Charleston

Finally made it to Charleston and it was worth visiting. Coming from the northern coast, it was really easy to get into the historic part of town. Although I had trouble spotting the signs until I was on foot parking is plentiful and reasonable. The ramps and lots I saw are small and frequent and the ramps also contain public toilets. There are very few buildings from before the revolutionary war, most of the impressive stuff is mid-1800s or new and built to look like older.

The older part of town once had a defensive wall around it and the southernmost tip of the peninsula was tidal swamp like much of the coastline. Since the original settlers were french, it isn't surprising that many of the older parts of town had a foreign look to it. I found it surprising to see a look more closely resembling Quebec than New Orleans.

Originally the settlers built on Parris Island and then moved up the river and built again. When the governor decided that place would be too hard to defend, they moved to the current location. It was an orderly move. Charleston was carefully plotted and laid out. Green squares were made an intricate part of the plan and most of them still exist. Not only are there little green parks scattered around, there are many benches and walls on the streets waiting to be used. There are even free trolleys that loop around town on three different lines.

The older part of town is directed mostly to tourists. There are some shops, lots of restaurants, historical churches and buildings and then lawyer offices scattered around. Mostly I'd say it's residential with big, old, well-maintained houses and discrete apartment buildings, especially in what I think were wharf buildings. I'm guessing there are many more rentals than I saw because there are huge numbers of 20-something people using the green spaces. Everything I saw was clean; there's no trash blowing around, no graffiti, no loiterers and no obvious police or maintenance workers.

Move a little further up the peninsula and banks and hotels start appearing. They are built in keeping with the 1800s and with a french flair, but they have a new, sharp-edged look to them that the older buildings lack. Some of the older buildings have had face-lifts and most at least a good scrubbing. . Apparently it was customary for a plantation owner to have a town house for summer. Sea breezes keep Charleston cooler and healthier than a plantation in summer where the mosquitoes and gnats are supposed to be fierce. Course their slaves were still there.

Even though there weren't as many tourists as I prepared for, there were enough that I saw some kind of tour nearly every block. There are small tour buses, bicycle cabs that give tours, walking tours, harbor tours and horse-drawn wagon tours that were the most popular.

The first couple of wagons I saw were pulled by a single Clydesdale that made a funny sound as it walked by. Then I saw a pair of mules and they too sounded strange. When I took time to get a good look, I saw they were all wearing wooden shoes. Are they to protect the paving when the roads get really hot or to protect the horses feet?

One of the older buildings is the city market dating from 1841. Its made of brick and most of it is still open air. Lots of the vendors are blacks selling sweetgrass baskets. Originally the slave women made baskets as they had in Africa. Whether the original style was wide and flat I don't know, however what they made here was and the baskets were used for winnowing the rice after harvest. A plantation with 4-500 acres in rice would use lots of baskets so those women and their children would have perfected their skill. After the Civil War, some of the free slaves settled on the barrier islands, developed their own culture and continued to make baskets. I don't think many blacks can afford to live on those islands today though they do continue to make and sell baskets. Some are very elaborate and some are plain. All smell really good because of the sweetgrass that is the primary ingredient. The grass is worked into strands and coiled. The coils are sewn into each other with palmetto leaf cut into thin strips and pine needles are used to add color. They keep an even coil besides adding other colored material into it and then hide the ending so the buyer won't be able to see it. Besides the many sellers at the market, there are stands lining the highway where other women sell their baskets. All the baskets I saw were wonders of creation.

I could have bought a ton of stuff at the market. There was whimsical critters made out of spark plugs, nuts and bolts; nice collections of well-made jewelery; tacky t-shirts; hairbrushes with back and handle cast as cat, fish or bird; some appealing pottery patterned after items used in the 18^th and 19^thcentury; the usual local spices and mixes; and a collection of non-typical mementos – posters advertising slave auctions or offering rewards for runaways.

Charleston and surrounding area played a huge part in the slave trade. There was a port used principally in slave shipment and one of the few remaining original buildings is the slave market. This town is the only one I've seen that labels slavery as inhumane. Other southern cities have mentioned slaves or slavery however none have stood up and declared it as I saw here. The blacks here act like the ones at home and Charleston's acknowledgment may play a part in that. Most blacks I've seen in the south do not make eye contact unless they are challenging nor will they speak more than necessary if addressed. Not here, here the black people I've met expect me to acknowledge they are equal.

This visit I mostly looked at the outside of buildings as I walked down to the Battery Park at the southernmost end of town. There are lots of churches in town, some with the mandatory attached cemetery. One, painted a bright white, has a lighthouse instead of a belfry that was used into the 20^thcentury. The houses have street-side gates set in high walls that hide small gardens or driveways. Porches are everywhere. On the newer houses they are open to the air while the older houses sport shutters that block the sun and also block the view when if they are still used as sleeping porches.

All of the visitors I talked to were southerners themselves. One woman was from Atlanta and was going crazy over all the photo opportunities. Another was from Columbia SC, that's a bit like someone from Duluth visiting the Twin Cities. And, surprise, there were more french speaking tour groups than asian ones.

Total aside – a tow is going by –its dark and I can't see more than a small tug at each end. I wish they would go by in the daylight instead of the pleasure boats.

