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.