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The Gardens of Two Gullah Elders

s t . h e l e n a i s l a n d , s o u t h c a r o l i n a

“Have you been to see the Emancipation Tree yet?” Ralph Mid-

dleton asks me.

I have come to St. Helena, the largest of the Sea Islands off the

coast of South Carolina, to talk to Gullah elders about their gar-

dens. Right away I learn two things. First, that any question I ask

about gardens will elicit an answer about “the land.” Second,

that no one can understand this community descended from

African slaves without encountering the history of slavery and

the failed promise of emancipation, when the seeds of true racial

equality might have been planted. That history begins with the

tree. Ralph Middleton fully expects me to go see it before we

meet again, so I do.

In this landscape, where legendary storms wipe out homes,

wash out sandy roads, take down trees—live oak, pecan, sea

pine, palmetto, and pear—where fields of ripening crops and ev-

ery flower or bush that cannot survive a salt flood perishes, old

live oaks invoke the spirits of ancestors. One among them is con-

sidered the most sacred: the tree where, on New Year’s Day

1863, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was read

aloud to the blacks of St. Helena Island, telling them that now

they were truly free.

It stands on a small rise at the edge of Route 21, the two-lane

highway that crosses the island, with a pleasant brick house be-

hind it. Its huge trunk supports enormous spreading limbs hung

with Spanish moss. While written history records the drama of

the formal ceremony Brigadier General Rufus Saxton of the

Union Army arranged in Beaufort, Gullah oral history preserves

the quieter story of a local gathering of those who could not

make the journey to the mainland. “They came in from all cor-

ners,” Ralph Middleton tells me. “Most of them had to walk.”

Someone from the Union Army read the text aloud to them.

Lincoln proclaimed three things that New Year’s Day. First he

announced the liberation and protection of slaves in states cur-

rently in rebellion against the federal government (followed by a

list of those parishes and counties, state by state, where the slaves

owned by families loyal to the Union would not yet be free).

Next he asked the freed blacks for peace, a stay against retal-

iation for the long cruelty, and urged them, where they could,

to work for pay. Finally he invited all the freedmen who could

to serve in the Union Army, which was in need of soldiers.

When Ralph was a small boy in the 1930s, there were still

elders in the community, men like Sam Polite, who remembered

hearing Lincoln’s words read that day: “On the first day of Jan-

uary, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and

sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or desig-

nated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebel-

lion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and

forever free.” Emancipation set free four million women, men,

and children.

The blacks of St. Helena who gathered beneath the great live

oak had enjoyed an informal freedom as “contraband of war”

since early November 1861, when Union gunboats steamed up

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

Port Royal Sound and fired on Confederate troops stationed at

Hilton Head Island. The “big gun shoot,” as Gullahs know the

battle, lasted exactly one day. When word reached the planters of

St. Helena that the Union had taken control of the Sound and

were heading up the Beaufort River, they fled, some rising up

from tables set with their finest china, silver, and crystal, leaving

their dinners uneaten. The Union troops who landed on the

mainland and entered Beaufort a few days later found to their as-

tonishment that it was empty of white people but for one planter,

who was stone drunk.

Ten thousand slaves had been left behind. Though their mas-

ters had tried to scare them with stories about what the Yankees

would do to them (harness them like beasts to carts or ship them

off to the infamous sugar plantations in Cuba), most refused to

leave. Many hid so they wouldn’t be forced to accompany the

masters’ families as they headed north for Charleston. Some were

shot by masters incensed by their disobedience.

The people of St. Helena were among the first to be freed, the

first to be offered the chance to buy land, and the first to study in

a school for free blacks, the Penn School, founded by the Phil-

adelphia abolitionist Laura Towne in 1862. They soon became

one of the most closely studied African American populations in

the country. Lincoln himself took a keen interest in how the Sea

Island blacks were making the transition to freedom. Represen-

tatives from Europe, Latin America, India, and Africa regularly

visited the Penn School, which was considered a model of rural

education for the disenfranchised.

Now, 145 years later, the community of St. Helena Island is

the largest stronghold of Gullahs who still live on their ances-

tral lands. In the decades since historians demonstrated the living

connection between the Gullahs and West Africa, particularly

Sierra Leone, clarifying how enduring their culture truly is, Sea

Island Gullahs have been engaged in an increasingly difficult

struggle to hold on to their land. Since the bridges that link the

Sea Islands to the mainland were built, many communities with

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

a black majority have been displaced by resorts, gated communi-

ties with golf courses, condominiums, and private beaches. The

culture of tourism threatens the survival of one of the most sig-

nificant African American communities in the United States.

The stories of two gardeners determined to pass on their land

to future generations—Ralph Middleton, who returned to the

island in retirement after forty-five years away, and Otis Daise,

who has never lived anywhere else—bear witness to a stunning

act of cultural endurance. Their stories begin and end with

gardens.

It is already ninety degrees by 9 a.m. when I turn down Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive and see Ralph Middleton, a tall, dignified

man of seventy-nine, standing alone in the shade of a great live

oak. He calmly waits, lifting one hand in a slow wave as I pull

into a long driveway lined with oyster shells pressed into the

sandy earth. His smile is warm and welcoming as he reaches

out to shake my hand, his voice deep and quiet as he introduces

himself.

“Indigo is the main garden now,” he says quietly as he guides

me to a large rectangular garden bed that runs along the wooded

edge of his property, ten acres that have been passed down

through the family since emancipation. The indigo garden is full

of tall bushy plants with bright green oval leaves. “It gets about

eight feet tall. The flowers are dark blue, very small. I try not to

do anything to it, because we’re experimenting to see how it per-

forms on its own.” Indigo is not easy to grow. It prefers not to

be transplanted but is sustained by the spread of its seed. On

Ralph’s land, it comes back strong every year.

“This is very rich soil,” he says, and leans down to show me.

Lifting away a patch of grass, he gathers up some earth. “It’s

sandy loam, but it’s very rich.” I lean down beside him and take

some in my hand too, admiring its fine tilth.

When he releases the soil from his hand, Ralph’s gesture is

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

reverent. He stands up slowly and turns, inviting me to walk

back to the house. “After slavery, most blacks stayed on the land

here. We feel that we are part of the land,” he says in his deep,

calm voice. “This is where we’ve been, where we’ve worked, for

generations. You know your grandparents and great-grandparents

planted here. We have memories about the land, about what they

did here. So it’s important. It’s sacred.” For Gullahs, the land is

freedom. It is the ground of their dignity and the reason they

have endured.

