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This introduction provides a historical background on the transition of African Americans who worked on the Eastern Shore of Maryland from slave labor to wage labor. It establishes a sense of place and offers a brief history of the society and economy of the Eastern Shore between settlement and the American Revolution. It discusses the role of the waterways of the Delmarva Peninsula, whose regional economy was tied to shipping and boating, in the economic and social development of the Eastern Shore from settlement to the present. It also considers how the Eastern Shore made the transition from tobacco production to mixed agriculture, along with the role played by slave labor in the trend toward agricultural diversification. Finally, it examines how Eastern Shore slaves got their first meaningful chance to escape slavery and how the integration of the Eastern Shore in the global grain market contributed to the rise of black freedom.

Although the end of Prohibition has brought about one civil liberty, many individual rights were still being trampled — namely, those of the American Negro. Throughout the 1930s, the Ku Klux Klan regrouped and public lynching increased, but the atrocities remained unchecked by the Roosevelt Administration. In 1931 and 1932, two horrific lynchings on Maryland's Eastern Shore prompted Mencken to write some of his strongest columns against the subject, resulting in the Baltimore Sun being censored and Mencken himself receiving death threats. Not to be deterred, Mencken joined the NAACP to campaign for the Costigan-Wagner Bill to put an end to lynching.

This is a book about the taste of place and the styles and stories of cooking that define it. It is a book about how people talk about their lives and their histories through the stories that flow from field, marsh, kitchen, and table. This is also a book about tradition—the human process of making sense and discovering invention through experience lived, remembered, imagined. This book contains recipes, recollections, instructions, and insights about a universe of food. It taps into local histories, natural histories, material histories, and oral histories. It is about discovery through the worlds we eat and absorb into our bodies and memories. Most of all it is a book about the stories people tell about what they eat and why it holds meaning—not just for them but for all those folks who sit at their table—and at other tables in other places near and far. It is a book about how the taste of place expresses a love of place. This book originates in a particular place, but it resonates with foodways far beyond its borders. The place in question is the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

This book concludes with a summary of the topics discussed in each chapter. It considers emancipation in the early republic within the context of America's transition to a free labor system, as well as how white Marylanders developed expectations for free labor and slavery that would last to and through the Civil War. It examines how the transition from slave labor to free labor on the Eastern Shore gave rise to a free African American community with more social layers than one might expect in a rural society. It also assesses the impact of commercial agriculture on the lives and attitudes of free African American workers, along with the laws enacted by Maryland to force free African Americans into wage dependence and deny them the right to rise above their hireling status. Finally, it shows that slaves and free African Americans did not act as a single “community” and that their interests diverged with the transition from slavery to freedom.

The closing chapter pulls together the many strands of foodways that continue to define the Eastern Shore of Virginia as a distinct and distinctive terroir. The chapter begins with an African American church menu and turns to a group of award-winning contemporary chefs for their reactions to the listed fare. Every menu is much more than the itemized listing it provides. Menus are invitations to invention through pairings and juxtapositions. They are a literature where individual items speak to the expertise of the cook and the expectations of the diner. Menus are the most optimistic of all literary forms. They are about art and gratification.

This chapter examines the impact of economic recession on the wartime grain trade on the Eastern Shore in general and on rural free African Americans in particular. It first considers the response of planters to recession, such as joining the Maryland Agricultural Society, resettling in the Deep South, and selling surplus slaves to the new class of interstate slave traders. It shows that the economic crisis restricted trade and finance, resulting in unemployment, underemployment, and limited employment opportunities for free African Americans. Reduced wages and chronic underemployment forced many urban African Americans and their families to seek public assistance. The chapter also discusses the increase in racial violence during the period and how the recession affected the structure and development of African American neighborhoods.

This chapter explores the long arc of the modern oyster pie from its origins in 16^th-century England to its place as a fallback mainstay of the Eastern Shore of Virginia diet. Through storytelling, oral history, documentary evidence, and recipes, it places oyster pie in the heyday of the oyster industry and the multitude of oyster recipes from the turn of the 20^th century, many published in cookbooks and newspaper columns. The challenge embedded in pursuit of oyster pie is in negotiating the balance between those that were “ordinary” and those that were “precious.” With the archaeology of oyster pie sorted and recipes collected, the chapter turns to the creative work of contemporary chefs related to cuisine and terroir.

