In
low-country South Carolina, American slavery assumed a distinctive form, one
that has captured the attention of generations of historians. Between the end
of the 17th century and the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of people of
African descent toiled in swamps, ditches and fields cultivating rice, a crop
that by the time of the American Revolution had created a planter aristocracy
wealthier than any other group in the British colonies. The high concentrations
of slaves in rice-growing areas produced as well a black culture that remained
closer to its African roots than that of any other North American slave
society. Yet even in South Carolina, where they were a majority of the
population, blacks have remained underrepresented in the historical record,
partly because they were unable to leave the rich written legacy that immortalized
their owners, partly because historians have failed to look closely enough at
the evidence that has survived.
In
‘’Black Rice,’’ Judith A. Carney, a professor of geography at the University of
California, Los Angeles, finds new ‘’ways to give voice to the historical
silences of slavery.’’ Exploring crops, landscapes and agricultural practices
in Africa and America, she demonstrates the critical role Africans played in
the creation of the system of rice production that provided the foundation of
Carolina’s wealth.
Carney
challenges conventional histories, which describe Europeans adapting an Asian
crop to American uses. Arguing persuasively that highly sophisticated forms of
rice culture from West Africa preceded the arrival of any knowledge from Asia, she
carefully traces the variety of production systems used by Africans in
different environments and landscapes, including the elaborate construction of
canals and dikes in coastal swamps. The existence of these complex adaptations
was ignored by European observers all too ready to dismiss the possibility of
technological achievement among African peoples. The ‘’denial of African
accomplishment in rice systems,’’ Carney writes, ‘’provides a stunning example
of how power relations mediate the production of history.’’
Not
until well into the 20th century did changing assumptions about race prompt
revisions to this story. Since the publication of Peter Wood’s pathbreaking
‘’Black Majority’’ in 1974, historians have recognized a link between African
rice cultivation and Carolina’s economic success. But Carney’s richly detailed
analysis gives this connection real specificity.
In
order to understand the role of Africans in rice history, Carney argues, it is
necessary to think of rice as a ‘’knowledge system’’ -- not just a plant or a
seed but an entire complex of techniques, technology and processing skills.
Africans imported as slaves into Carolina possessed this knowledge, and used
their understanding to guide phases of evolution in American rice production.
Thus,
after a vast increase in importations of slaves between 1720 and 1740 provided
the necessary labor, Carolina rice cultivation, which had begun with upland or
rain-fed culture, shifted to higher-yielding inland swamps. The newly arrived
Africans created embankments, sluices and canals almost identical to patterns
of West African mangrove rice production. With another influx of slaves after
1750, cultivation moved to still more productive tidal flood plains, which
required such a large-scale deployment of floodgates, canals and ditches that
rice fields became, in one planter’s words, a ‘’huge hydraulic machine.’’ This
transition, Carney writes, depended on ‘’the large number of slaves imported
directly from the rice area of West Africa who possessed knowledge of the
crop’s cultivation.’’
Carolina
planters even knew which African ethnic groups were expert in rice growing and
explicitly favored them in their purchases of new slaves. A newspaper in
Charleston, for example, advertised the sale of 250 slaves ‘’from the Windward
and Rice Coast, valued for their knowledge of rice culture.’’
The
knowledge system Carney describes called for different roles and distinctive
kinds of expertise for men and women, and these aspects of rice culture were
also transported to the New World. Women played a critical part in seed
selection, sowing, hoeing and processing of rice. The importance of these
skills enabled slave traders to command higher prices for women in Carolina
rice-growing areas than in other American slave markets.
The
Carolina rice kingdom, the foundation of power in a state that would eventually
lead the South out of the nation, came into being because African slaves had
mastered -- and shared -- the techniques necessary for growing rice seeds in
standing water. ‘’Why,’’ Carney asks, ‘’would West African slaves transfer to
planters a sophisticated agricultural system . . . that would in turn impose
upon them unrelenting toil throughout the year?’’ The knowledge of rice
cultivation, she concludes, provided slaves arriving in South Carolina with a
crucial negotiating tool, enabling them to bargain for labor arrangements that
guaranteed them greater autonomy than in any other Southern agricultural
environment.
In
cotton-growing areas a system of gang labor prevailed that required unremitting
work from dawn till dusk. But on South Carolina rice plantations task labor was
the rule. Once their tasks were accomplished, slaves could turn to their own
gardens, or manage their own time in other ways. Task labor introduced a degree
of freedom into slavery’s oppression.
But
Carney is careful not to be too celebratory about the leverage Africans
achieved as a result of their knowledge and skill. As rice became a commodity
in high international demand, even the structures of the task system could not
protect Carolina slaves from almost ceaseless labor.
This
detailed study of historical botany, technological adaptation and agricultural
diffusion adds depth to our understanding of slavery and makes a compelling
case for ‘’the agency of slaves’’ in the creation of the South’s economy and
culture. But Carney also illuminates another of the almost limitless ironies of
Southern history. The knowledge and creativity of Africans created an
agricultural system in South Carolina that was based firmly on their own
enslavement and exploitation.
