FEATURE
Without Rhythm There Is No Movement
African enslaved peoples were a majority of the year-round population at Middleton Place, in Charleston, South Carolina, home of Declaration of Independence signer Arthur Middleton and once a thriving rice plantation because of African labor and skills. As a descendant of former enslaved house servants and carriage drivers of the Middleton family in the pre-American Civil War era, I have explored their humanity through dramatic interpretation and the African Seed Exchange© (ASÉ). Middleton Place ancestry brings me back to the stories of origin of African ancestry and their enslavement story. The rhythms of Africa are unifying in the African diaspora. While class stratifications were clearly delineated at Middleton Place between house servant and field hand, in the ‘slave’ quarters, Africans preferred the social engagement and folkways that framed a common unifying humanity. As rice-cultivating African people performed slave ‘tasks’ they maintained traditional mores and folkways. The African rhythm of living is perpetual movement. A note: Throughout this article, I use double quotation marks (“ ”) to identify direct quotations and quoted terms from sources. In contrast, I use single quotation marks (‘ ’) to call out words, like ‘slave’ and ‘tasks’ in the above paragraph, often used by white enslavers to describe African enslaved peoples and/or attempt to obscure the trauma of enslavement.
Ancestral Connections to Middleton Place
The primary source about my family’s African and African American ancestry is documented in Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir by Mamie Garvin Fields with Karen Fields, PhD. Further research by retired African American Studies Professor Robert A. Bellinger, PhD, illuminates the foodways of Black Middleton ancestors of the eighteenth century on the Middleton Bluff plantation in Charleston.
My experience includes Underground Railroads sites in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, John Batram’s Herb Garden in West Philadelphia, and Mother Bethel AME Church in South Philadelphia. In New York City, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture offered tremendous resources about African Americans from South Carolina who made their way to Harlem, New York, during the Great Migration in the early 20th Century.
Middleton Place and Lowcountry Gullah Culture
West African rice farmers were captured and shipped to South Carolina shores.
‘Seasoned labor Africans' were transported from Barbados to Charleston by the Goose Creek Men who established the foundation of the rice economy on nineteen plantations between North Carolina and northern Florida. The unique skills of west coast ‘rice Africans’ were exploited for sugar cane in Barbados. Sugar cane was not a profitable crop in the Carolinas; however, the skilled labor of ‘rice Africans’ provided knowledge of rice farming and harvesting for profit.
These rice cultivators developed a Lowcountry Gullah culture that is distinctly West African in the ways of knowing and being through language, art, religion, movement, and rhythm. Since culture is what you do and not specifically how you speak, Gullah is a way of preserving an African way of existence. The International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, describes how “Gullah or Gullah Geechee is an overarching term for African American cultural and language traditions found along coastal regions from North Carolina to Florida.” Historically, Africans were polyglots, speaking several African languages through trade, alliances, and diplomacy between the different peoples before enslavement. Using the vocabulary of European languages on an African grammatical structure is the essence of Gullah and other New World Africa languages, and West African “Pidgin” languages provide the deep structure of the languages that give it the “African rhythm,” as Dr. Robert A. Bellinger shared. The rhythms of Gullah are African. The words are Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, French, English, Bantu, and Benue, expressed in African rhythms. The secrets in the speech, music, and art preserved their humanity. There are slightly different expressions of African tradition among the regions of Gullah communities in the Carolinas, Georgia, and northern Florida. It is reasonable to accept these cultural nuances, since Africans were separated from land and tribes which they reclaimed independent of slavery’s influence. One of the best examples of regional difference is the way okra is prepared as a one pot meal. In the Lowcountry, it is called okra soup. In Louisiana, it is called by its original African name, gumbo; and in the archipelago of the Caribbean Islands, it is known as jambalaya.
Ty Collins
Mamie Garvin Fields (seated), author; Gayle Hawkins Bush (left), Community College Student Activities Director; and Ty Collins (right), Continuing Education Coordinator; gather for a photo in Black History Month: February 1985. Photo by Unknown family member.
Hercules, interpreted and represented in this 1794 Grand Illumination, was a Middleton Plantation cook, carriage driver, and manservant to Henry and Arthur Middleton. He was also a Christian minister for the enslaved population and an ancestor of Abram Middleton and George Washington Garvin. Photo by Ty Collins.
