Born in 1902, Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes grew up in Lawrence, Kansas and several other Midwestern communities at the turn of the century. In his autobiography he talks about his aunt and uncle Reed. Hughes recalled that his aunt cooked wonderful “hoe-cake, and sorghum molasses. . . .” Historically, out of necessity poor people made hoecakes by baking a corn meal batter over hot cinders on the blade of a long handled hoe they used in the field. West and Central African farmers used the long handled hoe in their fields and introduced it to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade. Similarly, sorghum is an African plant.
