Marcus began work on the breaks.
"The girls shuffled the rice about with their feet until it was clayed."
I could not help lamenting aloud, and Marcus felt obliged to offer me some comfort, so he said: "Miss, if we one been a suffer, I'd feel bad, but eberybody bank bruk, en eberybody fiel' flow." This did not comfort me at all, but I realized the folly of lamenting. Fortunately I had just bought 3000 feet of boards, and as soon as the water left the fields Marcus began work on the breaks, and by driving puncheons, laying ground logs, and flatting mud and filling in, the bank is up again, keeping out the river, and the fields are drying off. The season, however, has not waited on us. April is gone, and not an acre is planted when I expected to have 100 acres growing by this time. The worst is that I have been paying out heavily every week to put things back where they were at the end of March.
There are many curious things about the planting of rice. One can plant from the 15th of March to the 15th of April, then again from the 1st to the 10th of May, and last for ten days in June. Rice planted between these seasons falls a prey to birds,—May-birds in the spring and rice-birds in August and September. It was impossible to plant in April this year, and now every one is pushing desperately to get what they can in May.
Yesterday I went down to give out the seed rice to be clayed for planting to-day. I keep the key to the seed-rice loft, though Marcus has all the others. I took one hand up into the upper barn while Marcus stayed below, having two barrels half filled with clay and then filled with water and well stirred until it is about the consistency of molasses. In the loft my man measured out thirty-five bushels of rice, turning the tub into a spout leading to the barn below, where young men brought the clay water in piggins from the barrel and poured it over the rice, while young girls, with bare feet and skirts well tied up, danced and shuffled the rice about with their feet until the whole mass was thoroughly clayed, singing, joking, and displaying their graceful activity to the best advantage. It is a pretty sight. When it is completely covered with clay, the rice is shovelled into a pyramid and left to soak until the next morning, when it is measured out into sacks, one and one-fourth bushels to each half acre. Two pairs of the stoutest oxen on the plantation are harnessed to the rice-drills, and they lumber along slowly but surely, and by twelve o'clock the field of fourteen acres is nearly planted.
It is literally casting one's bread on the waters, for as soon as the seed is in the ground the trunk door is lifted and the water creeps slowly up and up until it is about three inches deep on the land. That is why the claying is necessary; it makes the grain adhere to the earth, otherwise it would float. Sometimes, generally from prolonged west winds, the river is low, and water enough to cover the rice cannot be brought in on one tide, and then the blackbirds just settle on the field, diminishing the yield by half.