Later I compared notes with Joan, one of the camp hosts. Its been a pleasure to share views with another outsider. Once in awhile even I like to verify I'm walking on the same side of the street as other folks, at least in some things.

South Carolina

My plan was to bite the bullet and spend a few days visiting Charleston. I thought if I broke the visits up with 'wild' days, I could manage a few town days. Plans mean keeping track of time, as in days, and the longer I wander the harder it is for me to track the days so I wasn't too surprised to discover it was Thursday, when I thought it might be as late as Tuesday, and I still haven't visited my avowed destination.

One of the people I talked to at Thanksgiving told me it was worth visiting McClellanville, named after its founder McClellan. Its only a few miles up the road so I did drive to visit it. The roads in the southeast deserve a word – narrow. State highways are however wide a road be, 8-9ft probably, and they have a stripe down the center. There are no shoulders though often sides are wide and level; maybe shoulder paving is a northern thing for snowplowing. Secondary roads usually have leaves & pine needles along the edges so its really hard to see if the road is wider than the one lane that is typically visible.

The road into McClellanville had a stripe and yards that came right up to its edge. In many ways it was reminiscent of rural roads in Scotland where it was easy to see how a track through a cluster of houses turned into the road through a village. Places in Scotland had hedges defining the roadway, here there are large trees draped with spanish moss that created a winding tunnel leading through the older part of town.

Its not the kind of town a tourist would typically give a glance. I saw a very busy restaurant, an art gallery and a gazebo where the road took a turn to the left and headed back to the main highway. On right there is a pair of brick posts, they are huge on driveway gateposts in these parts, and a newish road leading toward water showing behind a mowed field. Turns out the field is someone's yard and the road is a small loop driving past McMansions.

Back at the gazebo I spotted and then took another road heading to a boat dock. There I found an informational sign about rebuilding the oyster beds. Once baby oysters are spewed out it seems the little buggers prefer to anchor on a fellow oyster over anything else so the area has a recycling program for oyster shells.

While I was reading the sign I heard a car stop behind me and a voice called out a greeting. An older gentleman, he didn't tell me his name however he did tell me he is 85, and his equally old dog, Zoe, had spotted me and came to talk. In the process I learned that one of the McMansions belongs to an Australian, and the one for sale belongs to a man who has taken up with a woman who lives out of town. None of the older residents, particularly his lady friend, like houses are on the point so he is selling his. I also found out there are damnyankees, he was a teen before he learned that was really two words, who buy in and then want to change things, yankees, who are smart enough to leave, and westerners like myself who don't count. Further, if I really was interested in learning about his community I needed to visit the museum and a cemetery.

The museum was close at hand and is smaller on the inside than it looks on the outside. However the gentleman running the museum was interesting enough to be a museum on his own. There were five initial families and nearly all the locals are related to more than one of them. Talking to him about his community and its roots that are clearly alive today started giving me a sense of the south that I have seen but don't understand. He is  directly related to one of the oldest plantations in the area and his quiet pride in his ancestors is part of his character.

We talked quite a bit about blacks and plantation culture. He wanted me to understand that there was deep respect for Negro culture and knowledge in spite of them being slaves. In the best sense, at least on his family plantation, the relationship was symbiotic. If it remained patronizing in the intervening years, it really wasn't much different than the peasant–landowner relationship of Europe. And while whites don't generally invite blacks to their table, blacks don't generally invite whites either and that isn't much different than other parts of the country.

He told me nearly all the houses in town were built by a family of blacks who are known to be the best builders around and it is a matter of pride to own one of their houses. He asked if I'd noticed that blacks tended to live in clusters off a ways. That goes back to after the Civil War when they were free and now had less than nothing. Most of them had been field hands and lived in plantation housing, ate plantation provided food and wore plantation provided clothing. Plantation owners couldn't farm without the blacks and they in turn couldn't survive without the farm so in many cases the plantation owner gave land to the blacks for houses. That gave both the blacks some place to live and gave the farmer a ready supply of labor. Listening put a personal view to history that the teaching of it generally lacks.

I decided to visit the cemetery. As with most towns there is more than one however my gent had given me directions to the Presbyterian one so that is where I headed. No sooner was I parked and out of my car than another vehicle pulled in an another older gent asked if he could help me. When I explained why I was there, he nodded in satisfaction, told me I should see it in the spring with the azaleas in bloom, and drove further in.

Most cemeteries I've seen consist of long rows of stones, some with flowers and some with fancy carving, trees here and there and paved roads. This one is a bit different. I drove in on a sandy roadway with a bit of crushed rock spread over it, through brick gateposts and parked in a wide spot under a moss draped tree. There are lots of trees and bushes with groupings of stones clustered under or around them. Each cluster is like a little mini-cemetery and the stones share family names.  Some stones are two hundred years old and are hard to read. Some places have a bench.

While I wandered around looking at generations of family all buried together 'family plot' took on a different meaning. Family going back two hundred years and being buried together is hard for me to grasp. Granted my mother has stayed in one place for a long time, however her parents' families had spread out and my father's family had also spread. My uncles and aunts spread out as did my siblings and many of our children.

The more south and east I explore, the more European it feels. I find myself relating experiences and bits of information to European history rather than my own and the more that happens, the closer I think I'm moving to an understanding that keeps eluding me.