Mammaw, pass me that jar of sorghum molasses, would you please? And the butter?

Continuing with the subject of Southern food and African origins, perhaps we should explore one of the many misunderstood Southern staples and see how we have made assumptions that aren't so concrete.

Y'all know what sorghum is, right?  Thick, sticky like tar, near as dark, and sweet enough to make honey ashamed of itself.  You might have grown up calling it molasses.  That's ok, and it's even correct if you grew up in Louisiana.  That's because, technically, molasses is derived from the processing of sugar cane.  Sorghum, as we all know and love it, comes from a "sweet" variety of the grass by that name.  That's about as technical as we need to get here.

Now for the myth buster.  It didn't come over from Africa on the slave ships to Jamestown, Virginia!  How do I know?  Well, I was there.  Uh, actually, my Daddy's family was, but I can't justly claim a collective memory of excessive larders off-loaded from slave ships in the middle 1600s.  I do know, however, that the form of sorghum native to and used in northern Africa is not what you and I are familiar with at the breakfast table.  This variety of the grass was grown solely for its grains.  It was cereal!

Don't say I'm straddlin' the fence, but I must give due credit to enslaved Southern cooks for perpetuating the African preparation of sorghum here.  Problem is, they didn't have "sweet" sorghum, and never dreamed of boiling down the juices of this grass to make syrup.  They prepared and ate a cooked cereal that was worked up into a paste and baked as an unleavened flat bread.  And, rather likely, this never became popular in the "big house."  That doesn't mean it was never eaten by a white person, but we have no indication that white cooks ever discovered this little African delicacy and started fixing spiced-up versions with a Bourbon-pecan glaze to sell at the local coffee shop or tavern.  In other words, no appropriations here.  It was a simple food relegated to the diet of slaves. 

Interestingly, one of the South's beloved artist-naturalists (no, not John James Audubon, he comes much later!), Mark Catesby, commented about the eating of sorghum by South Carolina slaves as early as 1743.  He wrote in his journals that sorghum, "was first introduced from Africa by the negroes" [...] "who make bread of it and boil it in like manner of firmety." (Firmity means strength or stability.  Catesby could paint, but he wasn't the best speller.)  Remember, he's talking about the grain, not the sweetener!  No one even envisioned at this early date a syrup out of the stuff which you could pour over buttermilk pancakes.  Think about it a moment, a South deprived of sweet!

This is where our interpretations are fallible when we draw conclusions prematurely and then extend historical context beyond the breaking point!  As I will likely say many times should you follow my infantile blog, I reckon we should give credit where it is due, but don't perpetuate a myth out of personal bias.  So yes, staples such as grain sorghum arrived in America as a byproduct of slavery for consumption by African slaves.  Did slaves bring the seeds?  No, silly, they didn't have due warning they were about to be captured, sold and chained for a voyage across the Atlantic, allowing ample opportunity to accumulate, dry and store heirloom seeds in anticipation of slavery in America.  Be realistic please.  Many stores of various indigenous coastal African crops would have been packed in bulk to provide food for the voyage.  Extras would have been brought ashore for later use, with many plants dried and their seeds salvageable for future planting. 

Forgive my sarcasm, or flippancy, or however I might come across inadvertently.  And please don't read any false racist sentiment into it!  I share my sarcasm, and scholarly criticism, freely with all races.  I simply don't like corrupted history, even if it applies to a persecuted ethnicity.  Atrocities of the past fail to make excuse for overstated credit today.  Yes, foods brought from Africa have made their way into the common Southern diet, but so have foods, recipes, and traditions from England, France, Germany, Scotland, Ireland, and the list goes on.  We may have sympathy for the plight of enslaved Americans, and we should, but we can't make it up to them by creating a fantasy story for the origin of all Southern foods and their preparation.  That isn't fair to the memory of the enslaved nameless who toiled, or to the countless more white hands who prepared generations of Southern meals.  (More on that at another time.)

Back to Catesby a moment while we're side-railed.  I'm proud to say my family knew Catesby.  In fact, they acted as his first American patron, inviting him to Virginia to stay at our ancestral home on the James River, "Westover."  There's a story about him and a bear I'll have to dig out for another post.

Now, on to sorghum!  The sorghum of Africa came to be know as "guinea corn."  It was cultivated in Barbados by the 4th quarter of the 17th century, and was clearly & directly linked with the African slave trade, as the word refers to a coastal region of West Africa by that name, the source of colonial gold that also identified later English coinage struck from that gold.  So, "guinea" initially referred to a place of origin in Africa, but eventually was associated with the fowl by that name.  There are, you see, indications that sorghum had found alternative uses in America by the middle 18th century.  A relation of "broom corn" the sorghum that was being grown in the colonies was sometimes referred to also as ""whisk" inferring its ultimate use in the making of brooms.  The already aged term "guinea corn" is found to be common in the United States by 1810 when John Lorain of the Philadelphia Agricultural Society recommends it as a "soiling crop."  (This is a crop cut green and fed directly to livestock.)  It soon was more commonly referred to as "chicken corn," a new corruption of "guinea", indicating its primary use in the 19th century as chicken feed.  Thus sorghum's original African use, its intent as a cereal or bread, had evolved primarily into a fresh silage for cattle, feed for poultry, or material for brooms by the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th.  That doesn't preclude its limited use as food stuffs, but the continuation of eating the grain by slaves, or whites, or anyone, had to have been waning pretty drastically by this time. 

Why, you may ask?  Sugar.  Always expensive, it became our sweet of choice early on, and impeded the introduction of sweet sorghum, Southern sorghum, until near the end of the Antebellum period.  Historic records point to an introduction of sweet sorghum around 1853, 1854, 1856 or 1857 (depending upon the source you cite) originating with seeds from China that were sent to Texas to be raised by the Comanche Indians!.  (See now?  It wasn't slave ship contraband after all.)   It was a competitor to the Louisiana sugar market, and (hold on, this is rather disturbing at first), it caught on like gang busters in the deplorable wastelands of the yankee-filled midwest and north during the War when they had no access to Southern sugar.  Breathe a sigh of relief now, for the tide turns, and sorghum production becomes almost exclusively Southern by the 1890s.  A concession here, however, for thanks in part goes again to the yankees.  Apparently in 1883 a New Yorker patented a devise to extract more syrup from sorghum, which improved production.  Today, Kentucky & Tennessee are the leading producers.  (Oh, and a quick explanation for my erratic spelling.  I intentionally use lower case letters as a visually derogatory reflection of my feelings for non-Southern states and their inhabitants.  It's my blog, and I can be insulting if I want to!  So there!)

In summary, yes, sorghum has its most ancient origins in Africa, but the syrup we mix with butter and spread on cornbread and biscuits has nothing to do with the slave trade.  It's more Chinese-Texan-Indian than African, if you want to get picky, and has little (if any) original cultural association to African-Americans.  But they're entitled to love it!  The end-product, however, is embraced by all Southerners, eaten by Southerners, and officially and forever adopted by us.  The big point is it doesn't make a heap of difference which ethnicity is attached to it.  It's Southern.  Don't worry about skin pigment.  It won't affect the taste. 

Keep your hands off my buttermilk biscuit, you thievin' yankee scoundrel.  And don't you dare touch my sorghum molasses!