winter drives to markets. The fictional Forresters in Rawlings’sThe Year-
lingmay illustrate a historical reality several ways. Herdsmen were men,
after all, and the Forresters are an overwhelmingly masculine clan illus-
trating practically every genteel objection to piney-woods crackers: Their
grooming and dress are scraggly at best; they are loud-talking boasters,
gamblers, and drunken joy-makers. When not lounging, they are on horse-
back, wreaking havoc for play or engaged in the serious and probably lucra-
tive business of roundups and drives. Such men, one might logically cal-
culate, spent cash from cattle, pig, or horse sales on meat (read pork),
meal, and molasses—the notorious three-M diet of the age of pellagra. The
youngest of the Forresters, the crippled boy, Fodderwing, dies young, al-
though there is not a remote suggestion of pellagra. Fodderwing’s older
brothers, however, might have been candidates for dietary distress and dis-
ease, given their high mobility and disinclination to dig in the earth. But
no, the Forresters are actually quite robust. Rawlings does not detail the
Forresters’ provender, but I think it significant that this herdsmen’s house-
hold was (de facto) headed by a woman, the matriarch who, like Rawlings
herself and almost all southern women, beginning with the original ones,
was very likely a gardener. Women almost certainly produced and prepared
the vegetables that balanced and enriched the meat, meal, and molasses
for many generations. Historians have written much of such peoples’ very
masculine public economy but little of their private, feminine, and sustain-
ing one.
tAs much as shelter, the garden is home, another room, as it were, ex-
tending from kitchen and hearth. Open to the sky, such rooms nonetheless
required walls to protect plants from foraging varmints, deer, bear, cattle,
and hogs, not to mention meandering dogs. Walls might have been similar
to palisades of wood or cane among natives and then frontiering Euro- and
Afro-southerners. Later they would be more conventional fences, like the
one the fictional Jody heightened against Flag, the yearling, in Rawlings’s
novel. Later still, when varmints were scarce, deer and bear were gone or
distant, and domestic animals were penned, more gardens were unfenced.
Yet rooms many of them remained, by design, especially among black coun-
try folks.^14
West African people maintained protected exterior spaces near their
houses, for gardens and for outdoor chores and relaxation. These may or
may not have been remembered by descendants of forced migrants to
North America. Certainly the climates of the southeastern United States