_I have a confession: I am terrible at cooking rice—the real wash-it-before-you-cook-it grain that my enslaved ancestors would recognize.

I carry some shame about the fact that I don’t have the technique to prepare the grain that feeds almost half the world’s population. As a food writer and recipe developer, I take pride in pulling off intricate, time-consuming dishes like Toulouse-Style Cassoulet and Leah Chase’s Gumbo Z’Herbes. I even developed a notable recipe from scratch: My sweet potato pecan cake with white chocolate icing lives in The Kitchn’s archives. But rice is one thing I just can’t get right. The big problem is my patience: I don’t know how to leave well enough alone. I have to stir the pot, to open the lid and make sure there is enough water.

The results are rarely edible. I love to cook for people, but I never put a rice dish on the menu for company because I am scared that I’ll ruin it—I never know how it will turn out.

I have cooked rice every kind of way and gotten every type of negative outcome. Sometimes it’s gummy, mushy, or simply clumpy. Other times the texture is uneven, with perfectly cooked grains in the center and pebble-hard, barely warm bits on the outside.

There are days when I’m so anxious about dinner but distracted by deadlines that I scorch the pot badly enough that it takes two rounds of Bar Keepers Friend to get my Dutch oven back to its original color. The upper floor of the house smells like smoke.

The blessing and curse of rice is that it takes on any flavor it is introduced to, and I am sure it also absorbs my energy. I think it can smell my fear.

My family has lived in South Carolina for hundreds of years. The enslaver Grahams arrived in Savannah, Georgia, in 1733 before America was America, and they purchased enslaved West Africans around a decade after their arrival when they decamped to the South Carolina Lowcountry. For much of my family’s time on these shores, rice was the mainstay, and it should be a regionally and culturally familiar food. So why don’t I know how to cook it right?

My daddy’s people, for all their faults, are honest about their lifetime of farming, foraging, and food insecurity. They lived in Newberry County, where the sandhills grow higher as they ripple toward the Appalachian Mountains in the distance. This is where I learned to make most of my traditional dishes—poke sallet, blackberry cobbler, and if you promise not to tell it, a couple of liters of muscadine wine. My paternal grandmother, Mary Elmer Graham, says she didn’t know when the Great Depression came or went because they were equally poor the whole time.

Rice didn’t grow up their way, so they didn’t have much use for it. Occasionally a small pot of fluffy white rice might be made to accompany a bigger one of hog maws or a “junk pot”—bits of offal we had left from processing hogs that would be cooked low and slow till they turned tender—but this far inland, rice was an afterthought, usurped by cornbread and grits because corn was something we could grow.

On the other branch of my family tree, my mother’s folks seem to be formal buttoned-up people. The main topic at the extended family dinner table is religion. These are supposed to be the rice people, the ones situated not far from South Carolina’s last rice rivers, swirling arcs of water that are closer to the rice fields on the coast. My grandparents, Charles Corley and Artie Bell Corley, left Wagener, South Carolina, for “the city,” Columbia, where they stripped themselves of anything they needed to in an attempt to assimilate. In a family that valued cleanliness, convenience, and economic ambition (they were working-class but set the table as if they were upper-class and tried to emulate those eating habits), rice made only rare appearances and was as white as the porcelain plate it was served on, stripped of its nutrients, color, and history. The staple grain is featured in many well-known South Carolina dishes like chicken bog, red rice, Hoppin’ John, and perloo, but with the current generation of my maternal family, we don’t eat any of these things. This, maybe, is our way of forgetting.

My home state was once the seat of chattel slavery, and the exports produced by my ancestors made the Lowcountry—and by extension Charleston—one of the richest colonial towns in the Americas. Richer than Philadelphia and New York combined. The cultivar of Carolina Gold (sometimes called Carolina Long Gold) that was grown right before the Civil War medaled at the London World Fair in 1851 and was featured in the 1855 Paris Exhibition. Accolades like these made the South Carolina staple crop the most sought-after rice in the world.

Rice became riches. At its height, South Carolina exported about 66 million pounds of rice—without a single piece of automated machinery. Between 1670 and 1808 (when the transatlantic slave trade was abolished), an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 Africans were brought to Charleston in nearly 1,000 separate shipments. Import bodies. Export rice. This is the grain that shaped the American South.

I have spent the last decade examining the relationship between my body, its blackness, and the natural world around me. I do my research even though I know it already lives in me. So, when I am tasked with talking about rice, I accept the assignment with something approximating zeal. I have a chance to get things right, I think. About rice. About me.

