Rice: Poems

Preface

xv Preface My first breaths were drawn, my first words coaxed on a triangular patch of sandy land called South Carolina. This was land that Indians first inhabited and that Black folks, Africans, had made.1 I was born to a land thick with Spanish moss and swamp, cypress and live oak, and, in its day, slavery and many a rice field. I call South Carolina land that Black folks made because it was on the backs and knees, the minds and muscles of enslaved Africans that acres of timber-dense South Carolina were transformed into rich rice fields. Africans who by hand and horse pulled up trees and stoked back water then planted seed by the African heeltoe method did in fact “make land” out of uncut forests, as well as make European landowners incredibly and indisputably rich. Africans who were skilled agriculturalists and land engineers were cargoed to America from Senegal and The Gambia, vast rice-producing countries in their own right. As slaves they harvested the rice, threshed and winnowed the rice, and won international acclaim for the high-quality South Carolina rice known as Carolina Gold. At the same time the southern aristocracy that basked in the worldwide attention to its acclaimed crop treated these knowledgeable human beings worse than animals. I was born in a tiny state that is half dipped in the sea, a place that in 1737 “look[ed] more like a negro country than a country settled by white people,” as a Swede, Samuel Dyssli, wrote.2 More Africans were led off the boats in South Carolina than in any other place in North America, until whites, fearing reprisals, enacted laws setting strict controls on the Black population of the state. From the early 1700s and for years beyond, in South Carolina Black people were the major import and rice its most favored export. These two entities were intimately linked. To clear the land and make it fit for rice, and to grow the rice and weigh it in by the ton, year after year, only Africans could do. Africans alone endured the daily stench, the relentless heat, the mosquito infestation, and the backbreaking labor. Whites often left the land and traveled back to Europe, unable to stand the South Carolina tropics. When I was a girl growing up in the Palmetto State in the 1960s, there was always a punch bowl of rice on the dinner table. In my own house today, we eat rice, never tiring of it. I hold this tradition of rice culture and diet to be sacred. Rice constitutes the basic diet of over one-half the world’s population. Unenhanced, alone in a bowl, xvi with nothing for gravy or garnish, each grain fluffy and separate, rice is a complete and sustaining meal. I believe South Carolina has disregarded much of its African heritage. The grandchildren of the Africans who first endowed the state with their labor and land making are presently being taxed off their land tracts inch by inch. This beautiful country of my birth is being turned into one-half golf course and one-half toxic dump. Its incredible natural beauty is up for sale to the highest bidder. Black people never got their forty acres and a mule as promised. From field order to government decree to presidential proclamation, those in power have never kept their word. But still Black people cherish the land and keep it close, still Black folk love the rice. We clearly remember it to be soil and food that our mothers and fathers made for us and we live to rightfully pass it along in the tradition. In my ongoing passion for South Carolina, I continue to seek out all seeds of its African lineage. From the telling pen of historian Charles Joyner I read of Mary One, who refused to be beaten for allegedly having failed to complete her assigned task. “Going drownded myself,” was her reply to her master. “I done my work. Fore I take a lick, rather drownded myself.”3 Mary One’s resistance succeeded. Rather than lose this good-working woman her master reassigned her. May we always resist what we know in our hearts to be wrong. May we do right and keep our word. May we know the fullness of plain rice and how simple and delicious a meal it can be with plain words. This is the steel and downy of a true life. Nikky Finney Lexington, Kentucky January...