The untold legacy of Bibb lettuce

Bibb Country: Unearthing My Family Secrets of Land, Legacy and Lettuce by Lonnae O’Neal is available now from Andscape books. In this excerpt she explores the little-known history of Black Bibb descendants in Kentucky.

I remember the first time I heard Black Bibb descendants talk about Bibb lettuce.

The two women, mother and daughter, were sitting in the Bibb House front room, surrounded by old photos, drawings, pastoral images of Logan County, and maps demonstrating its centrality to western Kentucky. Quotes with portraits from Civil War–era politicians hung on the wall behind them. The older woman, LaVaughn Duncan, breathed through an oxygen tube that wrapped her ears and snaked down the front of her sleeveless blouse. Her face was unlined, her hair more pepper than salt. She is too young to need oxygen, I thought.

“We used to say that Bibb lettuce belonged to us,” Duncan said.

“And that we were going to be rich!” She giggled lightly at the thought.

For a moment, her daughter, Loretia Seals, dropped her head to shut her eyes, like she might need to pray on the matter. Then she looked up and joined the giggle, laughing right along with her momma. She is in on the joke, you understand. We all are. Seals’s eyes crinkled lightly at the corners.

The brief scene is from Invented Before We Were Born, a documentary on the legacy of Major Richard Bibb, by filmmakers Jonathan and Rachel Knight, white Bibb descendants who had been heavily involved in organizing the inaugural Bibb reunion. But that exchange felt palpably Black. I immediately understood what I was looking at as I watched Duncan and Seals. Their laughter was protective. Their smiles were resistance. Their ruefulness was, most precisely, a reflexive Black defense mechanism against the consumptive flames of our own, American, Babylon. Or, put another way, it was just part of that old Black knowing.

I thought we were going to be rich!

Hahahaha.

Whatcha goin’ to do?

In the vast majority of history and backstories I’ve come across detailing the origins of Bibb lettuce, Major John Bigger Bibb’s role as an enslaver was never mentioned. The contribution that enslaved people might have made to kindly Jack Bibb’s horticultural triumph was never entertained or raised as a line of inquiry. Camille Glenn, famed author of The Heritage of Southern Cooking, who called Bibb lettuce one of the “aristocrats of the genre,” did take note, however, of “the gardener and helper in [John Bigger Bibb’s] small greenhouse, knowing his secretive ways, [who] wisely slipped a few plants” out of the door.

I, of course, have questions about that “gardener and helper.”

I wonder if he or she was akin to those Black helpers mentioned, as culinary historian Michael W. Twitty puts it, in “the canon of cookbooks written by white women whose worlds were populated by black cooks and servants, whose presence can be read across the pages in recipes in dialect, recipes with only first names, or recipes with descriptions of plantation life.” Twitty specifically cites The Kentucky Housewife cookbook with its thirteen hundred recipes, which also includes helpful information on “established rules for domestics and slaves” in the introduction, just so there’s no confusion. Apparently a Kentucky housewife was wise to avoid confusion.

I wonder if John Bigger Bibb’s “gardener and helper” syncs up with the persistent, although unproven, supposition that it was a Black woman who originated the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. Enslaved cooks had married the Scottish tradition of deep-frying chicken with their own creative seasonings, popularizing fried chicken in Southern cuisine and turning it into an enduring staple of communal Black meals. But it was a white former insurance salesman, filling-station operator, and motel owner, Kentucky Colonel Harland Sanders, who shrouded his “top secret, original recipe” chicken, with eleven herbs and spices, in mystery, and made it a central part of the KFC identity and appeal. Colonel Sanders (colonel not being a military rank but rather an honorific bestowed by the Kentucky governor) operated a motel/restaurant precursor to his Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Corbin, Kentucky, where, by the way, a white mob drove its entire Black population out of town in 1919. Largely never to return.

