South of Haunted Dreams (27 page)

When I explored Charleston it was with new eyes. I believe now in ghosts. I believe now that we carry the past with us, not just a personal past but the deep past as well. I believe we have two lives, the one we live for ourselves, and the one we live for others. And perhaps the measure of a man's worth is the smallness of the gap between the two.

I'm sure Great-Grandfather Joseph would have passed this way, if only to see Charleston, then as well as now one of the most beautiful and charming cities in the country. If he was at all like me, he would have come here to touch the past and then to put it behind him, to remind himself of what he had escaped and what he was no longer, to remind himself that the line between good and bad fortune is thinly drawn, to remind himself that he could never really escape, that he would never be free, that no man ever is.

We are parties to our own lack of freedom, and no matter which side of the gate we are on we are all of us prisoners.

Once again slavery takes center stage, and we see slave and slaver both as prisoners mired in deceit and self-deception: the lies about inferiority and over-sexed savagery, the myths about the inability to learn, the lack of a work ethic, and about the docile, happy-go-lucky slave, the southern falsehood too that whites and blacks cannot live together, that they have been and must remain strangers to one another. Against these lies in particular Charleston gives beautiful and expert testimony.

Charleston was the capital of slavery in America, the country's primary slave port. Half the city was black, and more whites owned slaves here than in any other city. The beauty of the city, its wealth and its economy were built on slave labor, and on the labor of free blacks. Black men and women worked here, slave and free, and are on the record as butchers and fishermen, seamstresses, laundresses, nurses and midwives, tailors and cap makers, blacksmiths, porters, masons, printers, cabinetmakers, coach makers, shoemakers, locksmiths, sailors, barbers, bookbinders and barrel makers, painters and plasterers. They were a decidedly industrious lot. They did everything that needed doing.

And yet the image passed down is of a docile slave idling in the shade, loitering with nothing to do, without a thought in his head, an image that was comforting to the white population, no doubt. Whites, then as now, were afraid of uncontrolled blacks. Racial stereotypes of lazy blacks were promoted to maintain the myths of superiority and the need for subordination, but if the image had been a true picture, there would have been no need to control blacks so severely.

Remember that Denmark Vesey lived in Charleston. He had won a $1,500 lottery prize and with part of that money he bought his freedom. He educated himself, began preaching to other blacks, and urged them to fight for deliverance. A slave revolt was planned for June 16, 1822. It failed but not before many whites were killed.

So much for the docile black who did not resist his captivity.

And so much for the image of lazy trifling blacks. Black labor built this city, and yet there is no monument to their efforts, certainly no monument to slavery, no reminders at all.

It is as if the city in its guilt or shame is trying to pretend that slavery never existed. But here in Charleston of all places there ought to be some kind of shrine.

“Here was a thin neck in the hourglass of the Afro-American past, a place where individual grains from all along the West African coast had been funneled together, only to be fanned out across the American landscape with the passage of time.”

—Peter H. Wood.

Nearly all the slaves brought into the country from Africa and the West Indies, if they did not come through New Orleans, came through Charleston. In the same way that European immigrants to America were quarantined at Ellis Island in New York, newly arrived slaves were quarantined at Sullivan Island just north of the city. Sullivan Island now is a mostly black community, a quiet place where people live and not much else. If you didn't already know the history, you'd never know it. There is no Ellis Island–type museum. There are no reminders.

On the corner of Meeting Street and St. Michael's Alley, in the shade of St. Michael's Episcopal Church, an old woman in a red floppy hat squats on the pavement. She has but a few teeth in her head, she never smiles. But in her hands and in her face are centuries of patience and hard work. Her name is Miss Stokes and she sits here all day every day, she said, and weaves baskets. Palm fronds, they looked like to me, but she said they were blades of sweetgrass.

“Hard work?”

“What isn't?” she replied. “A lot of work, a lot of patience.”

