Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (70 page)

Pieces of his description are still recognizable, and the fort yet stands, but much of the island today is driven by a commercialism that makes the words (in coastal dialect) of Poe’s character, the manumitted Negro servant Jupiter, seem prophetic: “Dis all cum ob de goole-bug!”

As the
Bog Trotter
motored around the hooked point of the island, Fort Sumter appeared a mile distant, a narrow shadow on the horizon. In April of 1861, secessionist troops of General P. G. T. Beauregard began bombarding Sumter before dawn, but Union soldiers inside the fort didn’t engage until after sunrise when the first Federal shot of the war was fired by none other than Abner Doubleday of later baseball renown. One report says Doubleday succeeded in putting two rounds into a hotel near Fort Moultrie. (Charleston itself just then took no Union shells, a good thing since men in top hats and ladies in crinolines were cheering cavalierly from the waterfront.) Doubleday, in his
Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–61,
says, “Our own guns were very defective, as they had no breech-sights. In place of these, Seymour and myself were obliged to devise notched sticks, which answered the purpose, but were necessarily very imperfect.”

With the surrender of Sumter thirty-four hours and four-thousand rebel shells later, Federal commander Robert Anderson ordered a hundred-cannon salute before lowering the flag; exactly halfway through, the cannon discharging the fiftieth round exploded, a “friendly fire” that killed a Union soldier who became the first of more than six-hundred-thousand casualties, the color of their uniforms of no consequence.

Not far east of Sumter, three years later in 1864, a contraption made of an old boiler became the first submarine to sink an enemy ship when the Confederate
Hunley
took down the
Housatonic
 — and somehow itself — in another history-remaking battle between ships of alliterating names. Like the
Monitor,
the
Hunley
had been found recently and retrieved, its entombed sailors reburied, and was being readied for display. Such was the topic as we entered Charleston harbor. A North Carolinian, who had lent me several books, said, “Warships on display and prettified battlefields feed warmongering, but if instead we put up wax replicas of dead and mutilated people, maybe the history of wars would have less jingoism. Let kids see the reality of blood and spilled intestines. Don’t show a bronze soldier charging forward — show him bloated and rotting in the mud, his eyes pecked out by vultures.”

Five miles up the harbor, on the Ashley River, the
Bog Trotter
tied to a dock at the city marina not far from the heart of the old town, and there most of our fellow passengers departed to be replaced the next day by some new, happy lubbers. We were six-hundred-fifty miles out of Baltimore, the upper South now above us, and below lay the nether Southland of Low Country cooking, tidal rivers, cabbage palmettos, yaupon holly, and those invisible biting insects called flying teeth.

9

The Oysters of Folly Creek

O
F THE PASSENGERS DEPARTING
were two South Carolinians,
both attorneys, who shared our interests in history and good
food and, by happy chance, had an apartment overlooking the city dock. When I first saw the passenger manifest, I reversed their genders, not a difficult error to commit in the South. Garland McWhirter, the daughter of Frances Pierson, was married to Pat McWhirter whose given name, Harrie, also didn’t clarify at first who was who. When I learned Garland was named after her grandfather and he after an aunt, my error seemed less Yankee. For our layover in Charleston, the McWhirters and “Miz P” offered a long excursion from Sullivan’s Island to Folly Beach, in pursuit of the place historically and culinarily.

Just before sunset, they drove us southward out of the city. I had hopes of at last finding some Low Country pine-bark stew. At an
END COUNTY MAINTENANCE
sign, we ran out of paved road and followed a packed-dirt lane to a lumpy parking lot, where leaving one’s car in the wrong place while inside the eatery could mean returning to find the tide had turned your vehicle into an aquarium.

Behind large heaps of bleached oyster shells was a consecution of connected, low structures, hodgepodge sheds looking more like a transmission shop or recycling center than a restaurant. A few yards distant, Folly Creek was ebbing. A splintery, ramshackle pier wobbled over marsh grass to the edge of the redolent gumbo, a substance here called plough (pronounced
pluff
), a Land of Cockaigne for oysters.

An old fellow who looked like a dishwasher stood near the door. I asked, Oysters fresh tonight? He glanced at me to see whether I was stupid or simple. “Fresh?” he said. “Hell, junior, they ain’t out of the crick yet.”

