The Burden of Rice

The word “rice” appears 62 times on Judith Carney’s resume. In names of articles, titles of lectures--rice in Africa, rice in South Carolina, rice on hillsides, in swamps, rice as food, as history. The word scatters like so much rice across 10 pages describing her career as a professor at UCLA over the last 13 years. Now, she’s harvested her study into a book that gives new color to the hard, white grains.

“Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas” (Harvard University Press, 2001) combines the histories of rice and slavery, winning Carney praise from critics and fellow scholars for an unusual multidisciplinary work with broad implications for how Americans view their past.

It is also propelling Carney to the forefront of her field, geography, a specialty aimed at defying academic overspecialization. Merging the methods of botany, anthropology and history, “Black Rice” sets out to discredit for good an old Southern recipe for history that depicts slaves as mere laborers who dumbly performed work their masters conceived. Carney tells it the other way around.

After years visiting West African rice fields, then digging in archives on both sides of the Atlantic, she has emerged with evidence that early slave traders sought and seized Africans who had the abilities to grow a specific African rice, Oryza glaberrima . They selected them, sometimes capturing them as they worked in rice fields, “the way companies these days go after specific hires,” Carney explains, sitting at home in the hills of Topanga Canyon.

She follows the rice trail from Africa to South Carolina to Brazil, from the age of exploration to the early 19th century, a brutal epic marked by slaves’ bondage and ingenuity.

Slaves carried rice across the Middle Passage to Carolina and Louisiana, spawning a legend that women even hid the seeds in their hair in hopes of growing it as they had at home. These Africans, Carney argues, taught English colonists barely competent enough to feed themselves how to grow it in watery places that mirrored coastal West Africa. From the hoes they used to break soil, to the way they cooked the grains, slaves shared the skills of rice and became the workers who produced it.

Carney confronts us with hundreds of thousands of Africans and their descendents over the generations who were forced into swamps, ditches and fields infested with snakes and disease. They pounded tons of rice free of its shells with a mortar and a pestle at a pace that turned a custom of food culture in Africa into torment. Their work put many of them into early graves and made the rice barons of South Carolina rich enough to help lead the South’s split from the Union.

A New York Times reviewer praised “Black Rice” for making “a compelling case” for the “knowledge and creativity of Africans” and said Carney “challenges conventional histories ... by European observers all too ready to dismiss the possibility of technological achievement among African peoples.” Reggie Bryant, host of a Philadelphia program whose listeners are mainly African American, found the book such a “valuable piece of the puzzle” about “the rape of Africa” that he’s had her on twice.

Academic intellectuals usually build on a scaffold of previous writing. “Black Rice” adds to work by other scholars who have shaped a revolution in the study of slavery over the last 50 years--including Peter Wood, who wrote the path-breaking “Black Majority” about South Carolina, and Daniel Littlefield, author of an important study called “Rice and Slaves.”

“Many scholars of my generation, white and black, thought Africa a very interesting country but hard to get to,” said Wood, 58. Of Carney, 55, he added: “This next cadre that Judy is part of is more anthropologist than historian. She’s immersed herself in Africa.”

I find the rice professor in her garden on a dry, honey-colored slope, but not growing rice. She dabbles in all kinds of home agriculture. “This is the holy Mexican trinity of corn, beans and squash,” she says, eagerly handing out news about food as if it were food. “The corn needs nitrogen, the beans supply nitrogen and the squash hold the soil together.”

She leads me inside a small apartment filled with books (titles include “The Rice Economies,” “The South Carolina Rice Kitchen,” even “Rice as Self”) and folk art from the rice-growing corners of the world. Though a happy warrior on behalf of her work, Carney speaks of her feelings with a hesitant depth of sensitivity. Asked where she wrote “Black Rice,” her first book, she points to a desk against an inner wall. Here, fitting the writing around her teaching duties for 10 years, she worked with her back to a beautiful vista of the arid ridges and valleys that envelop Topanga State Park. “The human history of slavery is so awful that I felt I could not be looking out at such a view,” she says, softly. “I would take breaks, look out and go back in.”

On one wall hangs the unforgettable photograph from the cover of “Black Rice.” An African American woman strides through a South Carolina rice field about a hundred years ago, gripping--proudly, as if it were the long tiller of a ship--an African-style hoe. Strong chin tilted to the sky, her mouth open, the woman looks like she’s about to sing out the “hidden narrative” Carney wrote to “give voice to the historical silences” about how much slaves contributed to building America, especially those who grew rice.

“Cotton and slaves everyone knows about,” Carney says. “The rice thing tends to throw them. I rarely meet people who aren’t specialists who know about it. Everybody’s seen ‘Gone With the Wind,’ and their image of slavery stops there.”

