Rice

IF YOU TRAVEL in on airplane between Charleston and Savannah, you can see traces of the old rice plantations in the watery grids that line the lowcountry’s rivers. It’s a testament to the enormous engineering skills of West African slaves, who were the real masters of rice growing. All along the rivers a series of banks and canals that impound the rice fields were carved out of the subtropical jungle. The anthropologist Leland Ferguson has shown that the movement of earth that was necessary for the rice plantations in the lowcountry was greater in volume then the Egyptian pyramid at Cheops, the world’s largest. By the out-break of the Civil War, nearly all of the nation’s five million bushels of rice exported annually were being grown in the lowcountry.