A problem relating to the provision of food underlies the early colonial history
of the English in North America. In Virginia the supply of victuals constituted
a cmcial aspect of the rivalry between the native Americans and the whites.
European failure in that field resulted in instances of settlers abandoning their
communities in order to live with the Indians as well as in these of burning native
cornfields. Both phenomena led to a toughening up of imperial policy

Kowalczyk-Twarowski, Krzysztof

English

Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Śląskiego RE-BUŚ

             Title: Provide, provide : food in the American South  Author: Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski  Citation style: Kowalczyk-Twarowski Krzysztof. (2003). Provide, provide : food in the American South. W: W. Kalaga, T. Rachwał (red.), "Viands, wines and spirits nourishment and (in) digestion in the culture of literacy : essays in cultural practice" (S. 52-57). Katowice : Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego  Krzysztof Kowalczyk-TwarowskiUniversity of Silesia, KatowiceProvide, Provide: Food in the American SouthA problem relating to the provision of food underlies the early colonial history o f the English in North America. In Virginia the supply o f victuals constituted a cmcial aspect o f the rivalry between the native Americans and the whites. European failure in that field resulted in instances of settlers abandoning their communities in order to live with the Indians as well as in these of burning native cornfields. Both phenomena led to a toughening up o f imperial policy.Colonial agriculture was driven by double motives. On the one hand, the imperial interest required that the colonies produce costly exotic “staples like hemp, sugar, indigo, silk, and wine, which would not grow in the British Isles and for which British gold had to be sent abroad.” 1 On the other hand, there were the exigencies o f everyday life to consider. The familiar charge that the native peoples did not deserve to own their land because their primitive economy failed to produce enough turned out bitterly false in Virginia. Not only did the Indians outperform the whites; they occasionally provided the colonists with food. The growing frustration caused conflicts with the natives, including occasions o f destroying their fields even though the English themselves were starving. Peter Hulme comments on that: “to bum cornfields when you are starving, rather than stealing the com, is to court the charge o f psychosis.”21 Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), p. 263.2 Peter Hulme, Colonial Encouters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492-1797 (Lon­don & New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 167.In the late eighteenth century the agricultural character o f Southern economy created the illusion o f the section feeding the whole country. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century statistics demonstrated clearly that the pro­duction o f “cereals, fruits, garden vegetables and esculent roots”3 in the free states exceeded that o f the slave states. Hinton Rowan Helper, abolitionist and staunch racist, quotes in The Impending Crisis (1857) a fellow North Carolinian:By every consideration o f  self-preservation, we are called to make better efforts to expel the Northern grocer from the State with his butter [...] It is a reproach on us as farmers, and no little deduction from our wealth, that we suffer the population o f  our towns and villages to supply them­selves with butter from another Orange County in N ew  York.4This component o f Southern mythology, by and large, disappeared in the wake o f the Civil War. Still, food retained an elevated position in Dixie, distinctly different from that elsewhere in the United States.In the early twentieth-century representation o f food tended to overlap with the socioeconomic and geographical divisions o f the ante-bellum South. The landed class argued for the good life afforded by the benevolent cli­mate and a life o f ease. In 1930 the I ’ll Take M y Stand symposium, the chief expression o f these sentiments, contrasted the Northern and Southern life­styles: “The amenities o f life also suffer under the curse o f a strictly-busi- ness or industrial civilization. They consist in such practices as manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love.”5 The Agrarians stressed the provision o f abundant nourishment as an index of a refined, leisurely culture, their favourite comparison being o f Dixie with Mediterranean Europe.The Piedmont as well as the poor white culture o f the lowcountry, on the other hand, disseminated the image o f outdoor life, with hunting, fish­ing, and plentiful consumption. It is in this tradition that Thomas Wolfe’s work belongs. As Thomas C. Moser points out, both in his life and in his books Wolfe was a man o f excess {The American Novel 147), therefore it may be