g. Next day the crop would be bound in sheaves and stacked for a brief
curing. When the reaping was done the threshing began, and then followed
the tedious labor of separating the grain from its tightly adhering husk.
In colonial times the work was mostly done by hand, first the flail for
threshing, then the heavy fat-pine pestle and mortar for breaking off the
husk. Finally the rice was winnowed of its chaff, screened of the "rice
flour" and broken grain, and barreled for market.[7]

[Footnote 7: The best descriptions of the rice industry are Edmund Ruffin,
_Agricultural Survey of South Carolina_ (Columbia, S.C. 1843); and R.F.W.
Allston, _Essay on Sea Coast Crops_ (Charleston, 1854), which latter is
printed also in _DeBow's Review_, XVI, 589-615.]

The ditches and pools in and about the fields of course bred swarms of
mosquitoes which carried malaria to all people subject. Most of the whites
were afflicted by that disease in the warmer half of the year, but the
Africans were generally immune. Negro labor was therefore at such a premium
that whites were virtually never employed on the plantations except as
overseers and occasionally as artisans. In colonial times the planters,
except the few quite wealthy ones who had town houses in Charleston, lived
on their places the year round; but at the close of the eighteenth century
they began to resort in summer to "pine land" villages within an hour or
two's riding distance from their plantations. In any case the intercourse
between the whites and blacks was notably less than in the tobacco region,
and the progress of the negroes in civilization correspondingly
slighter. The plantations were less of homesteads and more of business
establishments; the race relations, while often cordial, were seldom
intimate.

The introduction of indigo culture was achieved by one of America's
greatest women, Eliza Lucas, afterward the wife of Charles Pinckney
(chief-justice of the province) and mother of the two patriot statesmen
Thomas and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Her father, the governor of the
British island of Antigua, had been prompted by his wife's ill health
to settle his family in South Carolina, where the three plantations he
acquired near Charleston were for several years under his daughter's
management. This girl while attending her father's business found time to
keep up her music and her social activities, to teach a class of young
negroes to read, and to carry on various un