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Okay I'm going to get started. https://twitter.com/CarolineGrego88/status/1319772519713415174
First, to be clear: DCH was a racist who, in his Jim Crow era book, dreams about his dominion as a rice planter, speaks of his enslaver ancestors in glowing terms, and promotes racist propaganda. The book is in a common style for the time - see: https://envhistnow.com/2018/09/13/the-environmental-roots-of-jim-crow/
2nd, to also be clear: despite white South Carolinians' deliberate campaign to mute the fundamental contributions of enslaved West Africans & their descendants to rice cultivation and to downplay their cultural/hist memory, Black people in the Lowcountry were never so deceived -
- Anything that we white historians could possibly write about the history of rice & resistance is simply catch-up to everything that the Gullah-Geechee and their ancestors have known and been saying for a very, very long time.
Okay, on to the photographs.
Okay, on to the photographs.
By 1940, 3 yrs after the book's publication date, just 1,160 acres of rice were planted in SC, yielding only 3.85 bushels/acre - v. low given that 40 bushels was the ideal yield/acre for the Lowcountry. DCH himself halted rice production sometime in the 1920s.
DCH came from a wealthy family of enslavers & saw rice "planting" as his birthright. His grandfather, Nathaniel Heyward, enslaved 2,500 people and owned 17 labor camps. In 1849, those enslaved workers harvested 16.7 million pounds of rice.
But an onslaught of severe hurricanes (esp. 1893 & 1911), coastal subsidence from centuries of rice production & upstate logging, soft soil that didn't allow large machinery, & competition from La, TX, & CA reduced profitability for DCH & his ilk.
Enslaved engineers & skilled rice growers of West African built a massive "hydraulic machine" across the Lowcountry - in these photographs, you can see the complex gates & trunks of tidal rice cultivation as they still existed in the 1920s:
But here's something I want to clarify. Rhetoric about the late years of commercial rice production often favors phrases like "decline in profitability" which centers the experience of white planters. For Black rice workers, that wasn't what happened -
Working in rice was brutal, deadly and difficult (see Them Dark Days for stats on this). W/o the force of slavery, African Americans had little interest in maintaining the back-breaking pace that produced immense profit for white South Carolinians.
For the descendants of enslaved rice workers, commercial rice production didn't "crash," per se; instead, they deliberately sought work arrangements that reduced the level of control that white landowners/descendants of their enslavers exerted over their labor & crops.
They knew that white landowners relied upon their expertise & knowledge for rice cultivation, and leveraged that. The contraction of commercial rice production suited the Gullah-Geechee just fine - instead, they planted rice for their own consumption.
DCH, of course, like generations of white South Carolinians, refused to recognize and honor that expertise. A peer of his, Elizabeth Allston Pringle, noted in the early 1900s that Black rice workers yielded only 17 bushels/acre on her land, and 30 - 50 on their own plots.
While DCH's book is filled with racist, picaresque tales of the Gullah people who worked his family's lands along the Combahee River, we can read his book against the grain. His historical fabulations have a desperate air to them - they'd be comical if they weren't so insidious.
DCH's lies are deep-seated in the Lowcountry to this day. Techniques for rice cultivation came from China, or England. The Gullah have no cultural or familial memory, and are dying out. Enslavers were benevolent - DCH points to his grandpa's tabby "servant house" as proof:
But one small victory comes in using DCH's own book against his fabricated history of the Lowcountry, of the Gullah people, and of rice cultivation. The portraits of experts in rice cultivation, of family life, of joy and leisure, tell on his lies.
So that's how I want to end this thread. We need to lay DCH's vision to waste. There are so many Gullah-Geechee activists already doing this work, an ongoing project centuries-old. Historians are here to provide support when needed.
Actually here’s an even BETTER way to end this thread: https://twitter.com/excusemyfly/status/1320026782075031554