“Most of us are poor,” Ralph continues. Though he speaks in

the present tense, it is his childhood he is remembering, for he

and his wife, Lisa, are prosperous now. They live in a beautifully

constructed wood frame house built by Ralph’s great-uncle, Ben-

jamin Boyd, who was a revered teacher of carpentry at the Penn

School decades ago. “We were so poor,” Ralph adds, laughing

lightly, “that we didn’t even notice the Depression.”

I turn to look at him, and he smiles. The Gullahs were not

only that poor, they were that self-sufficient as a community.

“Many of us had to make it on the land when we didn’t have

any other jobs here. This was our source of life for years. That’s

why we don’t like to see fences. We hate gated communities, most

of us do, because everybody here was raised to feel free to walk

anywhere, and you respect it, that freedom.”

There is no fence around the Middletons’ land. You see very

few fences anywhere on Gullah land on St. Helena Island.

“Here, you respect a person’s land,” Ralph explains. This is a

tradition that never needed stating until their island attracted the

attention of developers.

Ralph never uses the word property or mine in speaking of this place. His habitual use of you for I, like his tendency to speak in the plural, suggests the importance of the Gullah com-

munity over the individual.

Gullah is the name of both the people and their English-based

Creole language, which contains elements of many African lan-

guages. By emphasizing the African rather than the English vo-

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

cabulary and grammar within the language, slaves could com-

municate among themselves while concealing their meaning

from their masters. The slaves were experts in the art of “code

shifting,” speaking their language one way with white folks and

another with blacks.

No one knows for sure whether the word Gullah refers to a place (Angola, some think) or a people (perhaps the Gola of

Liberia and Sierra Leone). Lorenzo Dow Turner, a black linguist

who studied the Gullahs for fifteen years beginning in the 1930s,

recording and analyzing their songs, folktales, and everyday

speech, was the first person to bridge the worlds separated by the

African diaspora. He demonstrated that Gullah was profoundly

influenced in its grammar and structure by African languages

and contains thousands of African names and words. His race

and his gracious manner gave him access to intimate aspects of

Gullah culture, like the private “basket name” every Gullah child

was given at birth, for use only within their community—an

assertion of their African heritage in opposition to the master’s

gesture of stripping slaves of their birth names as the first step in

making them chattel. Gullah basket names, like the actual sweet-

grass baskets their newborn children nestled in—“fanners”

made for the winnowing of rice—reflect the endurance of ancient

African traditions.

The Gullah language is so close to a language currently spo-

ken in Africa—Sierra Leone Krio—that when President Joseph

Momoh of Sierra Leone came to the Penn Center in 1988 and

greeted the community in Krio, some elders wept as they realized

they could understand him. For so long they had been told that

their language was no more than a broken and degraded form of

English that their ancestors had acquired from their white mas-

ters under slavery.

It is in keeping with the Penn Center’s contemporary role in

the community that it was the place where the Gullahs learned

that their African cultural heritage had survived 250 years of sep-

aration. Since Emory Campbell became the first Sea Island Gul-

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

lah to serve as director, Penn has been at the center of the move-

ment to preserve and restore traditional Gullah culture.

When Ralph Middleton was growing up, Penn Center was

still a school. Its mission included helping Gullahs remain self-

sufficient on the land while encouraging them to adopt English so

that they might assimilate to mainstream culture. Like his father

and grandfather before him, Ralph was fortunate enough to be

educated at the Penn School for twelve years at a time when

many Sea Island blacks could not go to school at all.

“Most of the community schools only went up to the sixth

grade,” Ralph explains. “It was important to get into Penn,

because that was the only place you had to go. At first it was

just academics, in Miss Towne and Miss Murray’s days. Then,

around 1900, it changed to include trades. Gardening was year-

round. In the summer they taught us to strip the corn blades to

strengthen the ears. We’d dig potatoes. We’d have a row a quar-

ter of a mile long, and we’d go along with a horse and plow. We

had a dairy. We had silos where we stored fodder for the animals,

horses and mules. And we had chickens, of course. In the spring

we had what was called Planting Week, and then in the fall we

had Harvest Week. It was part of our curriculum. They would

teach us new ways to plant, new things to plant.

“The teachers would come out to each family’s garden. Rossa

Cooley and Miss House, they’d ride out on their horses. The

main thing was to see how you were getting along in your home

garden. Miss Cooley was still there when I graduated. It was

her last year. She and Miss House really took an interest in the

people here—they knew every child by name, they knew every

family.”

When Rossa Cooley, Penn’s second principal, arrived, there

was no garden at the school. She set to putting one in and turned

it into a classroom. She decided that teaching a rural African

American community to memorize the kings and queens of En-

gland, to study the Magna Carta, and to solve abstract problems

in mathematics would never train them for a life of dignified self-

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

sufficiency. Forty years after Laura Towne proved that the freed

slaves could be educated, the community needed a different kind

of school.

Under Cooley’s direction, Penn became a working farm. The

entire cycle of cultivation, from preparing the soil for planting to

sharing a meal with friends who helped harvest the food, became

part of the curriculum. Students trooped outside to mark the

land they would help dig to make the gardens. Mathematical

problems were now concerned with measuring out plots and cal-

culating yields. Science began with soil and light and water, how

seeds grew, how corn is pollinated, why all nutrients should be

returned to the soil, how to get the healthiest harvest from the

land and preserve the surplus for winter.

“Our object was to bring island life into the classroom—into

the little world of teaching too much bound up in the printed

word,” Cooley wrote in her 1930 memoir, School Acres. But the family fields exerted a pull on the students that could not be ig-

nored. “The crop often called the children to the fields at the

same time our old Liberty Bell called them to the classroom,” she

wrote. Penn “had that paradox of an agricultural school seem-

ingly in conflict with the farming community it served.” So Coo-

ley adjusted the school day and year to the rhythms of the

Gullahs’ fields. The knowledge of how to cultivate land, she

knew, was “their true Magna Carta.” “Education,” she declared

in her 1926 book, Homes of the Freed, was “to teach power, not technical skill.”

Planting and Harvest Weeks, as Ralph remembers, were a

time when children stayed home to help with the family gardens.

The teachers came to them, riding island ponies they’d given

names like Jubilee and Wonder.

Ralph left Penn in 1945 to join the army. Once the war ended,

he went on to get his B.A. as well as an M.S. in social work from

Howard University. Fifty years after he left the island for the first

time—and encountered a world that had no idea there was a

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

place in America where blacks had owned their own land for five

generations—he now tends a garden that holds within it the

memory of the African origins of his people’s culture.

