The Historical Background on Black Eye Peas.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?

Wanda J. Ravernell, Special to The Chronicle

When I was young, dinnertime on New Year's Day was a showdown, a staring contest between me and the black-eyed peas looking back at me from my plate.

"Eat them for luck," my mother would say.

Why couldn't it be that the ham was luck? Or the greens?

The Southern custom of serving black-eyed peas, collard greens, and ham or some part of the hog on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day reaches back to West African traditions. During slavery, it became an African American tradition and the custom continued after emancipation - when New Year's Day was also called Emancipation Day.

My mother says she was a Johnny-come-lately to the ritual. A seamstress in a factory in downtown Philadelphia, she picked it up from overhearing her co-workers discuss their recipes and methods. What she paid most attention to, she said, was the meaning of the meal.

"They said they cooked and ate black-eyed peas for luck for the year," she says. "And I needed all the luck I could get."

Perhaps I came to it late myself because I have such a visceral memory of being 11 years old sitting at the table, letting my luck grow cold. There was nothing appetizing about them. As their name implied, they looked like a pile of cooked eyes. I pretended to eat some, but they really went on the floor under my seat.

Within a few years I was off to college and into a life of my own, not getting within sight of a black-eyed pea for decades.

I had no idea that my New Year's Day dinnertime trauma might have been worse. Some people cook black-eyed peas and rice together, a dish called hoppin' John. Had I been born a generation earlier or even just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, I would have been eating meat much lower on the hog: pig's feet and ham hocks, neck bones and hog maws - or something that combined them into a loaf called souse or hog's head cheese.

"You ate (that) or you didn't eat at all" on New Year's Day, says semi-retired vocalist Autris Paige, who was born and raised in Oakland to Southern parents.

The hog's head cheese was prepared in an almost reverential way. "The people from the church came over. And they gathered around it and prayed," he says.

The ritual symbolism of the meal for African Americans is linked to the New Year's Eve church service called Watch Night, a tradition originated by Methodists, where people gathered to pray for the coming year. For African Americans, free and slave alike, New Year's Day was when laws that had been passed in the previous year that might especially impact them went into effect.

They worried when the Fugitive Slave Act went into effect on Jan. 1, 1850, rejoiced on Jan. 1, 1863, when slavery ended. Until emancipation, they would vicariously celebrate the end of slavery with Haiti's independence in 1804 and Jamaica in 1839.

Thus, Jan. 1 came to be seen not just as New Year's Day, but Emancipation Day, with attendant parades and festivities, "a black people's Fourth of July," according to slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Tradition lives on

Many of those celebrations began to die out in the first 20 years of the 20th century, especially in the northern and western United States, but the custom of the meal survived.
"Historically, we celebrate because we were freed on that day," says Lawrence VanHook, adjunct professor of ethnic studies at Laney College in Oakland. "And we celebrate with our traditional eating habits," he says of the black-eyed peas, greens and pork meal. "We eat that as a symbol of where God has brought us from."

Unfortunately, VanHook says, "We have kept the celebration, but not the message."

The association with freedom notwithstanding, black-eyed peas and hog meat have been associated with luck, health and prosperity among various cultures for hundreds of years.
The Yoruba people of West Africa make ground black-eyed peas into fritters fit for the traditional goddess of the wind, Oya. Called acara, it is a filling snack sold by street vendors in Nigeria.

In the anthology "African Roots/American Cultures" (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), editor Sheila S. Walker notes that ritual meals of beans, rice and "non-noble" pork served on New Year's Day were common throughout the African diaspora. Black-eyed peas, also known as cowpeas, were also favorites of the West African Wolof and Senegambian groups, the likely ancestors of captives who came to the United States as slaves.

Essential meal
However this humble meal came to be, adherents feel strongly about it.

"It's what you do. You don't even think about it," says Bay Area TV personality Belva Davis, who serves gumbo with the standard fare. It is so ingrained that when she was vacationing in the Bahamas with her husband, William Moore, on New Year's Day about 10 years ago with no prospects for the de rigueur black-eyed peas and greens, they were perturbed.

But Moore got a whiff of a familiar scent and wandered to the resort's next floor to find its source. "There were two young women from Chicago and they had greens and black-eyed peas and were cooking them on a hot plate," Moore recalls. The four wound up spending the day together and even made hot water cornbread in a skillet.

Carolyn Patton, a homegrown San Franciscan whose family is from Louisiana, says she's noted a variation on the custom in Northern California.

"You go places and people give you little bundles of (dry) black-eyed peas instead of eating them," she says, adding that some people are so attached it became "a scary thing" not to have them on New Year's Day.

Ajuan Mence, a Mills College English professor from Long Island, N.Y., says that when she was in college there were two groups of people - those whose parents still ate those lucky foods and those, like her parents, who had begun to distance themselves from them.

Her Southern parents didn't really understand the significance of what they gave up, she says.
"They grew up with it," she says of the lucky food custom. "It's not as important to them. My generation is trying to recover it. You have to stop seeing it as just what you do every day, but as what constitutes culture."

This year, I'll have something else to celebrate. I don't know what President-elect Barack Obama and his family will be eating on New Year's Day, or on Jan. 20, when he is sworn in. But, I'll be eating black-eyed peas for my ancestors, with gratitude, and this time, also with joy.