Thinking about slavery as vocational training
and a poster mentioned that a relative of theirs always hired Black help because they knew how to cook from a heritage of cooking as slaves.
My grandmother Anderson, who was white, was taken out of school when she was in second grade and put to work in her stepmother's boarding house. She learned to cook good food (I can attest to this!) in quantity, how to serve it and clean up afterward. As a child, she could make light biscuits and savory gravy, salt-rising bread and fried pies (for the railroad men who were the main clientele of the boarding house) to be taken along in a lunch pail.
She learned how to clean house and wash, starch and iron mountains of sheets and the underwear and socks of men who were going to be back in a couple of days. And understand, this was with a washboard and a cake of lye soap, in a cauldron of boiling water over a coal stove in the basement. The dirt she was washing out was coal dirt, which is foul and gets up your nose and makes your boogers black.
She hauled buckets of coal to keep the furnace going and cleaned the windows weekly because of the filth the coal put on them..
She worked like a dog, morning to night.
When she was 16, my grandfather, an engineer for the C&O, stayed at the boarding house, and they fell in love, and he rescued her.
Had she been a Black, enslaved woman, her work might have been similar; her being deprived of an education certainly was--although she had learned to read--and there would have been no rescue.
Further, she worked for her family's business--the owner was, after all, her stepmother--and she was not beaten or otherwise physically mistreated (other than being made to work starting at age 7). IOW, she went to Vo-Tech, too, just like those lucky slaves who were being trained for careers! The slaves, I guess, had the added benefit of job security for life.
= new reply since forum marked as read
??? Not really. How better to preserve their culture?
