Williams-Forson examines the complexity of black women's legacies with food as a form of cultural work. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, Williams-Forson focuses her analysis on the ways black women have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to "the gospel bird."

From personal interviews to the comedy of Chris Rock, from commercial advertisements to the art of Kara Walker, and from cookbooks to literature, Williams-Forson considers how black women defy conventional representations of blackness in relationship to these foods and exercise influence through food preparation and distribution.

Psyche A. Williams-Forson is assistant professor of American studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs

Black Women, Food, and PowerBy Psyche A. Williams-Forson

University of North Carolina Press

Copyright © 2006 Psyche A. Williams-Forson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780807856864

Chapter One

We Called Ourselves Waiter Carriers

Bacon to spare will allow me a preference with the country people or rather Negroes who are the general chicken merchants.-John Mercer

We called ourselves "Waiter Carriers."-Bella Winston

When Augustus Baldwin Longstreet wrote Georgia Scenes in 1835, he included among his characters a rambunctious and offensive native gentleman from Georgia by the name of Ned Brace. Ned was the kind who would wreak havoc wherever he went. Lyman Hall, one of Longstreet's two narrators, accompanies Ned on a three-day venture to Savannah. After a day of playing pranks on everyone from the lodging house hostess to a member of a fancy funeral procession, Ned takes his behavior to the market to "buy something of everybody and some of everything." Being the sort of character who "wanted his articles in such portions and numbers as no one would sell, or upon conditions to which no one would submit," he approaches "an old Negro woman" and explains that his wife is sick and she wants chicken pie. Ned, however, has just enough money to buy half a chicken based upon the seller's asking price. As a result, Ned wants the vending woman to cut the live chicken in half. In her outrage and disbelief, she explains to Ned that this is impossible. She has no place to properly dress the chicken, and she does not want to get feathers all over the other chickens that she has to sell. If this was to happen, she is sure that it would result in her being punished by other white men:

"Do, my good mauma, sell it to me," said he; "My wife is very sick, and is longing for chicken pie, and this is all the money I have" (holding out twelve and a half cents in silver), "and it's just what a half chicken comes to at your own price."

"Ki, massa! how gwine cut live chicken in two?"

"I don't want you to cut it in two alive; kill it, clean it, and then divide it."

"Name o' God! what sort o' chance got to clean chicken in de market-house! Whay de water for scall um and wash um?"

"Don't scald it at all; just pick it, so."

"Ech-ech! Fedder fly all ober de buckera-man meat, he come bang me fo' true. No, massa, I mighty sorry for your wife, but I no cutty chicken open."

Upon the refusal of the woman to sell him the chicken, Ned appears to leave her, ending the scene. The reader is left with no knowledge of whether or not the old woman complied, but one can assume by her closing remarks that she did not. Although I will return to this scene later in this discussion, it is important now for its illustration of at least one level of interaction exchanged between whites and blacks in the New World marketplace. It reveals the boundaries that each established and transversed in his or her desire to consume and obtain goods. Moreover, it lends itself to an examination of how black women left their mark both in kitchens and on the market landscape. It further suggests some of the social, cultural, and economic tensions that were bound to arise in a society marked by patriarchal control and white dominance. The basic goals of this chapter are to discuss two things: some of the various interactions that African and African American people may have had with chicken upon their arrival in the New World and how those relationships have been circumscribed by a discourse of race and capitalism.

Like intricate weavings on a tapestry, so are the stories and the heritages that help to compose the beginnings of African life in America. The accounts that surround the forced migrations of Africans to Brazil, the West Indies, and America have been the source of debate for decades. What remains consistent is that the Atlantic slave trade left an amalgamation of cultures and transformations that permeate every aspect of American life, including its foodways. The historical contexts within which relationships developed between black women and chickens reveal practices that were circumscribed by gender, race, class, and power. Certain boundaries guided the exchange of goods that took place in and around the marketplace. Black people were no freer than their circumstances allowed at that time. But it was the level of market autonomy and relative independence that reveal some of the ways in which black people saw themselves in relationship to certain goods. Far from simply being victims of their circumstances, black women and men were sometimes in positions where they could be enterprising. Chicken may be considered one food with which competency for trade was exercised and meanings were expressed. Chicken may have figured very minutely within the scope of early wide-scale commercial capitalism, but an examination of its role within the marketplace provides a small glimpse of how power, race, and capitalism converged in the American landscape.

When exploring a phenomenon such as the one this study suggests, it is necessary to make some generalizations at the risk of oversimplification and overestimation. Recognizing this pitfall, this chapter will limit its geographic focus mainly to areas of the Maryland and Virginia Chesapeake and the Carolina Lowcountry, even though the marketing activities of slaves and free blacks have been recorded as far north as New England. But, before furthering the discussion on African American relationships to chicken, it seems a brief history of poultry and fowl in American society is necessary.

The history of chicken (Gallus domesticus), the common name for what we know today as domestic fowl, is long and complicated primarily due to cultural diffusion as much as anything else. But there seems to be perennial agreement that chickens arrived in the New World from Asia and are descended from the red jungle fowl. The agricultural surplus found in the New World allowed eastern seaboard settlers to be relatively self-sufficient. The areas surrounding the Chesapeake Bay were especially lush with wildlife, fish, plants, nuts, fruits, and other food provisions. Chickens were a part of this surplus and the general exchange of foods, tools, and methods of production between European colonists and Native Americans. Because these birds roamed freely, Native Americans often traded chickens and wild turkeys with the colonists in an effort to obtain more favorable goods like guns and other kinds of cooking utensils.

Writing in 1634, Captain Thomas Young wrote of a journey to Jamestown, Virginia, wherein he noticed that America was endowed with "very great plenty" of birds, fowl, and other foods: "In so much so that in ordinary planters' houses of the better sort, we found tables furnished with pork, kids, chickens, turkeys, young geese, caponetts and such other fowls as the seas of the year afforded." As Young rightfully observed, goose, duck, and chicken appeared often on the tables of the "better sort." Writing in 1709, William Byrd kept a detailed journal where he secretly recorded the minutiae of his daily life. While many dined on "hash'd or fricasseed" cold remains of turkeys and geese, or "boil'd and roasted" fowl, Byrd broke his fast with boiled milk. Nonetheless, by dinner, boiled beef, blue wing, pigeon, partridge, geese, duck, pork, and boiled or roasted mutton graced his table. And in the latter part of the eighteenth century, German settler Johann Martin...