Southern Cross

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “Speaking of romantic,” I suggested.

  “Of course. You remember those days—we thought we could change everything. I decided the best way for me to go about it was to become a trial lawyer. Daddy had some clout in Washington, and when there was a spot with the U.S. attorney in Charleston, I crossed the Mason-Dixon Line with my bride of six months and my J.D. from Yale, and ended up within spitting distance of Fort Sumter. Callie couldn’t stand it, then or since, but I pretty much got to love the place.”

  “How come Callie didn’t like it?”

  “Because the thing about Charleston is, the blue bloods may smile and say ‘How y’all doin’?’ when they see you on the street, and sweet-talk you in support of their charities, but no matter how friendly they seem or how long you’ve known them, you’ll never be more than an interloper and you’ll never set foot inside their front door. Which suits me just fine, to tell you the truth, but it didn’t fit Callie’s sense of her place in the universe. Callie’s a Brahmin—she wasn’t an outsider till she married me.”

  “Is she back in Boston now?”

  “Nope. Moved down to Kiawah with a guy who’s an inch above a mobster. Since every other film out of Hollywood seems to be a biography of one of his peers, he’s become quite a celebrity; Callie’s coming back with a vengeance.”

  “How long were you with the U.S. attorney?”

  “Three years. Drug stuff, mostly. We’re only a few miles off I-95—the Miami-to-New York connection—plus we’ve got hundreds of miles of open shoreline, so there was plenty of contraband to keep us busy. Drugs made me my first million.”

  “How so?”

  “After I left the government and hung out my shingle, defending drug cases was my specialty, and I got damned good at it. Could have made more, but when my kids started school, I decided I didn’t want to be part of that life, even indirectly. Now I represent respectable criminals.”

  “Could one of your disgruntled clients be behind this Alliance outfit?”

  He shrugged. “If I knew who was behind ASP, I wouldn’t have gone north to lasso you.”

  “Are you the only Jew in town?” I asked after a minute, both because I was interested and because bigotry seemed to be at the core of his trouble.

  “Not nearly. Jews came here at the end of the seventeenth century. The oldest Reform synagogue in the world is in Charleston—the Nazis took care of the other contenders, of course. One of the most illustrious Charleston Jews lost his fortune during the Civil War. After he made a second one, he paid to have the South Carolina boys who fell at Gettysburg brought back to the state for burial, even though he’d been strongly opposed to secession. Charleston has plenty of stories like that.”

  “I’m sure it does.”

  Something in my tone made him laugh. “Keep an open mind, Marsh. Yankees are conditioned to see Southerners as reprehensible—ignorant, racist, inbred, brutal.”

  “You’re saying it’s not true?”

  “I’m saying it’s no more true here than a lot of places; the South just isn’t good at hiding it. But don’t blow out a brain circuit trying to figure us out. Better minds than yours have gone mad trying to explain the place.”

  “What about the New South I hear so much about?”

  “I guess I’m one of those who suspects the New South is just the Old South with some big banks and a Voting Rights Act. Don’t think for a minute the Bubbas wouldn’t prefer things the way they were back before Rosa Parks got uppity.” He chuckled dryly. “The proponents of the New South have a hard time explaining why the Confederate battle flag still flies from the state capitol and why Strom Thurmond is still our elected representative.”

  “You’re kidding. About the flag, I mean.”

  “Nope. A popular history of Charleston calls the residents ‘unrepentant,’ and I think that about covers it.”

  “You’re telling me nothing’s changed down there since Reconstruction?”

  “On the contrary. The shanties are gone from the roadsides, and the White and Colored signs have come down from the rest rooms, and everything from public accommodations to the political process is open to everyone—Charleston’s mayor has done wonders with race relations in the city. Hell, Charleston even has a black police chief. A black Jewish police chief, if you can believe it. But a racial subtext is out there—David Duke would have gotten a lot of votes in South Carolina if Buchanan hadn’t stolen his thunder.”

