The rice barn was not a very inviting place to spend the night but the Overseer made himself a pallet out of rice straw and curled up near the door to wait. He didn’t bother to stay awake because he knew that anyone entering the barn would rouse him.
The next morning the Overseer awoke nicely rested. His sleep had not been disturbed by anyone coming into the barn. Disappointed but undaunted, he slept in the barn again the next night, with the same results.
This puzzled the Overseer greatly. Why wasn’t his plan working? He thought some more and decided that Devine must have known somehow that he was sleeping in the rice barn. Of course, Devine and the others would avoid coming in to steal rice with him there.
So that evening the Overseer made a big show of moving his pallet out of the barn and giving up his attempt to catch anyone coming into the barn at night. But as soon as it was dark he sneaked out of his cottage and crept back to the rice barn. This time he hid himself in the trees along the edge of the barnyard where he could keep close watch on the barn without being seen.
The Overseer sat for hours watching in the dark, again with no results. No moon or stars shone through the cloudy skies and night noises made him uneasy at times but he was determined to catch his thief.
Suddenly a faint light appeared at the far edge of the barnyard. The Overseer’s initial thrill quickly turned to apprehension. This was a very strange looking light. It was not a torch but a faint, eerie glow.
Gradually his apprehension turned to terror. All the stories he had ever heard about haunts and plat eyes came rushing back to him as the faint glow bobbed slowly along the far tree line. What manner of horrifying specter was coming from the miasmic swamps to threaten him? At least it wasn’t coming any closer!
Slowly the glow moved toward one of the outbuildings in the barnyard, the one where workers stored rice straw after they threshed the rice grains out of it. Nothing was wasted on the plantation and even worthless rice straw made good animal bedding or compost for cornfields.
In another moment, a light flared inside the outbuilding as if someone had lit a torch. Suddenly the explanation came to the shaken Overseer: the faint glow that he had watched bob along the tree line had come from a glowing ember carried hidden in a pot. Now someone had used that ember to light a torch inside the building.
Fear drained from the Overseer to be replaced by curiosity. What was anyone doing sneaking into the shed where they stored rice straw? The Overseer moved closer until he could see inside the building. A large muscular slave stood with his back to the doorway holding a small “fat light’erd,” a splinter of pine heartwood saturated with pine resin that served as a torch, illuminating the inside of the building. Under his direction, three field hands dug down into the piles of straw and pulled out seagrass baskets. From the baskets they poured rice into sacks.
When the sacks were full and tied closed the workers hoisted them over their shoulders. The man with the torch then turned to lead them out and the Overseer could see him clearly. It was not Devine. It was John! One of Captain Ward’s most trusted field hands, and the plantation Class Leader!
As the Overseer watched, John extinguished his torch. He and the others stole back out into the night and headed toward their homes in the Street.
The Overseer understood that later they would pound the rice in homemade mortars hidden in the swamps to remove the outer hulls, then boil it up for dinner in their cabins in the Street. Not only would they have extra rice to stretch their weekly rations, but fancy whole grain rice even better than the midlins, which are the broken grains that could not be sold on the international market, that Captain Ward and his family ate, and certainly better than the small broken pieces the slaves usually got in their weekly food ration.
Now the whole situation became clear. No wonder he hadn’t caught his rice thief by sleeping in the barn. Devine was not stealing rice from the barn. Nobody was stealing rice from the barn! And Devine was not involved at all. The thief was John!
Each day as field workers threshed the rice and scooped it into baskets, they hid some of the baskets in bundles of straw instead of taking them to the rice barn. Then when they carried the bundles of rice straw into the outbuilding for storage, they were also carrying away hidden baskets of the newly threshed grain.
Later they easily returned during the night to collect the hidden rice from under the straw in the unlocked shed. There was no need to steal rice from the carefully locked rice barn!
The Overseer had discovered his thieves at last. And the biggest shock was that John, the plantation Class Leader—the slave religious leader—was now leading them in their thievery!
Captain Ward had grown to admire John, the Class Leader on his Brookgreen Plantation. John was a tall strong man, a good worker, and a leader among his people. As a field hand, he became expert in all phases of rice production. Captain Ward came to rely on John more and more because of his intelligence, his expertise, his leadership abilities, and especially because of his honesty.
The plantation Overseer was not quite so trusting of John and sometimes resented Captain Ward’s reliance on John’s judgment in matters related to the rice growing operation. But Captain Ward continued to entrust John with numerous responsibilities and to praise his abilities and loyalty.
