South Carolina Meets Bahia
Enslaved street sellers also operated in North America and in the urban regions of today’s United States. More than anywhere else in North America, enslaved, freed, and free Black women participated in the marketing economy of Charleston and New Orleans as street vendors.
Since the colonial period, enslaved women marketeers were a dominant presence in the Lowcountry region. But as in the British colonies of the West Indies, colonial authorities soon recognized the potential of enslaved people’s economic autonomy. Slave owners and planters feared that bondspeople were stealing goods to sell or exchange for other items in the marketplace. In 1686, legislators passed an act prohibiting free individuals, indentured servants, and slaves from bartering, purchasing, or selling any goods to or from servants and slaves.31However, these legal measures did not prevent bondspeople from continuing to sell produce and whatever they could in Charleston’s wharf and streets, where enslaved Africans and their descendants became increasingly visible during the eighteenth century. Except for butchers and fishermen, enslaved women predominated in the city’s market house, which was unveiled in 1739.32 But despite this visibility in the central market, it remains difficult to clearly distinguish the legal status of Black women marketeers as free, freed, or enslaved. It is also a hard task to identify the kind of arrangements these women had with their owners to secure their presence in the market. Certainly, some of them were sent by their owners to work in the streets because they brought most of their income back to their owners. Eighteenth-century observers noted that Black women worked all day selling fruit, eggs, rice, cakes, poultry, dry goods, and drinks. They also reported that enslaved women marketeers clearly privileged other Black and enslaved customers.
Not surprisingly, after the 1739 Stono Rebellion, which took place nearly twenty miles south of Charleston (and which we will explore later, in chapter 16), there were growing official efforts to limit the movement of these enslaved peddlers. But enslaved women persisted in their market endeavors. Their presence obviously upset white residents, who complained about Black women’s ability to purchase fine clothing.33 Charleston’s marketplace was not only a space where enslaved women sold food. As in many other cities of the Americas, where enslaved populations were significant, the market was a haven of sorts for enslaved people, including bondswomen, who escaped bondage by running away.34 Ultimately, for Charleston’s Black population, the public market was a site of reunion, assertion, and resistance.Despite their marketplace activities, and unlike in Brazil, enslaved people in South Carolina, including bondswomen who worked selling food in the streets, were rarely able to amass substantial amounts of money that allowed them to purchase their own freedom during the colonial era. This situation only changed after the United States became an independent country, when South Carolina’s slave owners started relying much more on the income brought in by enslaved women and men they hired out. In 1783, as white residents increasingly protested the activities of enslaved peddlers, authorities once again passed additional legislation attempting to regulate enslaved street vendors in the city, including the introduction of a badge system (briefly discussed in chapter 8). But these provisions and other similar measures neither stopped nor decreased the activities of enslaved Black women sellers, even though growing surveillance certainly impacted their ability to freely circulate in the city.35
In other cities in the US South, enslaved people working as street vendors and marketeers were mostly women as well. In New Orleans, where women composed much of the enslaved population living and working in the city, peddling on the streets allowed them to seize the city’s geography.36 Despite the autonomy of enslaved women peddlers, however, slave owners paid close attention to the amount of money they agreed to receive on a regular basis from enslaved street vendors.
If enslaved peddlers brought a smaller amount or were unable to sell the agreed-upon amount, they risked physical punishment. For example, according to the testimony of a New Orleans bondsman peddler in the middle of the eighteenth century, his owner’s business partner forced a young enslaved woman who worked as peddler to swallow “the vegetables she had not managed to sell.”37 Although exposed to many dangers, including disease and physical violence, this great mobility offered bondswomen opportunities not only to make money but also to occasionally escape slavery.38 Moreover, similar to other cities of the Americas, already in the eighteenth century, public authorities feared that the activities of enslaved street vendors disturbed the social order. In New Orleans, as in Charleston, officials attempted to impose regulations on slave owners who sent enslaved people to sell goods in the streets in the early nineteenth century. But as elsewhere, these cities’ restrictions were never fully successful.Enslaved women street vendors were ubiquitous in various cities of the Americas where slavery predominated, but nowhere else were bondswomen sellers more visible and important to the local economies than in Brazilian cities. Because Salvador had no central marketplace building structure until the 1850s, residents purchased food from peddlers and vendors established in three quitandas (open markets) where they sold fish, beef, bacon, whale meat, and vegetables.39 In Salvador, most enslaved and freed women peddlers were born in West Africa, especially in the Bight of Benin, where women also worked performing marketing activities.40 These Black women peddlers became iconic figures in the city’s landscape. Still today, tourists who visit Salvador’s historic center and other parts of the city are greeted by Black women called baianas (a term referring to Bahia’s residents), whose existence became popular worldwide through the song “O que é que a Baiana tem?” (“What Does the Woman from Bahia Have?”) composed by Dorival Caymmi in 1939 and immortalized by the voice of the popular Portuguese-born singer Carmen Miranda.