Indigo has not been grown on St. Helena Island for over two

hundred years. Since 1995, Ralph Middleton has been growing it

from seeds given to him by an African American artist, Arianne

King Comer, who studied textile arts in Nigeria. King Comer

moved to St. Helena when she learned that indigo had once been

widely cultivated here. Her home and studio are part of the Penn

Center campus, just down the road from Ralph’s place. Together

with a visiting artist from Nigeria, Arianne prepares indigo dye

in the traditional African way, using a mortar and pestle to

pound the leaves harvested from Ralph’s garden. The beauty of

her cloth has brought her recognition and respect. She has begun

teaching children in the community about the African origins of

indigo cloth and often takes classes to Ralph’s garden to learn

about the plant that played a pivotal role in the evolution of the

island’s culture.

For thirty years beginning in the 1740s, indigo became a suc-

cessful cash crop, second only to rice in the low country, the re-

gion that includes the Sea Islands and the flat, fertile coastal plain

that extends inland for forty to fifty miles. Since the Sea Islands

lack the freshwater swamps and tidal rivers necessary for the

large-scale cultivation of irrigated rice, island planters hoping to

duplicate the success of rice on the mainland with their own lu-

crative export crop eagerly turned to indigo, which does not re-

quire irrigation and thrives in the loose, sandy soil. The discovery

that indigo would flourish there transformed the culture of the

Sea Islands, as planters brought in great numbers of African

slaves required for the large-scale production of indigo dye,

which is labor-intensive at every stage.

The introduction of indigo to South Carolina is traditionally

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

attributed to a young female slave owner, Eliza Lucas Pinckney,

who was born in 1722 on the Caribbean island of Antigua,

where her father served as lieutenant governor. Educated in En-

gland, she moved with her family to a plantation on Wappoo

Creek, near Charles Town, where her father hoped the climate

would be easier on his wife’s health. But it wasn’t, and when he

was called back to Antigua, Eliza, by all accounts an extraordi-

narily accomplished young woman, assumed control of the fam-

ily’s plantations at the age of sixteen. Her youth, her gender, and

her indigo have made her the stuff of legend.

“When talk of indigo began,” historian William Gaillard

Stoney writes in the introduction to his 1938 volume, Plantations of the Carolina Low Country, “Governor Lucas sent packets of seed to his daughter and was also able to find to help her a man

experienced in the trick of making the dye, a task of great deli-

cacy. Any fair planter with the average gang of hands could make

the weed, but training and organization of master and men were

extremely necessary once the mass of green leguminous stuff was

cut. The quality and price of the manufactured dye varied widely

and it took a split-second judgment as to just when to stop the

‘steeping’ or the ‘beating’ of the liquor and when to let in the

lime-water that precipitated the ‘mud,’ as each step might settle

the question whether you got something that remained truly little

better than mud or the fine purple, the fine copper, or the most-

to-be-desired fine flora of the trade . . . Eliza Lucas,” he concludes,

“with the aid of her assistant and the cooperation of a neighbor,

Andrew Deveaux, did a very great deal towards establishing the

new crop.”

Though tradition leaves little room in the story of indigo

for anyone but Eliza Lucas, who has been called “America’s first

great agriculturalist,” small details scattered among historical ac-

counts suggest where to look for the missing pieces. Who, for ex-

ample, was the “man” Governor Lucas sent his daughter, whose

expertise, as Stoney acknowledges, was “extremely necessary”

to the training of both master and slaves?

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

In her 1896 biography, based on Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s letters

from the period, Harriott Horry Ravenel is careful to note that

Governor Lucas sent not one, but three men to help his daughter

learn the complex art of making dye. Though nearly all scholars

refer to the passage in Ravenel’s text where she mentions all three,

most acknowledge only the first two, brothers named Nicholas

and Richard Cromwell, overseers from plantations in Mont-

serrat, a center of French colonial indigo production. Nicholas

Cromwell arrived in 1741 and built the brick vats on Wappoo

Creek that made it possible to produce the first indigo dye in

South Carolina. Some version of Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s famous

account of how Nicholas Cromwell “made a great mistery of

the process” and intentionally spoiled the color because he “re-

pented coming” to help the American colonies compete with his

own country must have reached her father soon after the making

of the first inferior dye occurred because Governor Lucas sent

Nicholas’s brother, Richard, to replace him. In 1744, when four

years of experimentation with the crop finally yielded a suc-

cessful harvest, Eliza wrote to her father that Richard Cromwell

had produced “17 pounds of very good Indigo, so different from

N[icholas]-C[romwell]’s, that we are convinced he was a mere

bungler at it.”

“The truth,” Ravenel adds to this account, is that both Crom-

wells “were traitors,” and neither made excellent dye. It was not,

she wrote, until Governor Lucas “sent out a negro from one of

the French islands” that “the battle was won.” Whoever this black

man was, his name, his origins (was he a free black or a slave?),

and his pivotal role in the economic, political, and cultural life of

South Carolina have been all but erased.

Among the lingering injustices of slavery has been the dis-

torted history of who shaped the landscape and culture of the

South. None of the three cash crops that made South Carolina

so wealthy—rice, indigo, and cotton—was indigenous to the

United States. For so long, the question of who made their large-

scale production possible was answered by historians who relied

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

on the accounts of white planters and their descendants, who

tended to take the credit themselves. The slaves, whose African

cultural heritage, it was assumed, had been expunged by the ex-

perience of slavery, were said to have provided little more than

brute strength. In Black Rice, Judith Carney, building on the work of a generation of scholars who have been rewriting the

history of slavery, reverses this model. By focusing on the African

side of the Atlantic slave trade, Carney demonstrates how the

evolution of rice cultivation in South Carolina depended upon

“the diffusion of an entire cultural system” indigenous to the

Rice Coast of Africa, where rice had been grown for millennia.

White planters in South Carolina, whose early attempts to grow

rice failed, were at first completely dependent upon their African

slaves for the agricultural and technical knowledge of how to

grow and process rice.

Though no one has done for indigo what Carney has done

for rice, the story of white planters eager to produce a cash crop

but ignorant of the proper methods of cultivating or processing

it suggests how to restore balance to the story of Eliza Lucas and

indigo, and so provide a context for Ralph Middleton’s indigo

garden.

