Rice and Slavery: Making the Past Tangible
By Jean West

Overview

"Rice and Slavery: Making the Past Tangible" is a lesson plan for students to use with studies about the slave trade or as a culminating activity. Between 1505 and 1888, approximately 12 million Africans were enslaved and transported to the New World for profit. Students will take geographical, economic, climatic, and primary source data and convert the information into maps, graphs, and measurement activities to help visual and tactile learners understand written information more comprehensively. Students will be asked to (a) measure out linear distances and weigh soil (dry and wet); (b) use either paper or computer programs to map American and African rice-producing regions; (c) research and compare climatic data in hand- or computer-generated charts for West Africa and the Southeastern British colonies; and (d) use either paper or computer programs to covert information from three tables in the essay Rice and Slavery: A Fatal Gold Seede into graph form.

National Curriculum Standards met by this lesson

For a list of standards that this unit addresses, click here.

Time required

One-two 50-minute class periods, depending on the amount of outside reading or media center research assigned and access to computer labs

Materials

• Essay, Rice and Slavery: A Fatal Gold Seede
• Measuring tape
• Twine string and stakes
• A 40-lb. sack of topsoil (this might be a donation item from a local nursery or discount
• store)
• A scale (if the school clinic or science department has one, arrange to use it)
• Five-gallon bucket and a gallon container of water
• Almanac and atlas
• Graphing paper and/or computer program(s) capable of generating charts, graphs, and maps

The Lesson

Anticipatory Set

1. Arrange for an outside area where students can stake out a day's task for a slave on a rice plantation. Also, arrange for use of a scale.


2. Take students outside. Set the first stake and have students measure a rectangle five feet wide and 24 feet long, set the remaining three stakes, and run string around the four stakes. Direct a student to measure five feet up from one of the corner stakes and explain that an adult slave was expected to excavate that amount of soil in ten hours while preparing the mail canal of a rice field. Ask students to calculate how many cubic feet of soil would need to be removed (5 x 5 x 24= 600 cubic feet).


3. Set a second stake and have students measure a rectangle three feet wide and 133 feet long. Direct a student to measure 18 inches up from one of the corner stakes and explain that an adult slave was expected to excavate that amount of soil in ten hours while preparing a quarter-drain for a rice field. Ask students to calculate how many cubic feet of soil would need to be removed (3 x 1.5 x 133= 598.5 cubic feet).


4. Return inside to the scales. Ask students to fill the five-gallon bucket about half-way with top soil and then weigh it. Empty the gallon of water into the five-gallon bucket and then weigh the wet soil. Ask students to calculate how much weight was added to the soil by the water. Discuss whether the soil is muddy, or whether additional water is needed; if dry, continue adding a gallon of water until the soil is muddy. Weigh the mud and compare the weight to the dry weight of the soil. Explain that rice cultivation meant that the 600 cubic feet of soil that a slave was removing was mud rather than dry soil.


5. A cubic foot of wet soil weighs 120 pounds or more. Ask students, how many pounds of soil did a slave excavate during his or her daily task (600 x 120 = 72,000 lbs. or 36 tons)?


6. Return to class and discuss with students whether the assertion that digging out 150,000 acres of rice plantations was a feat comparable to building the pyramids. Remind students that, in both cases, slave labor was used.

Procedures

1. Ask students if the description of the rice plantation slaves' labor would have been as meaningful without having done the activity in the Anticipatory Set. Explain that they will be using information either directly from or related to the essay and transforming it into "user-friendly" history through maps, graphs, and charts.


2. Divide the class into teams and explain that each team is responsible for reading the essay Rice and Slavery: A Fatal Gold Seede, although each team will focus on different information, as follows:
   
   
   • The Map Makers: Provide this team either with a map-generating computer program or blank maps of the Southeastern United States, Africa, and/or the Atlantic rim nations. This team should consult with atlases or online sources to mark on its map(s) historical locations for rice cultivation in:
   
   
   1. Africa including: Cape Vert, Senegambia, Mali, the Niger River, the Sine-Saloum River, Gambia, the Gambia River, the Casamance River, Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Bandama River, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Liberia, "Windward Coast;" "Gold Coast," Angola and Madagascar.
   
