a deeper significance for the now expatriated captives; preserved within the seeds and cuttings from ships' stores were familiar dietary staples - foods that recalled lives now lost.  
The inadvertent introduction of these crops created opportunities for appropriation by the people for whom the seeds had meaning. A maroon legend about the beginning of rice cultivation is enlightening in this respect. The oral history, recounted in maroon communities across north-eastern South America, allegorizes the process by recalling an enslaved female who brought rice into the colony by tucking grains into her hair as she disembarked from the slave ship. The maroon account recognizes rice as an African crop, the slave ship as the vessel by which it arrived and a female forebear's conscious act as the driving force behind its cultivation by her people (Carney and Rosomoff, 2011, pp. 92-93).  
The memory of Africa is also evoked by the lexicon of plant names that the New-World-born descendants of enslaved and fugitive Africans continued to use. The African legacy can be seen in our times through the names that the plants bear in New World colonial languages. Throughout tropical America, these plants still carry vernacular names from diverse African languages. Examples include: quingombô and quiabo (okra), ñame and inhame (yam), dendê (oil palm), guandu (pigeon pea), bissy (kola), eddo (taro), cuxá (sorrel) and callelou (Amaranthus), gobogobo or voandzeia (Bambara groundnut), benne (sesame) and even banana (see Table 1) (Schneider, 1991; Cassidy and Le Page, 2002). These were the novel plants that slaveholders and naturalists first encountered on the 'Negro plantations' - the fields where enslaved Africans grew their food.