RICE RECORD 1

_I’d been poring over the writing of my South Carolina community—Amethyst Ganaway, Emily Meggett, Kevin Mitchell, Princess Pamela, Sallie Ann Robinson, and Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor—for days when I heard the sentence that would change everything. Standing in my mother’s kitchen, between rounds of dishes, I listened to Dr. Edda Fields-Black’s 2022 interview with the Fields podcast on Heritage Radio Network. Professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University, Fields-Black is the author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora and Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee  River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War. She began traveling to South Carolina to give lectures when her first book, Deep Roots, was published. In the interview, she said, “With each trip I sort of learned more, but it really wasn’t until 2013 when I visited a cemetery on a rice plantation where my father’s family is buried…I encountered an open grave full of water with my ancestor’s skull floating at the top. It completely changed the way I looked at history.”

“I’m just no longer satisfied with teaching an academic version of slavery,” she added, and I sat up, startled, and paused the podcast.

What I knew wasn’t theoretical; it was ancestral, and somebody in my family had to work it out and write it down.

RICE RECORD 2

_In 1993, I was seven, sitting on an almost-white stool in front of the electric stove in our rented duplex on the right side of town in Nashville, Tennessee.

My parents were occupied, so I was making dinner for the four of us—my mom, my dad, my four-and-a-half-year-old little brother Nicholas, and me. I almost fell off my perch reaching for a box of Success Rice. With its bright primary color packaging and simple instructions, this was the type of rice that could be overcooked but not burned, so I approached the stove with a big pot of water and turned on the burner.

Once the steam made my edges curl, and the middle began to bubble, I dropped in two bags punctured with holes. Long before microplastics entered our cultural conversation, little children were allowed to boil food in plastic mesh pouches. This type of rice couldn’t escape or make a mess, so I did not fear it, not yet. I would learn to fear all carbs later.

We did not own a kitchen timer, so I sat on the stool because I had to watch. I was big for my age but my feet didn’t touch the floor, so I soothed myself by letting my legs slap against the stool rungs.

Success—no measure, no mess the tagline touted. Perfect for a child. I was a child in charge of dinner.

When it was done, I topped the whole thing off with a little pat of margarine before doctors broke the news it was bad for us due to the trans fats.

I saw the glimmers of possibility—I could be useful this way, making spaghetti, and, when I was a little older, baking chicken or making cookies. I understood even then that food could function as a kind of power because it made us feel something and we needed it. This was my coming-of-age narrative. Everything was bad. Being useful made it better. Comfort foods made it all bearable.

RICE RECORD 3

_The term “aspirational eating” was new to me, but it described the spirit of what my family had done. Were still doing. I had to admit that I hadn’t stopped. I first heard the term in a New Books Network podcast with Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson while she was talking about her book Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America.

I finally had a name for the thing we did when we exercised hope with our money, signaling our difference with the desire to purchase something unfamiliar.

I kept searching and discovered Stephanie Mariko Finn’s 2011 dissertation Aspirational Eating: Class Anxiety and the Rise of Food in Popular Culture. In the abstract, Finn wrote that “aspirational eating, or the use of food as a means of performing and embodying the ‘good life’ is a quintessentially middle-class practice that emerged in Anglo-American culture in the eighteenth century. Its changing manifestations reflect the shifting nature of middle-class status anxieties. Since the 1980s, as the middle class has struggled to maintain its material advantages over the lower class, the cultural capital represented by food has become a central technology of creating class distinctions and one of the primary ways that many Americans have of aspiring to the ‘good life.’”

According to Finn there were four main focuses of this articulation of anxiety: sophistication, thinness, purity, and cosmopolitanism.

I was born into this type of striving: my father, once a rising star at Wal-Mart, and my mother, a blossoming fashion designer with a degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. Young, ambitious, and unafraid, they both left their hometowns in search of something different before familial expectations could dictate their futures. The farmer’s son did his best to endure those Bangles-styled Manic Mondays, and the domestic’s daughter searched for “The Glamorous Life” Sheila E. sang about.

Their lofty aspirations made them fans of the movies, and they had their first date at a screening of Fame. Fixated on success, they married and moved around the country.

Bad things happened. My father couldn’t keep a job. Out of money and temerity, the family was forced to turn back to South Carolina. My parents divorced. My father became a farmer. My mother, a mail carrier.

We wanted to be middle class so badly that we believed we were. It was only when I left my little hamlet that I began to understand all the ways in which my world was lacking. Not everyone was responsible for making dinner at seven years old.