By the American Revolution, Carney writes, one out of five persons in the Colonies was a slave, a number to which rice-growing South Carolina, a colony more black than white in its early years, contributed heavily. Carney says that Bryant, the Philadelphia radio host, portrayed the crop’s importance just right when he reminded listeners that “rice was also king.”

“Black Rice” might be called an agricultural detective story. The historical crime--and that’s clearly how Carney sees it--is the relative lack of attention given to African rice. “Almost everybody you talk to, if they don’t know, will tell you that all rice basically comes from Asia,” she says. The origins of Asian rice--a type called Oryza sativa , some 7,000 years ago--are pretty well understood.

The background of African rice--Carney’s prose often calmly conveys outrage--has been neglected mostly due to a “long-standing research bias against Africa” that stems from “deep-seated views” that “technology was beyond the ken of Africans. ... “

To dramatize her attack on that notion, Carney reaches back to the early written records of African rice, deflating arguments that it stemmed from a transplanted Asian sativa and pressing her research showing glaberrima probably arrived among the first rice types in the American colonies.

To show that rice and slavery were inseparable from the start, she cites Portuguese and Italian explorers’ first visits to Africa. Between 1420 and 1450, hugging the wide curve of the West African coast, they saw the landscape transform as they sailed south of the Senegal River. One account, in particular, sends a shiver down one’s spine, in light of what would happen:

“It appears to me a very marvelous thing that beyond the river all men are very black, tall and big, their bodies well formed,” writes a 15th century Venetian named Cadamosto, “and the whole country green, full of trees and fertile. ... “

By 1460, Carney tells us, “the densely populated region from Senegal to Liberia would serve as a major focus of the Atlantic slave trade.”

The land there was especially rich with, among other crops, rice. In fact, mariners called this the Rice Coast. Using evidence from botanical studies, Carney concludes the rice was native glaberrima .

The abundance of this rice, according to Carney, became a curse: It literally fed the slave trade. Yams were low in protein, perishing easily. But nourishing rice lasted--as long as an Atlantic voyage, as long as needed to feed sailors. It sustained their living cargo, Africans who understood rice, and who would now be sustained by it so they could grow it under conditions that eclipsed bonds between rice and cultural identity that stretched back thousands of years in Africa. “We’re talking about feeding the stomach of the Middle Passage,” Carney says.

Though the stories in “Black Rice” are anchored in the 17th and 18th centuries in South Carolina, Carney reaches into the 19th century to cite the case of the Amistad, the slave ship whose uprising in 1839 was portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s movie as an illustration of how slave traders made a special point of stalking African rice farmers toward the end of American slavery.

Before the Supreme Court case that led to their return to Africa, the Amistad slaves told their stories in legal depositions, and Carney uses these details:

“He was a blacksmith in his native village and made hoes, axes and knives; he also planted rice.”

“He is married, but no children; he is a planter of rice. ... “

Carney writes that masters repaid skilled slaves for their rice abilities with marginal freedoms--like having gardens to grow their own food, which they also traded. “Sharing knowledge did get them certain freedoms, but those gains disappeared as relations between masters and slaves became increasingly rigid after the American Revolution,” Carney says. “My sense is that the masters had learned what they needed to know and didn’t have to trade leniency for ability anymore.”

Carney, who speaks Portuguese and French, started her study of Africa in Brazil. Going there to work on a UC Berkeley doctorate about land use in the Amazon, she followed the pull of the region’s African slave heritage to West Africa. “It was an emotional and spiritual attraction I can’t fully explain to this day,” she says.

She landed in Gambia in 1983, searching for a graduate thesis “the way a reporter looks for a story.” Stumbling into a low-level job with a University of Michigan project planning a dam to irrigate rice by the Gambia River, she became one of the few women on the scene as a group largely made up of men pushed to give men more power over the crop.

“The women had always been in charge, and the development people, in their zeal to get more men working in the fields, started to give them more control.”

The women, fighting this, started to teach Carney about rice as woman’s work in Gambia (as opposed to the more male-frequented rice fields of Sierra Leone, where the Amistad slaves came from). The women taught Carney about weeding soil to clear it for planting, about sluices for flooding and draining fields. She helped them stop the dam and devoted herself to rice as it affects daily lives. Into the 1990s, she explored rice policy in Nicaragua and Mexico and even left rice for a while to look at wheat in the Central Mexican highlands for something called the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.

Crossing the UCLA campus one day in 1991, Carney bumped into Kairn Klieman, a graduate student in African history. As they talked, Carney recalls, “Kairn suddenly said: ‘Did you know slaves grew rice in South Carolina,’ and I said, ‘No.”’ Klieman mentioned the work of Wood and Littlefield, and “it all came together,” Carney recalls. “We don’t always read the books that people tell us to. In this case, I did, and it was momentous.”

