Speaking of Charleston

      

Standing around the fire pit outside my brother’s house, drinking beer and doing the casual grilling that is left to men, while the major cooking and talking goes in inside.  One way or another the conversation comes around to my family’s April vacation trip to Charleston, which gets me saying to my brother the things I now say to everyone about Charleston. 

I talk about the horse carriage ride we took around the old part of the city (actually just part of the old part of the city) the afternoon we arrived.  How the old city is terrifically beautiful and historic, huge chunks of it saved, ironically, by its own post-bellum poverty.  For decades no one in Charleston could afford to tear down the old crumbing homes and put up something better, so the old homes and streets remained in place until the money finally came, by which time the urban planners and regular folks generally had come around to the obvious – that it was better to preserve and restore the historic than to knock it down in the name of progress.  And so the streets of colonial Charleston go on for blocks and blocks, on a scale that seems far greater than anything that remains of the other great colonial cities of Boston or Philadelphia or New York.   

I tell my story about our tour guide, a cheerful, roundish fellow with a melodious voice and an easy calm delivery.  He knows his stuff and his genuine love for Charleston shines like a gloss on every sentence.  He is, on the whole, terrific.  Except when he tells us that all the history books get it wrong when they say the first shots of the Civil War were fired from Fort Sumter, which was manned by federal forces, when in fact they were fired at Fort Sumter, by cadets from The Citadel who – my words now, not his – could not wait any longer to begin the violence that inevitably came with secession. 

The history books that I have read, not surprisingly, get exactly right this business of who first shot at whom, but that’s not my issue with our guide.  Rather, it’s the bitterness he reveals a few minutes later when he criticizes the Union forces that came back to Charleston later in the war and laid siege to the city for over 500 days, blowing cannonballs through the streets of “the most beautiful city in the South” until it much of it lay in ruins.  To which there are a couple of rejoinders that I decide not to make out loud.  The first being that the siege would not have gone on for 500 days if the good folks of Charleston had the common sense to put up the white flag a bit earlier.  The second being, what the hell did Charleston think was going to happen when they so proudly shot up Fort Sumter and drove the tiny federal garrison away?  Can it be that they thought then – and still think now – that think having started the greatest conflagration this continent has known, there should not have been any shooting back? 

If you’re going to start a fight, you better be prepared to win it or quit it fast or get your ass whipped. 

I talk about the rest of our week.  How we take a guided kayak tour through the salt marsh and ride horses through the low country woods.  How we see dolphins from the kayaks and the beach, and alligators in the ponds and even a big one in the surf.  Lone blue herons and white egrets.  Squadrons of brown pelicans.  The blessing of the shrimp fleet.  Eating shrimp and grits and gumbo and fried tomatoes, fried pickles, fries hush puppies, fried chicken.  Washing it all down with lemonade and the ubiquitous sweet tea. 

Our last day we go out to tour Drayton Hall, a great square brick mansion, sitting in the middle of a vast lawn on the bank of the Ashley River, miles upstream from Charleston. It has, against all odds, survived largely in the same shape that it was built in 1738. 

Like Charleston itself, it is beautiful but bittersweet – built with the riches of “Carolina gold” rice.  Every grain of it planted and tended and reaped and processed and loaded and shipped by slaves, working under the hot sun and the whip.  The sun is the same one we stroll under as we cross the grounds to tour the grand old house. 

The whip they don’t show here anymore. 

So this is what I talk about when I talk about Charleston, a place I would soon return to and explore a great deal As it turns out, even as I was telling my Charleston stories by the fire pit at my brother’s house on a Sunday evening, talking about the remnants of the old rice plantations and all that was built from them, The Sunday New York Times Book Review that was sitting on his kitchen table (which we hadn’t yet looked at that day) had a good review of a new book, Saving Savannah, about the Savannah region during and after the Civil War.  Savannah, another place still to visit.  Not far from Charleston, at least these days.  Part of the tidewater region where, as the reviewer put it simply and starkly enough, "small armies of slaves spent their days knee-deep in the stagnant water of the paddies, churning out the profits that made their masters spectacularly wealthy."  More notable than the review itself was this accompanying picture of slaves plowing a rice field near Savannah, circa 1855.   

We know the history of man, and so we are used to the awful notion of slavery.  But it is another thing to see it in actual pictures, to think that slavery has existed into an age modern enough for photography.  And to walk into the remnants of a rice field slaves carved with tools like this into the swampy pine forests of Carolina and Georgia.  And to walk the floorboards and stairs and porches of one of the grand homes that was built from such as this.
Truly, we have no idea.  But the remnants, in so many ways, remain.