Statistics on the production of indigo vary, but most historical

accounts show that after 1745, when South Carolina exported

5000 pounds of indigo dye in the form of dried cakes, the num-

bers rose with stunning speed. By 1747 the figure had risen to

150,000 pounds, and by 1775, South Carolina was shipping over

a million pounds of indigo a year to England. In the three de-

cades leading up to the Revolution, colonial planters received a

bounty of six pence for every pound of indigo shipped to En-

gland when access to dye from the French West Indies was cut off

by hostilities between Britain and France. The bounty system

worked so well that shrewd low-country planters who invested

in indigo could double their wealth every three to four years. As

a result, “the province,” Stoney records with relish, “expanded

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

as it had never done before.” Many of the great Palladian man-

sions of Charleston, the most fashionable city in the South, were

made possible by indigo, as were some of the great plantation

houses along the Ashley River fifteen miles inland, including

Drayton House and Middleton Place, with their magnificent gar-

dens, and the early plantations of St. Helena Island. None of this

could have been accomplished without African slaves, whose

numbers ballooned in this period.

The success of indigo is directly related to the establishment

of a black majority community on St. Helena. In 1720, as the

census data Peter Wood cites in Black Majority, Negroes in Colo- nial South Carolina demonstrates, before indigo was introduced, there were 150 whites and 42 African slaves in St. Helena parish.

By 1760, as indigo production soared, slaves made up three

quarters of the population. Many of the Africans brought to South

Carolina in this period came from areas where people would

have been proficient not only in the cultivation of rice but also in

the growing of cotton and indigo as part of an indigenous cloth-

making tradition like the one Arianne King Comer observed

in Nigeria. As Johann David Schöpf, a German visitor to South

Carolina observed in Travels in the Confederation, 1783–1784, it was not the white planter but the skilled slave who was com-

monly the head-man in the dye-making process. As with rice, the

seeds, the technology, and the knowledge necessary to the large-

scale production of indigo dye all came to South Carolina as part

of a system of “ecological imperialism,” as Alfred Crosby calls

it, in which colonial planters appropriated the agricultural tradi-

tions and exploited the knowledge of those they enslaved.

Ralph Middleton’s indigo represents a new kind of garden on

St. Helena, a form of heritage garden that reconnects the pieces

of a tradition torn apart by the Atlantic slave trade, when Afri-

cans for whom the production of indigo, like the growing of rice,

was part of an honored heritage were compelled to share their

expertise with the colonial planters who enslaved them. Indigo

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

links Ralph to generations of his forebears who worked the in-

digo plantations of the Sea Islands. And it reaches farther back,

restoring a severed tie to their ancestral homeland in Africa.

It’s Saturday, early morning, and the breeze coming off the Beau-

fort River tempers the heat as I walk along the waterfront park

to the farmers’ market, where Otis Daise has spread his table

with baskets of fresh produce. Otis’s pickup is parked nearby, the

tailgate down, holding boxes of cucumbers, zucchini, and pota-

toes. His onions, with their long green stems and big panicles of

white flowers still attached, make a great show at one end of his

crowded display.

People have already begun to stroll slowly from one table to

another in the shade of overhanging trees. It’s impossible to talk

with Otis here, so I scrawl his phone number on my pad and

later, when I call, he gives me directions to Orange Grove Com-

munity, down past the Penn Center at Land’s End.

A live oak shades the front of the house Otis built with the

help of his father-in-law in 1970. Yuccas he dug from the beach

years ago hug the base of the mulberries, and white oaks protect

the approach to his door. Just beyond them grows a row of

evenly spaced bushes covered with red roses. A fire-blackened

tub rests on a table beside one of the sheds that dot the side yard.

Out back, the sea breeze lifts a line of neatly hung laundry.

Otis comes out to meet me, grinning as he extends a hand.

Dressed in camouflage pants, a yellow polo shirt, and sneakers

and wearing a red baseball cap that says Grandpa, he is so trim and fit that he looks far younger than his sixty-six years.

“I have about ten acres of my own. It’s all right here,” he says,

“straight across. These are the original acres.” He opens his arms

wide, gesturing left and right. “I’ve got a market garden out

back. And I got five acres I bought across the road. Then I got the

four fields I rent other than my own. I go to the waterfront, the

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

farmers’ market, make money. I give my neighbors a lot of stuff

too.” Otis’s rent helps his neighbors pay their taxes.

Welcoming me inside, Otis brings me a tall sweating glass

of icewater, sits down, and begins. “I was born and raised right

here. My mother, grandmother, sisters, and brothers, all raised

right here. My great-grandmother, she started it off. She was a

Smalls, Jane Smalls. All this land was hers originally, from 1861.

My mother keep it up. And then me and my brother and sister

keep it going. Now it’s me keep it going, since my oldest brother

died.

“Back in the forties, a storm destroyed the house and every-

thing, took out all the fruit trees. They rebuilt, but that house

gone now too. Most of the trees from old times, the fruit trees—

all them, you know, they gone.

“I raise five kids on this land. My wife died back in ’72. I put

all my kids through school. Two married an’ gone. But I got my

son here and I got two daughters live here. I got nine grands.

“All of this come from the land. History, history. Two of my

grandsons, they work in the fields with me. When you look back

over your shoulder and you see your grands helping you, it make

you feel good. I try to teach them, you know, how to follow my

footsteps. You got to be a leader, because if you be a leader, they

tend to follow you. You train ’em right, they’ll do good. But if

you stagger, stagger, stagger, they gonna stagger too.” He shakes

his head, then says it again. “They gonna stagger too.

“We’re six or seven generations on this land. We all speak

Gullah. My children and grandchildren, they all know Gullah.

“I love my land. I love right where I’m at,” Otis says, pointing

to the ground beneath the house we sit in. “I know my neighbors,

they love where they at too. You got to love your land. Just like

you love your husband or wife. You’ve got to love it.”

Each time he repeats the word love, it sounds different. Some- times it’s one long curving note, other times an exclamation.

Typed out, Otis’s words lie flat, lined up in orderly rows. They

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

convey nothing of his authority over language. Growing up in

a rich oral tradition, his standard English, a second language,

is adapted to the grammar of Gullah. His voice rises and falls in

quick shifts of pitch and timbre. His range spans octaves, and he

uses every note.

“My great-grandparents, they give me this, I didn’t have to

buy it, so that’s why I love it so much. We work hard, selling cans

and doin’ this and that, try to keep the land, so when I come up,

it was here for me. Now, when I go, I’m gonna leave it to mine. I

stress to them over and over, pay your tax. ’Cause I work hard.

Just keep it. If they don’t keep it, it’s gone. And that’s all over this

whole island.”

The strength of Otis’s urging, his shift from “we work hard”

to “I work hard,” suggests how anxiously older Gullahs now

watch the young.

“When I come up, in my old house, we used to go outside

morning time, we didn’t have to come back in for lunch, because

we had everything. We had fruit trees—peach trees, fig trees,

walnut trees, pecans. We had orange, apple. We had figs, we had

walnuts, we had grapes, anything we want out here to eat. And

we had the outside pump to get the cool water. Everybody had

a flower garden too. We had all kind, sunflowers, lily, tulip. You

name ’em, we had ’em. My grandmama work it. I used to work

some of ’em too.