misleading to take too much o f his work for an expression o f regional sensibility. Yet I am going to look at his representation o f food as charac­teristic o f the above-mentioned strand o f Southern literature, partly because3 Ante-bellum. Writings o f  George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper, ed. Harvey Wish (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962), p. 181.4 Ibid., p. 185.5 I ’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition, ed. Louis Rubin (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), p. xxv.of his exuberance. Describing the eating habits o f the Gant family in Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe says they fed “hugely,”6 “stupendously...,”7 the “father ate ravenously and without caution, immoderately.”8 “He got choked on a bone each time he had fish, bought more than he could eat. [...] He had a Dutch love o f abundance: again and again he described the great stored bams, the groaning plenty o f the Pennsylvanians.”9On the whole, the imagery o f food in Wolfe operates along three lines: 1) it signals the protagonist’s craving for the exotic, 2) it underscores the sensuality of the South, 3) it indicates social background. Elaborating on Eugene G ant’s childhood literary fascinations, Wolfe writes: “He read a dozen o f Scott, and liked best o f all Quentin Durward, because the de­scriptions o f food were as bountiful and appetising as any he had ever read.” 10 Exoticism, which impels his father to travel to Louisiana and allow himself to become overwhelmed with its tropical profusion,11 makes itself felt to young Eugene through locally available foreign cuisine.She sent him to the little Jewish grocery down the street for the sour relishes she liked so well: tabled in mid-moming they ate sour pickles, heavy slabs o f  ripe tomatoes, coated with thick mayonnaise, amber per­colated coffee, fig-newtons and lady fingers, hot pungent fudge pebbled with walnuts and coated fragrantly with butter, sandwiches o f  tender bacon and cucumber, iced belchy drinks12.Immediately preceding this fragment is a description o f the lush sensuality of the South, both drawing on closely related vocabulary.Lastly, food figures as index of breeding. A minor character in the novel, who has left his home town and gone up in the world, on return is involved in the following scene in a sandwich bar:“A c Ibid., p. Ibid., p. ouple o f  slices o f  buttered toast, if  you please, not too brown,” said Spaugh delicately to the counterman.“A mess o f  hog chitlings and sorghum, you mean, you bastard. You were brought up on salt pork and combread.”13Class distinction implied in the conversation is related to a resentment occasioned by a local betraying his region for career’s sake. Diet becomes6 Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 55.7 Ibid., p. 71.8 Ibid., p. 72.9 Ibid., p. 73.10 Ibid., p. 306.11 Ibid., p. 73.12 Ibid., p. 142.13 Ibid., p. 173.a measure o f sectional identity and the scene on which to air social views. Thus the exchange quoted points to the figuration o f food in the South while articulating differences between the South and other regions.In the 1976 novel The Great Santini Pat Conroy employs food in a broad sentimental project o f rehashing the Southern outdoors myth, with a benevo­lent black in the background, and, generally, overtones o f Mark Twain’s The Adventures o f  Tom Sawyer and The Adventures o f  Huckleberry Finn. Toomer, the black boy, owns a dozen beehives, and a pack o f twenty-six dogs. He teaches Ben, the white protagonist, to eat raw oysters, introducing him into the lore o f the land. They eat sea turtle eggs, talk about removing honey from the hives, plan to gig flounder, until Ben comes to believe that[T]he secret o f  this marsh haunted land resided in the quivering flesh o f  oysters, the rich-flavoured meat o f  crabs, the limp o f  the flower boy, the eggs o f  the great turtles that navigated toward their birthing sands through waters bright with the m oon.14The wealth of South Carolina nature in this novel offers ample nourishment, translating itself into friendship and, subsequently, into qualified sectional patriotism.A similar paradigm operates in Conroy’s Beach Music. However, this time the bounty o f nature enables the protagonist to turn food into a career by becoming a writer for a gourmet magazine. He admits that cooking, and teaching cooking to his daughter, is his brand o f escapism. Instructing her to regard every form o f life as edible, he tries to prepare her for every contingency. Besides, there are two uses o f food in this novel that figure prominently in the lives o f the girl’s mother and grandfather.In the former case, the profound identity problem of a girl growing up in a South Carolina immigrant Jewish family is aggravated by her parents serving ethnic food at her birthday party to her schoolfriends. Culinary failure indexes unsuccessful assimilation which terminates