‘There Would Be No America Without Rice’ — How a Single Grain Made a Nation Possible

Charlotte Jenkins holds out a pot and makes it clear that if you want to learn something, it’s time to look closely. “See this rice?” she says. “This is how rice is supposed to be.”

She’s right, of course. The rice is neither mushy nor crunchy. Each grain retains its individuality, but together, the grains have softened toward the optimal threshold for soaking up flavor. Charlotte Jenkins is 81 years old, and she has spent seven of those decades (yes, she began cooking as a child) transforming simple pots of rice into dishes that tell a deep, ancient, and sacred story about where she comes from.

Jenkins comes from — and lives in — South Carolina. But more specifically, and crucially, she carries on the culinary traditions of the Gullah Geechee communities of South Carolina — communities whose connection to West Africa continues to thrum through a style of cooking that has endured in this region since the earliest years of slavery. The rice in that pot, here in her home kitchen a short drive outside of Charleston, will emerge in a few minutes as a tantalizing purloo studded with nuggets of bacon and pinwheels of okra.

Jenkins doesn’t measure anything. She doesn’t hover over the stove. Like a seasoned musician, she lets her ears and eyes lead the way. She drops chunks of pork into a pan, returns to the kitchen table to chat with her daughter, Kesha, and simply waits “until it’s crisp.” When the pork is done, she wipes the residual schmutz from the pan with a paper towel. “This is a trick,” she says. “Because that can definitely change the taste of your food. Oh, I have a lot of tricks now.” The okra shows up late to the party on purpose. “I don’t cook the okra in the rice the whole time because if you did that,” Jenkins says, “the okra would disintegrate.”

Her okra purloo, when ready, turns out to be a marvel of contrasting textures and currents of seasoning, and it confirms what everyone in the Charleston area tells you, which is that Charlotte Jenkins is an absolute queen of Gullah cooking. Yet right now, you might be reading about her for the first time.

For years in nearby Mount Pleasant, she and her late husband, Frank, ran a restaurant called Gullah Cuisine, which closed a decade ago. Her cooking attracted national acclaim, but somehow Jenkins never ascended into the pantheon that includes godmothers of Black gastronomy such as Edna Lewis and Leah Chase. Why that didn’t happen — well, that’s a complicated story that goes down to the roots of Charleston’s troubling history when it comes to race, rice, money, and power. But it’s never too late to honor a dignitary in our midst.

After all, as Jenkins herself puts it, “I’ve earned it.”

The rice fields were hell

Horror marked every aspect of slavery throughout the American South, but there was a particular intensity to the agony for the Africans who were brought to the Lowcountry of South Carolina to plant, grow, and harvest the grain. Alligators and snakes lurked in the ditches alongside the fields. Mosquitoes and horseflies thickened the air. If you merely touched the bark of a tree in a moment of rest, your entire body might start to itch from a sudden swarm of clover mites.

Rice fields did not exist in South Carolina, at least not in the late 17th century, when British colonists and the Africans they enslaved began to move from the sugar plantations of Barbados into an area known simply as Carolina. Before the decades of planting and growing rice, before the surge of profits that would make the region outlandishly rich, plantation owners forced African men, women, and children to clear thousands of acres of woods and swamps.

Growing rice is a complex enterprise, one that involves the strategically timed flooding of fields. Soil has to remain moist enough that rice keeps getting nourishment as it grows from seed to sprout to plant, but the water can’t surge so high that it drowns the crop. At Anson Mills, founder Glenn Roberts has helped bring Carolina Gold rice, a locally beloved variety, back from obscurity. If you ask him to expound on the history of the Lowcountry and rice, he’ll begin with a single word: water.

“The water is food to rice,” says Roberts. “As long as the top leaves are above the water, the plant survives.” For 110 to 120 days, as the rice matures toward harvest, there’s a careful dance between wetness and dryness. You have to monitor the weather constantly because a serious downpour can tip the scales. The rice grows better, tastes better, and carries more nutrients if it shares the field with agricultural companions such as sorghum, millet, benne, and Sea Island peas. “Rice doesn’t like to grow alone,” Roberts says. You’ll know you have a rice crop when the panicle — the part that resembles the branches of a willow tree — grows heavy with grains. As Roberts puts it, “the panicle bends.”

But plantation owners didn’t know any of this, which meant that specific tribal pockets of West Africa were targeted for enslavement because Africans had the experience and the knowledge. “Rice for thousands of years had been a major crop for Africans,” says Jonathan Green, a Charleston artist who has played an instrumental role in amplifying the true history of rice in the region and in creating an extensive visual tribute to the culture of the Atlantic diaspora. It’s no accident that fishing boats in Senegal and other coastal areas of West Africa look similar to Gullah fishing boats in South Carolina, and it’s no accident that both coasts, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, produce cuisines devoted to rice and seafood.