RICE RECORD 4

_In college at Dartmouth, Ghanaian jollof made me forget myself and my desire to be thin. In 2006, my friend Lennel fixed a long pan of it for Limin’, the annual Afro-Caribbean celebration we held on campus. I was in the depths of my eating disorder. Ten years of starving, bingeing, purging, and overexercising had left me a mottled mess. In that competitive academic space, I was often an unnatural shade of winter gray, hiding my rotting teeth and bruised fingers. In college, I could polish off a twelve-pack of Diet Coke a day, running on spite and aspartame. Some nights after three-hour gym sessions, I only ate canned pineapple for dinner.

Atkins was ubiquitous. Created by Robert Atkins in the 1970s, the diet, which emphasized protein and eliminated carbohydrates, took thirty years to become a cultural phenomenon, the latest in a long line of get-thin-quick schemes. Atkins, as it was presented, with branded foods and constantly running celebrity-endorsed commercials, was more than a diet, it was branded as a lifestyle. Over thirty million Americans attempted to curb their carb fixation during Atkins’s height. Sales of pasta, bread, and rice declined, and we talked about these household staples as if they were forbidden foods.

Rice was filler.

Rice was fluff.

As a family we did our best to shuffle our larger-than-average bodies away from this harbinger of poverty and obesity in hopes that we would look morally upright, even if we were aesthetically deficient.

_Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers got money we didn’t have. We snapped up sugar-free foods and diligently ate grain substitutes like cauliflower rice when the keto diet—Atkins reinvented—came around. At sixteen, I left home for boarding school hoping that I was trading domestic turmoil for academic success. That process of assimilating—stripped of my brown shell through rigorous training meant to process me into something of value—meant I was like rice. Forgoing all carbs, counting calories, and limiting myself to a dangerously low energy threshold, I straightened my hair and did my best to be an Ivy League lady.

Carbs took the blame for so many things, including diabetes and heart disease. Back when my maternal grandfather was diagnosed with heart disease, Grandma Corley went to seminars to learn how to cook for him. No more salt pork, and since carbs instantly transformed to glucose, exacerbating diabetes, those had to go too.

I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even born yet, but I can imagine the clinical room where copies of typed up lists of dos and don’ts made their way around the room, circulating among people who hoped what they would learn might save their lives.

Diabetes was rampant in our family, so when Grandma Corley got her diagnosis in the early 1990s and Aunt Carolyn got hers in 1996, the two would go to the seminars together. Following the program meant that when visiting we ate the early predecessors to meatless Morningstar sausage patties, warmed up in the toaster oven of Grandma Corley’s all-cream-colored kitchen.

The putrid smell of ground-up fibrous vegetables and liquid smoke leaked away from the kitchen and into the children’s bedroom. We needed to try hard to be thin, we learned, because chubby children grew up to be single adults.

It was the late ’80s and my elders watched Oprah be badgered about her weight. This was what it meant to be a Black professional woman in America: assessed, critiqued, then judged. Even white women like Delta Burke and Kirstie Alley couldn’t catch a break.

The culture was almost as anti-fat as it was anti-Black, and to be both was an automatic two of the three strikes that might make a woman undesirable. To top it off, we were something approximating poor.

_As I unraveled, I bounced around to all-white therapy practices that recommended I change my diet. One older male therapist recommended I eat only meat. I started to understand that these well-intentioned billing-by-the-hour people didn’t understand my backstory let alone my history. Medical professionals told me that everything that was wrong with me could be solved by the right balance of nutrients, minerals, and proteins.

What I saw on television exacerbated my anxieties surrounding both food and race. Watching fat people on prime-time television beg for bottles of water while being overexercised to the point of injury by “celebrity trainers” Jillian Michaels and Bob Harper couldn’t be the source of my anxiety about food. If I only worked hard enough—was disciplined and pure, resisted temptation—I could be in proximity of being worthy.

Sitting in front of the television in 2007, watching Black people protest the miscarriage of justice for the Jena Six—six Black youths harshly prosecuted down in Louisiana—couldn’t be the reason for my troubles. Coming on the heels of Hurricane Katrina, it was the first discussion of the broader trends of racism in the U.S. criminal justice system. In the early days of 24-hour news, the world watched as people died on their roofs or gathered in the street with their signs demanding equality. It was easier to blame my mind’s fracturing on rice—on hopeful diets and an imbalance of nutrients—than it was to articulate the fact that I was being subjected to a quiet but violent integration into Ivy League society and would be forced to grapple with the pillars of systemic racism that supported such an elite structure. There was “science” behind the food theories, and they were easier to explain.

