The fare of the field hands was, of course, far more simple.  Hoecake and bacon were its basis and often its whole content.  But in summer fruit and vegetables were frequent; there was occasional game and fish at all seasons; and the first heavy frost of winter brought the festival of hog-killing time.  While the shoulders, sides, hams and lard were saved, all other parts of the porkers were distributed for prompt consumption.  Spare ribs and backbone, jowl and feet, souse and sausage, liver and chitterlings greased every mouth on the plantation; and the crackling-bread, made of corn meal mixed with the crisp tidbits left from the trying of the lard, carried fullness to repletion.  Christmas and the summer lay-by brought recreation, but the hog-killing brought fat satisfaction.[1]

[Footnote 1:  This account of plantation homesteads and dietary is drawn mainly from the writer’s own observations in post-bellum times in which, despite the shifting of industrial arrangements and the decrease of wealth, these phases have remained apparent.  Confirmation may be had in Philip Fithian Journal (Princeton, 1900); A. de Puy Van Buren, Jottings of a Year’s Sojourn in the South (Battle Creek, Mich., 1859); Susan D. Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter (Baltimore, 1887); Mary B. Chestnutt, A Diary from Dixie (New York, 1905); and many other memoirs and traveller’s accounts.]

The warmth of the climate produced some distinctive customs.  One was the high seasoning of food to stimulate the appetite; another was the afternoon siesta of summer; a third the wellnigh constant leaving of doors ajar even in winter when the roaring logs in the chimney merely took the chill from the draughts.  Indeed a door was not often closed on the plantation except those of the negro cabins, whose inmates were hostile to night air, and those of the storerooms.  As a rule, it was only in the locks of the latter that keys were ever turned by day or night.

The lives of the whites and the blacks were partly segregate, partly intertwined.  If any special link were needed, the children supplied it.  The whites ones, hardly knowing their mothers from their mammies or their uncles by blood from their “uncles” by courtesy, had the freedom of the kitchen and the cabins, and the black ones were their playmates in the shaded sandy yard the livelong day.  Together they were regaled with folklore in the quarters, with Bible and fairy stories in the “big house,” with pastry in the kitchen, with grapes at the scuppernong arbor, with melons at the spring house and with peaches in the orchard.  The half-grown boys were likewise almost as undiscriminating among themselves as the dogs with which they chased rabbits by day and ’possums by night.  Indeed, when the fork in the road of life was reached, the white youths found something to envy in the freedom of their fellows’ feet from the cramping weight of shoes and the freedom of their minds from the restraints of school.  With the approach of maturity came routine and responsibility for the whites, routine alone for the generality of the blacks.  Some of the males of each race grew into ruffians, others into gentlemen in the literal sense, some of the females into viragoes, others into gentlewomen; but most of both races and sexes merely became plain, wholesome folk of a somewhat distinctive plantation type.