   
   2. The British colonies of the southeastern seaboard including: North Carolina (Cape Fear, Cresswell-Somerset Place Plantation); South Carolina (Charleston, Ashley River, Georgetown, Pee Dee River, Waccamaw River, Black River, Sampit River); Georgia (Sea Islands/Hilton Head, Savannah River, Altamaha River, Satilla River, St. Mary's River, Ogeechee River).
   
   Remind the group that their maps should include a key, if appropriate, compass rose, and title, as well as the names of the group members.
   
   
   • The Graph Makers: Provide this team either with graphing paper or a computer program that generates graphs. Direct students to examine the three tables in the essay, Rice and Slavery: A Fatal Gold Seede. Ask students to create three graphs (either bar, line, or pie) to express the data in the three tables. Remind the group that their graphs should include a key, if appropriate, and titles.
   
   
   • The Chart Makers: Provide this team either with rulers and blank paper or a computer program that generates charts. Explain to students that they will be collecting data about the geography, weather, and climate of historical rice regions in Africa and the United States. Some information will be available in a world atlas or almanac; other information may need to be retrieved from travel guides or online, for example at http://www.countrywatch.com. For the African cities of Abidjan, Dakar, Bissau and Conakry, and the U.S. cities of Charlestown and Savannah, students should create a chart containing the following data: Latitude, Average Annual Rainfall, DGP (Days of Growing Period), and Mean Annual Temperature. Remind the group that their chart columns should be clearly titled and organized.
   
   
3. Ask each team to share its completed assignment with the class. Discuss as a class whether there were similarities in the historical rice-growing regions of Africa and the British colonies of the southeastern seaboard. Also discuss whether the three graphs, if combined, show relationships between rice-cultivation and slavery. Finally, return to the question of the value of turning written information into visual data and whether it makes history more "user-friendly."

Assessment

You may evaluate projects on a 20-point scale (which may be multiplied by five to convert to 100-point scale or letter grades) using the following rubric:

Sources

Books

Carney, Judith A. Black Rice: the African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Coclanis, Peter A. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Dusinberre, William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Littlefield, Daniel C. Rice and Slavery: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

Internet Resources

"African rice (Oryza glaberrima): History and future potential" by Olga F. Linares.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/25/16360.pdf

"Rice Cultivation, Processing and Marketing in the Eighteenth Century" by Michael Trinkley and Sarah Fick.
http://www.chicora.org/Rice%20Context.pdf

"Rise of the Georgetown Rice Culture," by Christopher C. Boyle.
http://www.ego.net/us/sc/myr/history/rise.htm

"Slave Prices and the Economy of the Lower South, 1722-1809" by Peter C. Mancall, Joshua L. Rosenbloom, and Thomas Weiss.
http://www.eh.net/Clio/Conferences/ASSA/Jan_00/rosenbloom.shtml

"Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball"
http://docsouth.unc.edu/ballslavery/menu.html

Interdisciplinary Links

• Art (visual arts): Students use the sewn-coil technique to make a basket out of sweet grass or create illustrations showing labor on the rice plantations as Steele Burden illustrated labor on the sugar and cotton plantations in the Image Gallery.

• Home Economics: Students try to polish the bran from brown rice using a mortar and pestle, or prepare a slave's daily ration of boiled rice, corncakes, and butter or bacon grease. Alternately, they could locate and prepare traditional rice recipes from Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, North America, and Australia.

• English: Students write a slave narrative ,such as Charles Ball's, about the life of a slave on a rice plantation. For additional ideas, consult "The Life and Adventures of Zamba, an African Negro King; and his Experience of Slavery in South Carolina" at:
  http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/neilson/menu.html.

• Agriculture/Ecology: Rice is cultivated globally between latitudes 50º N and 50º S, but half of the world's output comes from countries located between 20ºN and 30º N. Students will refer to an atlas and determine in which states rice cannot be cultivated. Conduct research to determine the states in which rice is cultivated. What factors besides temperature might explain why it isn't cultivated in all potential geographical locations in the United States?

This lesson was submitted by Jean West, an education consultant in Port Orange, Florida.