  “Duke was a subject of some discussion at the reunion. There was a variety of opinion about what was behind his popularity.”

  “Hard times make hard attitudes, North and South. Basically bigotry is fear. Jews are feared for their prowess with money; Asians are feared for their intelligence; Mexicans are feared because they’ll work for next to nothing; and blacks are feared for the most primal reason of all.”

  “White men are afraid black men are going to beat them up and rape their women.”

  “That’s the prosaic part. The poetic part is that we’re afraid the women are going to like it. The musk of black sexuality is still overwhelming—it’s why Emmett Till was slaughtered and why after the yoke of slavery was lifted after the Civil War, the chains of Jim Crow were clamped on. And why the young black male remains the most imperiled component of the population to this day, North and South.”

  Seth paused to catch his breath. The intensity of his exegesis seemed to make him tired. “The South has problems, Marsh. Lots of them. But I can tell you this—if you’re white and have a job, Charleston’s a pretty nice place to live.”

  I found the encomium odd. “That flyer you showed me didn’t make it seem so nice. I thought the business with ASP had to do with the Southern stuff.”

  Seth’s face clouded to match the sky outside the window. “In South Carolina, everything has to do with the Southern stuff.”

  EIGHT

  Seth and I didn’t have adjoining seats on the plane, so I spent the leg to Chicago thinking about Libby Grissom, trying to decide what to do about her. I finally decided that for the moment I didn’t need to do anything, which was my most common conclusion regardless of the object of the exercise.

  In keeping with our guise as strangers, Seth continued to avoid me when we changed planes at O’Hare. So studious was his disengagement that I began to entertain the possibility that I’d been lured into a web of intrigue, that the chilling judgment handed down by the Alliance for Southern Pride had its origins in the oily enmity of the Middle East or the reemergent Nazism in the bowels of the greater Germany.

  Although I tried my best to quell it, the sense of the surreal enlarged when we reached the Charleston airport. Filled with soldiers coming and going in fuzzy hair and bemedaled greens, its distant runways lined with gross black airships whose drooping wings and snarling snouts made them seem eager to flatten any city in the world at a moment’s notice, the place was a petri dish for paranoia. As I took it in, then tried to discount it, Seth continued the ruse that had at its core the impression that he and I had never laid eyes on each other before.

  The cab ride to town took twenty minutes. Seth and I made small talk—Seth told me the rivers we’d flown over were the Ashley and the Cooper, which came together at the tip of the Charleston peninsula to form a harbor at a place called the Battery, and that an English ship named the Carolina had deposited the first settlers on the banks of the Ashley back in 1670. Then he told me that what I’d thought from the air was funny Southern scrub brush were in reality the jagged stubs of the thousands of trees that had been snapped in two by Hurricane Hugo back in 1989.

  For my part, I cheerfully proclaimed that this was my first visit to the area and I was looking forward to it, that I was in town to look at some prime retirement real estate on behalf of an investment syndicate in Ohio and was considering an option on a parcel south of the city. We maintained our pose all the way to town although it seemed wholly unnecessary—the cabbie wasn’t paying attention to the road, much less to our charade.

 
We fell off the freeway at King Street and descended into a cluster of denuded and decaying wood houses interspersed with a jumble of churches and taverns and featureless storefronts that seemed equally infirm. The people on the street were mostly black and the goods in the store windows had been put on display back when the voters still liked Ike. After passing what looked like a medieval fortress but was in reality some municipal office space, we entered the Charleston that people bragged about.

  As befit its age in this section of the city, the road turned narrow and bumpy, an anachronism from two centuries before Henry Ford altered the functional size of streets. The buildings on our flanks were too close to traffic and off-kilter with age, but the establishments within them were far from anachronistic—chic boutiques and jewelry stores and a clutch of antique shops whose seams seemed to swell with silver trays and walnut occasional tables. There was even a store for blazer buttons.

