New Year Luck and the Black-Eyed Pea
While many plantation owners relied heavily on the agricultural knowledge, labor organization, and crop‑specific skills of enslaved people, owners and contemporary histories often minimize, ignore, or reframe that expertise.The History
This post is about the cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), also called the field pea or black-eyed pea, because of its distinctive black spot that resembles an eye. The back-eyed pea is one of several indigenous African legumes (beans) and is considered one of the most important legumes consumed across much of sub-Saharan Africa. Often remembered today as a symbol of luck, the bean is eaten on New Year’s Day alongside greens and cornbread. Yet this familiar tradition masks a much deeper and more complex history. Long before it appeared on Southern tables, the cowpea black-eyed pea was an African crop embedded in systems of farming, trade, and spirituality. Tracing the journey of the black-eyed pea reveals how African knowledge and foodways survived enslavement, crossed the Atlantic, and became foundational to New World agriculture and cuisine.
The black-eyed pea was originally domesticated near Lake Chad in Africa, spreading westward and southward with the Bantu migrations into central and southern Africa, eventually reaching the Americas via the transatlantic slave trade (Twitty 2012:21). Black-eyed peas occur in a variety of seed colors (blue, black, white, black eyed, speckled, and red) and can be made into stews, fritters, or flours, but more typically are boiled, seasoned, and served with a porridge made from cooked grains (Twitty 2012:23). The history of consuming cowpeas is very old; there is evidence for rice and cowpeas cooked together dating back 3,500 years (Twitty 2012:22). Other black-eyed pea dishes include sinan kussak from the Diola region of Senegal, waakye, a snack dish or spicy rice and beans from Ghana, and yoo ke omo, or black-eyed peas and grains, consumed by the Ga people, a non-Akan group from coastal Ghana (Twitty 2012: 22).
During the Atlantic slave trade, as well through other conquests, migrations, and trade, the black-eyed pea was introduced to the Americas, Europe, and Asia. But, how did the black-eyed pea actually get here to the United States? In part it was an intentional crop brought to supply New World plantations, but staples carried aboard slave ships, including yams, cassava, maize, cowpeas, rice, millet, and peanuts, also served as provisions for the enslaved cargo on the Middle Passage. The infamous “slabber sauce” served aboard slave ships, made from palm oil or lard with grains or tubers boiled into mush and, when available, horsebeans, pigeon peas, or black-eyed peas, lightly salted and spiced with melegeta or chili, was intended to provide sustenance to keep the cargo alive, but not necessarily nourishment (Twitty 2012:26).
Once in the New World, black‑eyed peas, along with rice and other beans, became popular crops on plantations. Plantations, or what we could call slave labor camps, were capitalist ventures meant to produce cash crops for sale on the market. Thus, economic prosperity depended on the plantation’s success. While early labor often relied on indentured servitude, by the 1600s, slave labor became the dominant form of labor on plantations, supplied via the transatlantic slave trade. The use of chattel slavery, a system in which enslaved individuals are considered the legal property of their owners, was particularly brutal. When we discuss slavery and plantations, the plantation’s success and the credit given to particular owners are often overstated, while enslaved people are portrayed merely as the labor force, a narrative that wrongly separates their bodies from their agricultural knowledge and expertise. Before explaining that more, I want to consider a related misconception about gender and farming.
When archaeologists explored the origins of domestication, there was a tendency to attribute the role of farmer to men (see Dismantling the “Man the Hunter” Myth). The stereotyped model holds that, in hunter‑gatherer societies, men were hunters and women were gatherers, and that when agriculture developed men suddenly became the agricultural specialists. This view assumes two falsehoods: (1) that men were better suited to hard labor such as hunting and later farming, and (2) that women had millennia of plant knowledge yet were displaced once plants became central. However, these gendered theories do not hold up under scrutiny (read more here).