An aerial view of the grand curb appeal: the parterre and front entrance to Middleton Place. In the 1800s, guests would arrive for a visit on Middleton schooners and climb the parterre. Women would stay in the Conservatory; and men would stay in the Gentleman's Quarters, the current House Museum. Image from an unpublished documentary.
Culture in Motion
Enslaved African people working on the Middleton Bluff plantation reengineered the Middleton landscape in ways of knowing and working with the land. Wetlands were made dry, and dry land was irrigated through rhythmic rituals for working in rice fields from planting to harvesting seasons. At Middleton today, public history interpretation offers hands-on activities and gives evidence of the ‘stoop’ labor and agricultural ‘tasks’ dependent on lunar cycles and tidal systems. ‘Task labor’ required circadian rhythms (or the natural twenty-four-hour rhythms of the human body, based on the movement of the sun and presence of light and dark) with ‘specialized labor’ for rice production.
The cultural norms and traditions of food survival sustained body, mind, and spirit, ensuring rice farming success. The African knowledge of rice production and the staple food sources of West Africans connects the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural recreation of a homeland familiar to African people. The South Carolina Lowcountry was not unlike the coastal regions on the West African coast. Africans understood tidal rhythms touched every shore, and the African culinary aesthetic maintains a consistent rhythmic beat with nature.
In this tour of Eliza’s House, a Freedman’s Cottage, Ty Collins provides a pictorial and graphic history of rice culture origins in West Africa. This pictorial narrative about West African rice culture and folk customs helps communicate the origins of Gullah Geechee Lowcountry culture. Photo by Robert A. Bellinger, Ph.D.
Rhythm and Work
Perhaps, were it not for the African movement in labor, Americans would still be singing madrigals and dancing the minuet. The planting season required many steps in the process of preparing the land before planting rice seed. The men broke up the ground and tilled the soil. The women followed afterward with the ‘task’ of planting rice seed with bare toes and heels in pluff mud. Both steps in the process required a rhythm of activity. This heel-and-toe method of planting rice moved from the rice field and was stylized by the formerly enslaved Rev. Daniel Jenkins (1862-1937) and the Jenkins Orphanage Band, who moved in rhythm and played early forms of South Carolina Jazz. The rest is history. The Charleston, a 1920s American dance craze, was an African rhythm and a worldwide sensation. (Heel-ball-toe! Kick! Heel-ball-toe! Kick!) Rice farming was a group effort, but there were always elders, as rhythm leaders, who established the tune and the accompanying movement. The "call and response" became the "work song" which reinforced the ability of each person to perform a ‘task’ in a unified recitative. Rice cultivators worked as a group, rested as a group, and retired from the rice field daily as a group. Throughout each day, singing and moving in rhythm had one goal: ‘Mayibaye’ … come on back home. The words to come together as a group have a unifying musical rhythm. This movement and memory of unified call and response was practiced in swept yards, ritualized in the field, and offered as a nightly refrain in the Hush Arbors. The Praise House of organized Christianity led to ritualized practice in the Black church tradition. Here, the "lined hymn" of the worship leader is the recited first line of each verse, before it is sung in unison by the congregation. The Blues form, past and present, is shaped by field rhythms and lined hymns. Repetition is the thread to reinforce ideas and feelings: I got the lowdown blues, I got the lowdown blues; My heart is heavy with the sadness, I got the lowdown blues. The global American musical influence of rock-n-roll and, more recently, rap and hip-hop, continues the rhythm and movement traditions. Everybody mimics our rhythm, but they don’t want our blues.
Rhythm and Rice
Literacy has been evident in the family and documented in this memorandum by James B. Middleton in 1884. James represents the first African American Middleton born free, and he chose religion and education over the movement from slavery into sharecropping or debt slavery. Photo courtesy of the Anita Middleton Pearson Family Archive.
Planted rice seed was readied for the first water flow: the Ashley River was close to the rice field at Middleton Plantation. The second and third flows of freshwater over rice seed established the tidal system of growing rice for the marketplace. The ‘task’ of pulling weeds from the rice stalk was essential between each flow in the three-step process which was the work of women and children.
Middleton archives offer documented records about a planter’s preference for tidal rice production (as opposed to broadcasting, or throwing rice seed in wetlands), and the African agricultural system for developing irrigation methods to control the ebb and flow of water with damming gates, dykes, and trunks that provided the success of a profitable cash crop.
