In the comments on Part 1 of this series, @babstheshopper wrote eloquently of her great great grandfather, born a slave. She got me to thinking about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as I remember the day he was assassinated. This act of extreme racist hatred was carried out by an American terrorist because Dr. King led the fight to apply the laws set forth in our Constitution to all Americans, not just white ones. Those were dark days in America.
Yet we still are on the journey for equality in America. Any questions about that can be answered by GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, a man who is so ignorant of his own prejudices that last November he made the following outrageous statement to a Harvard crowd, advocating putting poor children to work as janitors:
It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid. [...]
Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.
These toilet-and-floor-cleaning children would be hired from a poor, de facto minority population into jobs created by firing working janitors en mass, the majority of whom are also minorities and are not happy to be considered so worthless by someone like Newt, who clearly plays our system of government for his own financial benefit.
Newt went so far as to defend his “jobs for children” plan more strenuously in the recent South Carolina GOP debate held at Myrtle Beach, only a dozen or so miles from the location of the Waccamaw River where the Plantation Tours featured in this series operate. So this is where I lost my zen and entered the fray, starting with this political cartoon here.
I can’t help it. How it cut my heart to see New Gingrich’s position cheered so loudly by the very people standing on Ground Zero of American slavery, where the history of centuries of slavery was forged. Gingrich and his supporters no doubt vehemently deny the reality of the politically engineered destitution of an entire ethnic population, the ancestors of those slaves. Perhaps they should ask those South Carolinians who aren’t white if they think putting poor children to work as janitors is so different from the enslavement of their ancestors.
Writer John Ward defined it precisely:
It was a moment that will likely be dissected, debated and discussed for some time: a black journalist being booed by an overwhelmingly white audience in a deep South state on Martin Luther King Day, as a white candidate for president talked about the work ethic in low-income, majority black neighborhoods. It’s hard to imagine a more charged few minutes in public life in recent memory.
So with new inspiration (thanks, Newt), I return to my brush with history last September on a two-and-a-half hour pontoon boat ride with Plantation Tours down the Waccamaw and Peedee Rivers.
Life and death on the River: Into the waters
[Click on photos to enlarge.]
Plantation Tours departed here at the Wacca Wache Marina in Murrells Inlet, S.C.
These black water rivers are deceptively serene. I say deceptively because the malevolent history that happened here is soon enough revealed by the remnants which still remain of the system of slavery on the rice plantations of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Many large osprey nests can be found on the river.
Floating through the quiet, natural environment of saw grass, trees, and a variety of plants, it would be a mistake to forget the surrounding dangers which will kill you if you’re not careful. Besides the power of the ever-changing currents and tide, the rivers and swamps support a wide variety of wildlife, including highly poisonous pit vipers called the water moccasin and the very aggressive cotton mouth. Our guide, whom I’ll call Sarah though I can’t remember her name, said alligators are still plentiful, averaging 10 to 12 feet in length. Those in my photos live in the natural habitat zoo of Brookgreen Gardens, the outdoor museum I mentioned in part one, adjoining the banks of the Waccamaw. (More on Brookgreen Gardens in a future blog.)
A small gator in the natural habitat at Brookgreen Gardens
So amid all the beauty and fearful nature of the Waccamaw and inter-connecting Peedee, we come to the history which no words are sufficient to describe–but words and images are all I have.
Where Rice Was King, Not Cotton
My own realization of what those victims of the American economic slave system actually endured for 250 years started here, with this benign looking, primitive mechanical device:
I am entirely inadequate to tell this tale, but I must try, so I’ll do my best. These are sluice gates, built by plantation owners, or more accurately, by the slaves. These gates were an essential part of controlling the river waters; a slave given high ranking for his abilities raised and lowered them to flood or drain the rice fields behind them, a critical job because this process made or destroyed the crop. The intricate timing was coordinated with the rise and fall of the river, pushed in and drained out by the ocean tides where it emptied into the Atlantic. A better description with illustrations can be read here.
The trusted slave who was the gate-keeper also had the only gun given to a plantation slave, to shoot over the rice fields to scare off the birds which flocked to eat the rice. It was the job of female slaves to plant the rice, tend to it during the stages of growth during the long season, then harvest and process it for shipment on the river to market for sale. It was tedious work, made tolerable by “call-and-response” songs, sung as the field women worked together, digging into the mud with their heels to place their seeds.
Sarah told us many stories about the plantation owners and their families, the daily lives of the slaves, and of the rise and fall of the system, which ended, of course, when free labor was no longer available after the end of the Civil War. Some of her information came from this text which I found online: to read more go to page 103, “Waccamaw Neck.”
What sticks with me, though, are the fearful images that crept into my mind of wading into these waters to clear the river of cypress trees to make way for the rice fields. The feeling I can’t shake comes from looking into that opaque, silky darkness, lush and thick, swampy with plants, trees draped with spanish moss and snakes, still eyes watching from an aquatic prehistoric predator. No, I’m not being dramatic; this is life on the river even today.
Would you go into these waters?
Yet into that water countless men were forced to go on the “master’s” orders, for that is how the innocuous looking floodgates and dykes which controlled the river were built. A forest of huge, ancient cypress trees and live oaks grew out of the black water; the slaves cut them back below the water line to make way for rice crops, fending off alligators, snakes, disease, and injuries from using sharp tools. Those dangers resulted in male slaves on rice plantations having an average life expectancy of 20 years.
