Baileyblog: October 2017

Sunday, October 29, 2017

Rice Culture and A Tribute to Gullah Folklorist and Stateswoman Cornelia Bailey

Gullah folklorist Cornelia Bailey died on October 15 and will be remembered for her stalwart commitment to African American culture in the Low Country Sea islands of Georgia. She will be remembered for preserving that culture – even when it was in danger of facing extinction. She will be remembered for inspiring a writer like me to look beyond the wide gate to the narrow, to look beyond the grand narrative to the narratives of ordinary people with an extraordinary history. A descendant of enslaved Africans in this region, she helped us all to see the nobility of their work and of their contribution to America at large.

Here is an excerpt from my new book, The Weeping Time:Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History, which celebrates the culture of rice that once brought prosperity to this region and birthed a heroine who will be greatly missed.

Rice was central to Gullah/Geechee culture. Even today, it is said by many, “We are Gullah. We’re rice eaters. If we don’t have rice, we’re miserable.” Having enough rice was and is associated with a good life.[i] Slaves relished their monthly rations of rice even if it was difficult back breaking work to plant and to harvest it. They no doubt inherited this from their ancestors for whom rice cultivation was a vital part of their identity. As it is still said on the Rice Coast of Africa: “Unless a meal includes rice, they claim not to have eaten.”[ii]

The rice season started in early March through April with the planting of the crop. Female slaves like Betsy chattel no. 100, listed as “ rice hand unsound,” and Dorcas, chattel no. 278 listed as “rice prime woman,” would drop rice seed into holes in the ground and would tamp down the seeds into the holes with their bare feet. In fact, it was often a pregnant or at the very least a young woman of child bearing years who would drop the rice seed at planting time. It was never someone older.

As Cornelia Bailey, Gullah Geechee folklorist, oral historian and slave descendant says: “You had to thresh all of that rice, and you had to put it in a mortar. You had to winnow it in the large baskets. You were still not allowed to eat any of it. You planted it and harvested and do all that back-breaking work. You could not enjoy it. So the women devised a way of tying the apron around them, and when they tied it up, they tied it in such a way where there was like a pocket here. So when they got the basket and they had took the rice out of the mortar and pestle, put it into the basket for winnowing, then they would shake it up and they'd go:

Peas, peas.

Peas and the rice done done, uh-huh.

Peas, peas.

Peas and the rice done done, uh-huh.

And when they go with the "uh-huh", some of it would always drop inside that apron pocket. So when they went home at night when work was over, they had enough rice to feed their families. And without being caught. So you have to be a little bit ingenious to feed your family. So the ladies were ingenious, of course. That's the only way you could do it. [iii]

After they dropped the seed, the slaves would then hoe the fields from early June to August. They used a “fanner” basket to sort the rice grains and separate them from other plant matter. Finally, they pounded the rice by hand to take off its husk often with large mortar and pestles from late November to February.[iv]

Anne C. Bailey

[i] John H. Tibbetts, ”African Roots Carolina Gold,” Coastal Heritage, South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium, Summer 2006, Vol. 2. No. 1, p 4-5.

[ii] Judith Carney, Black Rice, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) p. 31.

[iii] Interview with Cornelia Bailey, Folklorist, Africans in America PBS series http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i2970.html

[iv] Tibbetts, p. 5.

Woman hulling rice with mortar and pestle in African tradition

Picture Credit: Courtesy, Georgia Archives, Vanishing Georgia Collection, lib028.

Saturday, October 21, 2017

“The more things change, the more they remain the same – A 21st Century Black Wall Street”?

A recent news report caught my attention and led me to a federal government website. I found what I was searching for on page 106 of the behemoth 464-page Concurrent Resolution on the Budget-Fiscal Year 2018.¹ Embedded in a list of bulleted points under the heading Commerce and Housing Credit was the dreaded information: “Consolidate the Minority Business Development Agency into the Small Business Administration.” This is one of the many strategies outlined in the fiscal year 2018 budget as a way to eliminate “…waste, abuse and duplication…” in the federal government, The budget was passed by both the House and the Senate.

Let us step back a bit and try to understand the relevance of the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) and the reason why the decision to “consolidate” is viewed as a threat by many. On March 5, 1969, then President Richard Nixon created the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, which blossomed into the present-day MBDA.² The purpose of this office, which is housed in the U.S. Department of Commerce, is to provide funding for minority businesses, as these businesses are more likely to be denied loans at higher rates than white-owned businesses. The MBDA reports on its website, that minority-owned businesses contribute over $1.4 trillion to United States annual output, and account for 7.2 million jobs. The move to “consolidate” the MBDA should therefore, be troubling not only to the business owners who will be affected, but to anyone concerned with the growth of the United States economy.