The exploitation of African agricultural expertise, and a dependence on hundreds of thousands of unpaid laborers who endured brutal conditions in bondage, led to previously unimaginable profits. “For 100 years, Charleston was the wealthiest city in America — and arguably the world,” Green says.

The city’s charm and beauty, its soaring church steeples and antebellum mansions, did not arise by happenstance. Between 1670 and 1808 (when a federal ban on the slave trade went into effect), an estimated 40% of all enslaved African people who were brought into the United States entered through the port of Charleston. The city boasted the first liquor store in the colonies — the Tavern at Rainbow Row, which opened in 1686 and is still selling bottles today — as well as the first museum.

Enterprise boomed. According to Roberts, the average export of Carolina Gold rice from the Carolinas and Georgia in the early 19th century was about 160 million pounds per year. And according to Kim Cliett Long, project administrator at the Jonathan Green Maritime Cultural Center, the wealth per capita in South Carolina during a flush period was around £180 (or about $35,000 in today’s dollars) versus £38 in the colonies of New England. Rice (as well as cotton) flooded Charleston with money. With money came a new white aristocracy and the financial resources that could convert a colonial upstart into an international superpower.

Amethyst Ganaway, a Charleston-based chef and writer, puts it this way: “There would be no America without rice.”

It’s no accident that the Civil War started in Charleston Harbor

South Carolina had seceded from the United States just before Christmas in 1860, and in April of the following year, Confederate guns began to bombard Fort Sumter, a U.S. Army outpost located on an island in the harbor. As a tourist in Charleston today, you can stroll to the Battery at the southernmost point on the peninsula, surrounded by the mansions once built by the city’s wealthy plantation owners and the artillery that once defended them, and spy in the distance the very spot where the cataclysm began.

When the war ended in 1865, newly emancipated African Americans in South Carolina secured their roots on the eastern islands, such as Edisto and Daufuskie, where they could rebuild their communities with minimal interference. (In fact, a government edict called Special Field Order No. 15 — issued by William T. Sherman, the Union military leader notorious for his March to the Sea, and later revoked by President Andrew Johnson — essentially granted about 400,000 acres of Southern coastline to Black families that had survived enslavement.)

It was on these islands that Gullah Geechee culture, cuisine, and commerce flourished. Seeds served as a form of currency between Black and Indigenous inhabitants of the islands. “No white people knew about it,” Roberts says. “They had their own commerce. It survived all the way into the 1950s.” The rice plantations collapsed, but the centrality of rice persisted, and the marriage of African traditions and American ingredients led to a rich living database of dishes such as hoppin’ John and chicken bog, red rice and purloo.

Even today, the thread of connection between Gullah Geechee cuisine and West Africa remains bracingly direct. Last year, Charleston saw the opening of Bintü Atelier, a restaurant whose chef, Bintou N’Daw Young, was born in Senegal. When Amethyst Ganaway first ate at Bintü Atelier, she ordered thiéboudienne — a Senegalese classic in which a mound of jollof rice is surrounded by a delicious orbit of fish and vegetables — and instantly noticed the echoes. “I thought it was red rice on the table,” Ganaway says.

A tourist visiting New Orleans would know, probably without prompting, that a trip to the Crescent City is not complete without feasts full of gumbo, jambalaya, shrimp étouffée, and red beans and rice. Such food is baked into the folklore of the city. But in Charleston, particularly the tourist-luring precincts of the peninsula, Gullah cuisine does not dominate the local conversation in the same way. Instead, it feels curiously invisible. To Ganaway, there’s a simple reason for that: “White people!” she says, throwing up her hands. “They’re not going to be overtly racist because Charlestonians have too much class. What they’ll do is ignore you.”

And yet Ganaway admits that after a few years of living elsewhere, she sensed a deep love for Charleston and its cuisine pulling her back. “I moved home because the water was calling me home,” she says. “I’m where I need to be at. Now there’s me and my friends calling each other — ‘Hey, how do you make hoppin’ John?’ For me, it’s about now having the awareness of how special it is.” As Ganaway strolls through Charleston’s fastidious French Quarter on a warm winter day, she finds herself grappling with the ways the city can simultaneously disturb and delight. “It’s a beautiful place,” she says. “A beautiful place. With a lot of history that people don’t know.”

Back in her living room in Awendaw, Charlotte Jenkins would be inclined to agree with all of that, both the deep love and the deep frustration with the city’s lingering prejudices. Decades ago in the South, segregation meant that Black and white folks did not dine in the same restaurants. “And Charleston — I don’t see a lot of changes,” Jenkins says. “There’s something about Charleston — they can’t let go.”