I did get one photo of a cypress tree remaining which I think is a good example of the violent nature of this work: this trunk, now about twenty-five feet high, was hollowed out by slaves.
The reason they did this, our guide explained, was because these trees stood beside the floodgates, part of the mechanism to open and shut them. This was the only one we saw on our trip, so there may not be many left standing.
Sarah also told us that at one time, during the peak of the rice plantations, the area we were traveling had about 20,000 slaves, more than two-thirds of the population living on the Lowcountry Waccamaw Neck, which is the section of river where the rice plantations were.
It might surprise Newt Gingrich to learn that the Africans who were enslaved there were not lazy savages, but men and women who built the plantations: from the main houses to slave quarters, from livestock barns to rice fields, from food to ornamental gardens, from boats and barges to the commodities they transported, the “slaves” used the skills they brought with them from the coast of West Africa and did the work that made the plantation system possible. They were favored for “purchase” by the rice plantation owners because they came from a region of Africa where growing rice was already a well-developed crop system and their American “masters” needed them to cultivate that system in their fields for profit.
You can read more on this, including first-hand observations of the plantations and the Waccamaw River, here, if you like. If you read any of these accounts, it may strike you, as it did me, that the documentation is almost entirely one-sided.
I’ll end this part of my journey with a bad panorama photo of what was once a plantation rice field. I’ve spent a painful amount of time stitching it together for you–I totally blew the camera work. You’ll see the obvious lines of the three photos bumped together. I’m only sharing it to give you an idea of the rice fields. The Waccamaw River would have flooded this field, perhaps through a tributary.
I imagine the thousands of slaves who walked and worked in so many fields like these. It may be that we as a nation have managed to convince ourselves that this was all too long ago to matter now. Newt Gingrich and his supporters obviously have. I don’t see it, though, maybe because I’ve lived among racists and bigots all my life, so I know how far we’ve come, yet how far we have to go.
Thank you, Dr. King, for the roadmap.
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I apologize for the length; I’m too exhausted to edit more. In Part 3, which I promise will be shorter, I have some photos of an original plantation main house on the Waccamaw River and the story of Sandy Island.
TBOE: part 8? Meanwhile, back on the lawns
I’ve gone through the rest of my photos for this series and I am nearing the end. I’ve had a busy year and I fear I may have dragged this particular subject out too long. With that in mind, I’ll go straight to the photos of Brookgreen Gardens’ expansive lawns, where some very large statuary had lots of room to be appreciated.
One item of blog housekeeping: if you have the curiosity, patience, and time, you can start at the beginning of this photo journey, The Banality of Evil, here.
Happy Trails…with alligators
After leaving the Brown Sculpture Court [part 7] we walked across some large, well-manicured lawns. There we found a variety of subjects and themes worked into large pieces.
Impossible to miss is this bronze sculpture which is 27 feet long: “Time and the Fates” by Paul Manship. Three mythological figures represent the thread of life being spun, measured, and then cut.
[Click on photos to enlarge; click twice for closer details.]
But here is a surprise for you. It’s a sundial!
I really liked this pond, with this fun young man planted in the middle having a good time:
So many works of art to enjoy in such a beautiful environment…
…until I noticed this:
Gulp.
Hurrying along now….
This larger-than-life limestone work is called “Phryne Before the Judges” by Albert Walter Wein. Yes, that’s right, Judges. This was a real woman…courtesan…prostitute…in Greece, 4th century BC. She was tried for something like blasphemy of a god, but showed her breasts to the (all male) jury and voila! Not guilty. Makes sense.
A life-size contemporary statue I like which sat near the pond: watch out for the gators, baby!
I think the next work is not only well done, but unique in its own way–I can’t identify the artist, sorry.
The next group of photos is of one of my favorite sculptures and subjects, a work by Anne Hyatt Huntington herself: Don Quixote. It’s huge, so it will take several shots to get a good perspective.
I’ll end with another favorite subject, birds: “Heron, Grouse and Loon” by Elliot Offner, of the Offner Sculpture Research and Learning Center facility at Brookgreen. Offner is a contemporary sculptor whose depictions of wildlife I truly love. You can see more of fish, birds, and even a cute pig online at Vose Galleries.
Hope you enjoyed these as much as I do–I never seem to tire of looking at them. The next and final blog in this series will not focus on sculpture, however, but on wildlife in the natural habitat zoo and butterflies in the Indoor Butterfly Garden.
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PS I have one more treat for you, should you find you want to see more photos of Brookgreen, some of great works which I didn’t see or didn’t have time to photograph. I recently found this blog while googling to identify sculptors, and if this photographer isn’t a pro, I hate him even more! He is a master at light and composition…HATE HIM with a burning jealousy! But you might like him: Every Picture Tells a Story…. [Okay, I really love his photos. Wander around a bit and you'll find some astonishing pictures.]
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Posted in Entertainment, Photo adventures, S.C., sculpture, Social Commentary, Uncategorized
Tagged Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, photograph, Photos, rice plantations, S.C., sculpture, Slavery, South Carolina, Waccamaw River