“That was good times, comin’ up. For me it was. You never

wanted for nothing. The whole family been together. Sometimes

they got to call us to come in ’cause we play all night. That was

the enjoyment.

“We’d take the corn to the mill and grind it. We used to get the

grits, the cornmeal, and the flour. We used to put the peanuts on

the housetop to dry. We made our own peanut butter. We raised

our own hogs. We used to have our own chickens, get the eggs.

In the fall, we used to kill a hog and cure it with salt. We had a

smokehouse. Everything we grow, we had ’em to eat.

“Everybody shared. It change, I’d say about twenty, thirty

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

years ago. When all the old-time people died, it changed. My

mother’s generation. Them old-time people, they used to pray

and sing in the fields. Got the hoe goin’, and everybody got a

tune, songs like ‘Take Me to the River,’ ‘River of Jordan,’ ‘Do

Lord, Do Lord.’ They used to go along like that and then they

make up songs too. All that gone. Right now, if a neighbor move

in, if you don’t live with them, you don’t know if you neighbor is

sick. See, them old-time people, when they get up in the morning

time, they used to say, ‘You go over there and see who got a need.’

You know, like that. You got some meat, you got a chicken, you

got some rice, you share.”

Otis leans toward me. Every word he speaks next he says with

his hands too. “If you got,” he says, extending his hands to-

ward me, palms up, “I got.” He pulls his closed hands back to his

chest. “And if she got, you got.” He turns and points to an invis-

ible woman beside him, then back to me. “But now everybody

like this,” he says, hugging his crossed arms to his chest as if cow-

ering in fear. “Now everybody is so alone, what they got they

ain’t share. And that’s bad.”

The thought of it makes us so sad that when Otis says, “Want

to see my fields?” we’re both on our feet before I finish saying yes.

“My whole family eat from this garden,” Otis says as we stroll

along the edge of the garden behind his house, where he grows

okra, butter beans, pigeon peas, peanuts, watermelons, egg-

plants, white potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, and more.

“These peanuts. You know how they grow, don’t you?”

No, I don’t. This is the first time I’ve ever seen peanuts

growing.

“That’s the leaves,” Otis says, pointing. “The peanuts be in

the bottom. The bushes turn. Then you pull ’em. When I was

comin’ up, you make your own peanut butter. We go in the wood

and cut the tree and make the mortar out of hickory wood. We

used to make the pestle out of hickory wood too. Put that peanut

in that and get the oil.”

We walk by rows of squash and watermelons. Fat green

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

cantaloupes ripen in the hot sun. Beans and peas are coming

along well.

“I wish you come last week,” Otis says, chewing a toothpick.

“I had some white potato out there,” he says, indicating a long

stretch of clear earth, weed-free and ready for replanting. “They

was so pretty.” The way he says it makes me wish I’d been here to

see them.

Tomato plants, leafy and dark, span several rows. Nearby, cu-

cumbers ripen on the vine.

“I make my own pickles,” Otis says. “I can my own tomatoes.”

“In that tub near the shed?” I ask.

“Yeah, that be the best place, outside.”

Near the peas, I see zucchini vines with beautiful open blos-

soms. “Have you ever eaten squash flowers, Otis?”

He takes his toothpick from his mouth and turns to look at

me, incredulous. “You eat the flowers?” His voice rises, flowers breaking in two, one note high, one low.

“Sure,” I say. “You dip them in egg and milk, just as you do

the okra, then in the flour, and then you fry them. They’re deli-

cious.”

“That’s how I like my okra too.” Otis puts his toothpick back

in his mouth, then walks on, shaking his head.

We drive deep into the community, where Otis shows me

a field of beans, peas, and okra, then another with cucumbers,

squash, and watermelons. He grows nearly everything from seeds

he harvests every year.

“You can save all the seeds,” he says. “Once you buy it one

time, then you plant it, then you don’t have to buy it anymore. I

save okra seed, bean seed, potato seed, peanut seed, corn seed,

watermelon, cantaloupe.”

“How long do you think it’s been since you had to buy a

seed?” I ask him.

“I say it’s thirty years . . . ,” he begins. He looks down, think-

ing, then he looks up at me, smiling and shaking his head.

“Whew!” he says. “I save my okra seeds all my life.”

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

Okra. African word for an African seed. Okra is like kin, its place in Otis’s life reaching back so far that it has no beginning.

Of course he still uses it to make soup.

We’re still talking about food as we turn down the road

heading back to the house, passing a huge field stretching to a

stand of live oaks in the distance, planted thick with a dark green

leafy crop.

“What’s growing there, Otis?” I ask.

“That’s just tomatoes.”

“That whole field is just tomatoes? Who owns it? Someone

from the island?”

“Yep, that’s all just tomatoes. They get the Mexicans to come

in and work it. All I know is their name is Six L. They a big com-

pany. They got fields all over.”

As we walk along the edge of Otis’s newly planted field,

birds hidden in the cool foliage of the big trees start to sing. We

look over the windrow at the field a hundred times the size of

the one we’re standing in, planted with nothing but row after

row of tomatoes, with a wide, cleared aisle of dirt on either side.

A yellow cooler stands on a post at the edge of the dirt road. Ev-

ery now and again we see a Mexican fieldworker’s head as he

stands up.

“Nice and quiet here,” Otis murmurs, turning to look at his

own field. “Peaceful too. I love fieldwork.”

A breeze comes up and we stand side by side, quiet, listening,

just looking at the neat rows of seedlings.

“So hot the stuff ain’t growing. No water. Need some rain.”

Otis looks the length of the field. “It coming, though.”

“Do you irrigate, Otis?”

“No,” he says—a long, deliberate exhalation. “I just wait on

the Lord’s rain.”

It was a stupid question, really—there are no pipes, no pumps

in sight to suggest that he does. It’s just that without realizing it,

I’ve registered the fact that the crops in the commercial grower’s

field are ten times the size of Otis’s. The white PVC pipe bringing

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

irrigation water mixed with fertilizer, a technology called fertiga-

tion, stretches the length of the countless uniform rows.

“Right across the street from your house, right here beside

your field, with just this hedge between you, you’ve got this big

industrial farm operation,” I say.

“Yeah,” Otis agrees. “And I’m the little farmer on the other

side,” he adds, and laughs. “They work hard for they money,”

he says, thinking of the Mexican workers. “They don’t spend

it. They send it home to they families. They nice people to be

around.”