I almost missed her. I actually ignored her at first, passed her by and came back to her, this link to the deep past. She was a Gullah woman, she said, a vestige of African culture kept alive. She weaves baskets, she speaks another language, one that I cannot understand—a mixture of English, American and Creole. She sits all day doing what her ancestors did. She is a monument to slavery.

I walked over to Chalmers Street where the old slave market used to be. The market is closed now, all boarded up. For a time it was a tourist attraction. People came to see where and how slave auctions took place. Now it's nothing but an empty shell of memories, a low brick building, twice as long as it is wide, not many windows, and no way for air to circulate. It's dark inside, must have seemed even darker in 1820 when it was built. It must have been hot. In summer it must have been an inferno.

The city is crawling with tourists. But they do not come to the old slave market. They have nothing to do with it; it has nothing to do with them. They are on holiday, after all.

Instead they take expensive carriage rides along the old streets. They spend hours on the USS
Yorktown,
a permanently moored aircraft carrier that sits in the harbor. They ride the ferries out into the harbor where the Cooper River flows into the sea and Fort Sumter rises above the waves. The Civil War officially began here with the bombardment of Sumter. Those were painful days in American history, but they were days of honor, glorious days, romantic. The tourists don't seem to mind being reminded of it.

Along the north face of Washington Square there is a little monument to General Pierre Gustave Beauregard, the Confederate brigadier who ordered the assault on Sumter.

In the center of the square there is a large marble obelisk, another monument to the war. The names of great battles and campaigns are etched on its sides: Richmond, Petersburg, Drury's Bluff, Sumter, Manassas, Battery Wagner. Shrines to the effort to keep blacks enslaved.

But nowhere in the city is there a shrine to any effort to free the slaves, or even to the contribution blacks have made to the city.

When I walked out of the square and turned up Queen Street, a young woman approached. As we walked toward each other, very subtly she removed her purse from the shoulder nearest me and put it over her other arm. She clutched it close.

I wanted to scream at her for her stupidity.

“Lady, do you think I couldn't have that thing if I wanted it, the purse and you too?”

But there was no rage inside. I just laughed. This is the monument to black people I have been looking for, her attitude and her behavior.

On one side of Calhoun Street, the houses are old and beautiful. On the other side of Calhoun Street the houses are old and falling down. There is a black side of town, of course, and the people who live here seem to have missed out on the prosperity boom in the main part of town. Their front porches are collapsing. Paint peels off the walls. Young people sit on the front stoops and drink liquor concealed in brown paper bags.

This is another monument to black people.

I walked among the old magnificent homes. Some had been preserved, others restored. Hundreds of houses remain from the early 1800s, dozens more are even older. They are beautiful houses. It's a beautiful city. The shady tree-lined streets, the old churches, these houses—the entire town is a link to the past. And I realized that none of this would be here if not for the labor of black women and men.

A crew was rehabbing one of the homes, and at the top of a ladder a black man was perched. In his hands he held hammer and chisel. He waved down at me as I passed. I made a fist and gave him a black power salute. He looked at me like he didn't understand, like I was crazy. He went back to work.

I told this to a man named Phillip Carter as we stood waiting in line for ice cream cones at one of the food shops in the old market, now another tourist trap full of junk food and souvenirs. The market runs all the way from Meeting to East Bay Street.

“I get sick watching these out-of-towners eating all this silly stuff,” he said. But he was about to eat an ice cream just the same.

We talked awhile and when I told him about the worker on the ladder, Phillip shook his head. I thought he was as incredulous as I was. I was wrong.

“Fists waving in the air and fancy handshakes,” he said. “These things we do not need. We need to find a way to get on with it. We need to know what's important and what's not.”

Women like Miss Stokes know, he said. He didn't know her, didn't call her by name, but he knew that women like her sat near the church and weaved baskets.

“They live down on the islands,” he said. “They are keepers of the past for us.”