Men did most of the heavy moving of the earth and building the gates and dykes and trunks to irrigate rice fields for seed planting. Men also worked at knotting ropes for fish nets, and casting these heavy circular nets on the bank of the Ashley River for fresh catch of the day. Their handmade cages were dropped in shallow waters for shrimping and crabbing harvest. The repetitive movement of knotting ropes involved a rhythmic system.
Women followed the men with the greater ‘task’ for completing the greatest measure of daily rice-growing ‘tasks.’ Pulling the weeds between water flows was the responsibility of women and girls. Cleaning and polishing rice was more labor-intensive. Women cleaned and polished rice kernels for export in barrels which were taken to Charleston Harbor on Middleton schooners. Specifically, cleaning and polishing rice with a mortar and pestle was necessary before packing the rice into barrels for shipment. Traditionally, a woman’s touch made rice polishing most successful, ensuring a golden long grain polished kernel and the prized Carolina Gold. Meanwhile, men tended to be heavy-handed with the mortar and pestle. Their rhythm of cleaning the husk from the rice kernel created a broken rice that was called ‘Negro rice’ and was deemed not suitable for shipment. So, this ‘Negro rice’ became a supplemental food source for the enslaved population. Rice cake and rice pudding are two byproducts of broken rice that African ingenuity contributed to the African American menu and the American food experience.
Fouché Sheppard, a member of the Black and Brown Interpreters Network and a Certified Interpretive Guide, poet, storyteller, and activist, demonstrates cleaning rice with a mortar and pestle at the Aiken-Rhett House Museum’s domestic slave dwelling artifact in Charleston, South Carolina. Photo by Ty Collins.
Afterwards, women were responsible for preparing meals and caring for and protecting children, and so the women began many rhythms in food preparation. These included foraging for food sources and harvesting produce with the small African gardens they maintained near ‘slave’ quarters. The meal was a communal experience, and the food was prepared as a soup or stew that was placed over rice and known as the “one pot meal,” served all at once and never in courses. Unlike the work of men, work by the women was not possible without a rhythm for working and an accompanying song. Children as young as three years old learned a ‘task’ of labor in rice fields. Songs were instructions for learning. One example:
“Alight! alight!
Alight fin-gater light.
I give ya pack a rice.
Alight fin-gater light!”
In translating this Gullah tune, you can realize that children were doing the ‘task’ of chasing the “fin-gater”—fig eater, or June bug—away from the rice fields. The tune was sung with hand-clapping, bamboo sticks, and rhythm gourds supported by body movements. Consider the reaction of a stray animal who gets too close to you. Your knee-jerk reaction might have you clapping your hands, stomping your feet to punctuate the clapping sounds. You might even add vocal expressions like: “Get away from here!” “Git!” “Shoo!”
Rhythm stick and grapevine basket. Bottle gourds with seeds created musical textures, while gourds with removed seeds were vessels for wet and dry storage. Photos by Ty Collins.
Intermittent rhythms were part of preparing food. Songs like: “Pattycake! Pattycake…” and “Mammy little baby loves shortnin’ bread,” have lyrics that indicate a rhythm for work, as a distraction, to keep a toddler preoccupied while ‘Big Mama’ prepares something good to eat. The repetition of rhythm and song was a way to pass information and skills to a younger generation.
Artisan Work and Folk Medicines
Never idle, men and women were skilled artisans, making utilitarian domestic items to maintain the living quarters and a level of African humanity in rhythmic harmony.
Rag quilting is one of the best examples of relevant rhythms of work directly benefiting the enslaved people who performed this skill on their own time. Clothing remnants were repurposed to provide folk medical beliefs that protected the young and the elderly from common colds and other ailments.
The Face Jug, a distinctive type of ceramic face vessel, first appeared in the American South in the mid-1800s and played a role in literacy. Face Jugs are attributed to a few Black enslaved peoples working as potters in the Edgefield District of South Carolina. A man called “Dave the Potter” is recorded in the annals for his skill at throwing pots and writing inscriptions on them. As enslaved men and women acquired the ability to read and write, they were breaking the law when caught doing so. Literacy skills were not permissible during the slavery era, but there were exceptions to these literacy laws for house servants and ‘alpha males’ on Middleton Plantations, as record-keeping was necessary. However, the exceptional craftsman “Dave the Potter” had his own method of using his skills to teach English words widely, so others could understand the ‘master’s’ language.
The Joint Middleton Family Reunion Quilt 2011, created during the 2011 Joint Middleton Reunion, quilters show the migration pattern of Middleton descendants and rice-cultivating people between Africa, Barbados, and the Carolinas. Photo by Ty Collins.
