Glimpses of Enslaved Life on a Cape Fear River Rice Plantation

(1866) African American workers on Cape Fear River rice plantation, N.C. Weeding. 1866. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2007677023/. Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62–61965 (b&w film copy neg.) Call Number: Illus. in AP2.L52 1866 (Case Y) [P&P]. Although this engraving was made immediately after the Civil War, it depicts African Americans working rice fields by hand as they did during enslavement.

In 1855, Fanny C. Watters was born on Clarendon, a prosperous rice plantation on the Cape Fear River in Brunswick County, NC. Near the end of her life, in 1944, she penned a book of vignettes about her childhood. The family published it as Plantation Memories of the Cape Fear River Country, and her relative George M. Stephens republished it in 1961. In the second edition, Stephens writes in a brief forward that her “words made bright pictures of childhood before the Civil War.” While Watters’ stories gloss over her family’s enslavement of other human beings, they are still valuable glimpses of life on an antebellum rice plantation in the Cape Fear region.

For example, we learn from her book that poultry is so important to the household that one enslaved woman, “Mom Venus,” is called the “poultry woman.” Watters relates that “When Mother wanted any killed she would go out in the poultry yard and say “Venus, kill that one and this…Well, I don’t want to say which to kill. Just kill two, but don’t let me know which.” (p.6) In this story, we see Watters’ mother acceding to Venus’ judgement, while at the same time seeking Venus’ help in protecting her own feelings. Watters’ mother is fond of the poultry, so she doesn’t want to say which of the birds should be killed.