other articles which the whites had been accustomed to use could not be raised on the plantation, and the conditions brought about by the war frequently made it impossible to secure these things. The whites were often in great straits. Parched corn was used for coffee, and a kind of black molasses was used instead of sugar. Many times nothing was used to sweeten the so-called tea and coffee.”

Takeaway:

1. He details the usual diet for the enslaved where he lived and the things people ate in the “big house.” The (Civil) war evidently changed the whites’ lifestyle.
2. Leaves me curious as to how his mother adjusted what she cooked for the whites with no sugar and other resources.

References:

[Joseph McGill of The Slave Dwelling Project provides his insights on Jane Ferguson’s life as a plantation (more large farm) cook: Booker Taliaferro Washington]

[Sketch in featured image: Aaron Douglas Charcoal Drawing, Tuskegee Institute.]