Ask the right folks, and you’ll hear plenty of stories about the Lowcountry and rice

And not just in South Carolina. Swing by the Harlem apartment of Alexander Smalls, the influential New York cookbook author and restaurateur, and he might cook you a bowl of rice grits (which are made out of broken rice grains instead of hominy) smothered in a rich, peppery gravy studded with crabmeat and shrimp. His grandfather worked in the rice fields of South Carolina, and Smalls spent time in and around Charleston growing up. “My grandfather would’ve done it just like this,” he says. “My dad would’ve had okra in here. My father had to have rice for every dinner and every lunch. My father would get up from the table if there was no rice.” In the kitchen, Smalls puts a spoonful of hot grits onto the palm of his hand and pops it into his mouth like a bump of caviar. “Oh my my, it’s ready,” he murmurs.

Hank Tisdale, now 85, left South Carolina for decades to pursue a career as a corporate executive in New Jersey, but eventually, his Lowcountry roots pulled him back. On any given evening, you might find him digging into a heap of seafood purloo at Gillie’s Seafood on Folly Road in Charleston. When he was growing up, he’d come home from school and head for the wood stove. Before going outside to play ball with his friends, Tisdale says, “I had to start the rice.” He measured the water using the time-honored knuckle method, touching the top of the rice with his index finger and pouring in water so that it reached the joint of his first knuckle. His mother would later doctor it up with vegetables and seasoning, and that rice would form the nightly centerpiece of a family dinner.

When it comes to reclaiming and preserving Black traditions of rice cultivation in South Carolina, few people go as far as Rollen Chalmers does. Drive south of Charleston, almost to the Georgia border, and you can visit a small, welcoming store in Hardeeville, Rollen’s Raw Grains, where he sells bags of Carolina Gold rice that he grows and harvests on nearby land. His connection to this land goes way back. His father, orphaned at 13, used to hunt alligators and plow fields with an ox; his mother farmed peas, watermelon, okra, sweet potatoes — and rice. Long before that, his ancestors were born into enslavement. Some of them are buried right up the road in Bluffton. They, too, grew rice.

“People say, ‘Man, you had to get connected with this rice — it’s in your blood!’” Chalmers says. Twenty years ago, he met Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills; the company sells rare strains such as Carolina Gold while also making the seeds available for free. “He said, ‘Rollen, would you like to have some of these seeds?’” Chalmers recalls. “I just went and started planting.” Richard Schulze, a retired eye surgeon, owned a former plantation called Turnbridge. The planting began there, and Chalmers now oversees and attends to 47 acres. (These days, fewer than 2,000 acres in South Carolina are used for the cultivation of Carolina Gold and other heirloom varieties of rice; a roughly equivalent number of acres are devoted to it in Texas and Arkansas.)

More recently, Charleston began turning toward its complicated history and set out to create the International African American Museum. In 2023, the museum opened on Gadsden’s Wharf, the building itself a monumental work of art that floats — supported by 18 massive pillars — above the same ground where enslaved Africans entered the city. Today, you can walk its exhibits, where the story of rice and the voices of the people who first planted it are in constant dialogue with the city’s present.

You can also visit Turnbridge with Rollen Chalmers, if you want to see the fields. He’ll show you where the alligators sleep in the colder months. He’ll tell you that people wandering the fields still, now and then, pick up Civil War belt buckles. He’ll tell you how enslaved laborers slept on dirt floors and died in the heat. “It was rough,” he says. “It was unlivable.” Spanish moss dangles from the live oaks. The big house stands in the distance. “These fields are just like the fields 150 years ago,” Chalmers says. He is correct about that, and that’s why maybe when you visit you can’t help but feel a wave of nausea and a chill up your spine.

“It happened,” he says. “It happened. There’s nothing we can change. I talk to people with an open mind. My ancestors were enslaved, and they were growing rice.”

“We don’t know how much was taken from us”

Amethyst Ganaway says. “We don’t know how much was hidden from us.” What can be carried forward, though, are the rituals of cooking — the sacred steps of creating nourishment from raw ingredients that have been passed down through countless hands. For residents of the Lowcountry, there’s a spiritual dimension to handling, cooking, and washing rice. “It’s something that really connects us to our ancestors,” Ganaway says. “I was taught to rinse it three times — and then once more. Washing the rice — it is a meditative process. But it’s magic. And so much of Gullah culture has magic in it.”