We took our cones outside. Tourists crowded the streets. They stopped traffic to take pictures. They hurried on to the next site.

“To these tourists the past is just a place to visit,” he said. “But it lives inside those old basket weavers. They are our monuments. These beautiful homes are our monuments. None of this would be here if not for us. Not the city, not the whole damned country. We have a lot to be proud of. No matter what you or anybody else can do, we are here. And we have been here. And we are going to be here. None of that stuff that happened a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago is going to stop us or help us, but we shouldn't forget it. If anything, we need longer memories. We've been measuring ourselves by how far we've advanced since slavery, and how far from it we are, how many generations and all that. But me, I wish I were closer to it. I wish my grandfather had been a slave. I want to be able to feel it, to hear his old stories and know how it was. What's happened has happened and we shouldn't be ashamed of it. We need to touch it from time to time, then set it aside and just get on with it. We owe it to ourselves; nobody else owes us a damned thing.”

Now it was my turn to shake my head—not at what he was saying, but that he was saying it at all.

I wanted to ask him one more question, but I never did. I wanted to know why he was here.

Eleanor Tate had already given me the answer. Ron White tomorrow would give me the answer again. And then a man named Gopher.

Ron White is a retired Marine Corps sergeant who put his life savings into an empty building just outside Beaufort, South Carolina. He turned the building into a restaurant. A Marine Corps flag waves in the wind. The sign out front says:
REAL HOME COOKING.
I stopped there for lunch on my way south toward the coastal islands and Gullah country.

Inside, the place was packed. Black men, white men, not many women. Soldiers from the base across the road. Two local policemen. A table crowded with men whose bellies were so big they could not see their feet. I pointed to one as he was leaving.

“That guy was skinny when he came in here,” I said. “You're going to kill these white people. You're feeding them too much.”

Fried chicken, greens, black-eyed peas, corn bread, grits, stew, barbecue. And massive portions. And oh it was good. These are things I used to eat when I was a kid. My childhood came flooding back to me in wave after wave of soul food delight.

I had a plate piled high with just about everything. It's a wonder my belly wasn't as huge as the other men's when I left. The only disappointment was the pie. It was pecan. They didn't have coconut.

Sergeant White came from Memphis, was stationed here by the Marines and decided to stay.

“And it's been all right?”

“It seems to work,” he said. “I stay busy, and that's what it's all about. Trying to do what I can to get on with it. If you're not moving forward you're standing still. And that's the same as going backwards.”

He left me to talk to another ex-Marine and his wife, and to a colonel from the base. He had to get on with it, had to keep busy.

*   *   *

Spanish moss covers the trees in Carolina, hanging from the branches of the oak trees and creating canopies of shade. Every tree becomes a weeping willow, every lawn invites a picnic.

Closer to the sea, the tall marsh grass hides meandering backwaters, deadens the sound, quiets the world. This is the low country.

I had followed Highway 21 through Beaufort, across St. Helena Sound, over a series of islands to one called Fripp, and the end—or beginning—of the road.

Fripp Island is a private island. It used to be a vacation resort, but now the developers are selling homes for year-round living. There is a guard posted at the gate and you cannot get in without prior invitation. I tried, was refused, and ended up in the sales office. I wanted to have a look around. It was no place I'd want to live anyway—too sterile, too safe, too private. But worst of all it gave me a sense of sudden loss.

I met Gopher on my way back. He was fishing off a bridge, said he hadn't caught anything all day. I had stopped to ask him what had happened with the developers.

“I thought this was all Gullah country,” I said.

“It is,” he said. “But it's changing. We've been discovered. And somebody has decided this part of the world is valuable real estate.”

He wore clothes that made him look like a vagrant. He didn't sound like one.

He spent the long days fishing, he said, and that gave him plenty of time to think. There wasn't much else to do. I asked him why he hadn't left, why he still lived here. In this backwater country, in the South, in the middle of nothing to do.