Charleston Rice and the Gullah People
From 1720 to the 1860s Charleston was one of the wealthiest cities in the world due to its rice plantations built on slave labor. From the albatross of slavery, the blacks in this region also known as the Gullah Geechee people created a creole culture blending African and European traditions. The Gullah Geechee people started a cuisine whose foundation is rice and are also the only ones to create an English-based creole language in North America.
Some scholars believe the early Carolina planters learned rice cultivation from their slaves. West Africans had been growing rice for thousands of years. A lot of the early documentation of rice cultivation in the Carolinas has been lost to history.
In the mid-18th century, the Lowcountry rice plantations changed in ways that allowed the Gullah Geechee culture to develop, grow and thrive. As the rice planters became very wealthy, they abandoned their swampy mosquito-infested estates during “fever season” from June to November. The whites who could afford to leave did, thus allowing some slaves to have “relative” freedom from planters' control.
By not being under the control of their planters for months at a time, after their daily tasks were completed, the Africans were able to grow crops in their private garden plots. To supplement rice dishes, they added field peas, greens, fish, and wild game to the planters' leftovers from hog killings.
Slaves and rice planters negotiated a new form of labor called the “task system” unlike any in the history of America. A slave would work a given task in a day and once completed, they were able to grow their own food in their gardens, hunt, fish, and trade their goods along the riverbanks.
Living on isolated sea islands and mainland pockets, the Gullah Geechee people continued to grow rice until the 1950s and 60s. This isolation allowed the Gullah Geechee people to maintain a lot of their unique cultural heritage.
The “rice coast,” known today as the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage corridor, stretches across 27 counties from Wilmington, North Carolina, in the north to Jacksonville, Florida, in the south.