The records are sparse on the foodways of the enslaved at Mount Vernon and colonial Virginia. To fill in the blanks, take a journey to the Senegambia

Consider the black-eyed pea, Vigna unguiculata, a variety of the cowpea. The commonly told narrative about it being fodder for livestock and then later a surprisingly palatable food for people obscures an ancient history. Many see it as uniquely Southern, and it is indeed a deep part of the cuisine and lore of the larger region. But like the people who relished it the most in the mid– to late 18th century at Mount Vernon, the black-eyed pea didn’t begin its history on the plantations of Virginia’s Tidewater region, where a scarce few would find their way into the soil near where the cabins of the enslaved once stood. Its story, like that of the cowpea’s culinary and cultural stewards, began thousands of miles away across the Atlantic on the tropical savannahs of West Africa, where, after it was picked clean from the fields by Wolof, Serer, and Mandinka farmers, their Fulani neighbors—pastoral people—would graze cattle in an ancient pattern of cultural symbiosis.

African Origins
The Kermel Market in Dakar is where I first saw Virginia in Africa. It’s a bit like seeing the child in the face of her grandmother. I was overwhelmed by the noise and competing smells of fresh meat and fish, seawater, soil, and spices. Here, all the foods are “whole,” not cut up, modified, genetically enhanced, or otherwise processed. The Babel of languages spoken is reduced, for haggling purposes, to four or so lingua francas—Wolof, Mandinka, Arabic, French, and English. What caught my eye were the blue-hued crabs, the fish that resembled shad or rockfish, and the shallow troughs filled with oysters, transporting my mind to the Chesapeake and its tributaries. There are massive pyramids of rice (ceeb), hot peppers (kaani), lima beans (sebe), tubers of different types such as sweet cassava (nyambi, a Wolof word from which we get the term “yam”), as well as mounds of okra (kanja), tomatoes (tomat), and of course, black-eyed peas (niebe). All of these would come to have starring roles in the cuisine of Virginia and the greater South, becoming what would later be known as soul food.

Change of Perspective
For a long time, the lens through which we viewed the culture and lives of enslaved people at Mount Vernon and other sites was largely determined by the view from the Big House, or planter’s house. The othering gaze of slaveholders and plantation visitors trying to make sense of a people they found fascinating, perplexing, and alien, along with scattered records of sales and transactions, punishments and emancipations, has largely written the story of colonial Black Americans. Later, archaeology stepped in to add to the narrative, from botanical remains, bones from meal scraps, and forensic analysis of the ancestral dead. These methods, though important, are incomplete. Understanding the humanity and culture of the people who powered the estate and nearby communities in the region requires going on a deep dive into distinct pockets of their origins and unraveling a world to find untold stories and overlooked connections. It gives texture to the narrative.

Only in the mid-1970s did scholars begin looking into both the transatlantic origins of enslaved Africans and studying the peoples within the different cultural hearths (a term referring to the place from which a culture spreads) of colonial British America. Following the introduction of Afri-Creoles from Central Africa in the mid– to late 17th century, it was the Senegambians who made a profound impact, working down the map from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to the Chesapeake to the Low Country to the Gulf Coast and lower Mississippi Valley. In Virginia, Africans from Senegambia were roughly a quarter of the total human beings imported. And in the corridor of the Upper Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia to the southern banks of the Rappahannock, the majority of the enslaved Africans who labored in the fields of Orinoco tobacco were from Senegambia, according to the research of historian Lorena Walsh, Ph.D. Because of the domestic slave trade, this would shape the diet and material culture of colonial Virginia and the rest of the South for centuries to come.

The Quest for Roots
Senegambia as a historical region not only encompassed the modern-day countries of Senegal and Gambia, but also parts of Guinea-Bissau and Guinea. Multiple ethnic groups within the region primarily spoke one of two language families, the West Atlantic or the Mande. Among the primary ethnic groups were the Mandinka, the Fulani, and the Wolof. The region was settled from the north and west as a result of the expansion of the three major West African kingdoms of the Sahel—Ghana, Mali, and Songhai. Although the groups were diverse, there were long-standing exchanges based on trade, religion, and intermarriage, as well as periods of conflict.

Understanding the traditional rural life of Senegambians helps us decode correlating knowledge and skills among their descendants. Most Senegambians lived in hierarchical societies based on different labor castes that would later be reinforced in their new villages in exile along the Chesapeake. In fact, founding fathers and planters such as George Mason, neighbor to George Washington, had estates lauded for their highly skilled labor force consisting of enslaved people with Senegambian origins. Senegambians were (and still are) known for their leatherwork, musical instruments, blacksmithing, and wood carving, and a caste of musicians and storytellers, among them the gewel (in Wolof) or djeli (in Mande). These griots served to preserve historical memory and genealogy through song and performance arts. Correlation between these players of the kora and akonting—traditional stringed instruments—and the fiddler, and later the blues musician, is almost unmissable.

The Senegambians farmed grains, peanuts, indigo, cotton, and tobacco along western Africa’s river valleys and on the dry savannah, also fishing from the river banks and along the coast and shepherding cattle. Their labors were divided by distinct gender, age, occupational, and class roles. Men and women performed separate chores related to obtaining and preparing food that would carry over into the American colonies. Men cleared land for farming; hunted and made traps; caught fish; cared for, slaughtered, and butchered the larger livestock; and gathered honey while procuring wood for carving. Women drew water, gathered firewood, winnowed and pounded grain, guarded the fields against pests, maintained kitchen gardens, cooked, and passed on these traditions to their daughters. They also gathered edible fruits, leaves, and greens; traded and sold their produce in the village market; and collected medicinal plants and herbs. Children learned and entertained themselves by mimicking the actions of their parents. They contributed by catching small game and fish and were sent to gather fruit and other wild foods such as alom, an African relative of the American persimmon.

Parallel Lives
Many of the core practices that define the foodways and folklife of the Chesapeake region and the enslaved communities that lived at estates such as Mount Vernon likely originated from Senegambia. Families collected crustaceans, oysters, clams, and other shellfish. Wolof fishermen along the Senegal River and its tributaries used ingenious basket traps set in the water. They made seines and cast nets in a mirror image of what their descendants would do along the Chesapeake Bay. The coastal beaches burned with fresh fish smoking over wood fires. Smoked or salted fish were an important trade item with the interior, a forerunner to the salt herrings of Chesapeake plantations. Men blessed with success in hunting caught antelope and hares, antecedents of the white-tail deer and cottontails of the Virginia countryside.

Many of the crops that would grow in the gardens of the enslaved and the fields around them were common to Senegambia. Millet, sorghum, rice, and maize were the most important staple grains in the region and also make an appearance in colonial Virginia. Black-eyed peas, leafy greens, bitter tomatoes, okra, pumpkins, watermelons, sesame, onions, eggplants, peanuts, and hot peppers—basic kitchen produce in Senegambia—were also the essentials of plantation truck (produce) patches. Most of the animal protein came from fish, but occasionally meat—in the form of beef, poultry, goat, or lamb—was added to the diet, along with dairy products. The Wolof turned millet, sorghum, corn, and other grains into the starches and stews that formed the basis of their daily meals. Chere was steamed millet flour eaten in the evening with a rich sauce of vegetables and hot peppers served with a bit of meat or fish. Lah and rui were porridges of boiled millet eaten in the morning. It’s not a far leap between this daily fare and the morning-time “small hominy,” of the Chesapeake, later known as “grits.”