CITY THAT RICE BUILT

A hunger for rice laid Charleston's foundation. Could a love for the grainand the city that grew from it—be the way to a more unified future?

- JEFF GORDINIER GEORGE McCALMAN

Charlotte Jenkins holds out a pot and makes it clear that if you want to learn something, it's time to look closely.

"See this rice?" she says. "This is how rice is supposed to be."

SHE'S RIGHT, OF COURSE. The rice is neither mushy nor crunchy. Each grain retains its individuality, but together, the grains have softened toward the optimal threshold for soaking up flavor. Charlotte Jenkins is 81 years old, and she has spent seven of those decades (yes, she began cooking as a child) transforming simple pots of rice into dishes that tell a deep, ancient, and sacred story about where she comes from.

Jenkins comes from-and lives in-South Carolina. But more specifically, and crucially, she carries on the culinary traditions of the Gullah Geechee communities of South Carolina-communities whose connection to West Africa continues to thrum through a style of cooking that has endured in this region since the earliest years of slavery. The rice in that pot, here in her home kitchen a short drive outside of Charleston, will emerge in a few minutes as a tantalizing purloo studded with nuggets of bacon and pinwheels of okra.

Jenkins doesn't measure anything. She doesn't hover over the stove. Like a seasoned musician, she lets her ears and eyes lead the way. She drops chunks of pork into a pan, returns to the kitchen table to chat with her daughter, Kesha, and simply waits "until it's crisp." When the pork is done, she wipes the residual schmutz from the pan with a paper towel. "This is a trick," she says. "Because that can definitely change the taste of your food. Oh, I have a lot of tricks now." The okra shows up late to the party on purpose. "I don't cook the okra in the rice the whole time because if you did that," Jenkins says, "the okra would disintegrate."