ABSTRACT

Galeano’s prose embellishes an oral history widely recounted in maroon-descended communities across much of northeastern South America from the Guianas to Amapá, Pará, and Maranhão, Brazil. The broader narrative concerns rice-and no other seeds-that escaping female ancestors sequestered in their hair. Each variation attributes rice beginnings to the deliberate act of an enslaved woman. In the version from Suriname, she tucks the grains into her hair while fleeing a plantation rice field. Maroon accounts from French Guiana and Amazonic Brazil place her aboard an arriving slave ship. Realizing that she is about to be taken off the ship, the enslaved woman steals some unhusked rice grains from the ship’s

larder and hides them in her hair. The risk of discovery is enormous, but she knows something important that makes the danger worthwhile: that unmilled grains are also seeds and that from these rice can be grown. In this telling, rice is explicitly tied to a slave ship and, by inference, to Africa (Vaillant 520-529; Price, First-Time 129; Carney, “‘With Grains in Her Hair;’” Carney, “Rice and Memory”). The seeds link an African past to contemporary maroon community and culture, for rice is the gift that fed (and continues to feed) the woman’s descendants. These narratives also function as a foundation story for maroons, situating life and survival as runaways in an African woman’s daring act of defiance and vision.