The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South

CHAPTER 14 “I’m Talkin’ ’Bout the Food I Sells”: African American Street Vendors and the Sound of Food from Noise to Nostalgia

Food easily appeals to four of the five senses: the feel of the soft fuzz of a ripe peach, the juicy taste of a sun-heated tomato, the sight of a dewdrenched bush laden with blueberries, or the pungent aroma of a fiery habanero .Sound,though,is usually left out of the culinary equation.The sizzle of a steak on the grill or the tinkling sound of Moroccan mint tea poured from on high or the clink of glasses in a toast may well be evocative. But the best“text” waiting to be discovered comes from the generations of vendors, both enslaved and free,who hawked their wares in the country’s urban areas and rural byways for more than three centuries. A woman strolls across the stage at the beginning of act 3 of George Gershwin’s folk opera Porgy and Bess. Oh dey’s so fresh an’ fine An dey’s just off the vine Strawberry, strawberry, strawberry. The composer uses the woman’s plangent call to signal daybreak over Cat- fish Row. As the community emerges to face the day, the cry of the honey man and the crab seller follow that of the strawberry seller. Street vendors such as those evoked by Gershwin and his librettist, DuBose Heyward, were longtime fixtures on the streets and in the street markets of the United States. The vendors each used a specific cry to extol their wares.They were so much a part of the South’s character that travelers wrote home about them and magazine illustrators profiled them. In South Carolina, the street cries of Charleston were typical of major CHAPTER 14 ▶ “I’m Talkin’’Bout the Food I Sells” African American Street Vendors and the Sound of Food from Noise to Nostalgia jessica b. harris 334 Jessica B. Harris cities across the globe in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries . Old etchings show various Parisian street vendors, including the hot chocolate seller, the chestnut vendor, and the notions peddler. In the late seventeenth century, Marcellus Laroon the Elder etched the street criers of London.The cries of Dublin streets are remembered in the folk song“Molly Malone,” who sold“cockles and mussels alive, alive-o.” The vendors of London were immortalized more recently in the Broadway musical Oliver! with the song“Who Will Buy?” Charleston’s street cries were different. They offered a New World twist on an Old World theme. In most of the urban areas of the American South, well into the nineteenth century, the majority of the street vendors were of African descent. Whether freedmen, newly emancipated, or enslaved, they brought a verve, a verbal dexterity, and an ingenuity to marketing their wares that was all their own (fig. 26). Market women in Africa have wielded both economic and political power for centuries. In the upheaval of the transatlantic slave trade, they brought their marketing traditions to the Western Hemisphere and transformed its vending habits.West Africa had traditional markets that were fixed and well organized. Itinerant vendors existed, but the majority of women vendors worked in well-established markets, divided according to the wares they sold and stratified by the status of the vendors. More prosperous vendors sold wholesale to smaller retailers, who transported the wares to outlying regions and often sold door to door. Different sections of the large markets offered different items, ranging from metal goods to fabric, from calabashes to portable grills. The markets also had dedicated sections for food, and some markets dealt with food exclusively. They, too, had their hierarchy of stall holders,itinerant vendors,and occasional or illegal vendors.These were places for commerce and also for news-gathering, gossip, and assembly. These types of markets also existed in the NewWorld context.They could be found in major urban areas throughout the United States. Africans and their descendants played the same roles they had on the African continent. In the New World, though, the Africans who marketed their wares did so as street vendors. Early on in the New World,“higglers,” or “hucksters,” as itinerant vendors are called in the English-speaking Caribbean,appeared in the markets. “I’m Talkin’ ’Bout the Food I Sells” 335 In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, Barbados planters were inundated with enslaved street vendors. Huckstering was so endemic that it was made punishable by law. So many engaged in...