Few US cities have so profitably capitalized on their past and their foodways as Charleston, South Carolina. Founded in the late 1600s near Oyster Point, it was one of colonial America’s metropolises, fattened by slavery and competing with New York City and Philadelphia in population and port city swag. On the shores of the Atlantic, the region birthed the dynamic Gullah culture and communities of Black fisherfolk who gave America shrimp and grits, crab rice, she-crab soup, and the one-pot wonder Hoppin’ John. In this region, land, sea, and Black labor converged to leave a culinary imprint that has traveled far beyond the Carolina coast.
But no matter how much Charleston touts itself as “America’s Most Historic City” and a bastion of authenticity, cities and foodways survive because reinvention is perpetual. As we toured the South Carolina coast, African American culinary entrepreneurs showed just how to build off history—and not be bound by it.
Land and Legacy, St. Helena Island
On a drizzly fall day, Sarah Reynolds Green gathers a mess of collards, hugging the bouquet with both arms. The embrace represents the philosophy she shares with the students ages 10–17 who attend Marshview Community Organic Farm’s Young Farmers and Chefs of the Lowcountry program: “When you are out here growing food, your heart has to be clean…. Your vibration has an effect on the universe.”
Green and her chef-hunter husband, Bill Green, teach the students farming basics on her family land. She picked peanuts, corn, and okra here as a child before going to Spelman College in Atlanta. In Georgia she got involved with a legendary, now defunct community health food store, Life’s Essentials, and several schools that promoted racial pride, good health, and collaboration. “If we can’t work together, we can’t work,” she says.
The students tend crops, from sowing in the greenhouse to harvesting. The program also gives their families seeds to start home gardens to cultivate Gullah land connections that have been lost to time, off-island migration, and encroaching development. But Green remembers, and she wants to teach because it pains her to hear some youngsters say of agriculture, “I don’t want to do that ‘slavery job.’”
The Call of the Water, Brittlebank Park
Tia Clark gently shakes the contents from a crab cage onto a pier off Charleston’s Brittlebank Park. She holds aloft a cerulean Atlantic blue crab, fingers safely away from its flailing claws. This beauty is a male. “You can tell by the pattern. People say the males have a Washington Monument on its underbody, and the mature female a Capitol with a pointed dome,” she says.
Clark, founder of her Casual Crabbing With Tia ecotourism venture, sounds as if she’s always known these things. Black people have worked the waves around Charleston since kingdom come. But though she’s a beenyah—Gullah for “been here,” or a native, as opposed to a comeyah—this was recent knowledge for her.
Clark found the waters after she left behind years of bartending and hard drinking. A cousin took her out crabbing, and heeding a call she didn’t quite understand then, she began fishing alone.
She “made the outdoors my gym,” shedding pounds and gaining peace. Today she leads popular tours during which guests accompany her on the water, keep some of the catch they net, and take it home or to a local restaurant partner to cook.
“We all have a right to these natural resources, and it doesn’t matter where you came from, how much money you’ve got,” she says. “And I want to empower and teach young Black kids [in the region] that our culture is directly connected to the water…. If you don’t have a relationship with this water and know this water, you probably don’t know who you are.”
History of Ancestors, The Middleton Place Plantation
Distant cousins Ty Collins and Robert Bellinger both descend from some of the 3,000 people enslaved by the Middletons, a prominent Charleston trading and political family. At the Middleton Place plantation, beside its garden shop and visitors parking, they’ve planted the Asé Garden. It’s a small collection of raised beds of herbs to honor the enslaved people whose labor made the estate’s world-renowned formal English garden possible. On a recent walking tour, Collins pointed out how enslaved and free people literally shaped the landscape as its primary gardeners and engineers: from its famous stands of camellias, bamboo they planted as fencing, and the strip of earth they constructed between the plantation’s rice field and the Ashley River’s mix of salt and fresh waters. “A 14-year-old girl would have been responsible for this,” he says, pointing to a watery quarter-acre of a demonstration rice field.
