Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory raises some very good questions about a reported find of a Brady studios photograph in a North Carolina attic that purportedly depicts two African American slave children. To which I will add the observation that while this certainly can be viewed as an image of the generic horror of rural poverty, it is highly unlikely that it is a Brady photograph of slave children in the American South. The foliage just doesn't ring true for the period, and certainly not for North Carolina.
Yes, we have no bananas.
Caribbean and Latin America, yes. Carolina, no. Not in the 1860s. Not with banana leaves killed by temperatures under 20 degrees. Americans imported bananas in the 1870s, but we did not grow them during the Civil War, and only much later in south Florida and southern California.
Perhaps as ornamentals today. But not in plantations during the Rice and Indigo days at the end of the little ice age.
Posted by: Tim Abbott | June 13, 2010 at 04:56 PM
I have seen banana trees around Charleston, South Carolina though. Not necessarily a new thing, given the cosmopolitan nature of the sea trade there.
Posted by: Reflections | June 13, 2010 at 04:53 PM
I found your site looking for an answer to the same questions. No bananas or platanos in the Carolinas. I think the plants are platanos or, in English, plantains... a species of the banana plant. This Boys are Haitian I suspect children of Caribbean migrant farm workers. For example, Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic. Jules J laMontagne
Posted by: Jules laMontagne | June 12, 2010 at 03:04 PM