Lowcountry Time and Tide by Tuten James H.;

Author:Tuten, James H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

4.4 West Point Mill engraving. From the mill’s stock certificate. Courtesy of South Carolina Historical Society

CHAPTER 5

Rice as a Symbol and Foodway

And since daddy was a Geechee in the truest sense, no meal could be served without fluffy Carolina long grain rice. (I’d seen him leave the table, refusing to come back, until my mother, who was trying to break the habit, made him some.)

Alexander Smalls, in Alexander Smalls and

Hettie Jones, Grace the Table (1997), p. 3

Many grave difficulties faced the planters and black cultivators of rice after the Civil War. Indeed they faced so many that they—or more often, their offspring—ultimately abandoned the practice. It is fair to ask, then, why they persevered for so long under such conditions. The value of planter identity to members of that class was discussed earlier. But, as important as planter status was in terms of self-regard, it neither reveals the entire picture for planters, nor does it begin to explain the persistence of black laborers in cultivating rice. To be sure, neither group lived in a place or time where they had many other economic options. However, consider the attitude of Langdon Cheves III as early as 1883: “the truth is that when cotton failed us, nothing was left, for this truck farming is the next thing to running a saw mill.”1 For Cheves, only planting cotton or rice ranked as appropriate activities. In other words it mattered what you planted. Cotton might have been acceptable, but truck crops were not.

Planters and laborers not only cultivated the crop; they also ate it. Therefore it is appropriate to consider their attitudes about growing and eating rice as well as the associated meanings and symbolic power of the staple crop. Sidney Mintz, in his path-breaking work, Sweetness and Power, demonstrated the important cultural aspects of sugar in the plantation context. Mintz showed that the rise of sugar production and consumption in the Atlantic world was a complex story. Sugar occupied an important symbolic place, for “food preferences are close to the center of self-definition.”2 Similarly T. H. Breen showed that colonial tobacco planters shared a set of cultural values because they planted a common staple crop. He noted that staple crops have a “distinct personality” and that they come to have “special significance for the grower.” Taken together, Mintz and Breen have demonstrated that over time the foods you grow and consume become as much culture entities as commodities.3

Rice culture required participants to manipulate land and water in ways not demanded by other crops. Judith Carney called rice culture a “knowledge system.” Planters came to believe that only they could manage such a complex undertaking, which added to their pride of being rice planters. Their specialized knowledge enabled them to look down on those who grew other crops. Moreover it added to their sense of uniqueness and led them to consider the aesthetic qualities of their land and crops.4

The aesthetics of rice fields under cultivation affected visitors and planters alike. Near the end of the antebellum era, T.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.