While black-eyed peas were closely associated with the violence of enslavement and colonization, they also represented a thread of continuity for many enslaved communities. Twitty writes powerfully of this: “Before we were exiled, they were fritters and puddings. They were wedding foods symbolic of goddesses of fertility. They were charitable food shared with the poor. They were a symbol of the unclosing eyes of the Creator and Ancestors… The search for their meaning has, in many ways, been a search for the missing pieces of myself.” And, the legume was not only carried by European colonizers: enslaved peoples also transported the crops themselves in order to ensure this continuity and subsistence. Carney and Rosomoff demonstrate that the introduction of the cowpea to Jamaica can be “directly attributed to African slaves.” Oral traditions, “whispered on pages said that seeds were brought in the hair of our Ancestors during the Middle Passage,” reaffirmed this knowledge.
For Black communities across North America, the crop became central to a “transnational myth of resilience.” Food staples like the black-eyed pea enabled enslaved peoples to create a “subaltern food system” for their own subsistence in the Americas. Carney and Rosomoff detail how African practices of intercropping black-eyed peas with cereal like sorghum, which effectively work to increase food yields through attracting pollinators and fixing nitrogen, “was also observed in the Carolina colony” and Jamaica, “the crucial, but often overlooked, linkage of food sovereignty to enactments of political and economic freedom.”
Perhaps because of the significance of these alternative subsistence food systems, the black-eyed pea took on new mythology in this context. Twitty recounts the “scripture” of eating a “mess of black-eyed peas…alongside greens as a good-luck food at the start of the civil year.” He recalls that every New Year’s Day, his mother made a tiny pot of black-eyed peas, despite not liking them. When he commented that this was a long and beleaguered process just to make something she doesn’t like, his mother posed a critical, if not rhetorical question: “How else am I supposed to get good luck and change?” For his mom and many other Black Americans, this is a critical tradition to beckon in New Year prosperity. While the origins of this tradition are debated, this practice reveals the centrality of the legume in Black American culture. As Twitty writes, “Our peas were tiny little texts, and we didn’t even know it…Each pot was a bit of our own immortality going back millennia.”