Writers are always uncovering nuggets of neat info when researching a story or novel. Thought I’d share a few of mine in this ongoing series.
I stumbled upon this one while researching Seed, my upcoming historical thriller. Part of the book takes place on a plantation outside Savannah, Georgia in the early 1800’s. Two slaves, Mattie and Henry, play a pivotal role in the book.
Reading and studying about slavery during that time, I ran across a project called “The Slave Narratives”. It was undertaken during the Great Depression by the National Writers’ Project in which they interviewed over 2300 former slaves about their lives in bondage. In a portion of those narratives, the ex-slaves detailed how they would resist their captivity. One such story caught my eye and made me laugh at it’s sheer audacity.
It seems that the slaves on one plantation were given little to eat, and as a result were just shy of starvation. “They ribs would kinder rustle against each other like corn stalks a-drying in the hot winds”, said Josie Jordan, once a slave on that Tennessee plantation.
Now it seems that the master of the plantation had seven fat hogs ready for killing, and told the slaves to see to the butchering. But the day before the hogs were to be killed, one of the field hands ran to the master, yelling that something terrible had happened. “The hogs is all died. Now they won’t be any meats for the winter.”
Fuming, the master hurried to investigate. He found a group of slaves standing around seven dead hogs, looking devastated at the lose of all that meat. The hogs, presumably, had died of an illness.
“What killed them?” the master asked, and one of the slaves answered solemnly, “Malitis.” And the slaves shied away from the hogs, acting like they wanted nothing to do with diseased, contaminated meat.
Old master is upset, but tells the slaves to dress the hogs anyway, as there’s no more meat on the farm. But he’ll be damned if he’ll eat the meat from critters that have died from malitis, or serve it to his family. He tells the slaves they can have the meat if they want it.
Josie says her mama would laugh, remembering. “Don’t you-all know what is malitis?”, her mama would say. “One of the strongest Negroes got up early in the morning, long before the rising horn called the slaves from their cabins. He skitted to the hog pen with a heavy mallet. When he tapped Mister Hog between the eyes with that mallet, ‘malitis’ set in mighty quick.”
And that’s how seven fat hogs with ‘malatis’ wound up feeding seventy hungry slaves.
