raising commodity prices; so the -odd percent of farmland still under cul-
tivation became too valuable to subdivide into gardens. A reduced and des-
perate rural workforce—sharecroppers were legally the same as laborers—
meant that landlords were also emboldened to forbid gardens again and
to reopen or persist with their stores and commissaries.^11
The New Deal and the organized chaos of the war brought about the
structural changes that ultimately erased pellagra and other ills of the
South’s grossly unbalanced postbellum system. Federal regulations and
subsidies and the introduction of tractors, cotton-harvesting machines,
and combines rendered big agriculture in the region more like Califor-
nia’s than the dying sharecropping regime. By , too, more than mil-
lion southerners had left the South, and a roughly comparable number had
moved from rural areas or mill towns to southern cities. Southerners, at
home or abroad in the land, had become an urban people at last. And cities
(and, later, suburbs too) are where the food is.
Finally, pellagra’s place in southern history may be properly viewed, I
think, as yet another long-reaching result of defeat in the Civil War, which
(as we have already observed) led to an overreliance on production of com-
modities extracted from the earth, the overrunning of the old commons
by the powerful, and the enormous expansion of the poor population. The
era of pellagra, ca. –—also the era of Jim Crow and of Dixie dema-
gogues, among other pathologies—was a long storm of disequilibrium in
the South’s history, the worst altogether since Europeans infected the na-
tives and created the derelict landscapes of . Pellagra and complemen-
tary ills of diet were not inevitable, not unpreventable, and hardly the norm,
rather the opposite.
tEighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century southerners, on the trails to
resettle former native countries, often outran bountiful supplies of food.
They depended on game, bread from meal brought along, and whatever
new frontier landscapes presented. Depending on their circumstances and
the time of year emigration took place, migrants’ provender may have been
monotonous and unbalanced, notably by the absence of fresh vegetables.
Southerners have always loved vegetables, the more variety the better. Sweet
potatoes (rich in vitamin C) thrived in southern soils and climate, and they
were ubiquitous in fireplace or campfire ashes or simmering in boiling
pots. Southerners loved peas and beans of every sort and, like the natives,
commonly planted them among corn. Turnips, both the nutritious green
tops and the tubers, were also popular. Yellow summer squashes were com-