“As a child I remember watching the women shell mountains of fresh black-eyed peas, and then put them up in big glass jars for eating during the cold months. When my family moved to Philadelphia, I’d return to South Carolina in the summers, and carry some of those jars on the train back to my new home.”1
Vertamae Smart Grosvenor
This story reveals a myriad of characteristics about Grosvenor’s Geechee community. The peas picked from their own gardens, on their own land, were used to sustain them through all of the seasons. They came together to complete work that would sustain them through the cold winter months. Even when members of the community went away, they were still thought of and taken care of. Grosvenor remained part of her community and its culture of connectedness by a gift as simple as a jar of peas.
More than that, these peas were a link between Grosvenor, her community and their deep history in the land. The land that grew the black-eyed peas Grosvenor was eating was a land that had known this crop for a long time. It was the same land where “enslaved communities grew dietary staples such as okra, greens, rice, and black-eyed peas in their own provision gardens, using food to exercise choice and preserve culture, memory, and identity under brutal circumstances.”2
Black-eyed peas originated in West Africa, where they were farmed by free Africans and used in dishes such as thiebou niebe in Senegal. From there, they spread around the world and have been used for countless dishes, in countless traditions. If you missed it, check out the Hoppin’ John page on this site for more depth on the uses of this legume in different dishes:
Individual + Community + Land = History
Writer, poet, and philosopher Edouard Glissant is credited with saying “The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history.”3 Gullah and Geechee communities perfectly embody this assertion. Through the stories that Grosvenor, Raiford and Robinson tell in their cookbooks—both their own remembrances and those of their elders—we see how the Gullah and Geechee histories are created in the space where the individual, the community, and the land come together. This can be seen through the simple black-eyed pea story in Grosvenor’s cookbook:
- Individual: Vertamae Smart Grosvenor
- Community: The women who gave her the jars of black-eyed peas and the Gullah Geechee communities everywhere who grow black-eyed peas.
- Land: The land where their communities have lived for generations, the soil that has grown black-eyed peas for hundreds of years.
- History: Growing black-eyed peas that came to the Lowcountry from West Africa with enslaved Africans. The crop that these same people farmed for themselves while enslaved, using the crop to exercise choice. The same crop that is now grown by Gullah Geechee communities, the direct descendants of the enslaved Africans, on the same land as their ancestors grew the crop. And then, working together, the communities pick and shell them, and give a jar to the individual in a gesture of caring for one another.
This crop, black-eyed peas, can represent the interwoven space between the individual, community and land. A space that is also occupied by agricultural knowledge. Matthew Raiford shows this with his recipe for “Cowpea Salad,” cowpeas being another name for black-eyed peas. This pea recipe led him to a fond memory of an encounter he had with Sapelo Island resident, griot and storyteller Cornelia Walker Bailey—who will come into our conversations more in the next sections of this website. On the same page as his recipe, Raiford remembers:
“Just after I left UC Santa Cruz and returned to the farm, I did everything I could to amend the soil so that I could plant my own Sea Island red peas. But my plantings grew into these lush, beautiful bushes with no peas at all. So I went to the source, Miss Cornelia Walker Bailey, the late Geechee historian and storyteller of Hog Hammock, who was born and lived all her life on Sapelo Island. She laughed with me as I told her the story of how I planted my peas. Miss Cornelia then showed me her heel-toe method for how to drop a pea into the sandy loam and lightly cover it, then leave it alone. Like Nana often did, Miss Cornelia reminded me that I was overthinking it.”4
Matthew Raiford
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Footnotes
- Vertamae Grosvenor, Vertamae Cooks in The Americas’ Family Kitchen (San Francisco: KQED Books, 1996), 48. Available here.
- Olivia Ware Terenzio and Kristen Solecki, “Feijoada and Hoppin’ John,” Southern Cultures 25, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 162.
- Nik Heynen, ““A Plantation can be a commons”: Re-Earthing Sapelo Island through Abolition Ecology,” Antipode 53, no. 1 (2020): 97.
- Matthew Raiford with Amy Paige Condon, Bress ‘N’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer, (New York: The Countryman Press, 2021), 40. Available here.