Black business ownership is not a new phenomenon in the United States. In spite of the horrors of enslavement and institutional discrimination, Blacks have historically sought the independence of self-employment. Whether enslaved and seeking income by hiring out oneself, or modern-day street vendor or barber, or doctor, or lawyer, Black men and women have embraced entrepreneurship at all economic levels. Thus, the more I think about the federal government’s decision to “consolidate” the MBDA, the more I am convinced that Black (and other minority) businesses and their supporters must collaborate and develop a countervailing strategy if these businesses are to survive the decision. This thought leads me to the story of Black Wall Street and its eventual destruction, which, in my opinion, is a cautionary tale for all ages.

Take a step back in time with me, if you will. The year is 1906, forty-three years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Enter Mr. O. W. Gurley, whose parents had been slaves. Mr. Gurley is a wealthy man, not because of his inheritance of the promised and never delivered forty acres and a mule, but rather, because he has had the foresight to purchase forty acres of land in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Mr. Gurley’s vision is to establish a Black community on the land. Racist? No! Such were the times – segregation, Jim Crow, and outright racism were the order of the day. Mr. Gurley’s dream was realized in the form and substance of a thriving, self-sufficient, affluent and powerful community of Black people, many of whom had migrated from Mississippi. In its heyday, this community in the Greenwood District of Tulsa was home to amenities such as banks, movie theaters, hospitals and hotels. At least six of its residents owned planes. The houses had indoor plumbing. There was an excellent school system in place to educate Black children. And, as an economist, I must mention that the velocity of money was high, in other words, money circulated within the community for almost a full year. It is no wonder that this community was christened “Black Wall Street”.⁴

The high socio-economic status of the residents of Black Wall Street drew the ire and envy of whites, and made the community a sitting target. In May 1921, an accusation of harassment by a white woman against a Black man was the literal match that set off a conflagration that destroyed Black Wall Street. In an effort to ensure the safety of the accused, Dick Rowland, a group of Black men went to the courthouse where an altercation ensued with a group of white men. This was the beginning of an assault on the Black community that lasted 18 hours. When it was over, 35 blocks had been destroyed, 300 people had been killed, and 10,000 people had been left homeless – Black Wall Street was no more!⁵

I said earlier that the story of Black Wall Street should be a cautionary tale. “Cautionary” because although the methodology used to repress Black advancement may have changed, the objectives remain the same. No one will argue against eliminating waste and duplication in any organization, public or private, but history does repeat itself, and Black and other minority business owners should be united in their concern about this latest move in the 2018 budget. So, what now? To Black business owners, I say, unity is strength. If you are not a member of a small business association, join one! If there is no small business association in your area, start one! As members of a business association, you can work together to create alternate sources of funding in view of the reduction that appears to be imminent due to the planned consolidation of the MBDA.

In an earlier blog post, I wrote about the su-su, a community savings system that originated in West Africa, spread to the Caribbean through slavery, then to the United States and other countries with the migration of Caribbean people. However, this type of saving system is not unique to these areas of the world. In South Korea, the system is known as kye; in Japan, as tanomosiko, in the Middle East, it is called gam’eya. In every country, the objective is the same – to encourage sustained community saving. There is undocumented information that small business owners in the United States are already involved in su-su-like arrangements, pooling their money as a group, and paying the full amount collected to a different member each month. Black business owners, this is one sure way to create your own source of funding. Take the challenge - adopt the su-su in its original form, or restructure it to your own likeness! The basic model is sound.

But access to money does not guarantee that a business will be successful, as I am certain business owners know. Customers are looking for a good product, excellent service, and value for money. Among other things, businesses must effectively market their products, provide good customer service, and be sure that their accounting is impeccable. All things considered, I continue to circle back to the theme of unity. Black business owners, economic theory explains that resources are scarce and wants are unlimited, thus competition is inevitable. You may be competing for scarce resources, but as the saying goes, you must hang together or most assuredly, you will all fall apart.

Notes:

¹ House of Representatives, 1^st Session. “Concurrent Resolution on the Budget – Fiscal Year 2018: Report of the Committee on the Budget.” https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-115hrpt240/pdf/CRPT-115hrpt240.pdf

²https://www.mbda.gov/about/history

³ Minority businesses are identified as businesses owned by African Americans, Asian Americans, Hasidic Jews, Hispanic Americans and Pacific Islanders.

^4,5Several sources, including: https://southcarolina1670.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/last-survivor-of-tulsa-race-riot-dies/; <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/long-lost-manuscript-contains-searing-eyewitness-account-tulsa-race-massacre-1921-180959251/>

Bernice J. deGannes Scott, Ph.D.

Picture image:

By Alexisrael (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Thursday, October 19, 2017

THE WEEPING TIME IS PUBLISHED

And so it is that The Weeping Time was published on October 9!

I am enormously thankful.

Please watch this space for upcoming readings. I just had my first at a conference in Paris on Slavery and Memory. I look forward to upcoming talks and readings in the near future.

Till then, stay tuned this weekend for Baileyblog's wonderful guest contributor, Dr. Bernice J. deGannes Scott who will be writing on the legacy of Black Wall St.

You will not want to miss it!

