sometimes purposefully introduced—seeds and seedlings for familiar Eu-
ropean field crops, kitchen gardens, and ornamentals—but most species
were introduced inadvertently, clinging to bedding, clothes, and bagging,
but also clinging to domestic animals’ hides or surviving journeys through
animals’ alimentary canals. One visualizes cows browsing among American
tidewater marsh grasses, simultaneously plopping European plant seeds
in their meandering paths, or swine rooting and devouring tender shoots
on forest floors, leaving behind in hog-plowed ground a variety of foreign
plants buried in fertilizer. What emerged, principally, was ‘‘weeds,’’ that
is, opportunistic, fast-growing plants that healed an earth much disturbed
by teeming herds, squadrons, flocks, and packs. The weeds soon became
ubiquitous, as they remain today: dandelion, plantain, nightshade, black
henbane, white clover, Saint-John’s-wort, barberry, corn cockle, cress, and
a host of others, including a grass later (and imperially) named Kentucky
bluegrass. One can hardly visualize the stunning conquest by Eurasian flora
throughout humid eastern North America and on to the plains and deserts
of the West and Mexico without the agency of invading domestic animals.
All the animals listed above figured in transformations of southern land-
scapes. Many country people kept at least a few sheep, for instance, for
wool, and a few spots of the region supported considerable numbers, with
predictably resulting bare, gnawed-away hills. Goats were not much fa-
vored. Cattle were, as already seen, very important. But the South was really
the region of the hog. Their numbers amaze, still, and are reflected well in
human culture. Until recently, ‘‘meat’’ in the South meant pork. (Beef was
beef.) To be in ‘‘hog heaven’’—an old southern exultation—suggests every
sensual gratification. ‘‘High on the hog’’ is ambition—not that pigs’ feet
were scorned. Best of all was the whole skinned and cleaned hog, cooked
for many hours outside over an open pit filled with the charcoal of hickory
and basted lovingly with a perfect sauce of vinegar and red peppers. The
next day entire extended families or neighborhoods or congregations or
hordes of sovereign voters might ‘‘pull’’ the pork in celebration. The meat
would be tender—some juicy, some (‘‘outside meat’’) crisp—all of it sub-
lime. This was, of course, ‘‘barbeque,’’ the European and African American-
ization of a native Caribbean word and grilling apparatus imported, in all
likelihood, by the Spanish. The word, the fuel, and the peppers essential to
basting and sauce are native—unless the peppers are of African origin; the
animal and vinegar are European, rendering the most magnificent hybrid
imaginable, beyond the blending of the three peoples themselves. Barbe-
que is pork (never beef, unforgivably never chicken), and it is as much as