Slavery

Abstract

Abstract Self-esteem once beclouded Americans’ vision of human bondage, and to some extent it still does. More than 125 years after the end of slavery, the Georgetown (South Carolina) Rice Museum’s valuable display of plantation technology yet testifies to white people’s unquenchable thirst to think well of their ancestors. The museum’s model of a slave settlement features a little building labeled “School”-as though the typical rice planter thus ostentatiously defied Carolina’s law of 1834 which banned any free person from teaching a slave to read and write. The labels on the museum’s exhibition say that oxen or mules plowed the rice fields, ignoring the fact that some planters like Nathaniel Heyward never used a plow to lessen the arduousness of his slaves’ labor in breaking the soil. These labels imply that only seed rice was hand threshed, failing to acknowledge that the exhausting toil of hand threshing the whole rice crop lasted almost universally in the low country until 1830, and usually later than that date. The word “malaria” is never named on the museum’s displays, despite the profound effect of this disease upon both the lives of the slaves and the social structure of the white community; nor is the appalling rate of slave child mortality mentioned. Indeed the word “slavery” never appears in the Rice Museum’s exhibition, even though slavery was central to the history of tidal rice culture.