Drive out to Edisto Island, about an hour from Charleston, and you’ll sense those rituals and that magic close at hand in a house that once belonged to Emily Meggett. In 2022, after decades of using her personal kitchen to feed her community, Meggett published a cookbook, cowritten with Kayla Stewart and Trelani Michelle, called Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island. A year later, at 90, she died.

The beach houses of white families dominate much of Edisto’s coastline now. Chefs like Ganaway and BJ Dennis pour their energies into shining a spotlight on the beauty and soul of Gullah cuisine in South Carolina, but even a casual glance around the island tells you that what remains of Black culture on Edisto seems to be locked in a stalemate with the forces of time and gentrification. If you’re lucky, though, you might visit on a Sunday and find three of Emily Meggett’s daughters — Lavern, Marvette, and Dee Dee — gathering in that very same kitchen to cook red rice and fry chicken and celebrate their mother’s legacy. A wood stove keeps the room warm. “My mom cooked on this stove all the time,” Lavern says. “This is all they had when they were growing up.” There are bags of Carolina Gold on the counter. A sign on the wall says “Emily’s Kitchen.” A few steps away is the famous door.

Emily used to wake up each day, read some scripture, and pray that her food would find the people that day who really needed it. Then she’d start cooking. If hungry people passed the house and noticed that the famous door was open, it meant that she had food to give them. “She did that all of her life,” Lavern says. “She loved people, and she just had that passion.”

“Nobody left her house empty-handed,” Marvette says. Lavern sautés some onions, cuts up some sausage. “I cook like my mom,” she says proudly. “I don’t measure. How much is in there? I don’t know.” Sure enough, pretty soon she’s boiling rice in water, adding seasoning and tomato paste and a pinch of sugar, and transferring everything to a special aluminum pot — purchased at a hardware store and known locally as “the Charleston Rice Steamer” — that’s often viewed as de rigueur in Gullah cooking.

“In just a little bit, you’re going to have the perfect red rice,” she says. “This is one of the things that our ancestors made — way, way back.”

Here, the spiritual dimension of rice is on full display. When it’s ready, the rice is served, and chicken, too. A group gathers around the dining table. There are several cakes — a maple-walnut cake, a sweet potato cake, and a pineapple–sour cream pound cake. It’s a feast. Someone says grace. Everyone says “amen.”

“My mom always said she never served guests,” Lavern says as the group begins to dig in. “Everyone is family.”

On our way home

As we traveled in and around the Lowcountry of South Carolina for Food & Wine, the two of us began to notice a theme

It became a refrain, almost like the chorus of an old song. “I left for a while,” folks would tell us, “but then I felt called to come back.” We listened to the stories of people who had grown up around Charleston, had experienced the crushing weight of sedimentary layers of systemic racism, and had (in some cases) gone on to achieve fame and fortune elsewhere but gradually found themselves drifting back to the food and culture and language and maritime breezes that they associated with home.

And the more we listened, the more we understood. No, South Carolina is not our home — we’re a Black Caribbean artist and a white author who have spent most of our professional lives in New York and California. But from the moment we arrived in Charleston, everything that we’d thought we knew about our destination was turned on its head. This wasn’t just a story about rice. We discovered that we were also reporting on the painful origins of our country. We were absorbing truth, and as we ate and roamed and listened, we found ourselves coming back to a quote from the Southern writer William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

American history — our history — is not some distant, abstract thing in Charleston. Wherever we went, the living mirror of history looked back at us. There was the Uber driver who told us about his Confederate ancestors. There was the moment when we were having breakfast with Anson Mills founder Glenn Roberts, and he pointed across the Ashley River to a patch of land that, he said, had once been the finest example of African regenerative agriculture on these shores. There was the afternoon when we climbed into a pedicab on the peninsula and realized that we, a Black man and a white man, were traveling together to the very spot where the Civil War had begun.

Charleston breathes history. Cities are living organisms — expressions of the land merging with countless human decisions. You see it in the architecture that’s a city’s framework. The first American museum was born in Charleston. The city’s oldest church dates back to 1680. But the vital conversation endures in new places, too: at Philosophers & Fools, a bookstore and wine bar that beckons anyone who loves literature and a glass of Malbec; the monumental International African American Museum; and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts.

The organic pattern that we heard from every person we interacted with was a sense of loyalty and reverence — love, really — for Charleston and its grandness. Amethyst Ganaway spoke of leaving and returning. Alexander Smalls spoke of himself as a prodigal son — one who would probably circle home to the Lowcountry when his Manhattan chapter comes to a close.

No one could imagine abandoning it. No one wanted to. Charleston is full of universal stories about who we are as human beings, even if we’re technically from somewhere else. The two of us were transformed by what we witnessed and heard in South Carolina. We were inspired. And we cannot wait to return.