The Cowpea in Radicle Ecologies

Abstract A legume originally hailing from Africa, the cowpea sojourned across the Atlantic in slave ships and circulated in Caribbean provision grounds before becoming a staple of Black Southern food culture. This article analyzes literary and cultural works by Black authors in the US South—Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899), George Washington Carver's early twentieth-century writings at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, and Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men (1935)—to demonstrate how the cowpea foments what the author terms a “radicle ecology”: the power of its leguminous roots to replenish soils and thus foster radical resistance to plantation structures. This radicle ecology marks a broader ecological praxis of Black world making and storytelling that nourishes the soil and, in turn, the community in service of liberatory presents and futures. Bringing together scholarship in Black ecologies, plant studies, and the environmental humanities, this transnational analysis of the cowpea counteracts colonial historiographies by turning to the cowpea as a shaper of Black abolitionist and narrative imaginaries.