Somewhere in this nation in love with contests and records, there must be one for the Most Cluttered Tumbledown Cookshop. I put forth Bowens Island (“Since 1946”). After trying a couple of mishung, locked doors, we found an open one marked with a cardboard sign:
ENTRANCE FOR TONIGHT.
The ceiling was so low that from the stilled ceiling-fan a coat hanger dangled as warning. It’s possible there were actually walls behind the thick graffiti rather than simply more graffiti layered into stratigraphies of names and dates. Like a spring tide, inscriptions rose up the walls and overflowed to the ceilings, drained down onto the blackened windowpanes, rose again to cover stacked boxes, signs, framed pictures, and — I’m sure — right across the forehead of any diner sitting still too long.

Against a wall was a stack of ten televisions (when one gave out, it served as a base for the next) and four busted radios (crumbling antiques that had once carried war news from H. V. Kaltenborn and the shadowy voice of Lamont Cranston and the creaking door of
Inner Sanctum
); nearby was a partly melted jukebox (the Inkspots, “To Each His Own”) and a hair-dryer frightfully like some primitive electrocution machine. On a cola case I could make out a graffito:
THIS PLACE IS PLUM WORE OUT
.

The tangle of objects ceased at a doorway labeled in large letters over darkened scrawlings,
OYSTER EATERS ONLY.
Inside sat a cadaverous man, shaggily bearded, pulling meat from a barbecued carcass that was slowly becoming skeletal to match his appearance. Covering the dining tables were newspapers and in the center were holes to shove the remains of a meal — bones, oyster shells, shrimp carapaces, that pouty kid — into buckets below. At the other end of the room, a slender, elderly black man tended three bushels of oysters under wet burlap steaming atop a sheet of steel heated by bottled-gas flames. The air, full of Old Bay Seasoning, stunned my eyes and throat until they translated the fragrance into appetite.

We were there for “roasted” oysters, shrimp and grits, and Frogmore stew. (No luck on the pine-bark version.) The Frogmore was a toothsome mix of boiled shrimp, chopped kielbasa, potatoes, and a few cuts of corn-on-the-cob in a broth infused with Old Bay Seasoning (but without amphibians — Frogmore is a Low Country settlement). The shrimp and grits were a
pot au feu
of the titular ingredients with diced sausage, green peppers, celery, sweet onion, and — all together now — Old Bay Seasoning. (I once heard of a Low Country vanilla pie made without that Baltimore elixir, but that’s only rumor.)

As good as these dishes were and as heartily as we shared them, what we’d come for arrived last: oysters from Folly Creek right outside the back door via the wet burlap on the grill. They were piled on an oven tray with oyster knives and heavy towels alongside. The sharp shells were still cemented into fist-sized natural clumps that made opening them a puzzle of how to find a way into the cluster without letting one’s blood (second Old Bay rumor: its color is to hide lacerations from inexpertly opened mollusks). The oysters — small, sweet, and fresh — had elicited a testimonial graffito above our heads:
THEM OYSTERS PUT THE GUMPTION BACK IN ME.

A meal in a place like Bowens Island can make up for days of forgettable, traveler’s fare and even help atone for one’s sin of dining at somebody’s Chez Somebody, and that meant I owed the Island a few more visits to clear my slate, a penance to be looked forward to. Some months later, Pat McWhirter sent me a news clipping: Bowens Island had burned to the ground. So now atonement would have to rest on a few bowls of pine-bark stew.

10

Meeting Miss Flossie

S
OUTH OF CHARLESTON
the magenta line twisted through marshes,
estuaries, rivers, and creeks with jolly names for those who love vowels (Toogoodoo, Wadmalaw, Ashepoo, Coosaw), on a generally southwesterly course all the way to Beaufort where the
Bogger
anchored for several hours. The town, almost encircled by handsome marshlands, shows off to best advantage from its riverside of antebellum houses and live oaks that form a scene either classic or clichéd, depending on one’s Southern experience or sense of the sardonic. Bay Street was empty of all but the Sunday quiets broken only by grackles rattling from moss-strung oaks and the crunch of quintillions of fallen acorns breaking crisply and loudly under every footfall as if in remonstrance.

Embodied Southern history today often comes down through restored mansions and manicured battlefields that, taken alone, become distortions feeding Northern perceptions of the people. A South Carolinian bookseller said to me, “We exist in the Yankee mind somewhere between
Gone With the Wind
and
Tobacco Road.
” There was a little of both in Beaufort, although along the river the former was ascendant.

