Antoinette T. Jackson

Imagining Jehossee Island Rice Plantation Today

The analysis of the legacy of commercial rice production on Jehossee Island, today part of the ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge, provides a unique opportunity to underscore the complex system of interdependence between Africans and Europeans in America. The dominant analysis and public discourse concerning antebellum plantations as national heritage sites, however, provides one perspective—primarily focusing exclusively on life as experienced by plantation owners and their families. In such interpretations, majority African communities go unrepresented. This article breaks new ground in giving primacy to the labour, ingenuity, and expertise of enslaved African people and the role they played in construction and preservation of an ecosystem considered to be of world class significance today.