Eating in the Side Room: Food, Archaeology, and African American Identity by Mark S. Warner (review)

Rooted in a meticulous study of the faunal remains excavated at an Annapolis, Maryland, house, Mark S. Warner’s book addresses sweeping questions about race, resistance, and identity. Between roughly 1858 and 1990, the house was owned and inhabited by two African American families. As Warner explains, his intention in reconstructing their diet is ultimately to “explore how these families’ daily food choices within a newly emergent mass consumer society served as a relatively safe way to express a unique outlook and history, as well as offer a subtle, yet persistent, commentary on the racist stereotypes and violence that surrounded them” (p. 2).

The book begins with John Maynard, a free black man with the means to buy not only a house lot but also his family, including his wife, Maria, and her daughter, Phebe Ann. A foreclosure in the early twentieth century led to a sale from the Maynards to their in-laws, the Burgesses. These details are telling features of Warner’s portrait of Annapolis’s financially precarious and densely interwoven free black community. The extended Maynard-Burgess family was bent on maintaining their place—physical and metaphorical—in a city that was not always welcoming. Warner sketches the many legal and institutional barriers to equality for Annapolis’s large free black population. He also persuasively imagines their daily encounters with institutional racism in the ways white butchers and grocers reserved the worst, the oldest, and the most expensive for their black customers.

In chapter 3 Warner begins to describe his archaeological findings, and for a historian the details are abundant and evocative but perhaps a bit murky; a “cat astragalous” appeared in the faunal remains, for example (p. 37). Appendixes elaborate on these findings, which no doubt will be of interest to other zooarchaeologists, but Warner hopes to appeal to a broader audience as well.

His central finding is that pork, both choice and less expensive cuts, is over-represented in the remains. The association of pork with African Americans, particularly in the South, is a long-standing feature of food scholarship (as his notes demonstrate). But rather than arguing that pork signaled a distinct foodway isolated from the white beef-eating mainstream by the racism of white butchers, advertisers, and industrial producers, Warner tries to assemble a portrait of pork eating as an assertion of African American identity and resistance to white Annapolis (and white consumer culture in general). This family shopped carefully for foods they desired and could afford; the evidence in this case is copious. In the case of fish and poultry, Warner finds evidence of patterns of exchange that knitted the African American community’s food-procuring strategies into webs unseen by white Annapolis. A chapter comparing the Annapolis findings with excavations of contemporary sites supports the broader association of pork with the African American diet in this region.

As Warner chases his topic further from his zooarchaeological sources—into blues lyrics and quilting—some may decide not to follow him. But the line between evidence (that “cat astragalous,” for example) and interpretation, even speculation, is clearly marked. However far a reader chooses to follow Warner, there are interesting connections to ponder.

The “side room” of the title refers to the room where the Maynards and Burgesses ate their meals. It was hidden from the street, decorated with a motley assemblage of furniture and dishes—genteel once, to be sure—and filled with this sprawling, tenacious, and closely knit family. Picking through what little they left behind, Mark S. Warner shows us what they ate and suggests the many meanings those meals conveyed.