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The 1619 Project

Pecan Pioneer: The Enslaved Man

Who Cultivated the South’s Favorite Nut

By Tiya Miles

Pecans are the nut of choice when it comes to satisfying America’s his neighbor J. T. Roman, the owner of Oak Alley Plantation. Roman did
sweet tooth, with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season what many enslavers were accustomed to in that period: He turned

being the pecan’s most popular time, when the nut graces the rich the impossible work over to an enslaved person with vast capabilities,

pie named for it. Southerners claim the pecan along with the corn- a man whose name we know only as Antoine. Antoine undertook the

f different

bread and collard greens that distinguish the regional table, and the delicate task of grafting the pecan cuttings onto the limbs o

South looms large in our imaginations as this nut’s mother country. tree species on the plantation grounds. Many specimens thrived, and

The presence of pecan pralines in every Southern gift shop from Antoine fashioned still more trees, selecting for nuts with favorable

South Carolina to Texas, and our view of the nut as regional fare, qualities. It was Antoine who successfully created what would become

was an enslaved

masks a crucial chapter in the story of the pecan: It the country’s first commercially viable pecan varietal.

man who made the wide cultivation of this nut possible. Decades later, a new owner of Oak Alley, Hubert Bonzano, exhibit-

o the middle southwestern region of the

Pecan trees are native t ed nuts from Antoine’s trees at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, the

Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico. While World’s Fair held in Philadelphia and a major showcase for American

the trees can live for a hundred years or more, they do not produce nuts innovation. As the horticulturalist Lenny Wells has recorded, the

in the first years of life, and the kinds of nuts they produce are wildly exhibited nuts received a commendation from the Yale botanist

variable in size, shape, flavor and ease of shell removal. Indigenous William H. Brewer, who praised them for their ‘‘remarkably large
people worked around this variability, harvesting the nuts for hundreds size, tenderness of shell and very special excellence.’’ Coined ‘‘the

and probably thousands of years, camping near the groves in season, Centennial,’’ Antoine’s pecan varietal was then seized upon for com-

trading the nuts in a network that stretched across the continent, mercial production (other varieties have since become the standard).

and lending the food the name we have come to know it by: paccan. Was Antoine aware of his creation’s triumph? No one knows. As

Once white Southerners became fans of the nut, they set about the historian James McWilliams writes in ‘‘The Pecan: A History of

trying to standardize its fruit by engineering the perfect pecan tree. America’s Native Nut’’ (2013): ‘‘History leaves no record as to the

o cultivate pecan trees for a commercial market begin-

Planters tried t former slave gardener’s location — or whether he was even alive —

ning at least as early as the 1820s, when a well-known planter from when the nuts from the tree he grafted were praised by the nation’s

South Carolina named Abner Landrum published detailed descriptions leading agricultural experts.’’ The tree never bore the name of the

of his attempt in the American Farmer periodical. In the mid-1840s, a man who had handcrafted it and developed a full-scale orchard on

planter in Louisiana sent cuttings of a much-prized pecan tree over the Oak Alley Plantation before he slipped into the shadow of history.
t
o

relationships with white landown- the industry consolidates in fewer to say it’s all bad. But this is definitely The company is being sued by

ers his father, Eddie Lewis Jr., and and fewer hands, Lewis believes a community where you still have to a former fourth-generation black

his grandfather before him, built black sugar-cane farmers will no say, ‘Yes sir,’ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and accept farmer. As first reported in The

and maintained. longer exist, part of a long-term ‘boy’ and diff erent things like that.’’ Guardian, Wenceslaus Provost Jr.

Lewis is the minority adviser for trend nationally, where the total One of the biggest players in that claims the company breached a

the federal Farm Service Agency proportion of all African-American community is M. A. Patout and Son, harvesting contract in an eff ort to

(F.S.A.) in St. Martin and Lafayette farmers has plummeted since the the largest sugar-cane mill company deliberately sabotage his business.

Parish, and also participates in lob- early 1900s, to less than 2 percent in Louisiana. Founded in 1825, Patout Provost, who goes by the first name

bying federal legislators. He says from more than 14 percent, with 90 has been known to boast that it is June, and his wife, Angie, who is

he does it because the stakes are so percent of black farmers’ land lost ‘‘the oldest complete family-owned also a farmer, lost their home to

high. If things don’t change, Lewis amid decades of racist actions by and operated manufacturer of raw foreclosure in 2018, after defaulting

told me, ‘‘I’m probably one of two government agencies, banks and sugar in the United States.’’ It owns on F.S.A.-guaranteed crop loans.

or three that’s going to be farming in real estate developers. three of the 11 remaining sugar-cane June Provost has also filed a federal

the next 10 to 15 years. They’re trying ‘‘There’s still a few good white men mills in Louisiana, processing rough- lawsuit against First Guaranty Bank

to basically extinct us.’’ As control of around here,’’ Lewis told me. ‘‘It’s not ly a third of the cane in the state. and a bank senior vice president for
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