Otis’s thoughts turn to his own field. “You come back about

another three months, this whole field will be clean.” He sweeps

one hand lengthwise in the air. “I going to dig it in September.

Then I’ll make sweet potato pie. Candy yams.

“When you finish with this, you go into collard greens and

cabbage in winter. That grow September to January. January,

you start back with this again. So it’s a constant thing. I ain’t get

a break from last year, and I still going. But that’s farming. You

go from one to the other. Hard work. But I like what I do. You

got to like what you do.”

As we head back across the road to Otis’s house, a handsome

teenager wearing a straw hat strides slowly toward us. “That’s

my grand,” Otis says with pride. “That’s the one that help me in

the field, Oti the Third. Oti, come here,” he says affectionately.

After Otis introduces me, I ask if I can take their picture.

“Okay, Oti.” Otis puts his arm around his grandson’s shoul-

ders and says something to him in Gullah. Oti takes off his hat

and lowers his head, then looks up at me, smiling.

“Two farmer,” Otis says, and they look straight into the

camera.

“The present and the future,” I add, releasing the shutter.

“He might be the future, if he don’t go in the army.” Otis

turns and gives Oti a look. Oti smiles, but he’s not saying any-

thing.

It hangs over everything here, the question of the future of the

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

land. I wonder if Oti has any idea how rare it is in America to be

the seventh generation of a family to work the same land. Or if he

understands how important this land and these fields are to the

history of his people.

Otis Daise’s gardens map the history of Africans becoming

Americans as well as the Africanization of American culture. It

was in the gardens of Ralph Middleton’s and Otis Daise’s ances-

tors that three garden traditions and three cuisines—African,

Native American, and European—were blended to create one of

the most distinctive culinary traditions in America. It was also in

their gardens that the slaves of St. Helena prepared themselves

for freedom.

Of the plants slaves are known to have cultivated, there

are only three that Otis Daise doesn’t grow—tobacco, sorghum,

and benne (sesame). The seeds of the original African American

gardens—okra, yams, peanuts, watermelons, pigeon peas, and

other African foods that Otis still grows—came with the slave

trade and were cultivated in the slaves’ small allotment gardens

—“provision gardens,” as they are known. Judith Carney calls

them “the botanical gardens of the dispossessed.” Their history

has yet to be written.

Until I visited St. Helena, I knew very little about the gardens

that were granted to the slaves, one of the four kinds of culti-

vated land that might be found on a big plantation in the South.

The largest areas would have been the master’s extensive fields

planted with a single cash crop—rice, indigo, and cotton being

the three most important in South Carolina. Then there would

have been kitchen gardens to serve the master and mistress’s ta-

ble. The wealthiest planters and their families might also have had

formal gardens filled with ornamental trees, shrubs, and flowers.

All four kinds of cultivated land were created and maintained

primarily by slaves. But only one type of garden has endured,

the slaves’ provision gardens. Provision gardens offered slaves a

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

place apart from the oppressive work of the master’s fields,

and the task system offered them time. Well established on low-

country plantations by the eighteenth century, this system as-

signed fieldwork to slaves according to their age and gender.

A “task” was a quarter acre. Since their labor was regulated by

tasks, not time, once they had completed their assigned work,

slaves had time for their own work, including their provision

gardens.

In giving slaves a measure of autonomy and self-determina-

tion, the task system also allowed them to demonstrate their sol-

idarity. When their own tasks were done, they could help others

who were tired or sick, saving them from a whipping. Sometimes

this meant they didn’t get to their own gardens until after dark,

when they would hoe and weed by the light of the moon or a pan

of grease set on fire.

From the master’s point of view, provision gardens offered im-

portant benefits. They relieved some of the economic burden of

providing for the slaves, and they discouraged runaways, be-

cause, as masters noted, slaves tended to become deeply attached

to their gardens and their animals.

But in this, as in so many things, slaves operated in accord

with their own quite distinct understanding of their situation.

Keeping a garden and some livestock meant slaves could partic-

ipate in trade, earning and saving money. It was common for

slaves to sell their produce, sometimes even to their own masters.

The making of a garden offered them important immaterial

benefits as well, including the symbolic power to shape a por-

tion of their world. Bringing life from the earth restored agency

and a sense of purpose. Growing traditional African foods from

seed preserved a link to their homeland and their ancestors. Hav-

ing the means to feed loved ones supported the family structure

that slavery so often broke down. Cultivating a garden meant

that slaves could grow herbs to use in traditional medicine and

flowers for beauty. In all these ways, gardens could heal and em-

power.

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

When emancipation came, many low-country slaves not only

had money to buy land, they had seeds passed down for genera-

tions. Most important, in their gardens they had kept alive a love

for the land that even the dehumanizing experience of slavery

could not expunge.

Today the making of gardens remains as significant a cultural

and political activity as it was for the Gullahs’ ancestors under

slavery.

“If you work the land, you keep the land,” Otis Daise told me

the afternoon we walked his fields.

“Lose the land and you lose the culture,” Ralph Middleton

says, completing Otis’s warning, during our long visit the next

day, when he shows me the original deed to his family’s ten acres.

“These are the descendants of my great-great-grandfather,”

he explains as we lean over a print out of the Middleton family

tree. The name Richard “Dick” Middleton stands alone at the

top in large capitals. “They just took the name from the Middle-

tons,” Ralph adds quietly, referring to one of the wealthiest and

most powerful slaveholding families in South Carolina, one of

whom—Arthur Middleton—signed the Declaration of Indepen-

dence.

“We were slaves on Wadmalaw,” Ralph continues in a matter-

of-fact tone. Wadmalaw Island lies just south of Charleston and

north of St. Helena. “We came here around 1866 and bought

land in the Corner Community.” After emancipation, the Gul-

lahs renamed each of the plantations a community.

The men who bought the land that has come down to Ralph

and his heirs were brothers. But because they were slaves, their

stories are nearly impossible to recover. The white man who sold

them the land, however, can be traced. “This man came down

from Massachusetts and bought the land off the tax sale,” Ralph

tells me. “Then he sold it to whoever wanted to buy it. When

people heard that they were selling land to freed slaves here, they

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

came down from Wadmalaw. This is how Richard Middleton

had a chance to buy land on St. Helena.”

He hands me a clear copy of a handwritten deed dated Febru-

ary 5, 1866.

