I still remember New Year’s Day mornings (afternoons) riding from Oakland to my Gran’s house in Hayward to eat black eyed peas. It wasn’t a thing I looked forward to. Black eyed peas are gross, at least thats how I used to feel, and I just didn’t understand why they’d be worthy of such pomp and circumstance. But now I look back in gratitude for having been raised in a family that values and honors tradition.

Why do we eat black eyed peas on New Year’s Day though? As a kid I got answers like, “It’s for good luck” and “if you eat humble on New Years Day, you’ll eat like a King for the rest of the year.” But it wasn’t until later in my adult years that I got the real breakdown of Black Folks’ (and southern whites) obsession with black eyed peas.

First, a bit about black eyed peas. Black eyed peas, or cow peas, came to the America’s from West Africa with enslaved Africans. In fact, at theJOYproject we grow a strain of black eyed pea that has been grown by the same family (the Ezelle family) for generations and traveled here braided in the hair of an Ezelle family matriarch. The Ezelle family calls them fisheye peas but whatever you call them, when dried, they’re little beige colored peas with a black iris shaped circle in the middle. Now an iconic American food available on most every major grocer’s store shelves, black eyed peas are indigenous to Africa and weren’t always recognized by mainstream/white culture. Prior to the civil war they were grown as a food source for livestock which, in the eyes of Europeans, included enslaved Africans. George Washington Carver would later help popularize the BEP in his work to help a. Poor black folks practice food sovereignty and grow nutritious foods for themselves and b. The United States rebound its Agricultural economy after the Civil War destroyed farms and after generations of growing cotton cotton cotton depleted not just the souls and bodies of black folks, but the soil as well. BEPs became a restorative balm for both Adam (humans>name of first human>Hebrew name meaning ‘made from soil) and Adamah (soil>Hebrew word meaning soil) adding much needed nitrogen to the nutrient poor soil, and a high dose of protein and fiber for the sharecroppers suffering from malnutrition and pellagra due to diets heavily reliant on non-nixtimalized corn products. 

Soil depletion didn’t just affect the diets of the newly freed descendants of enslaved Africans as the growing regions (particularly the south) of the country fed the entire population. As this African legume worked its way into the everyday diets of the descendants of European colonizers, so too did the culture and traditions around it. 

Now back to these traditions. Where did they come from? Well, there are about as many stories as there are peas in a 10lb sack but a few things remain consistent in all of them

1. Eating a meal of black eyed peas, greens, cornbread and pork on New Year’s Day will bring fortune in the new year

2. The reasons differ from story to story but black eyed peas represent good luck

3. Greens represent money

4. The cornbread represents gold

5. The pork represents progress/open roads because pigs move in forward motions when rooting for food (unlike the other popular meat alternative of the time, chicken, which scratches in a backwards motion)

Hoppin’ John is the name of a one pot recipe for rice and peas that folks, especially in the south, tend to reach for on New Year’s Day. However, popular as it may be ,these days, to use black eyed peas in this dish the proper pea for Hoppin’ John is the sea island pea which is known as a field pea. Sea island peas, like black eyed peas, are cow peas. They’ve got the same little black eye, but instead of the creamy beige color, the rest of the sea island pea is a deep red burgundy color. Also, like black eyed peas, Sea Island peas traveled to the Americas with enslaved Africans. They too are cowpeas and all cowpeas are indigenous to Africa. (Bonus points if you can remember how many times the word ‘pea’ was used in that last paragraph)

The tradition of using Sea Island Peas in Hoppin’ John continues, almost exclusively, in the Gullah Geechee culture of Carolina Low Country. The ancestral african-isms in Black American culture remain largely intact in Gullah Geechee traditions. They are the descendants of the Africans who grew rice, indigo and cotton on the sea islands just of the coast of South Carolina. The swampy marshy land was beneath the living standards of the enslavers who preferred the mainland so the occupants of the islands had minimal contact with their enslavers and a lesser threat of being on the receiving end of violence as a consequence for practicing their traditions. Not having an ever present pressure to assimilate, things language, spiritual practices, dance and other cultural markers including foodways have held up in ways they haven’t in other parts of the country. 

So again, where did these traditions come from? Why do bring in the New Year with black eyed peas? Maybe it’s because after the union soldiers decimated the south the only thing they left behind to eat was black eyed peas and salt pork. Maybe its because ancient Egyptians ate them to show humility and receive favor from their Gods. Maybe it has something to do with Jewish ceremonial laws.

For me though, its because my mom does, and her mom did, and my grans mom did and my great grans mom did too. And while I’m not a person who advocates for holding on to tradition for tradition’s sake, I’m also not a person to abandon tradition without a full understanding of the pros/cons, meanings and intentions of the tradition, especially when it comes to food ways.

After all, it was the abandonment of the indigenous tradition of nixtimalization that lead to an epidemic of pellagra and malnutrition related deaths of enslaved Africans and sharecroppers in this country. An avoidable tragedy that continues to this day in countries that are impoverished, due to white supremacist emperialism, and are heavily reliant of commodity foods.