in suicide. By contrast, the grandfather’s story assigns food a function in his surviving the ordeal o f the concentration camp. Degraded, he daydreams o f great composers playing their works with him. The concerts are enhanced by food.Before we play, I go to the great restaurants o f  Europe and I order the finest meals cooked by the finest chefs. I eat escargots glistening with butter and flecks o f  garlic and parsley, order roast duck with crisp brown skin and pods o f  fat just beneath the w ing bones, eat baguettes dipped in olive oil, and creme brulees with burnt crusts o f  brown sugar followed14 Pat Conroy, The Great Santini (London: Black Swan, 1996), p. 123.by layers o f  sweet cream that make the mouth pucker with pleasure [...] Because I live in my head I survive by concentrating on the great silos o f  beauty I have stored up .15The beauty on which he draws involves chiefly music but, behind it, the whole refined culture he inherited as a scion of a prominent Warsaw family.The last text in this survey, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, offers a profoundly original vision o f the South, food receiving a similarly unique role. The novel’s portrayal o f North Carolina in the early 1860’s is Darwin­ian, and it often links food with scenes o f biological struggle and death. The following excerpt presents the deserter protagonist attacked by insects.The sun climbed the sky and turned hot, and all the insect world seemed to find Inman’s bodily fluids fascinating. Striped mosquitoes hummed around his ears and bit his back through his shirt. Ticks dropped from trailside brush and attached themselves to him at hairline and pant waist and grew fat. Gnats sought out the water in his eyes. A horsefly followed him for a while, trou­bling his neck. It was a big black glob o f  buzzing matter the size o f  the end joint to his thumb, and he longed to kill it but could not, no matter how he jerked and beat at him self as it landed to bite out gouts o f  flesh and blood.16Further on, we read o f a meat-eating bog-plant. Terrified by the forest, and the war, Inman reflects: “You could hold the tip o f a finger to what stood for its mouth and it would snap at you. These flatwoods seemed only a step away from learning the trick on a grander scale.”17 Still later, he shoots a marauding Federal soldier and sees a hen peck at the brain through the cracked skull. The next day he prepares him self a breakfast from the brains o f the hog, previously stolen by the killed soldier, and an egg from the hen that had been feeding on the raider.18Inman professes the belief in not killing an animal unless he means to eat its flesh. Yet when he comes across a motherless bear cub, he shoots it because it would soon fall prey to stronger predators.He ate sitting at cliff top. He had not eaten bear o f  such youth before, and though the meat was less black and greasy than that o f  older bear, it still tasted nevertheless like sin. He tried to name which o f  the deadly seven might apply, and, when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.1915 Pat Conroy, Beach Music (London: Black Swan, 1997), p. 648.16 Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1998), p. 55.17 Ibid., p. 65.18 Ibid., p. 254.19 Ibid., p. 281.The last important perspective on food in this novel relates to tea. Although it is the mid-nineteenth century, one character in the book has only recently first tasted it.[S]he admired it so much that she gave Stobrod a handful o f  it tied in a square o f  cloth as he went on a coon hunt. The next time she saw him weeks later she had asked how he liked it. Stobrod had said it was no better than fair and that he didn’t find it preferable to any other kind o f  greens. Ruby came to find out that he had cooked it up with a strip o f  fatback and eaten it like cresses.20The fragment can be analyzed as a wry comment on the culture o f the country in which so much strife had taken place over tea trade. It can also indicate how far eating culture in the South and North differed.For a conclusion o f this analysis o f Frazier’s novel, and o f the present survey, I have selected the catfish episode. As two starving men spot a huge catfish heading upstream, thay block its passage, one o f them jumps in the water and wrestles with the fish, flings it onto the shore where the other shoots it. They eat a portion o f the meat and leave the remainder to crows that accompany them throughout their journey. The passage underlines not only pervasive Darwinism; it also shows that, like land and race, food in the South is mythic. Frazier transcends the two major traditions in the representation o f nourishment in Southern literature. Yet in his novel, too, food looms larger than life.20 Ibid., p. 301.

Provide, provide : food in the American South

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Provide, provide : food in the American South

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