Follow the Drinking Gourd , The Underground Railroad, & Rice!!!

The Underground Railroad meant freedom for many in the years before Emancipation, and it had a map. That map is a song called “Follow the Drinking Gourd.”

“Follow the Drinking Gourd” was supposedly used by “engineers” in the Underground Railroad to direct slaves to freedom. There are questions about its authenticity, but if accurate, “Drinking Gourd” describes a trail from Mobile, Alabama to Paducah, Kentucky. From Paducah, slaves could cross the Ohio River to the free states.

Peg Leg Joe, the Big Dipper and the Drinking Gourd

The unnamed hero of “Follow the Drinking Gourd” is an “old man,” sometimes known as Peg Leg Joe, who would “carry you to freedom.” In this case, the drinking gourd is a euphemism for the Big Dipper. Facing the Big Dipper, the viewer would see the North Star. The song is telling the listener to head North to freedom. 

The song further describes the road to freedom. The song says that the trail is marked with Peg Leg Joe’s symbol: A left foot and peg foot carved into the trees along the river, believed to be the Tombigbee. The “dead trees” and “quail call” in the song imply that the trip should take place in the Winter or early Spring. 

Once at the headwaters of the Tombigbee, the song describes Woodall Mountain, MS, with the Tennessee River nearby. From there, slaves would cross and follow the Tennessee River North. The left foot, peg foot mark on trees would continue to lead them to Paducah and the Ohio

 Peg Leg Joe was an engineer on the Underground Railroad. “He moved from plantation to plantation just north of the Mobile, Alabama area, working as a journeyman laborer. This work was a front for Joe’s true task: teaching slaves the Drinking Gourd song and marking an escape route.”

As was the case with many Black spirituals, “Follow the Drinking Gourd” became very popular during the American Civil Rights Movement.

Regardless of whether “Follow the Drinking Gourd” is fact or fiction, it is still a piece of American history. Not only does it make the Underground Railroad come to life, but it helped show the tribulations of Blacks before the Civil Rights Movement.

Carolina’s Gold Coast: The Culture of Rice and Slavery

Rice plantations shaped and reshaped the low country geography and economy, making Charleston one of the richest cities in the world, but it was a wealth built primarily on slave labor.

It was enslaved Africans who were responsible for South Carolina’s thriving rice economy. Rice was one of the most lucrative crops in the region during the early Colonial America days, yielding up to 25 percent profits. African rice is dark husked, and it served as a hardy grain that was used to feed ships full of enslaved people during the three-month journey across the Atlantic. A higher-yielding Asian rice would eventually dominate plantations, but African rice was reliably grown even in the unlikeliest of conditions. And Africans possessed the necessary cultivation skills to get it firmly established in the New World.

The journey of rice to the US is the journey of the people whose labour and knowledge led to its successful cultivation. Between 1750 and 1775, the bulk of more than 50,000 enslaved Africans were kidnapped from the aptly named Rice Coast, the traditional rice-growing region between Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and the western Ivory Coast where part of my African forebearers are from, and whose heart is in modern-day Sierra Leone and Liberia. Because rice was not indigenous to the Americas and plantation owners had no knowledge of how to grow it, enslaved Africans were brought to fuel its husbandry, feeding the US' eastern seaboard, Britain and provisioning many parts of the British Caribbean. In the antebellum South, if cotton was the king of commodities, then rice was the queen. And the queen brought incomparable economic power, transforming Charleston, and later Savannah, into thriving cosmopolitan ports.

On slave ships to the Americas, enslaved West Africans braided rice seeds in their hair & forever altered the New World economy with their knowledge of the rice crop.

During the African slave trade, enslaved peoples found ways to retain their agency, and keep themselves and their cultures alive in ways that were not widely acknowledged by Western historians until the late 2000s. As Dutch slave owners forcibly transported people from West Africa to colonies in modern-day Brazil and throughout the Americas, some African women, namely rice farmers, braided rice seeds into their hair as a means for survival of themselves and the culture of their homeland.

These seeds were safely transported to the New World, and became one of the primary ways that the rice crop came to be cultivated in the Americas, from Brazil to South Carolina. As research shows, West African women were the main contributors to the success of rice farming, due to their knowledge and practice in not only transporting seeds, but also cultivating the plant for mass consumption in a lucrative and exploitative plantation economy built on slavery. 

Hiding rice seeds in braided hair as part of Maroon tradition that dates to African slave trade. {Source: Tinde van Andel}

In an effort to carry rice seeds with them before being held captive on a ship headed for the New World, a rice farmer created a braided hairstyle for herself that successfully transferred these critical seeds.

Through this method, enslaved West Africans kept alive the very crop that sustained their bodies and their culture in one of the few things they still had autonomy over: their hair. By braiding rice into their hair, some ingenious West Africans helped ensure that parts of their culture and homeland in could be carried with them. 

African languages surrounding the rice crop provide insight into its origins. In parts of Africa where rice cultivation was already practiced before white colonists appeared, indigenous names for rice are used. The names for rice in these regions originated from native African languages including “mano” and “malo.” 

In other regions of Africa where rice was not being farmed prior to the arrival of Europeans, the word for rice is borrowed from Arabic and European names, such as “arroz,” “riz”, “erruz,” and so on. 

“The history of rice cultivation surrounding the Atlantic basin, however, suggests that the crop’s appearance in South Carolina was not the outcome of European agency and ingenuity but the result of a sophisticated knowledge system of wetland cultivation brought by involuntary black migrants.”

“Rice has always been a crop associated with women. In attributing rice origins to their ancestors, maroon legends reveal the ways in which the enslaved gave meaning to the traumatic experiences of their own past while remembering the role of the cereal in helping them resist bondage, survive as runaways, and commemorate cultural identity.”