Bees in America: How the Honey Bee Shaped a Nation

Chapter 4: After Bee Space 1860-1900

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After Bee Space, 1860–1900
Chapter 4 AFTER BEE SPACE 1860–1900 To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee. —Emily Dickinson Compared to honey, sugar always has been a more political commodity , but especially in nineteenth-century America. Until that time, Americans had relied on the sugarcane industry (which had been profitable because of slaves) to serve its collective sweet tooth and had neglected to address the conflict between democratic principles and chattel slavery . The American slave trade had been inextricably linked to sugarcane and rum since the colonial period, when the Dutch were establishing trade routes in the West Indies. During the eighteenth century , John Adams had the temerity to suggest that the American Revolution was really about one item—molasses, which was the main ingredient used in rum and was defined by the British as sugar.1 As pioneers moved west, the contradiction of allowing slavocracies in a democracy became much more clear when territories organized into states. Although I don’t want to simplify the causes of the Civil War, I want to suggest that the sugarcane industry was a catalyst because 102
Bees in America
sugar was everything honey was not—cheap, convenient, and free from stings—and slavery was tolerated in order to have it. African slaves labored on sugarcane, indigo, and rice plantations long before cotton was an established industry in the southern states. Because sugarcane could spoil rapidly, slaves often worked eighteen to twenty-hour days during harvest so the crop would not be lost. Given the stressful elements of the tropics (malaria, snakes, and heat), the average life span for a male slave on rice and sugar plantations was no longer than thirty years. As slaves were gradually exposed to, and accepting of, Christianity, they used the Bible to find hope and freedom. Yet as slaves gradually accepted the Christian religion, they used the Bible to find hope and freedom. They readily identified with the stories of Israelites and their search for Canaan, the land of milk and honey. In their songs, slaves appropriated references to Canaan. Ethnologists recorded slave songs after the Civil War. Of the south Georgia spirituals, “The Lonesome Valley” was one of the earliest recorded by Allen, Ware, and Garrison in 1867.2 My brudder want to get religion? Go down in the lonesome valley. Go down to the lonesome valley to meet my Jesus there. O feed on milk and honey. Go down to the lonesome valley.3 The slaves focus on Canaan as a promise for deliverance from slavery, leaving free the possibility to wonder if Canaan is the North or simply an emotional plateau. However, the slaves also could take a spiritual and turn it into a satire, as illustrated in the case of an old English folk song: The Lord made the bees, The bees made the honey, The Lord made man And Man made money. In 1863, Frances Anne Kemble recorded the same verse with a twist from a Negro boatman’s song while visiting in Georgia: God makes the bees The bees makes the honey. 103
After Bee Space, 1860–1900
God makes man, Man makes money. By the time Joel Chandler Harris heard the song in the 1880s, blacks had turned it into a sharp satire about the capitalistic ways of whites: De old bee make de honeycomb De young bee make de honey, De n— make de cotton an corn An’ de white folks gits de money.4 Harris recorded this song and other proverbs in Uncle Remus, which appeared after the Civil War. Uncle Remus reflected and recorded how slaves reversed the value system in which they labored. The slaves—not the white masters—were the industrious ones, and the whites were lazy. Other sayings worth noting: “It’s a mighty po’ bee dat don’t make mo’ honey dan he want” emphasizes industry. Another proverb, “Hit takes a bee fer ter git de sweetness out’n de hoar-houn’ blossom,” emphasizes the importance of maintaining an optimistic outlook when dealing with life’s bitterness.5 Recipes showed that blacks from honey producing regions in Africa remembered food patterns and incorporated them into the plantation menus. According to a slave narrative taken from Shad Hall in Sapelo Island, the writer’s grandmother would make a dish called sakara. She make strange cake, fus ub ebry munt. . . . She make it out uh mean...