Anne C. Bailey
Author of The Weeping Time

Saturday, October 7, 2017

An Early Review of The Weeping Time

Review from the multicultural book blog, The Reading Life:

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-weeping-time-memory-and-largest.html

This week I would like to thank The Reading Life for their review and also share another excerpt. I am particularly glad that the reviewer was able to connect the dots between her own family tradition of cooking rice and black eyed peas on New Year’s Day with this rich history.

Rice was so important in American history that on the eve of the Civil War, Southern rice planters of the Low Country (South Carolina and Georgia) were among the richest men in America. These aristocrats knew two things: 1) they did not know how to plant rice and make it a successful commodity and 2) the African slaves did. Africans had for hundreds of years planted rice on the Rice Coast of Africa using various technologies that they had passed down for generations or improved upon over time.

Here is an excerpt from The Weeping Time from the Chapter, "More than "Hands."

Contribution of Transatlantic Rice culture

Rice as a commodity became a dominant part of the culture of black and white alike. For example, there could be no celebration of New Year’s day without a dish of rice and black eyed peas ( often with salt pork mixed in). In South Carolina, the dish was called Hoppin’ John and was supposed to bring good luck. The saying goes that people “who eat poor New Year’s Day eat rich the rest of the year.”[i] Yet rice was every day and every season food, for in the end, it was not only sustenance after a day’s hard work in the field, but was also a bridge across the Atlantic between Africa and low country Georgia and Carolinas -- a bridge between their past and their present.

Little did Butler slaves know that black eyed peas and rice was practically the national dish for many an enslaved African all over the world. Whether it was Surinam or Jamaica, Antigua or Brazil, black eyed peas and rice in various mutations was sumptuously prepared with African herbal seasonings and always salt pork or beef. They could not have known that their counterparts had the same tradition; that they too had carried a pinch of Africa with them and added to that the new spices and flavors of what their masters were calling the New World. They could not have known that in Senegal the dish is called chiebouniebe, and in Brazil it is called arroz –de- Hauca.[ii]

It was as if some ancient ancestral memory refused to be forgotten and with every bite further left its mark. Yes, it was in the preparation of the dish but also in the technology used to plant the rice in the first place. It was further proof of Melville Herskovits’ 1941 thesis in The Myth of the Negro Past that Africans had not arrived in the Americas as a tabula rasa.[iii] They may not have been able to bring many physical aspects of their cultures, but they brought their memories. These memories incorporated every aspect of their cultures that could be reasonably replicated, in this case, agriculture and cuisine. This indeed was an important contribution to the New World and modernity as we know it. It is contributions like these which the pioneering field of African Diaspora Studies now seeks to explore in greater depth and detail. Such contributions prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that enslaved Africans were more than hands. Their work was more than “just field work.” Their work enriched nations while at the same time contributed to the development of New World cultures.

Anne C. Bailey

[i] John H. Tibbetts, "African Roots Carolina Gold," Coastal Heritage, Summer 2006, vol. 2. No. 1, p. 6.

[ii] Tabula rasa or blank slate, Karen Hess, The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The African Connection,(University of South Carolina Press, 1998) pp 101-102.

[iii] Judith Carney, Black Rice, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),

Introduction.

Picture credit: Bubba73 (Jud McCranie) (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Sunday, October 1, 2017

The Storm is Passing Over and Puerto Rican Resilience

There is a beautiful gospel song called “The storm is passing over” which reminds us that through life’s many storms, the night is dark but when the morning light appears, we know the storm is passing over. This song, written by Charles Albert Tindley, born in Maryland in 1851, the son of a slave, came to my mind in thinking of the night of September 20 when Maria brought devastation to the island of Puerto Rico.

One week later, officials of Puerto Rico, US citizens, are still asking for emergency services and help. The power grid is down. Over half of the population do not have access to safe drinking water. Many are living in the open since roofs all over the island have blown away. Some of the hospitals are functioning, but many are not. It is a desperate situation so much so that San Juan’s Mayor, Carmen Yulin Cruz, and others have been begging for more help.

In times like these, in addition to FEMA and US soldiers, many private citizens are rising to the challenge. Many of the organizations listed below are taking donations and are providing relief.

Puerto Rico will rebuild. Puerto Rico will rise again.

Tindley’s song is all about hope. Tindley experienced that hope in his lifetime. Born at a time when most Blacks in America were enslaved, he himself straddled between freedom and slavery, but the US Civil War changed all that. He later became a preacher and hymnwriter. His humble beginnings said nothing about his future. His storms did pass. In times like these, I pray those ravaged by recent storms, as well as storms of other natures will take heart:

Courage, my soul, and let us journey on,

Tho’ the night is dark, it won’t be very long.

Thanks be to God, the morning light appears,

And the storm is passing over Hallelujah!

Have a listen here.

Please donate here.

Fondos Unidos de Puerto Rico

P.O. Box 191914

San Juan, PR 00919

tel: (787) 728-8500

fax: (787) 728-7099

http://www.fondosunidos.org/