“These fields are identical to they might have been within the seventeenth or 18th century,” says Chalmers, 60, a fourth-generation rice farmer whose Lowcountry roots stretch again lots of of years.
Loads of People have eaten rice grown by Chalmers — even when they don’t realize it. Chalmers is a longtime collaborator with Glenn Roberts, founding father of Anson Mills and champion of heirloom grains, and for near 20 years, he has labored within the background of South Carolina’s rice revival. The farmer grows natural rice, amongst different crops, at Turnbridge Plantation, the place Richard Schulze Sr. resurrected nutty, fragrant Carolina Gold rice within the late Eighties.
Greater than a sower of seeds, Chalmers works as a fixer, analysis grower, hydrologist, woodsman, discipline and fence builder, and ancestral data keeper. “There’s not one farm now we have with rice on, and now we have numerous them, that Rollen hasn’t been to and suggested on,” Roberts says.
In spring 2023, Chalmers added one other title to his multi-hyphenate CV: rice vendor. Together with his spouse, Frances, Chalmers launched Rollen’s Raw Grains, his personal line of rice, peas and grits bought on-line, at farmers markets and on the couple’s Hardeeville storefront. “For years, I stored serious about doing one thing like this, however I get entangled in so many different tasks,” Chalmers says of his later-in-life public debut. “It’s a giant accomplishment.”
The beforehand unsung farmer now has chef followers (BJ Dennis, Pierre Thiam, Bernard Bennett and Mashama Bailey, amongst others) and a rising variety of loyal residence cooks, and for Chalmers, the state’s most seen Black rice farmer, every pot he fills is a quiet triumph of tradition.
Rice made South Carolina planters wealthy. By 1774, the coastal area exported some 66 million kilos yearly of the grain, all sowed and harvested by enslaved employees in treacherous fields infested with water moccasins and mosquitoes. Plantation homeowners sought out West Africans, specifically, for his or her ability in rising and processing rice. “Enslaved Africans taught People find out how to develop rice,” says Bailey, chef and co-owner of the Grey in nearby Savannah, Ga. Posters for Lowcountry slave auctions marketed employees from the “Windward and Rice Coast,” in addition to a “gang of 25” “accustomed to Sea Island cotton and rice tradition.”
After the Civil Battle, many planters bought or deserted their land, and South Carolina’s business rice farming pale within the face of mechanization (the area’s sticky pluff mud just isn’t variety to tractors), labor shortages and out of doors competitors. By the point Chalmers began farming rice, the fields that fueled the state’s antebellum economic system had largely turn into ghosts, earthen recollections pressed into the panorama. To see them now, researchers use aerial images and lidar, a complicated sort of imaging, to map fields’ man-made boundaries.
However rice tradition was tended all alongside by the Gullah Geechee people, descendants of enslaved West Africans, who, after emancipation, stayed put within the Southeast’s marshlands and sea islands. Up till the Nineteen Forties, Chalmers’s maternal grandmother grew and milled rice for residence consumption, for survival. “All people from round this space, particularly African People, had a small rice discipline of their very own after slavery ended,” Chalmers says. “However you couldn’t inform that they’re fields as we speak. They’re all grown up with timber.”
Chalmers says he believes members of his grandparents’ era stopped farming rice after they may now not supply seeds. Frances Chalmers suspects that when people bought manufacturing facility and pulp mill jobs, they now not had time to farm on the aspect. They may additionally afford store-bought rice, a present of rising household fortunes. “To develop your individual rice was thought-about low class, low lease. It was a pejorative,” Roberts says.
These associations to slavery and poverty, to subsistence relatively than abundance, helped bury the historical past of Lowcountry rice farming — even for contemporary acolytes like Rollen Chalmers.
In fall 2022, Chalmers bought a telephone name from Mary Socci, archaeologist for the Palmetto Bluff Conservancy. Over the centuries, the land on which Palmetto Bluff sits has hosted Native American settlements, antebellum plantations, Northern industrialist retreats and a searching membership. It’s now a luxurious resort and residence, framed by moss-draped oaks and the saltwater Might River. Company cross over a former rice dike after they drive into the principle entrance.
Socci invited Chalmers to Palmetto Bluff, ostensibly to speak to the farmer about putting in a rice discipline, but additionally to verify a hunch. Earlier within the yr, she attended a rice tradition lecture by Chalmers and couldn’t assist however ponder whether he was related to gravestones she’s charged with tending. Over lunch, Socci requested about his household historical past within the space, and after the meal, she instructed Chalmers she had one thing else to indicate him. They drove a brief distance to a cemetery, and she or he ushered Chalmers by the small gate. “Proper there, clear as day, I see ‘Maria Chalmers, spouse of William Chalmers,’” remembers Chalmers. “I used to be so shocked. I couldn’t transfer. I couldn’t speak.”
