Grow I Must, and as I Grow, I Will Resist
Grow I must, and as I grow, I will resist.
Twitty meets South Carolina Gold rice for the first time, 2010
On August 26, 2013, I hammered away at the gut-juiced log podium at MAD imploring the hundreds gathered to take note of the heritage of their food. I wanted them to consider their food’s stories and what those stories meant for the people who brought those foods into history. I also wanted them to consider what those stories meant for their descendants and those from other backgrounds who enjoyed the foods and benefited from their import.
One of the things I talked about was the connection between rice in the colonial and antebellum South and the people who were brought to grow it. Limited to a stretch of land on the Southeastern coast of the United States, rice cultivation in the dark malarial swamps was the most dangerous agricultural labor practiced in what would become the United States. It has been said that the human power needed to change those swamps into rice fields can be likened to the power needed to make the pyramids of Giza. Once those fields were created, however, they also gave rise to the wealthiest landed aristocracy in early North America; two successful rice crops made you the equivalent of a millionaire.
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On August 26, 2013 I made my plea, and on September 7, I found out just how personal this plea really was.
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Gina Paige, the head of a genetics testing company, arrived just before the meal to present me with a gift. Six weeks prior to Stagville, at a synagogue near my home, a rabbi bestowed a blessing on me before I swabbed my cheeks and placed them in plastic bags to be sent to a testing facility. Now I was about to meet a woman whose existence I hadn’t predicted, and without whom I would not exist. I would meet her in the shadow of slave cabins, around 150 years after the end of the American Civil War, about fifty years after the Civil Rights movement, in front of an audience of every color, ethnic group, religion, and lack thereof — gay, straight, and otherwise — in a scene neither slavery nor segregation dreamed imaginable. I wanted to learn the root of my food heritage, and here it was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg1PvlKdUvo
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Read the whole, rich story. Watch the videos. Then you’ll probably need lunch.