Know All Men by these Presents. That I, Edward S. Philbrick

of Boston, in the County of Suffolk, and State of Massachu-

setts. In Consideration of Fifty five Dollars, paid by Richard

Middleton of St. Helena Island, in the District of Beaufort,

and State of South Carolina, the receipt whereof is hereby

acknowledged, do hereby grant, remiss, release, and forever

Quit claim unto the said Richard Middleton a certain piece

or parcel of land, situated on the said St. Helena Island

. . . According to this plot of the U.S. Tax Commissioners

for South Carolina, containing Eleven acres of land more

or less, Being a portion of the tract of land formerly known

as the Corner place . . . and sold to the said Grantor by. . .

U.S. Tax Commissioners for the State of South Carolina, as

per Tax Sale Certificate No. 19, dated March 9th 1863 . . . To

have and to hold the above released premises, with all the

privileges and appurtenances to the same belonging to the

said Richard Middleton, his Heirs and Assigns, to his and

their use and behoof forever.

“So few blacks had a chance to buy land,” Ralph explains as

we try to imagine the moment when the deed was signed. “But

we were lucky in this area. When the Freedmen’s Bureau people

came down here, they started the Port Royal Experiment. When

the slaveholders left, the land went up on tax sale.”

In Sea Island Diary, A History of St. Helena Island, South Carolina historian Edith M. Dabbs tells the story of the repre-

sentatives of the Freedmen’s Bureau who came to St. Helena in

1862—some traveling with Laura Towne, the founder of the

Penn School—ostensibly to help the newly freed slaves make

the transition to freedom. They bought many of the abandoned

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

plantations, with the understanding that the land would be sold

to the blacks within a year for the same modest price they had

paid the federal government for the confiscated land. Edward

Philbrick was one of them. A white man born and raised in Bos-

ton, Philbrick graduated from Harvard in 1846 and worked as a

civil engineer for years before arriving on St. Helena in the spring

of 1862 as part of the Port Royal Experiment. Having donated a

thousand dollars to the experiment and paid for his own passage

to St. Helena, he was rewarded for his generosity with the posi-

tion of superintendent on the largest plantation on the island,

Coffin Point.

As a plantation superintendent, Philbrick was expected to

hold the land in trust. He was to recruit freed slaves to work the

land for pay, with the promise that in one year they would be

able to buy a parcel of their own. When he became the overseer

of eleven plantations, owning nine outright and renting two, he

held title to 810 acres of land planted with Sea Island cotton,

the finest cotton in the world. Another 1500 acres were planted

in food for the 933 freed blacks who lived and worked on what

was now his land. Philbrick owned more land on St. Helena

than even the richest of the slaveholding planters had owned, and

more blacks worked on his lands than had ever worked for one

master under slavery.

A year later, although he had promised to sell the land to the

freedman at the same price he had paid for it, Philbrick instead

began selling off whole plantations to Massachusetts friends and

business associates who came down to St. Helena to try their

hand at raising Sea Island cotton. Having paid $1 to $1.25 for

land he then sold for up to $12 per acre, “Edward Philbrick,”

Dabbs adds pointedly, “became a very wealthy man.”

Though the blacks of St. Helena rose up in protest, addressing

their grievances directly to President Lincoln, when Richard

Middleton signed his deed two years later, Philbrick was still sell-

ing confiscated plantation land to freed slaves for ten times what

he had paid for it. Given the extent of his holdings, there must

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

have been scores of land transactions like the one Richard Mid-

dleton’s deed represents.

As a result, the failed promise of emancipation is still mapped

in the pattern of land distribution today. Members of the black

community own small parcels of land—the same ten acres their

ancestors bought after emancipation—while a small white mi-

nority holds the large ones.

Commercial tomato fields deep in Gullah communities are part

of this legacy of racially determined landholdings. These indus-

trial farms have been carved out of large parcels of land passed

down through white families. How do these industrial farms

figure in St. Helena’s future as a black majority community?

“Tomatoes are the cotton of the latter part of the twentieth

century,” Dana Beach, an environmentalist with the Coastal

Conservation League of South Carolina, says when I ask him

what these fields mean. “Cotton was not a local product, and the

planters didn’t even deal with the United States. They engaged in

some trade with the Northeast, but most of their trade was with

Europe. That’s why they thought they could be their own coun-

try.” Like the cash crops grown on the old plantations, “toma-

toes are a boom-and-bust crop,” he adds.

Dana has seen what the commercial growers of tomatoes do

to the land on St. Helena. To prepare their fields, they cut down

all the trees, then scrape off the topsoil and sell it off-island.

What’s left serves as a mere substrate for the production of a

chemically dependent crop watered with millions of gallons

drawn from the local aquifer, for which the commercial growers

pay nothing.

The Mexican migrant farmworkers who harvest the tomatoes

are paid between forty and forty-five cents per thirty-two-pound

bucket. They have to pick two tons of tomatoes to make fifty dol-

lars in a day. Out of that, they have to pay rent and buy food.

They receive no benefits of any kind.

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

Cam Lay of the Clemson University Agricultural Extension

Service agrees that tomatoes are a boom-and-bust crop. He likes

to quote John Walpole of Anchorage Plantation on Wadmalaw

Island, a grower who recently opted for the one-time windfall

of selling his family’s old plantation to real estate developers

and who summed up the situation in a single pithy phrase: “I

can make more money planting Yankees than I can planting

tomatoes.”

If it comes down to a choice between tomatoes and Yankees

on St. Helena, though, tomatoes are clearly the lesser of two

evils. At least the tomato fields are green and open. The alterna-

tive would bring condominiums, golf courses, and gated commu-

nities, with the chemicals it takes to support their lawns, the

runoff from newly paved roads, and all the demands for goods

and services their occupants would want. Property values would

go up, raising taxes so that even more Gullah families might lose

their land, as they have on Hilton Head Island, once also a tradi-

tional Gullah community but now one of the most famous elite

resort areas in the world.

However goofy the pitch, real estate ads for land in Beaufort

County, including the discreetly worded advertisements for some

of the old slave masters’ houses, like Tombee, make it clear that

the marketing of St. Helena to wealthy white outsiders depends

on a willed oblivion to history.

“Welcome to St. Helena Island,” the Island Realty Web site

begins, below a color photograph of sunset over a low-country

marsh.

Isolated by the hauntingly beautiful physical barriers of tidal

marshes and saltwater creeks, the sea island of St. Helena,

near Beaufort, South Carolina, evokes a warm feeling of step-

ping back into time and nature . . . Meandering rivers and tidal

creeks blend with tree shrouded and dusty roads which hear-

ken back to a kinder and more gentler time when St. Helena’s

great plantations produced some of the finest cotton in the

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

world—Sea Island Cotton. Even today St. Helena still main-

tains a 19th century aura. History and wildlife abound. Come

and experience what life was and what it can be. Come to St.