Sanders once became right proprietary about the Bibb lettuce name at a Kentucky Tourist and Travel Council meeting. Apparently “some Yankee up in Chicago” was selling Kentucky Bibb lettuce and “not just making barrels of money at it,” Sanders bristled, but stripping Kentucky from the name and simply calling it limestone lettuce. If you can imagine.

I wonder if John Bigger Bibb’s “gardener and helper” was a similar figure to the enslaved Tennessee man Nathan “Nearest” Green, “Uncle Nearest,” who taught a young Jasper “Jack” Daniel how to distill whiskey. Daniel used that knowledge to become one of the most famous whiskey makers in the world. A corrective to the long-ignored history of Nearest Green, the brand’s first master distiller, was added to the Jack Daniel’s website in 2017.

There is one story about John Bigger Bibb that recounts how he used to take a “Negro boy” fishing with him to bait the hook and cast his line out into the water. The story goes that one day, the boy called Bibb’s attention to the surface of the pond. The frog he’d used for bait was swimming with all its might, away from the fishing line he’d just been attached to. Bibb instructed the boy to allow the frog-bait to escape, to let it swim to safety instead of meeting its death at the business end of a fishing pole. The point of the story, in this telling, was to illustrate John Bigger Bibb’s tender heart. To bolster his legend as an animal philosopher, a lover of flora and fauna, and a man possessed only of the most kindly inclinations toward even the lowliest of creatures. My takeaway was he was an enslaver. He trafficked in human beings and profited from a violent system of labor exploitation at a time when other white people, men and women of their times, made different choices, and the millions of enslaved were not consulted as to their choices at all.

We do not know if the story of John Bigger Bibb and that “Negro boy” took place during enslavement. But even if the young boy was not enslaved, he was not free. The circumscribed state of Black lives includes a question, among many, as to whether he would have chosen to help an old white man go fishing if the choice had been put to him or his parents.

My takeaway is that every glowing descriptor that amplifies John Bigger Bibb’s name, that lionizes him as a Kentucky original and a man of the gentlest persuasions, elides that simple fact. It is that inability to make room for complexity in the American story, for many things to be true at once, that feels pathological to the descendants of enslavement. That bent toward the most reductive history and blinkered understanding reeks of innocence. It is white people wondering publicly how we got here, as they fervently tell each other this is not who we are, while some are passing memory laws, and banning books, to make it ever so. They don’t contextualize John Bigger Bibb as an enslaver, because they don’t want to see the centrality of that role in his triumph, or in the American culture, character, and belief system that rose up from what he, and by extension the slaveholding nation, begat.

“Kentucky producers are often asked from whence [Bibb lettuce] came, or in true Kentucky style, who was its grandpappy. The answer to that probably passed on with Maj. John Bibb,” a 1942 Louisville Courier-Journal article contends. “We are told it bears a resemblance to some of the fine old cottage lettuces of England. . . . But it is unnecessary to grope with the past.”

As a descendant of enslavement, I disagree.

Who are the ones, we Black Bibbs wonder, who walk away with the spoils of colonialism and bondage and deem the process that gave rise to a white narrative primacy, and most assuredly generational wealth, as pre-political? As naturally occurring, rather than an amalgamation of brutal choices, policies, and legal maneuvers that created that very same narrative primacy and wealth. Who closed off that process to review, and deemed the foundational joists of American inheritance off-limits? Who gets to declare that legacy beyond reconsideration, un-subject to adjudication, remuneration, or the reapportionment of cultural and reputational shine?

Who is the white Simon who ever stops the music when he’s holding all the chairs? And when did Bibb lettuce shake the shackles off its leaves to enter the public domain fresh, innocent, and free of blight to become an heirloom treasure, menu delicacy, and source of Kentucky pride? What is that process called? Who do we see about that?

It is against this fuller history, and not separate from it, that I engage questions of Bibb lettuce cultivation, provenance, and cultural rise. That I assess its creditworthiness. That I think about kindly old Major Jack, boasting about the prized lettuce he’s giving away to his estimable friends into his eighties.