But little is known about what that girl and her family would have grown to eat in the slave quarters. Bellinger, a Massachusetts-based historian of West African griot traditions, has become a de facto food historian to solve that mystery and hopes he’ll soon be able to plumb Middleton Place’s private archive to find out. He and Collins are advocating for a larger garden space that’s more connected to the property’s core, where they’ll grow plants linked to the African diaspora: the benne seed that’s a symbol of the region, “Guinea corn” (probably sorghum or millet), and a tomato that might have traveled to North America during the Haitian Revolution.
Pushing Boundaries, Bluffton
Extreme fidelity to regional specialties can dampen diners’ appetites for the novel—or a broader history. Bernard Bennett, chef and co-owner of Okàn restaurant in Bluffton, 90 miles down the coast, pushes boundaries. His menus offer the holy trinity of rice, seafood, and greens, but much more: Guyanese pepper pot or a nod to his Senegalese grandmother in nebbe, a black-eyed pea salad. “There will always be rice on this menu,” he states. A recent menu offered three, including jollof, West Africa’s precursor to Lowcountry red rice; vermicelli with Haitian flavors via djon djon mushrooms; and tumeric-tinted Carolina gold rice.
He’s firm that shrimp and grits won’t make an appearance as he explores less-traveled pathways that led to African American food. When he debuted the West African greens and melon seed stew egusi, it languished on the menu until he rebranded it as “spinach soup” and instructed servers to describe it as hearty winter comfort in a bowl. He tries to stimulate customers’ curiosity, adding glossaries to his menus, but does not coddle them.
Forging a Path Ahead, St. Stephen
It’s hard to tell if the sparks flying around Quintin Middleton’s head are coming from his brain or the mechanical grinder he uses to smooth a knife blade. In October, Middleton, also a descendant of the Middleton family, opened what may be the nation’s only Black-owned retail knife shop. The work happens at his St. Stephen workshop, where he produces Middleton Made’s workhorse chef’s knife; its Japanese cousin, the gyuto; knives with wood handles made colorful by a fungus; and his own invention, a combo oyster shucker–bottle opener for those who want a beer with their bivalves. “You have to be a metallurgist, a carpenter…a visionary. You have to see it before you make it,” he says.
The same applies to his career. Historic Charleston once teemed with Black ironworkers, brickmasons, and blacksmiths. He saw their modern counterparts in relatives who held down blue-collar jobs. He relished TV and films of his childhood, where the Ninja Turtles and Luke Skywalker jousted with swords and sabers. A chance encounter with a sword and knife maker as a teenage mall worker launched a future designing bespoke and collectible cutlery. He prayed for a way to become a knife maker, and the Holy Spirit told him to make chef’s knives. Asked how knives could be his art and living, he simply says, “Faith.” Because if a clear path doesn’t exist, sometimes you have to forge one.
Barhopping and Oyster Popping, King Street
It was a Monday in oyster season, so Brittney Wall was shucking mollusks at Charleston’s Republic Garden & Lounge. Her business, Shucktowne Mobile Oyster Bar, pops up at the King Street eatery and throughout the city. Once a shucker at a restaurant which sold a thousand oysters a night, she took mere seconds to pop open local Lowcountry Cups and Beausoleil oysters from Canada. All the while, she watched a portable grill where other oysters warmed under smoked Gouda and bacon.
Eschewing the traditional light vinegar–allium mignonettes, Wall crafts cocktail-inspired sauces: pineapple and jalapeño; “mimosa”; watermelon with basil—all with Champagne vinaigrette and easy references for Charleston’s dedicated barhoppers. Wearing a T-shirt that says “We shuck ’em. You suck ’em,” Wall explains that she tinkers with tradition. “Food isn’t meant to stay the same forever. It changes with the people who cook it and enjoy it…. I like to think I’m helping move Lowcountry traditions forward by adding my own flavor and perspective to the mix.” At the end of the day, she just wants to keep the spirit of Lowcountry food alive.