Helena Island!

It’s as if the Gullahs were already gone, and with them the awk-

ward and inconvenient history of slavery.

On my last day in South Carolina, I drive north, toward

Charleston. There is one more kind of cultivated landscape I

need to see—a slave master’s garden. I have chosen Middleton

Place, created by the family from whom Ralph’s ancestors took

their name. There, the formal eighteenth-century gardens made

possible by the success of rice and indigo have been restored to

their pre–Civil War distinction through the efforts of direct de-

scendants of the family. The old rice fields are still there too, and

the old rice mill.

Henry Middleton, for whom Middleton Place is named, was

the third generation of a family of wealthy planters. In 1741

he married Mary Williams, heir to the property that now bears

his name. “Already of independent fortune,” William Gaillard

Stoney writes in Plantations of the Carolina Low Country, “mar- riage and management would make the first Middleton of Mid-

dleton Place one of the province’s richest men.” By the time he

was elected president of the First Continental Congress in 1774,

Henry Middleton owned fifty thousand acres of land, twenty

plantations, and eight hundred slaves.

Middleton Place in the days of Henry Middleton comprised

6500 acres. It is the site of the oldest landscaped gardens in

America. Soon after taking up residence, Henry Middleton be-

gan to plan the gardens after the style of Le Notre, the great

French landscape architect who designed the gardens at Ver-

sailles. Stoney considered this “the premier garden of the thirteen

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

colonies.” Even now, it is ranked as one of the greatest gardens in

the world.

The land Mary Williams brought to her marriage with Henry

Middleton is striking for its elevation, a rarity in the low country.

Rising a quarter mile above a great curve of the Ashley River, it

overlooks a long sloping bluff that reaches down from the origi-

nal house site to the tidal rice fields below, commanding a stun-

ning view of the river and the marshes beyond. The two most

striking features of the landscape on the river side of Middleton

Place are the terraced hillside sculpted from the bluff, with soft

green steps suggesting the wide marble stairs of a great European

house, and the lakes shaped like a pair of butterfly wings that lie

at its base.

Nothing in the literature I am given for my self-guided tour

suggests how I am to deal with the most salient fact about the

creation of this entire landscape—acres of formal gardens, two

long reflecting pools, a labyrinth of garden rooms, one opening

into another; a long, meandering path leading to the white statue

of a wood nymph who leans down to tie the ribbons of her slip-

per, her head framed by clouds of blue hydrangea blossoms. Ac-

cording to family legend, it took one hundred slaves ten years to

carve these features from the land.

I know from the little map I carry which path will take me to

the rice fields, which are, the map says, right beside the butterfly

lakes, for which Middleton Place is famous. After several min-

utes, the path leads me out onto a narrow strip of grass between

the demonstration rice field and the lakes. Spring-green blades of

rice have sprung from the rich mud of mounds raised above the

water, which pools in the channels below. Standing still in the full

sun even for a few moments, trying to take in what I see, makes

me lightheaded. Sweat runs down my face, stinging my eyes; it

forms rivulets that course down my arms and legs and stain my

clothes. How could anyone work in these fields in such heat?

The labor involved in transforming river bottomland into irri-

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e

gated rice fields like these was nothing short of staggering. Using

shovels, hoes, and baskets, slaves moved many tons of earth, re-

shaping the land and redirecting the flow of water on a vast scale.

The banks built to hold back the Ashley River are taller than the

men who built them. Once the banks had been constructed, the

land had to be carved into geometrically shaped fields separated

by handmade dikes and irrigation canals. Floodgates, or “trunks,”

controlled the inflow of fresh water at high tide, suppressing

weed growth and irrigating the rice, and then the outflow at low

tide, which kept the crop from drowning. The floodgates were

called trunks because in their earliest form they were actually

hollowed-out tree trunks with removable plugs, a technology for

water control that had evolved as part of West African rice cul-

ture, which the slaves introduced to South Carolina. The huge

project of transforming the landscape along the lower reaches of

the Ashley River and redistributing its mud took several years, as

Henry Middleton learned the African art of tidal rice cultivation

from his slaves.

The digging and cleaning of the dikes and canals of the irri-

gation system was called mud work. The slaves hated it. They

hacked at weeds, mosquitoes swarming around their heads while

alligators and water moccasins swam in the murk around their

legs. “No work can be imagined more pernicious to health,”

Alexander Hewatt, an eighteenth-century South Carolina histo-

rian, wrote, “than for men to stand in water mid-leg high, and

often above it, planting and weeding rice.” As they worked in the

rice fields, “the scorching heat of the sun” would render “the air

they breathed ten or twenty degrees hotter than human blood.”

Standing here in the fierce heat, I realize that the gaze of

anyone working in the rice field below me would be level with

my feet. I turn and take one step toward the nearest butterfly

lake and look up toward the vacancy at the top of the terraced

hillside where the great house, burned by Union troops, once

stood. Visitors arriving by boat, as most did, would have been

positioned in just this way: above the slaves, below the Mid-

p a t r i c i a k l i n d i e n s t

dletons. What intoxicating blend of wealth, power, and greed

concocted such a landscape? Here are gardens that map rela-

tionships of power on the land, positioning me in an eighteenth-

century slaveholder’s hierarchy of value. The impulse to dominate

is Henry Middleton’s signature on the land.

Somewhere on one of the Middleton plantations, Ralph Middle-

ton’s ancestors toiled and died. Something Ralph said as we

walked slowly back from the marsh at the far edge of his family’s

land comes back to me: “Sometimes when I walk here, I think of

the tears. I think of who was here, who walked this land, what it

was like for them.”

The butterfly lakes are separated from the rice fields by no

more than the width of a slave-built earthen dike. They were

carved from the same swamp as the rice fields, by the same

hands, under the same brutal conditions. When we are asked to

find this landscape beautiful, we are being invited to forget the vi-

olence of its making. The will to remember who made these gar-

dens, and at what cost, may well be the more important act of

historical restoration, more telling than filling in the holes the

great earthquake of 1868 tore open in the terraced hillside as it

brought down the charred remnant of the old north wing.

“The land is God,” Ralph Middleton told me. “And the land

is God’s. We see God walking through it. We’re just caretakers.

You do your part. Then, when you go back to God, you can say,

‘I did what I could. I left it in good shape.’

“We’ll hold this land for our children. I believe some of them

will come back. Even if they don’t come but once a year till they

retire. That’s what I did. All I do is keep the tree going. Someone

else planted it. It’s there to share. I’m just keeping it alive for the

next generation.”

t h e e a r t h k n o w s m y n a m e