The year that this story took place, which must have been shortly before the War, had been a good one for rice production. When the harvest came, Captain Ward placed John in charge of the threshing floor just in front of the rice barn. John worked under the direction of Devine, the Driver or head slave, and under the direction of the white Overseer, of course, but Captain Ward trusted John completely and gave him serious responsibilities. After all, John was the Class Leader on Brookgreen Plantation.
The harvest was in full swing. Every day, rice flats piled high with bundles of rice stalks laden with plump grains of rice arrived at Brookgreen Landing, just down the rice island steps from us here at the Museum. A steady stream of field hands carried bundles of rice stalks up the steps from flatboats to the barnyard. John directed them as they arranged the bundles on the hard packed dirt of the threshing floor in front of the barn.
Under John’s supervision, workers beat the rice stalks with wooden flails to knock rice grains loose from the stalks. Then, they scooped up the rough rice from the threshing floor into coiled seagrass baskets and carried it into the rice barn to storage bins where it would wait for milling later in the season. Finally, they carried off the bundles of rice stalks, now just the remaining straw, to an outbuilding for storage.
At least, that was what was supposed to happen. But now the Overseer had discovered that John wasn’t sending all the rice into the barn. There in the dark of the midnight barnyard the Overseer had discovered the secret of John’s thievery!
The Overseer was eager to tell Captain Ward what he had discovered, especially since it involved John, whom he had long suspected of being less perfect than Captain Ward believed.
But what surprising development awaited him? …
Find out in
Gullah Ghosts
by Lynn Michelsohn
(available in paperback or as an ebook)
~
Thank you for reading this selection. We hope you will continue to enjoy Lynn Michelsohn’s writings.
Happy Reading!
Other Books by Lynn Michelsohn
(most are available in paperback and ebook formats)
About the South Carolina Lowcountry …
Lowcountry Ghosts
Alice Flagg, Confederate Blockade Runners, and Haunted Beads
(Tales from Brookgreen Series)
Stories of ghosts from Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry
~
Gullah Ghosts
(Tales from Brookgreen Series)
Gullah folktales from Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry, with notes on Gullah culture and history
~
Crab Boy’s Ghost
&
nbsp; A Gullah Folktale
(Tales from Brookgreen Series)
A story from Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry
~
Tales from Brookgreen
Folklore, Ghost Stories, and Gullah Folktales in the South Carolina Lowcountry
(The Complete Series)
~
Lowcountry Hurricanes
(More Tales from Brookgreen Series)
Joy, tragedy, and surviving hurricanes along the South Carolina coast
~
About the Galapagos Islands …
Galapagos Islands Landscapes
in Herman Melville’s “The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles”
(ebook only)
~
Galapagos Islands Birds
in Herman Melville’s “The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles”
(ebook only)
~
The Chola Widow
Herman Melville’s Short Story of Death and Rape in the Galapagos Islands
(ebook only)
~
In the Galapagos Islands with Herman Melville
Tour the Galapagos Islands with the author of Moby-Dick
~
About the American Southwest …
Billy the Kid’s Jail
Santa Fe, New Mexico
A glimpse of history on the Southwestern Frontier
~
Billy the Kid in Santa Fe
Book One: Young Billy
Wild West History, Outlaw Legends, and the City at the End of the Santa Fe Trail
(A Non-Fiction Trilogy)
~
Roswell
Your Travel Guide to the UFO Capital of the World!
Tour Roswell like a Native, or maybe like an Alien!
“The best book on Roswell I’ve ever seen.” - Judge Dick Bean, Roswell Native
~
(Writing for children as Libby Lynn)
I See Santa Fe!
A Children’s Guide
“Should delight any child under ten.” - New Mexico Magazine
~
Extended Copyright
Lowcountry Confederates: Rebels, Yankees, and South Carolina Rice Plantations
(More Tales from Brookgreen Series)
Copyright © 2004 by Lynn Michelsohn
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations included in articles or reviews.
First Ebook Edition 1.0 S (12/14)
Also available in paperback.
Author image is used with permission from a photograph by Welden Bayliss. All other illustrations are by the author.
Published by
Cleanan Press, Inc.
Vista Plaza, Suite A
401 West Vista Parkway
Roswell, NM 88201 USA
http://www.cleananpressbooks.com
Lowcountry Confederates Page 5