Pan toting, also known as the service pan, was the practice of African-American domestic workers taking dry goods or leftover table scraps from their white employers as a form of compensation that they deserved, due to the wealth they produced for their masters during their former status as slaves and because of the low wages received post-Civil War.
[2][3] After the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, African-American domestic workers, as free laborers, continued this practice, to express their opposition to work conditions that deprived them of a decent standard of living, drawing on decades of experiences with creative resistance.
African-American domestic workers also claimed the right to this form of compensation due to their former status as slaves, for the unpaid work they had then performed for their masters and the white community.
[6] Some employers knowingly allowed the practice, openly admitting that they paid low wages with the workers' getting the table scraps in mind.
[7] A "Negro Nurse", writing in 1912, describes this dependence: Well, I'll be frank with you, if it were not for the service pan, I don't know what the majority of our Southern colored families would do.
Most poignantly, Richard Wright remembered waiting for his mothers' employers to finish their meals so that he could learn what his own dinner would be: If the white people left anything, my brother and I would eat well; but if they did not, we would have our usual bread and tea.
One employer stated: ...there are hungry children in the cabin awaiting their mothers return, when I give out my meals I bear these little blackberry pickaninnies in mind, and I never wound the feelings of any cook by asking her 'what that is she has under her apron'...I know what it is – every biscuit, scrap of meat, or bit of cake she can save during the day, and if possible, a little sugar filched from the pantry.
[10] Domestic workers, who had no legal remedies to redress grievances, could use pan-toting to alleviate the effects of being poorly paid and to counter employers' dishonesty involving wages.
Most notably, it meant that they could "pay less in cash wages, and they might hope, that because her family would have some at the end of the day, the cook would take extra care with the food, producing a finer result".
"Educator William Henry Holtzclaw, born about 1875, remembered genuine hunger waiting for his mother to return from her cooking job".
Audrey Smith recalled having to learn to eat the pheasant, lamb, and veal that her mother, Georgia Anderson, brought home from Maymont.
Throughout the South, cooks for Jewish families brought home chopped liver, kugel, and other Eastern European delicacies as part of their "hookarm".
Black women correctly associated these gifts with a system designed to keep them in the service of whites, and leaving them without the monetary means to achieve a higher standard of living.
Many white women remembered black domestic workers refusing to tote and "making it a condition of their acceptance of a job that they not be asked to do so".
Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin recalled her upbringing in an upper-class white home: "We verily believed that a Negro could not help but steal.
In 1912, The Independent—a progressive New York City journal edited at the time by a prominent abolitionist, Henry Ward Beecher—printed a quasi-autobiographical account of servant life by an African-American who was born and raised in the South and was a domestic worker for more than 30 years.
This song about black men portrays the attitude employers resented: I doan has to work so ha'd I's got a gal in a white man's ya'd Ebery night 'bout half pas' eight I goes 'round to the white man's gate She brings me butter and she brings me la'd I doan has to work so ha'd!