With our only transport shank’s mare, we walked till — to mix the metaphor — our dogs barked, and we took rest in an antiquarian shop where I added to my book satchel (beginning to overflow into a carton) a Low Country history and a cookbook with a recipe for Egg Pie but nothing about pine-bark stew.

In the afternoon, the boat raised her hook and ran due south down the widening Beaufort River, past the Marines at Parris Island and on into Port Royal Sound before jogging westward to get behind shoe-shaped Hilton Head Island for an anchorage there off Harbour Town; being neither town nor harbor, it was as authentically American as its spelling and bogus lighthouse.

We went ashore but got caught in a drizzle and dodged into a shop selling beach hats and T-shirts. From Baltimore I’d been keeping in my notebook a page of slogans on Ts, thinking a progressing list of them would reveal certain aspects of the territory; there I copied down two:
OLD GUYS RULE
and
LET’S GO SHOPPING
. When the rain stopped briefly, we walked on among the landscaped acres but again had to duck into another place, this one a clothing boutique where I could have bought a rabbit-fur sweater for twelve-hundred dollars. (Hilton Head was once home to a Gullah community of freed slaves who ate rabbits rather than wore them.) By the door was a flyer advertising an
ENVIRO-TOUR!
to try to spot a manatee or perhaps glimpse some other fauna whose querencia had been flattened by twenty-five golf courses and an annual load of more than two-million tourists, of whom we were a guilty — if reluctant — pair. A peril of group travel.

On the return to the boat, we cut through a marina hoisting several Jolly Rogers. Coming ashore was an affluent yachtsman wearing not a blue blazer and skipper’s cap but the new dress of the line: pressed denims and polished loafers, head wrapped in a bandanna. He saw Q and gave a one-eyed, Long-John-Silver squint intended as a wink, although it looked more like a nervous twitch that she acknowledged with an “Aarrhh.”

Respite from such excess lay only a mile distant and across the sound called Calibogue (four syllables, the final two as if one stroke over par), on the north end of Daufuskie Island, the Waterway forming its entire western shore. Large marshes have thwarted a bridge there, and the only access to Daufuskie (rhymes with
the dusky
) was by boat. Isolation of the island before the recolonizing of Hilton Head by realty privateers was measured not by miles but by topography: it’s surrounded by two rivers, one sound, an ocean, and the salt marshes. Such impediments helped enhance and preserve local Gullah life — with its distinctive blend of African and American ways and languages — until our time brought relentless real-estate agents. On the day we were there, only about a dozen Gullahs remained on Daufuskie, average age about seventy, all descendants of slaves who worked the indigo and, later, cotton plantations. Agriculture disappeared, and much of the island had returned to woods, although development from Hilton Head was creeping across the sound.

The
Bog Trotter
made fast to a narrow dock near the Cooper River Cemetery. At the small store there, I met the owner, a large fellow with amusing takes on local history, Wick Scurry, who invited several of us onto a school bus to show us Daufuskie stem to stern. The island had become known as the setting of Pat Conroy’s
The Water Is Wide
(and a couple of movies made from the book) about his year there in 1970 when he taught grammar-school children who allegedly didn’t know the name of the ocean on their eastern shore. Scurry believed the book exaggerates the naïveté of the Gullah: for years they had been making boat trips to Savannah — only eleven miles away by water — and by the ’70s they had television and had seen local men return from a couple of overseas wars. While myths of such innocence are always a lure to city people, it was still true that the Daufuskie Gullah were distinctive in several ways, perhaps none more intriguing than their speech. The island was a place I’d long wanted to visit, so when Scurry ended his little tour, I stayed back to talk with him about the people because it was clear he, a white man, for some time had moved easily between well-heeled tourists of Hilton Head and the Gullah on Daufuskie. Above all I wanted to sit down with a senior resident who knew the island as it once was.

Scurry made it clear, in a way politely Southern, that for years the Gullah have been the object of journalists and academics bearing tape recorders and cameras to conduct invasive and tiresome interviews. My curiosity edged toward guilt but got a reprieve when he at last offered inexplicably, “Would you like to meet Miss Flossie?” For his store, she sometimes made her rendition of the celebrated Daufuskie deviled crabs, a couple of which Q and I had just polished off. “I don’t think she’ll say much or be comfortable unless I’m there,” Scurry said, “and I’ve got to leave here soon, but I’ll take you over for a few minutes.” I understood I was to be a mere button on his shirt: two eyes, nothing more.