Eat Your Peas, Y'all!

Hoppin’ John, the traditional southern dish that features peas and rice, originated with the Gullah people who lived on the sea islands along the coast from North Carolina to Florida. The Gullah Geechee Heritage Corridor is a federal project that preserves and promotes the unique cultural heritage of the Gullah Geechee people. The peas represent good luck and the side dish of collard greens represents money. Of course, corn bread is required!

In the Carolina Housewife, a cookbook published in 1847, you can find a lowcountry version of hoppin’ john. Nineteenth century “receipts” are usually scanty on details so Kate Collins at Duke University’s Rubenstein Test Kitchen improvised and added some modern twists. Chef BJ Dennis from Charleston offers his Gullah recipe that features red peas and Carolina Gold rice. My personal favorite is Emeril Lagasse’s version with Creole mirepoix (onions, celery, green peppers), thyme, and bay leaf. Today, you can find recipes for different versions; however, the primary ingredients remain the same: pork, peas, and rice.

In November, 2024, I went on a boat tour of the abandoned rice fields at Hobcaw Barony in Georgetown, South Carolina. Hobcaw consists of 16,000 acres between the Waccamaw River and the Atlantic Ocean. Northern businessman Bernard Baruch acquired land from fourteen former plantations and in the early twentieth century, he used the land as a game preserve. But before the Civil War, rice was cultivated on the plantations. After 1726, Carolina rice became a major export crop and created the first generation of true wealth. Rice and South Carolina’s secondary crop of indigo created the greatest plantation wealth on the North American continent.[1] Rice planters set the tone of South Carolina politics with their wealth and power built on enslaved labor.[2]

Wet cypress, oak, and pine trees along with other growth had to be cleared from thousands of acres of swamp and marshlands to prepare the land for rice planting. Each field took five to seven years to clear the huge cypress-gum trees that grew up to eight feet in diameter.[3] 

Once the land was cleared, enslaved people dug canals by hand so that fresh water could reach every acre. An intricate system of trunks, dikes, and impoundments were hand-built from wood, then installed in the fields. The trunks and dikes were similar to small dams that controlled the flow of fresh water in and out of the fields. The flooding had to be managed with precision. Enough water had to be released to destroy parasites and weeds, but not so much that would drown the rice seedlings or hamper the rice plants from maturing. The fields were flooded and drained three times during the growing season. In “Ten Things Everyone Should Know about Lowcountry Rice,” historian Nic Bulter explains that enslaved laborers moved a volume of earth comparable to that of the pyramids in Egypt to build the system that controlled the flow of water onto rice fields.[4]

Rice planting usually began in late March or early April so as to miss the spring migration of bobolinks, or rice birds, who could wreak havoc on newly planted crops.[5] Seeds were planted in rows using the heel-toe method. In the mucky soil, enslaved laborers walked barefoot, used their big toe to make an indentation for the seed, dropped the seed, then with their heel, pushed soil over the seed.[6] During the growing season, enslaved workers worked in the fields, removing weeds and aerating the soil. “Bull-grass” sprung among the rice, growing rapidly, and choking the rice if not pulled up. During the second flooding, the enslaved were obliged to go into the standing water to grub up the grass between the rows of rice plants. Men, women, and children worked nearly naked, knee-deep in the muddy soil, with the sun overhead and reflecting back from the water onto their faces. The enslaved laborers were always fearful of leaving any grass in the rows because the presence of a blade meant a flogging.[7]

Rice harvesting began in late September by cutting the tall plants near the base with sheaths or sickles. The harvested plants were placed on rice flats, flat-bottomed open vessels dedicated solely to cargo and controlled by oars and push poles. The rice flats could carry two to three tons of the rice-laden stems to land for processing.[8] After the harvest, laborers loosened the husk by pounding a pestle with a long handle into a large mortar that could hold about a bushel of grain.[9]

Although the engineering on rice plantations was complex, the actual cultivation was “unimaginable drudgery” performed by enslaved people in “extremely unhealthy and debilitating conditions.”[10] 

The conditions were also dangerous. John Brown, who was formerly enslaved and escaped to England, called labor on rice plantations “perhaps the most unhealthy occupation in which a slave can be engaged.”[11] The long growing season in combination with the warm humid climate created an ideal breeding ground for mosquitoes and other disease-bearing insects. During the growing season, enslaved workers stood angle- to knee-deep in mud and water under the scorching sun. In the winter, they stood in cold water to repair dikes and trunks or outdoors to pound the rice in mortars before it could be sold. These working conditions, inadequate shelter and clothing, poor nutrition, and nearly no medical care made the enslaved people susceptible to life-threatening infections like pneumonia, tuberculosis, and influenza.[12] Alligators and poisonous snakes inhabited the canals; yellow fever, malaria, ringworm, and other ailments afflicted those who worked in the rice fields. Brown wrote that “Fevers, agues, rheumatism, pleurisies, asthmas, and consumptions are amongst the maladies the slaves contract in the rice-swamps, and numerous deaths result. It is very much more trying than either cotton or tobacco cultivation.”[13] The average life expectancy for rice laborers was thirty years.[14]

South Carolina’s rice empire dwindled after the Civil War and rice cultivation was nearly nonexistent after World War II. In the late twentieth century, folks began reviving Carolina Gold rice production. These days, you can find rice and sea island red peas at online retailers like Rollen’s Raw Grains. Whether you use black-eyed or red peas, bacon or ham hocks, Carolina Gold or long grain rice, make some hoppin’ john and eat your peas, y’all!

[1] Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 66.

[2] For comparison, by 1860 in South Carolina, the average farm covered 569 acres. Eldred E. Prince Jr., “Agriculture,” in South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, Institute for Southern Studies, April 15, 2016), https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/agriculture/; When Joshua John Ward died in 1853, he had been dubbed the “kind of rice planters” and over 1,000 enslaved people worked on his plantations. Matthew A. Lockhart, “All Saints Parish,” in South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, Institute for Southern Studies, April 15, 2016), https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/all-saints-parish/.

[3] Luana M. Graves Sellars, “The Lowcountry Story of Rice,” Lowcountry Gullah, June 24, 2023, https://lowcountrygullah.com/the-lowcountry-story-of-rice/.

[4] Nic Butler, “Ten Things Everyone Should Know about Lowcountry Rice | Charleston County Public Library,” Charleston County Public Library, March 2, 2017, https://www.ccpl.org/charleston-time-machine/ten-things-everyone-should-know-about-lowcountry-rice.

[5] Richard D. Porcher and William Robert Judd, The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice: An Illustrated History of Innovations in the Lowcountry Rice Kingdom (University of South Carolina Press, 2014), 78.

[6] “Planting Rice,” Inland Rice Fields, accessed March 15, 2025, https://inlandrice.charlestoncounty.org/planting.html.

[7] John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England, ed. Louis Alexis Chamerovzow (May be had on application to the editor, 1855), 186–88, http://archive.org/details/06374405.4802.emory.edu.

[8] Porcher and Judd, The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice, 83–84.

[9] Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 188.

[10] Porcher and Judd, The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice, 2.

[11] Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 195.

[12] Porcher and Judd, The Market Preparation of Carolina Rice, 95–96.

[13] Brown, Slave Life in Georgia, 187.

[14] Sellars, “The Lowcountry Story of Rice.”