  As we passed an S.S. Kresge, Seth told me it had been the scene of one of the first lunch-counter sit-ins in the sixties, and had continued to serve its clientele up until a year ago. When we passed a building labeled the Library Society, he told me it was the oldest private library in the nation.

  As the cab waited at a stoplight beside the post office, Seth pointed to his right. “South of here—South of Broad, they call it—is the core of antebellum Charleston. Several of the historic families still live there. Some have lost everything they own but the roof over their heads and their surnames, but they’re still venerated for who they are, or rather for who their forebears were.” Seth’s smile turned sly. “I like to take a stroll through there of an evening, just to remind them where some of their money went.”

  A block later Seth told the cab to stop. When I looked out the window, I saw a large, ungainly building, its jaundiced facade crumbling with age, its decor an inelegant mix of neoclassic motifs that didn’t quite make sense. The legend “Ruined by the Earthquake 1886. Restored by the People of the Union 1887” was chiseled in the architrave. A weather-beaten sign beside the wooden door was headed by the label THE CONFEDERATE HOME.

  “You’re kidding,” was all I could think of to say.

  “Nope,” Seth answered, pleased at my astonishment. “Your Home away from home.”

  We got out of the cab and pulled my luggage from the trunk and set it on the sidewalk. After we’d finished, Seth pointed to the sign, and I read it: “This handsome building, c. 1800, was constructed by Gilbert Chalmers. From 1810 to 1825 it was the home of Gov. John Geddes, who married the builder’s daughter. During Gov. Geddes’ term of office, Pres. James Monroe visited here. In 1867 Mary Amarinthia Yates Snowden and her sister, Isabella Yates Snowden, established a home here for Confederate widows and orphans and subsequently opened a college on the premises. It is still known as the Confederate Home.”

  When I’d finished my homework, I looked back at Seth. “I hope you named your daughter Amarinthia.”

  He grinned. “No. But I was tempted.”

  “So I’m going to stay in this place?”

  He nodded. “Nowadays it’s divided into studios for writers and artists and creative folks like that. I keep a room for a hideaway from when things get frantic at the office. It’s not luxurious, but there’s a bed and a chair and a TV, plus a shower down the hall. All the comforts, plus some interesting people roaming around at odd hours. I thought you’d prefer it to a hotel, but if you don’t feel like roughing it, I can book you into the Mills House, no problem. It’s up the street a few blocks.”

  I looked around. “This is fine. I’ve always had a secret desire to be Jubal Early anyway.”

  “I’m not sure Jubal ever spent the night in Charleston, but feel free to conjure up an intensely tragic tale and put yourself at the core of it—it’s what the South does best, pretty much.” Seth looked up and down the block, as though my presence were a felony. “Why don’t you settle in and I’ll come by around nine and fill you in on my situation. In the meantime, take a look around—there’s a guidebook up in the room. We’re at the corner of Church and Broad; lots of history any way you turn, plus a decent restaurant in the next block.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “And, Marsh?” Seth put a hand on my arm. “Thanks again for coming. If you don’t like the feel of things after I tell you what’s been happening, you can back out anytime.”

  “Agreed.”

  We slapped each other on the shoulder, then Seth glanced at the cabbie, who was behind the wheel and out of earshot. “I guess I shouldn’t show you to your room.”

  “I guess not.”

  “It’s room two-ten.” He fished in his pocket. “Here’s the key.” He slipped it to me surreptitiously. “Welcome to South Carolina, y’all.”

  “Pleased as punch to be here, Colonel.”

  Seth climbed back in the cab, and I shouldered my way through the heavy door that opened onto the inner courtyard that flanked the three-storied brick structure. As I lugged my bags up the exterior steel staircase toward the veranda that paralleled the second floor, I imagined the host of defeated heroes whose families had preceded me to the premises. By the time I got where I was going, I was on the alert for spooks.

