![]() Squirrels also seemed to have a special hunger for them, she added. She appreciates the hard-to-find, often flat and creasy tomato for its lower acidity, prolific fruit production that can make trellises sag under the weight, and how it makes a substantial slab for a sandwich. After seeing the Aunt Lou’s Underground Railroad tomato in the Southern Exposure Seed Exchange database, Mitchell added it to the inventory of Truelove Seeds, a company that partners with 50 farms nationwide to produce seeds. Among the seeds she offers are the large, curvy cushaw squash that her North Carolina ancestors grew a Caribbean tomato that may have been carried to the US by migrants fleeing the Haitian Revolution and a fish pepper collected by the early 20th-century folk artist Horace Pippin. ![]() Still, an ever-expanding host of farmers, seed keepers and historians have dedicated their work to excavating, whenever possible, how Black Americans stewarded and preserved plants.Īmirah Mitchell, one such excavator, is the founder of Sistah Seeds, a farm that grows and sells seeds of cultural import to African diasporic communities. Documenting the lives of African Americans, who were denied in slavery three things that make people more “trackable” – surnames, property ownership and literacy – often leads to a maddeningly long list of dead ends. Millwood’s move cemented the pinkish beefsteak tomato’s place in history as one of the few vegetable varieties whose name references, however obliquely, slavery or Black contributions to what we grow and eat.Īunt Lou’s Underground Railroad tomato illustrates the difficulty of constructing a more inclusive and accurate historical record. Black workers tilled the land, but white Americans have typically gotten credit for importing, breeding and cultivating crops that became critical to the US diet and economy. Despite centuries of forced farming that transitioned into sharecropping and other exploitative labor systems, few plants bear the names of the Black Americans who stewarded flora and fauna in fields and provisioning grounds. Millwood, who was white, suggested adding the “Underground Railroad” part to reflect the anti-slavery activity in the plant’s apparent home ground, and to acknowledge how enslaved people helped build the nation’s agricultural wealth in captivity. At some point, the Kentucky tomato guru Gary Millwood proposed a revision of the plant’s name to fellow seed keepers who knew of the variety.
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