But other people sharing their cultural foods, like jollof, made me forget all about my fear of carbs, and I gave myself permission, just for the day, to eat the thing in front of me.

Formally diagnosed with depression as a college freshman, when I chose to analyze the “Black Blues” in modern literature as the topic of my independent study, I wrote about the subject in a way that my professor couldn’t understand. A white woman in her mid-fifties with a PhD from the University of Chicago, what I wrote about was inaccessible to her. She gave me a “D,” said I didn’t know how to write, and suggested I buy a grammar book.

I was, at that time, the most literate person in my family, the filler-outer of all essential forms. I was the one my relatives trusted. Counted on. Prayed for.

I couldn’t make sense of the dislocation, of the mismatch in information. I didn’t understand it was racism, so I couldn’t call it that yet. Instead, I did a self-inventory of all the things that were wrong with me, wondering why I wasn’t thin, or perfect, yet.

Maybe I just wasn’t meant to be, I thought.

I planned to set myself on fire at the pond on the golf course at the edge of campus. I couldn’t figure out how to get thin, but a flame, that act of melting, could make me smaller than my college self. I wanted to be thin so badly, I was willing to die for it.

I spent much of my sophomore year institutionalized—first in the mountains of North Carolina, and later down in Florida.

Twenty years on, I think I have recovered from my eating disorder.

Then I am tasked with writing about rice, and my old habits creep back in again. I skip lunch, knowing that I will have to do some recipe testing, to see if Alexander Smalls’s chicken bog still slaps, to remember exactly how Michael Twitty’s jollof smells.

I drink an eight-pack of seltzer in one afternoon of research, the bloat from the bubbles familiar. It is only then that I realize the specter of Atkins is with me. I still have my hangups about rice.

RICE RECORD 5

_Language is a tricky thing when it comes to my maternal line. When we don’t outright erase or omit, we obfuscate.

Our words are imprecise, until they aren’t.

I first had this type of familial linguistic fight about what my grandmother, Artie Bell Corley, did for work. Sitting at our thirty-year-old solid oak dining table across from my mother, I made the mistake of calling Grandma a maid.

“She was a domestic,” my mother said, drawing herself up to her full height as she hissed the statement back, hot. As if this new-to-me designation wasn’t a derivation of what I’d said.

I asked Merriam-Webster the difference.

Maid (noun): 2 a: maidservant. b: a woman or girl employed to do domestic work

Domestic (noun): 1: a servant hired to work for a household

The dictionary couldn’t pick up the difference, but apparently “domestic” was the preferred word in my family. It commanded more weight because it was more expansive, a role that included childcare. Grandma came home with cast-off clothes from the children of her white employer that were meant for my mother, but I knew better than to say that.

I wanted to ask my direct elders, all of whom have college degrees, if they’d lived this role, but that meant I would have had to be transparent about the days that I made beds and cleaned floors for people with more money. How I’d prepared food and set up spaces for intimate little parties, always lurking around a corner to make sure that there was enough for everyone who was supposed to be there.

When it was all over, I took my edible castoffs, the things the professors living in the house didn’t want in their fridge.

Maid. Domestic. Dartmouth, who employed me, probably called me something like a “student service worker,” but as the conversations around power and equity shifted, I’m sure the name changed.

When I asked about my maternal great-grandmother, my aunt Carolyn told me that the stories I’d heard were wrong, that she didn’t die young, because Auntie had seen a picture of her as an older woman. But there were some problems, you see, and she wasn’t someone we talked about. Great-Grandma was “addled,” is what my aunt told me at first, and when I pressed her, “depressed” was the word she gave me—a supposed blip, an aberration in our ways of being, because everyone was adamant that our family had no negative mental health history.

Then there’s me.

RICE RECORD 6

_I heard about Carolina Gold a decade ago, while I was waiting for a table at Gullah Grub, woodsman Bill Green’s restaurant on St. Helena Island near Beaufort, South Carolina.

I used to come to this marsh-side haunt with an old boyfriend. When he choked me the first time, I thought I deserved it. When the abuse became regular and I couldn’t find a way to account for it, I finally stopped answering his phone calls.

So, I dropped the boyfriend but kept coming to this place where cell service dropped out once I left the main road.

There weren’t many places to eat back then around there, and a woman at the Penn Center recommended Gullah Grub, which inhabited the first floor of a dilapidated what-was-once-a-Lowcountry-single-house-that-just-kept-being-added-on-to.