Hands-on activity for young audiences to introduce Gullah traditions for storing wet and dry foods. Here, recycled plastic pieces found along the roadway in front of Middleton Place are repurposed into a face jug. Face jugs were used for wet and dry food storage. Photo by Ty Collins.
Handcrafted action figures, like Twiss Up dolls, fashioned from rags and twine offered a head stuffed with herbs and spices like dried citrus peel, ginger, onion skins, and pine needles as preventive medicine.
Native American and African people gathered herbs, roots, tree bark, and leaves, and wore medicine bags to prevent seasonal colds. Acifidity Bags were made of cloth and held medicinal herbs, such as cedar pine, which could then be boiled to make a strong tonic. The manufactured cough drop replaced the medicine bag most familiar to Indigenous tribal beliefs, but Africans brought their own understanding about the uses of the entire plant. The root and the bark of a tree often offered more vitamins and nutrition than the tree’s leaf or fruit. The useful minerals were often concentrated in the seeds, stems, and roots—parts of a plant that are usually discarded.
Such practices were shunned by Europeans and described as ‘hoodoo worship.’ While the medicine practice was forbidden for house servants, field hands were not closely observed daily. The folk medical belief system remained a first line of defense to cure ailments. The house servant benefited from the folk traditions of the field hand.
FAR LEFT: The Twiss Up Doll, a Gullah rag doll, is made of rope, rag pieces, twine, and seasonal herbs. The head was filled with plant leaves or citrus fruit skin known for their medicinal properties. It was used especially for clearing away phlegm, breaking fevers, and warding off colds. Photo by Ty Collins.
LEFT: Making pine oil tea with cheesecloth and pine sprigs. Photo by Ty Collins.
Cultural Bias with Rhythm and Work
The African oral tradition made rhythm and work tolerable. These cultural norms and customs for working were mimicked and parodied by Europeans in tunes like “Whistle while you work,” and they gave the false impression that these so-called ‘darkies’ were ‘happy slaves,’ as they worked from “can’t see, to can’t see.” Europe was not the center of the universe as Europeans presumed. History about Africans and Native American peoples is replete with negative attitudes about rituals and artifacts that are not readily understood by European captors. Laws were created to ban foreign objects and belief systems as contraband. Some of the early laws against non-Christian norms remain in books of law and are enforced at will.
Lowcountry Foodways and Cultural Memory
All these rituals of work are rooted in African tradition. Middleton ‘rice-specialized people’ preserved these Senegambian cultural norms, rituals, and folk beliefs. The first generation of Africans born on the Middleton Plantation established an African American way of existence. What they knew about rice culture was acquired from African elders’ ways of knowing. African Americans who acknowledge their Gullah roots are considered keepers-of-the-culture, by expressing traditions through seasonal rituals and daily domestic practices.
Today, the African Seed Exchange© (ASÉ) at Middleton Place offers public history interpretation with crafts of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century enslaved Africans on the Middleton Rice Plantation in Charleston. Dr. Robert A. Bellinger’s research identifies specific seeds that frame the origins of ASÉ© for the African Seed Exchange in the Descendants’ Garden. His goal is to rebrand the Foundation’s public-facing education for more inclusive interpretation. The ASÉ© Demonstration Garden’s initial seeds included sesame, yams, okra, Willings Barbados Peppers, guinea squash, Plait d’Haiti tomatoes, and roselle. These African-sourced and Bajan vegetables and spices, and the songs and rhythms they represent, are foodways and pathways of cultural memory, medical beliefs, and ways of knowing through movement and rhythm.
This loblolly pine provided a marker to draw the enslaved from nearby plantations. “Hush Arbors” were the clearings in the woods where rituals for African spirituality thrived, and movement and memory of labor in the hush arbor continued as a spiritual gathering in the European tradition. By 1851, Williams Middleton added a chapel above the Spring House, so the people he enslaved could worship European Christianity. However, the traditions of ritual worship continued the African spiritual system of belief. A Sunday off to worship gained popularity. Christian Circuit riders would visit Middleton Place preaching about duty and respect from the Biblical text: “Servant obey thy master.” The call and response rituals in the chapel were the opportunity to encourage literacy and promote ideas about emancipation. The field holler, sorrow songs, and spirituals shaped the music of the organized Black church denominations in America. Acrylic sketch by Ty Collins.