She “gobbled up two or three books about slavery a week” and made her first trip to Charleston, S.C., a city built by rice and slavery.

She walked the fields of old rice plantations, studied the region’s Gullah culture, with its well-preserved links to Africa, and learned about local slave rebellions. “I knew very little about slavery and the dimension of its impact on the United States,” Carney recalls. “The size of it was new to me.”

She saw how many African and American aspects of rice culture matched. Carolina cooking, she found, called for rice to be cooked so it ended up in the African way, separate, the grains dry, not clumped in the Asian style. Eaters of “soul food” have long cherished various combinations of rice and beans, and Carney traces these dishes to the sacrifices of those who prepared the rice under slavery.

The most painful phase of preparation was milling, sheering off the layers of a thin, brittle shell and softer membranes that enclose the rice grains. Carney reconstructs the work in what she considers the emotional center of her book. By slowly massing unadorned details, she gives a haunting physical impression of slave labor and its price in colonial South Carolina.

Most grains are pulverized to flour in preparation for market. Rice attains ideal marketability when the grains stay whole. Until rice milling was mechanized near the end of the 18th century, planters put slaves to work with the African method of mortar and pestle. The slave filled a wooden mortar with rice and repeatedly pounded the grain free of its shells with a wooden pestle shaped roughly like a large baseball bat. To split off the shells without shattering the grains demands control of a hard, downward thrust that becomes a delicate tap before it hits.

Carney knew this was a crushing physical test slaves faced after the September harvest, preparing shipments to reach Europe by early February, when European Catholics ate American rice with fish as the alternative to meat and potatoes during Lent.

She wanted to show exactly how many hours they stood at the task.

Drawing on observations in contemporary Africa, planters’ memoirs and other sources, she figured that slaves pounded about 66 pounds of raw paddy rice daily for men and 47 pounds for women. Considering the speeds with which she’d seen Africans pound rice today, roughly 2.2 pounds in 20 minutes, she figured men pounded for roughly 91/2 hours a day and women for about six hours and 20 minutes. The work, done before the sun rose and after it set, doubled the time slaves gave to other plantation labor.

Says Carney: “I gathered all this information because I want people to feel this work. The sound of rice-pounding, associated in Africa with the awakening of the village, echoed here with the power of exploitation and destruction.”

In “Black Rice,” she quotes a 1,733 patent requests covering a mechanical pounding mill that states how hand-milling “hath been of very great Damage [sic] to the Planters of this Province.”

Sheer exhaustion, the document indicated, had “killed a large number of Negroes.”

Carney believes her anger about the human losses caused by slavery may come from growing up surrounded by loss. Her father, a tool-and-dye maker in Detroit, died from a sudden heart attack when Carney was 5. She spent her early years amid what she calls “pretty severe poverty” in Lincoln Park, a tidy working-class town nestled among car and chemical plants along the Detroit River. Her mother died of cancer when Carney was 18.

“When you lose people when you’re young, you lose memory,” Carney says. “That’s been very painful to me: You lose who you are. To be a historian is to try to recover memory.”

She describes a “thread of curiosity” about African American culture she started to sense when she lived in Lincoln Park, which she says was “very white” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. “I was aware of blacks and their lives because we went to downtown Detroit, and I would notice them,” she says. Lately, she’s sought to more consciously understand that strong attraction.

“When you grow up in poverty, you always feel like an outsider, and I felt that they were outsiders too. My brother, Louis, teaches in an all-black inner-city Detroit school. We once had a conversation, and I said, ‘I think it is interesting that I wasn’t trained to go into this area, but my life took me there. You made a choice to do this.’ He said, ‘These are the people who come closest to sharing our experience, even though we are white. The closest cultural experience is these blacks, the city blacks, poverty and a lot of social strife.”’

Slavery will remain a vital part of how Carney combines history with agriculture, but she’s thinking of taking a break from rice to look at the ways slaves used their knowledge of plants to cure sickness, conduct African-based religious rituals and poison their masters. “Plant knowledge for poisons was a weapon, but it isn’t clear how often that really happened,” she says.

Meanwhile, the rice professor hopes that “Black Rice” will help solidify the legitimacy of work she and other scholars have done to detail the gifts of know-how and labor that slaves made to early America even as slavery inflicted a human catastrophe: “I hope that textbooks and classroom teaching will reflect more and more of this history as we now know it happened. It is time for all of us to realize that the American enterprise would not have been possible without slavery. The two were completely bound from the start.”