I liked the thud my tennis shoes made against the magnificent old porch. Inside, on a small, big-backed television in the corner of the room a series of videos played on loop. In one, Bill Green was wearing a plaid shirt and was stooped over in a small field of green and gold, the panicles listing to the side under the weight of their bounty. This was Carolina Gold, waiting to be harvested by Green’s hand. He didn’t have enough to sell—the little patch growing was just for him—and it was the first time I saw the grain clearly, able to trace this fraught grain from the land that cultivated it to the table of a restaurant where it was served.

I asked the woman who came to take my order about the rice, and she steered me toward the bottom of the menu, to something called red rice. Spicy, smoky, and a little dense, the tang and pop reminded me of Lennel’s jollof.

This was the closest I’d have to something like a Proustian madeleine moment, where I could sense the synapses firing in my brain, forging a connection. Black food in the 2010s was often highlighted devoid of its backstory and divorced from the land, and by extension from the slave labor that made the creation of these early dishes possible. At Gullah Grub there was complete ownership of the Black agricultural and culinary legacy. In my mental map, an arrow stretched back from this dining table in Lowcountry South Carolina across the Atlantic to West Africa and pulled taut, unbreakable. Over the years I would add more locations and faces to my mental culinary landscape.

RICE RECORD 7

_I was standing in my mama’s kitchen when I came to understand I’d been cooking rice the wrong way. I was in town to care for my mother, who had just had back surgery, but I also had an assignment to do.

Tasked with interviewing Alexander Smalls, I was making a couple of items from his cookbook, Meals, Music, and Muses: Recipes from My African American Kitchen. I was nervous but determined. The cream-and-black gas stove ticked then roared when I turned it on.

I’d finally found a rice-cooking technique that worked for me: I couldn’t boil it, but I could sauté it with enough broth that it could cook on its own.

I tried again when it was time to interview culinary historian Michael Twitty. In his directions, he suggested placing a layer of aluminum foil over the lip of the pot between the lid and the rice, so the steam didn’t escape and the rice cooked evenly.

RICE RECORD 8

_I learned about Rollen’s Raw Grains from chef BJ Dennis. In an Instagram post/video he shouted out Black-owned market vendors that would set up at the Emancipation Day festival, and though I couldn’t go, I wanted to hear what he was talking about. One of the merchants he featured was Rollen’s Raw Grains. Then, one day I saw the porch of the grain store as I traversed Okatie Highway between Beaufort and Savannah. I did a U-turn and whipped my station wagon into the parking lot.

It was the first time I had a chance to buy Carolina Gold from a Black person.

Before this, I’d had to buy Carolina Plantation Charleston Gold Rice in two-pound bags when I could find it around town.

From time to time, I stumbled upon Geechie Boy Mill rice but was always hesitant to buy it because I wasn’t sure who owned it. When I asked my Black Lowcountry sources about the owners, I learned that they had minimal connection to the culture. The current owners, who bought the company from Raymond Tumbleston, a white farmer whose nickname was “Geechie Boy” in 2003, had kept the name. The company was renamed Marsh Hen Mill in 2020. You know why.

That same year, Uncle Ben’s became Ben’s Original.

The Lowcountry was rife with people appropriating the Gullah Geechee name and associations of Black bodies with domesticity. For years, a Black woman’s face had appeared on tubs of Pawleys Island–based Palmetto Cheese’s products. Her name was Vertrella Brown, and according to the company, “her image personifies the soulful flavor that is embodied in this unique, southern recipe of pimento cheese. And this is why we refer to it as ‘The Pimento Cheese with Soul.’” I took issue with this explanation. When I passed the product at Costco, I saw another Black body being bent under the yoke of capitalism to sell the idea of something. This land I called home had been doing that for almost four hundred years.

But I am supposed to be talking about rice. I am talking about rice.

What am I to make of the moral weight of this grain?

I grapple with my body (fat, Black, female) and its legacies when I encounter rice.

Rice and labor.

Rice and wealth.

Rice and risk.

Rice and exploitation.

It would be so much easier to forget, to cook something else. But I have learned that for those who remember, rice is the backbone of who we (South Carolinians, Black South Carolinians, my family—with all its secrets, shames, and embarrassments—specifically) are.

I want to love it. God knows I do. But I was raised to be hesitant about trusting good things, particularly a crop that has done so much damage, that will never love me back because it requires I love myself first. It is a tenuous understanding, and my body is the tether for these two threads of narrative.

There is a nation’s worth of history in a grain of rice, and it can tell us who we are by what we eat or don’t.

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