Wearing long white skirts, colorful shawls (known as pano da costa), necklaces, and headscarves, most of today’s baianas sell acarajé, a fritter made with black-eyed peas, traditionally fried in red palm oil.41 Today’s Bahia tourism industry embraced the activities performed by these Black women entrepreneurs. Perhaps many of them have no direct connections with the traditional Black women street vendors, but some have female ancestors who were also street vendors and who passed down their acarajé recipes to their descendants.Written sources providing detailed information about the working and living conditions of enslaved and freedwomen street vendors in Salvador are scarce. Until 1821, peddlers had to obtain a license free of charge from the city to sell goods in the streets. Based on a sample of licenses provided to nearly one thousand peddlers between the end of the eighteenth century and the two first decades of the nineteenth century, one historian drew a broad profile of Salvador’s street vendors and concluded that half of them were Black or of color, and most of them were women. More important, among the enslaved peddlers, nearly all were women.42
Arrangements between enslaved sellers and their owners were based on oral agreements.43 Some paid their owners a daily or weekly amount from their sales. Other owners rented their slaves to other people who sent them out to sell goods. Enslaved women peddlers circulated in the streets of Salvador, carrying their merchandise on their heads. Some hawkers secured a place to display their items on mats and stalls, waiting for the customers to reach them. A smaller number of Black women marketeers also sold food in the three existing quitandas with permanent wooden structures that existed in the city by the end of the eighteenth century.44
Enslaved and freed street vendors offered a variety of food items and drinks, including milk, eggs, fresh meat, fish, manioc meal, salt, dried meat, dried shrimp, beans, and fruits such as bananas, oranges, tangerines, limes, mangoes, melons, grapes, guavas, papayas, and pineapples.
Bondswomen street vendors also sold vegetables, including lettuce, greens, cabbage, okra, green beans, onions, cucumbers, corn, pumpkins, and yams. Some peddlers sold prepared foods such as sweets, corn cakes, and bread, as well as grilled fish, cooked pork, sausages, and beef. Portuguese bureaucrat Luís dos Santos Vilhena, who sojourned for more than a decade in Bahia in the late eighteenth century, described the various prepared dishes sold by Black street vendors, including famous Afro-Brazilian dishes such as caruru (a stew resembling gumbo with ingredients such as shrimp, coconut, okra, peanuts, cashews, and red palm oil), vatapá (a mashed creamy paste made of bread, shrimp, coconut milk, ground peanuts, and palm oil), acaçá (a paste made of white corn and coconut wrapped in a banana leaf), and the aforementioned acarajé, all of which are still today ritual foods in Afro-Brazilian religions.45 More than one century later, British consul James Wetherell described the smells of “black cookeries” that assailed the noses of the lower city’s passersby by the middle of the nineteenth century. In his account, he explained that Black people, assumedly women, cooked and sold “little fish, stewed and mixed with pepper,” deep-fried sundry flour balls and plantains, little cakes made of flour or tapioca, and caruru they had prepared in large pots. They also sold “stewed salted codfish or grouper” as well as another dish that according to him consisted of boiled rice, corn kernels, roasted jerk beef, and pepper sauce that seems to be like present-day Hausa rice.46To avoid waste and make profits, enslaved and freedwomen peddlers had to plan and bargain to sell their items until the end of the day. Working from sunrise to sunset under the sun, wind, and rain, and transporting food and stalls along the sinuous steep streets was exhausting. The work performed by enslaved women street peddlers and marketeers required great physical and mental strength.
Like other slaves who hired themselves out, many women street vendors were responsible for their own living arrangements and shared with other enslaved persons rented rooms on the ground floors or basements of urban residences. Bondswomen who lived with their owners often occupied small windowless rooms on higher floors. Despite their arduous lives, depending on their health and other skills, several of Salvador’s enslaved women food sellers were able to accumulate sufficient resources to purchase their own freedom. Once emancipated, several freedwomen purchased bondswomen to work for them as street vendors as well.Historian Richard Graham explored the trajectories of some of these women. Take the example of Ana de São José da Trindade, a freedwoman, who obtained a license for herself and three of her slaves to sell food in the streets of Salvador in 1807. Working as a street vendor allowed Trindade to purchase her freedom and accumulate wealth. When she died in 1823, she owned a three-story house, land, several pieces of jewelry in gold and precious gems, silver objects, and nine bondspeople. Two of these enslaved persons worked for her selling food in Salvador’s streets, including one young bondswoman whom she described in her will as being pregnant.47 Owning bondspeople was the most efficient way for freedwomen to have access to social mobility in a society whose economy totally relied on slavery.
Sale advertisements of nineteenth-century Bahian newspapers also featured African origins of enslaved and freed women street vendors. Additional ads offered female cooks and confectioners as well.48 Likewise, death announcements of enslaved and freed women street vendors give us an idea of their varied origins and ages. On July 17, 1877, the newspaper Correio da Bahia announced the death of a freed, single, sixty-year-old African woman street vendor, Eva Lisbôa Moreira, who died of cancer on July 5. On August 9, 1877, the same newspaper informed readers about the death of Felicidade dos Santos, an African-born woman, aged eighty years and a peddler, deceased of tuberculosis on July 20. On August 12, 1877, another announcement publicized that Felismina, a freed African woman, single, peddler, fifty years old, had died of beriberi on July 28. Brazilian-born enslaved young women also worked as street sellers. On May 10, 1878, the newspaper O Guarany informed readers that two days earlier Guilhermina, a twenty-two-year-old enslaved woman street vendor, identified as parda (mixed-race), had died of variola.49 Until the abolition of slavery in 1888, these newspapers continued to feature announcements that confirmed the importance of bondswomen street vendors in Salvador.