The rice that made the South Carolina Lowcountry rich did not come from the planters who got rich on it. It came from West Africa, and so did the knowledge to grow it. Along the rice coast, plantation owners sought out and paid more for enslaved people from West Africa's rice-growing regions, because those men and women already knew how to build the fields, work the tides, and mill the grain. Carolina Gold rice, and the fortunes it threw off, rested on that stolen expertise. The people who made it possible were owned, uncredited, and unpaid.
When slavery ended, the industry collapsed, and Carolina Gold nearly went with it.
Rollen Chalmers is growing it again. A Black farmer in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Chalmers cultivates Carolina Gold the old way and, in 2023, launched Rollen's RAW Grains to sell his rice and grits directly. He is a link in the Gullah Geechee rice culture that carried this foodway down through the descendants of the people who created it.
"Everybody from around this area, especially African Americans, had a small rice field of their own after slavery ended. But you couldn't tell that they're fields today. They're all grown up with trees."
Rollen Chalmers, Rollen's RAW Grains
Those grown-over fields are the harm made visible. A foodway that Black families kept alive for a while after emancipation slipped away as the seed sources dried up and the knowledge stopped being handed down. Chalmers is one of the people reversing that, and the harvest comes in the fall. I will admit a personal stake. I come from the Cane River Creole community, and a pot of rice is not a side dish in that lineage. It is the foundation the whole meal is built on, the grain in the gumbo and under the étouffée, the base of the Black cooking of the Gulf and the Lowcountry. Buying it from a Black farmer growing the heritage variety closes a loop that ran the wrong way for three hundred years.
This fall, that is where the rice should come from.
Storefront: rollensrawgrains.com
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