Beer, “Waste,” and One Enslaved Women’s Currency in the Lower Mississippi Valley

This article examines the life of Marton, an enslaved woman living in eighteenth-century Louisiana. Through her biography, this article uncovers how women of African descent developed marketplaces using the leftovers of the plantation economy. Marton produced beer from scavenged rice. She sold her beer so successfully that enslavers eventually allowed her to sell it outside of the plantation setting. Her materials—fragments of grain—enslavers considered “waste,” yet she repurposed the kernels into a commodity, thus opening a narrow avenue of increased autonomy within a repressive slave regime. This work broadens historiographies in economic and women’s histories as well as studies of enslavement, revealing how enslaved women adapted to material scarcity.