There's been a lot of rain in the southeast - I know, it's not snow, I'm not complaining, just describing - so I didn't leave Savannah first thing Tuesday morning. Once the rain let up I consulted the Roadfood book that Uncle Bill and Aunt Connie gave me, to see what was on the map for the South Carolina coast. Sgt. White's Diner in Beaufort (pronounced Bew-fert) looked promising, so I took the way-scenic route, getting off the interstate just a few miles north of Savannah. Then I realized I'd still be getting to Beaufort quite early for lunch - even by my standards - so I started looking for wrong turns, and found a couple.
But as the song goes, if driving this way is wrong, I don't want to be right. Or something like that. Generally speaking, if I have the option to go toward anything labelled "island," I will do so. And along the way I saw a sign for "Penn Center Historic District" which at first I paid no attention to. A few miles - and random turns - later the sign popped up again and this time it was directing me off the main road so I followed it.
It was very, very interesting.
Penn Center is hard to categorize with a word more specific than "community." It's a school (now a museum) and community center and some other buildings, and is located on St. Helena Island, one of the South Carolina Sea Islands. It was designated a historic landmark in 1974 and celebrated its 150th anniversary last year.
The Sea Islands were captured (from the Confederacy) by Union troops in 1861. The U.S. government urged the former slaves to support the government (not the least of which was for men to enlist in the Army, which many did). While the government encouraged the former slaves to learn how to read and write, they had no resources to offer toward that end. Some Quakers in Philadelphia learned of this and received government permission to set up the Port Royal Experiment. They created a relief society to help the 10,000 former slaves in the Sea Islands. Two women, a Unitarian abolitionist named Laura Towne, and a Canadian named Ellen Murray came to the islands to set up a school which initially was focused just on literacy but then became a vocational school as well. It was the first such school for freed slaves. A Massachussetts woman named Charlotte Forten sailed down to be a teacher. Remember, the Civil War was still going at this point and although this area was controlled by Union troops, getting there was no small task. Forten took the most risks - an African-American woman, she would have surely been sold into slavery had she been captured by the Confederates.
Their museum introduced me to the Gullah Geechee culture. Even prior to their liberation, African slaves and their descendents far outnumbered the white population (ten to one, according to the Charleston Museum, although I don't want to get ahead of myself). The slaves worked rice plantations and were pretty isolated. (Even today with a car and a few decent highways, you really have to want to go to the Sea Islands to get there. It's not exactly on the way anywhere, unless you're the liberating/invading force [depends on your viewpoint] coming in from the sea.)
Anyway, the language and culture of the people of the Sea Islands reflected that isolation. Their language is a combination of English and various African languages. Their literature, music, folk customs and art are strongly tied to African traditions.
The archetypal product made by Gullah artisans is the sweetgrass basket. You've seen these before, but if you're like me you didn't know where they originated. Here's a picture that I didn't take - it's from a Department of State website.
These baskets are really, really expensive. A basket the size you see in this picture can easily be $150 to $200. Apparently they will last hundreds of years.
At the Penn Center museum, I met Robert Middleton, who wrote a short book which I bought. He's in his 80's (looks 15 years younger) and volunteers at the museum six days a week. He grew up on a farm on St. Helena Island and was a student at the Penn Center school. (His book is about his ultimately successful effort to locate his birth parents in, of all places, Philadelphia.)
There's a display about another Robert: Robert Smalls, of Beaufort. A slave, on May 14, 1862, he commandeered a Confederate ship (its three white officers were spending the night on shore) and piloted it and the 45 other slaves on board to the Union blockade outside of Charleston. He served as a pilot for the Union through the rest of the war and eventually became a politician. (This was during Reconstruction, when blacks were still able to vote in the South - a fact which several current U.S. Supreme Court Justices might want to keep in mind but that's just my opinion.) He served on the 1868 South Carolina Constitutional Convention which introduced the first public education system in the south. He was known as the "King of Beaufort County." Interestingly, after post-Reconstruction laws had effectively ousted all of the black elected officials in the South (by the 1870's), Beaufort County retained a number of black officials in key offices until Smalls' death in 1915.
(Another notable Beaufortonian is author Pat Conroy, whose book The Water is Wide was turned into the John Voight movie about the area called Conrack.)
All this, and I hadn't even gotten to Sgt. White's Diner yet! If by any chance you ever find yourself in the Sea Islands, by all means run do not walk there! (You won't be able to do either after you've eaten.) The pulled pork, cornbread and southern vegetables were to die for (perhaps literally; I could feel my arteries clogging as I chowed down). If I don't get out of the South soon, I will need to outfit the Vue with heavy-duty struts.
The other good thing about Sgt. White's is that it's right next to a bail bondsman, and you just never know when that will come in handy.
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| Sgt. White's Diner, on the left |
Tom, our licensed tour guide, introduced himself as "Tom, your licensed tour guide" and also introduced us to Edisto, his horse. Tom (and Edisto) showed us around the oldest neighborhoods and the market area. We saw homes that are valued at roughly $1.2 million per floor. There is a lot of money in Charleston. More on that in a minute. Tom showed us a lot of Charleston Single houses. These houses are one room wide, three back, with a porch across the whole house. The front door is into the middle room. The trick is that the narrow end is what faces the street so they have what are called "privacy doors" (pronounced like the British say, with a short i).
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| Charleston Single House - the street is on the left, by the tree |
The history of Charleston is long and fascinating (for instance, it's one of only three walled cities in what is now the U.S. - read to the end to see if you can guess the other two), and I will only dwell on a couple of points.
The first is where the city's obvious wealth came from. When I asked Tom about it, he said that people got it the old fashioned way, they inherited it. That begged the question "where did their ancestors get it," of course, but at that point the tour was over and everyone was getting out of the carriage. However, I spent some time at the Charleston Museum today investigating said question, and it turns out that a lot of the money came from rice. The Lowcountry (all run together), is the name for coastal South Carolina, and Charleston is in all respects its capital. Until the mid-19th century, the Lowcountry was a great place to grow rice. The climate was good and the labor costs were, let's just say, controlled. A number of white plantation owners made pretty good-sized fortunes up until the late 19th century when the Civil War, Emancipation, competition from mechanized production elsewhere in the South, and a couple of hurricanes effectively ended rice production in the region. (South Carolina arguably had the economy most dependent upon slavery in the 1850's and it seems no coincidence that they were the first to secede from the Union.) In addition, Charleston was one of the most important ports in the United States (and the Confederacy), and fortunes were made from the trade that happens in such a major port. Including, I feel compelled to add, buying and selling people.
The second point is the Civil War. As everyone who's been through elementary school knows, the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. I'm not going to rehash the history here, but I've got a couple of pictures and this is the part of the blog where I'm putting them.
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| Approaching Fort Sumter |
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| A cannon's-eye view of Charleston (the dark line at the horizon) from Fort Sumter |
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| South Carolina Flag |
So next time you see something that looks like a somewhat romantic moonlit night, think twice. It could be a revolutionary statement.
And the answer to the question about walled cities? New Orleans and St. Augustine. Now you know.
Great history lesson, thanks Karen!!
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