  My room opened directly off the porch, whose floor joists creaked as I disturbed them. Both the transom above the door and the thin window beside it were curtained in white muslin. As I fumbled for my key, the place seemed quiet as a crypt—apparently the writers and artists were out gathering material and the disembodied spirit of the widow of Johnny Reb was taking her afternoon nap. I freed the stubborn lock and dragged my bags inside.

  Although decorated with style and a masculine touch, the room was dark and dank, its atmosphere heavy with moisture. The ceilings were high, but the walls were predictive of claustrophobia. The smells of mildew and dry rot weren’t quite absorbed by the fragrances off the bouquet in the basket beside the door and the jar of potpourri on the edge of the desk. The window looked across the courtyard to an adjacent park; the fan in the ceiling was motionless. In homage to Jubal Early, I stowed my bags and inspected my quarters.

  Desk, easy chair, coffee table; wardrobe, daybed, TV; bookcase, refrigerator, stereo. That was pretty much it, except for the art on the walls and the carpet on the floor, both of which were sumptuous and ornamental, but faded a tad with age. I turned on the radio in time to hear a voice announce that it was broadcasting from the Pri Fly of the Yorktown in Charleston Harbor. I knew the Southern penchant for keeping politicians in office until they were well established in seniority and senility meant there was a major military presence in the Charleston area, but an aircraft carrier for a public radio station? Lordy.

  I threw some things on the bed, hung some stuff in the wardrobe, then changed my shirt and cleaned myself up. After thumbing through the guidebook and noting points of interest, I tucked a map in my pocket and retreated to the street. More than a little amazed at where I was, I took my first stroll about the fabled South, the latest in a long line of carpetbaggers to invade the place, yet another Yankee come down to teach it a lesson.

  NINE

  The first thing that struck me was the sidewalk. Made from stone that had been cut into heavy squares and irregularly laid out, it was so dislodged by time that the upturned edges reached for my feet and tripped me every few steps until I learned to lift my stride above my normal shuffle. It must have been a horror to old folks—maybe that’s why there were so few of them around.

  A second oddity was the cars—every one I saw was new and expensive. I was about to brand Charleston the most prosperous city in the land when I remembered the hurricane—the cars were no doubt courtesy of the casualty companies, replacements for those destroyed in the storm. Given the general state of the economy, the car dealers must have been praying for another one.

  A more interesting surprise was the speech patterns. Although I eavesdropped to the best of my ability, only a handful of people seemed to sport the drawl of song and legend, the slippery Southern slur that can
be so alluring or forbidding, depending on its message. The majority of people I encountered, particularly the younger ones, didn’t have much of an accent at all. Conceivably they were transplanted Yankees, like Seth, but I suspected another culprit—television has usurped both family and friends as the prime source of sound in our lives, and we are colorless because of it.

  But such observations were footnotes—the overwhelming sense of the place was history. As Seth and the guidebook had advertised, the past was all around me, omnipresent and inescapable, proclaimed in the names on the monuments and the plaques on the buildings and the books in the stores and, most musically and humorously, in the polished narratives that issued from the drivers of the ubiquitous horse-drawn carriages that toted tourists through the streets while pert young guides offered up their carefully edited versions of Charleston’s naughty history. The guides wore Confederate caps; the horses wore diapers; the tourists wore plaid.

  Energized by atmosphere, I peered and peeked and poked and pried, and took a trip through time. In the dozen square blocks that surrounded my digs in the Confederate Home, there were at least a dozen churches, each older and more magnificent than the last. Several marked the first meeting place of the denomination in this nation. One tolled the time at every quarter-hour. Another was round. A third sported columns on its portico larger than those at the White House. A fourth included in its graveyard the remains of John C. Calhoun, the man who had taken the floor of the Senate to proclaim slavery “a positive good.” True to its plantation heritage and its legacy as the first state to secede from the Union, South Carolina was proud of him as well.