This chapter looks at the contemporary rise of Latin American foodways on the Eastern Shore of Virginia through the lens of an evolving terroir and cuisine. The chapter begins with an Eastern Shore Guatemalan mutton barbacoa, pursues the narrative of Hog Island rare breed sheep associated with the natural and cultural history of Virginia's barrier islands, and concludes with how one family finds its own traditions, terroir, and cuisine in a new home.

This chapter examines the employment opportunities that were available to free African Americans in the Eastern Shore's agricultural society. It first considers how the steady demand for wage labor in various industries created opportunities for laborers and allowed many African Americans to seize the opportunities made available to them by an expanding labor market. It then challenges the notion that Maryland developed a “dual labor system” in the early nineteenth century, and instead argues that its labor system consisted of free, slave, and semifree workers. This “mixed labor system” is a more accurate reflection of the complexity of labor relations between planters and their former slaves during the period. The chapter concludes with a discussion of free African Americans' experience with wage work and freedom.

This chapter focuses on the African Methodist Episcopal Church and its meaning for free men and women in rural Maryland. Founded in 1816 by Reverend Richard Allen in collaboration with other African American Christians from across the Middle Atlantic states, the AME Church on the Eastern Shore expressed the values, culture, and experience of a distinct group of free African Americans while reinforcing their membership in a regional community. This chapter examines how the AME Church gained worship communities on the Eastern Shore through evangelism and how Methodism, along with Catholics and Quakers, contributed to the religious education of African Americans. It also considers the AME Church's denunciation of slavery and concludes with a discussion of the role played by the men and women who participated in rural prayer classes in propagating the AME mission.

This chapter examines the experience of migrant workers as well as the meaning of migration for African American laborers. It considers how migration contributed to rural African Americans' sense of belonging to a larger regional community that extended from the Eastern Shore to Philadelphia and Baltimore and beyond. It also discusses the impact of gradual manumission on the government's efforts to manage the mobility of unfree laborers in an otherwise unregulated labor market, along with the steps taken by Maryland whites to distinguish legitimately free workers from enslaved workers earning wages for slaveholders, including the introduction of Certificates of Freedom or “freedom papers”.

This chapter examines the legal regime created by the Maryland legislature to force free African Americans into wage dependence and how it was used by Eastern Shore planters to their advantage. It considers the unrelated criminal and civil laws, collectively known as the Black Codes, introduced by Maryland to define the legal status of free African Americans while reinforcing the racial hierarchy. It shows that the Maryland government legislated dependence by denying African Americans the right to pursue economic self-sufficiency. It also discusses the laws on vagrancy and apprenticeships used by the local government as a legal tool to extract labor from free African Americans and ensure their subordination to white masters. Finally, it explores how free African Americans secured the services of the local government to protect their own investments on the Eastern Shore.

This chapter describes Douglass’s life from his birth until his move to Baltimore as a young child. It describes his exposure both to the religion of local slaves and the proslavery Christianity of local masters. The chapter also details Douglass’s earliest encounters with evil and suffering, and how those encounters shaped the foundation of his religious outlook

Sarah Elizabeth Wright was a radical writer committed to leftist, anti-racist and feminist politics. Her novel draws on these commitments to imagine the layers of rejection experienced by southern black women workers in Maryland. Climates of rejection problematize the exclusionary legacies of the New Deal’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program. The narrative affects challenge social discourses that pathologized poor black women’s reproduction in order to deny them a place in the national body politic and the national family. When the novel places the laboring mother and her family in the laps of readers, Wright therefore poses crucial questions for her time: how responsible are we for inherited conditions and will we continue to reject our kin?

This chapter goes over the history of Fredrick Douglass’s early life, especially his fight with and escape from Edward Covey, the slave breaker. It starts with his birth on Maryland’s treacherous Eastern Shore and delves into his time as a slave and the time he was forced to serve Covey. It chronicles his escape from slavery in a context of uncertainty as well as some of the interesting views that derived from his ability to read and educate himself. The chapter then goes on to show how Douglass’s background as a law-breaker informed his political views and how lawbreaking contributes to slaves’ process of becoming free. Douglass recognized the imperative authority of the law while understanding that each individual has sovereignty over himself or herself.