Returning to the main story, the idea that plantation owners had the managerial skill and that enslaved people were merely unskilled laborers who simply executed orders, discounts the very real, and very important role of African knowledge in this success. Senegambians, skilled in growing multiple cash crops, fishing, pastoralism, and hunting, were considered by colonial slavers to be ideal enslaved persons because of these same abilities. Senegambians composed much of the early African presence in Spanish America. By the mid‑seventeenth century, 88 percent of enslaved Afro‑Mexicans were of Senegambian origin (Twitty 2012:25). Wherever Senegambians settled, rice and bean cultivation and consumption followed. Their agricultural knowledge, including expertise on seed selection, planting and water management, pest control, harvesting, storage, and local adaptations, was instrumental to the development and success of cash‑crop plantations throughout the West Indies, North America, Spanish America, and Brazil (Twitty 2012: 25-27). However, while many plantation owners relied heavily on the agricultural knowledge, labor organization, and crop‑specific skills of enslaved people, owners and contemporary histories often minimized, ignored, or reframed that expertise. This erasure served ideological purposes: it justified slavery by denying the humanity, agency, and technical competence of enslaved people and it bolstered the planter’s claim to credit and profit.
Separate from a crop grown on plantations, the foodways of black-eyed peas, like rice and other beans, continued to evolve in the Americas. Ongoing trade between islands and the mainland introduced new ingredients and influences, producing a wide variety of rice‑and‑bean dishes in the enslaved societies throughout the Americas (Twitty 2012: 27). Through time, the black-eyed pea, has become a symbol of the long process of cultural negotiation and creolization that blended African, European, and American influences and shaped the culinary and social worlds of the African Atlantic and African America (Twitty 2012:33).
Despite the use of black-eyed peas as a food source on the Middle Passage and the brutality of the slave trade and plantation life, the cultural and culinary importance of the back-eyed pea has persisted. This leads to the next part of the black-eyed pea’s story: why black‑eyed peas are eaten on New Year’s Day for good luck, along with greens (collard, mustard, turnip), which symbolize money or financial growth, cornbread or corn muffins to represent gold, and pork as a symbol of progress (pigs root forward, not backward).
The connection to New Years; however, is less clear. Folk stories tell that the New Year’s tradition started after the Civil War when peas became a crucial food source for enslaved people as Union troops had left black‑eyed peas in Southern fields, dismissing them as livestock feed; this coming to symbolize survival and hope. In another account, formerly enslaved people ate black‑eyed peas to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Whatever the origin, the common thread is that peas were read as symbols of good luck and survival. But the origins of the black-eye pea as a symbol of luck and fortune likely has even deeper roots. Before coming to the Americas, black-eyed pea had deep cultural significance in many African societies. They carried symbolic, mythological, and spiritual meanings for particular communities. In Senegambia, for example, black-eyed peas stood for divine protection, good fortune, and survival in times of hardship; they were often placed on ancestral altars and offered to spirits (Twitty 2012: 21).
It is harder to answer the why on New Year’s part of the tradition. New Year’s superstitions have European were brought to the American South by settlers. Over time, these traditions merged, and by the nineteenth century eating black‑eyed peas on New Year’s Day as a good‑luck ritual had become common (Twitty 2012 and in this article). However, it is important to note that Meso and South American societies, before contact, also had new year rituals, many of which involved food (in other words, it is not so straight forward, yay archaeology!).
Today, the black-eyed pea has seen a resurgence in importance. Long used as a staple and famine reserve crop in many African societies, modern agricultural research in the Americas has begun exploring the future of the black-eyed pea for its role in climate‑resilient farming systems.
The Recipes
For New Year’s Day, we made Blue Corn Bread and Three-Bean Black-Eyed Pea Greek insipired salad (because it sounded good). The cornbread recipe followed Alton Brown’s recipe (but with blue corn meal from Whole Foods) https://altonbrown.com/recipes/new-years-southern-style-the-cornbread/ and were insired by this NYT recipe https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015866-3-bean-good-luck-salad-with-cumin-vinaigrette
Happy New Year!
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