Carnegie Mellon University historian Edda L. Fields Blacks 2008 book, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, opened a vast new area of diasporic study by linking the cultivation of rice in Africa to the rise of this crucially important food crop in Colonial South Carolina.  What follows is a description of her work and the personal journey that led to that scholarly project. 

I grew up in Miami, Florida immersed in Caribbean and Latin American culture with two Gullah-speaking paternal grandparents.  My father’s nuclear family had moved to Miami from Green Pond, South Carolina when he was in elementary school.  As a child, I remember being aware of the difference between my grandparents’ accents and the West Indian accents that were so familiar to me in southern Florida.  Their speech was akin to West Indian immigrants, of which my mother’s family in particular and Miami in general had many.  

When I was in grade school, our family began taking my grandmother to Green Pond every summer to visit our relations who still lived in Green Pond, Whitehall, and Over Swamp.  My mother’s historical and genealogical research about my father’s family in preparation for and during our family summer vacations was my first inkling of Gullah as both a rich language and culture with its own peculiar history.  It also ignited a thirst in me which could not be quenched in a summer vacation.  More than anything, I wanted to speak Gullah, a language which my father understood but did not speak (at least not to my knowledge), and therefore could not pass down to me.  As the first generation to be born and raised outside of the Low country, I did not want to be the link which broke the chain of transmission.  

In hindsight, I chose to study rice farmers and to travel to West Africa’s Rice Coast region, so that I could live and work as my paternal great-grandparents had lived on plantations in Beaufort and Colleton counties, South Carolina.  By the time that I began traveling to Sierra Leone and Guinea,