Rice & Ducks is the story of South Carolina's coastal lowlands and those who owned them and prospered. It is about the people who harnessed the tides and engineered an intricate system that produced an extremely lucrative agricultural enterprise. It is an account expressed in rare photos, exquisite paintings and precise words of hard work by legions of hardy women and men -- their real names lost, their anglicized ones assigned -- who timbered, ditched, diked and sowed a spectacular patchwork of muddy fields day after day, generation after generation for more than 200 years.