FOR SALE: “Lowland Sarabande” (Middleton Place; Charleston, SC). pencil, pastel, and watercolor. $200. If interested in purchase, please email dterrydraw@aol.com or private message.
It’s all quite beautiful and peaceful now, of course, but?…..
West African slaves were the ones who, knowing how rice was cultivated, cleared Middleton plantation’s thousands of acres. Think of the sheer WORK involved in doing all that AND clearing away the mess……which was well-before slaves dug the ditches, built the tidal dykes to control the waters, showed their overseers and owners how rice was grown, and basically laid all the groundwork for their owners’ magnificent fortunes…and all well before 1800.
If it weren’t for those slaves, coastal South Carolina would still be a snake-infested, disease-ridden, marshy, stagnating, tidal backwater where a few hardscrabble white-folks were trying to grow tobacco and indigo.
I think of this every time I hear some white person mewling about even the notion of reparations.
Still?…..it’s quite beautiful. Every person (white or black or in-between) I know from the coast still loves it. Intensely. Folks from the mountains (I’m one) are the same way about our home-region. I have no idea what people from the flat, middle-of-nowhere love. Presumably, their mothers.