Due to slavery, it’s exceedingly rare for Black Americans to have the ability to hint their ancestry earlier than the Civil Battle. However Bluffton, S.C., plantation homeowners John J. Cole and Esther Caroline Corley Cole stored a household Bible through which the names of kids born into slavery have been inscribed. “They recorded the start of this child woman named Maria,” Socci says, “and Maria’s birthday matches the start date on the gravestone.”
Socci defined that Maria was Chalmers’s great-grandmother. In 1871, she married William, who was raised in Bluffton, and the couple had 4 kids: Errol, Sarah, Sabina and William, Chalmers’s grandfather. “It’s unbelievable,” says Chalmers, whose paternal grandfather died younger of an damage suffered whereas clearing a just-purchased plot of farmland. In his household, “nobody knew something about them.”
Socci additionally discovered within the 1880 Agricultural Census that William Sr., then 27, rented 4 acres inside what’s now Palmetto Bluff, and that yr, he and Maria grew 108 kilos of rice. “To have Rollen related to this land on this manner, after which to know that he’s carrying on this custom, is extraordinary,” Socci says.
Chalmers now has a stand on the Palmetto Bluff farmers market, and the resort’s cooks have added his rice to their menus. Cassie Beato, the resort’s naturalist, shares Chalmers’s story on hikes and eco-tours she leads.
“I’ve seen individuals get chills listening to his story and have actually emotional experiences assembly him,” Bailey says about Chalmers. She has additionally introduced her staff from the Gray to Hardeeville to attach with Chalmers and study Lowcountry rice tradition.
Rice, Bailey says, is the inspiration of her cooking. “I grew up on it. I really like cooking it; we ate it on daily basis rising up.”
Likewise, Frances Chalmers, who grew up in Hardeeville, remembers rice on the desk at practically each meal. If there have been leftovers, her mom fashioned them into patties and fried them for breakfast. Along with pots of white rice, Chalmers household favorites embody red rice, chicken bog, rooster and rice, and hoppin’ John — all dishes from the Gullah Geechee canon of perloos (additionally spelled purloo, perlo, pilau and pilaf).
However Rollen Chalmers’s fragrant Carolina Gold and Charleston Gold grains don’t want a lot doctoring. “Simply chop off a bit of butter, drop it on it, and stir round somewhat bit. You simply sit there and eat it with a fork. That is good things,” he says.
What has shocked Chalmers most is the recognition of rice grits, or middlins. “It’s the new factor with all of the cooks,” he says. When milling rice, any damaged grains get separated and sifted out; within the days of slavery, these castoffs went to animals and enslaved employees. Even with trendy milling know-how, 10 to fifteen p.c of Chalmers’s harvest cracks into middlins. Nevertheless, he sells these “seconds” as rice grits for the next worth than complete grains. At residence, Frances Chalmers likes to show the grits right into a creamy risotto with rooster inventory, parmesan and mushrooms.
Rollen’s Uncooked Grains is larger than meals, although. In Might 2023, when Chalmers’s Carolina Gold rice crops stood only a few inches tall, he posted a video to Instagram with the textual content “POV: Residing out your ancestors wildest goals.”
He and Frances self-financed Rollen’s Uncooked Grains. They circle of relatives land, initially bought in the course of the Jim Crow period, and so they’re coaching their daughter, Maranda Chalmers-Walker, and her husband, Randy, to ultimately take over the household rice enterprise.
At Turnbridge Plantation, now owned by Richard Schulze Jr., enslaved males carved rice fields out of wetlands, and centuries later, Chalmers — with the assistance of a bulldozer, tractor and excavator — restored them.
As he walked these fields, Chalmers’s cellphone interrupted the relative calm of the farm 5 occasions in a single hour: a burst pipe wanted fixing, somebody’s boat wanted transferring.
Later, a budding crawfish farmer stopped by the shop to see when Chalmers would possibly need to develop rice in symbiosis along with his crustaceans. Chalmers talked about upcoming analysis with Clemson College on salt-tolerant rice, the advantages of which may assist farmers as far afield as Bangladesh. “I’ll inform you, I get into somewhat little bit of all the things,” Chalmers says. “However this rice rising, I get pleasure from it. I get pleasure from watching it develop and producing seeds for the subsequent yr.”
