Folly Beach

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  And it was wildly changeable. By midday the sky could be a blazing blue with a sun that warmed you all over, so much so that you didn’t even need a sweater. But not that morning. It was simply miserable outside, a real Ohio winter day of the sort I remembered from my childhood.

  I knew that DuBose’s arthritis had to be troubling him, because my rheumatism was bothering me, not that the medical establishment seemed to be able to define the differences between them to me. It didn’t matter. It was pretty obvious that cold dampness aggravated our conditions. But I loved being on Folly Island in every season and I didn’t like to complain, because it didn’t change anything if I did. And it wasn’t as if we had not taken advantage of every alternative treatment there was. I had tried everything from ordering Hanovia’s Alpine cockeyed sun lamps out of a catalog to every diet in the world designed to reduce the inflammation in my joints. So had DuBose. Nothing really helped. We finally came to the conclusion that staying as thin as possible, being physically active, and taking aspirin was the best course. I normally weighed about eighty-eight pounds and DuBose could not have weighed more than one hundred and twenty-five. (Of course his tailor cleverly padded his jackets to make him appear to have a more manly physique!) And hot baths helped us, too.

  So that morning I soaked in a steamy bubble bath until the water was cool and I drained the tub a bit by removing the stopper with my big toe and added more hot water, turning the faucet with my big toe as well. I did this over and over until my skin looked like prunes. I finally got out, feeling ever so much better. I covered myself with great puffs of bath powder and thought about what I would make for dinner.

  This whole living on a shoestring business was beginning to be a trial but it was useless to complain about that as well, because it would only depress DuBose. What could he do? The whole country was still in a slump since the Crash in ’29. If only the Gershwins would finish the score for Porgy and Bess so we could get it up on the stage. Nine years! But did George Gershwin need money? No! He was flying high on Rhapsody in Blue! Our situation was not his problem. Ah well, when Porgy and Bess was finally up, people would come to see it in droves and then we’d be in the chips again. Golly! Have patience! I told myself this all the time. Patience, patience.

  Then I remembered I had split peas soaking from last night and I thought about how good the soup would taste with ham. The recipe I had yielded six servings for about eight cents a bowl. That was almost as thrifty as my vegetable soup, which also tasted better cooked with a ham bone for flavor. Didn’t a ham bone make everything taste better? (And don’t fret, the recipes for all of my budget meals are in the back of your program, too.) Anyway, I thought I just might take a walk down to Mazo’s Grocery to see if he had a smoked hock that fit my budget. And some cornmeal. I’d make a pan of cornbread in my cast-iron skillet. The walk would do me good. Moving around to work the kinks out of my bones always made me feel better.

  So I bundled up and made my way down the road leaving my husband and daughter in the Land of Nod under piles of blankets and quilts, still fast asleep. As I walked along, I wondered if the streets would always be paved with oyster shells. I loved the crunch of them beneath my feet. I would just hate it if anything here changed. This was one of the many things I loved about Folly. Streets with oyster shells, wooden sidewalks on Center Street, cars on the beach, and the goats people kept to landscape their yards. Yes, goats! You never saw that in Ohio. I even loved the two-tiered buses, with their tasseled shades, that brought us deliveries from Charleston. And I adored the fried chicken from the Magic Lantern. We stopped there for dinner every time we went to Charleston for drinking water. Now, hauling water in jugs was a definite inconvenience but if we lived in the tiny downtown area where the water was potable I wouldn’t have the thrill of watching the sun glisten all over the oyster shells. Walking down Atlantic Avenue was like walking on miles of pearls and that made me feel like a queen.

  I stopped by Mr. Spradling’s house to see if he had an extra copy of the News and Courier he could spare and he did indeed, for the price of a nickel. We were not regular customers but since the Donahue family was out of town he was happy enough for me to take it off his hands.

  “How’s that playwrighting going?” he asked.

  “Well. It’s going well.”

  “That’s good. Give my regards to Mr. Heyward.”

  “I’ll surely do that.”

  Most people on the island and, to be honest, most people in South Carolina couldn’t understand why anybody in their right mind would pay money to go see a play about African Americans. But all those same people would not be able to answer that question unless they went to New York City to see a performance. In South Carolina it was against the law for African Americans to perform in a white theater. Not only did the general public rail against the idea of seeing actual blacks on the stage, but they also could not fathom what was so interesting about the Gullah culture that a gentleman like DuBose Heyward with all of his pedigree would waste his creative energy to write about such an insignificant topic. Insignificant! Can you fathom such a thing? They probably thought it was my Yankee influence bringing his talent to ruination. Not so. Not so at all.

  DuBose was an intellectual who found the world of the Gullah people to be not only an endlessly fascinating subject but also that their culture was actually enviable. He longed, I mean longed to live that same spirited life he was forbidden to have. I think I mentioned that but you know, these days . . . I can’t remember everything quite as well as I used to.

  Although, at times, DuBose could be very narrow-minded about social boundaries. But who doesn’t do a little talking out of both sides of their mouth? Back in early 1923, which wasn’t so long ago, I had written him saying I had a delightful lunch with a Negro woman. At the time, I was still studying at Columbia. He wrote me back in that tone he sometimes used, saying he knew I could not have seen this as an absolute impossibility because I am a benighted Yankee from the Midwest, whatever that meant! Was he forgiving me? Then he warned me she would be in my room next. I got the gist of what he was saying and didn’t like it. His words contradicted his wide-eyed soul. But there were scads of people who thought that way even in Ohio.

  Unfortunately, it was the prevailing wind of the time in which we lived and although the wind had begun to shift, it wasn’t a change sufficient enough to make a noticeable difference in our society. So, I did what I normally did when something didn’t suit me. I ignored it, filed it in the back of my head, and wrote about it later on. After all, like my grandfather used to say, “The pen always has the last word.”

  Fade to Darkness

  Chapter Sixteen

  Grandma

  Old people can be sage-like and wonderful but they can also be as persnickety as the day is long. Obviously, I was still using Aunt Daisy’s car and she claimed she didn’t mind at all. But I thought I owed her the courtesy of letting her know I was going to take it downtown so I stopped by her house to tell her. I mean, I wasn’t driving her car to Miami or Albuquerque but I knew her meticulous (read: persnickety) nature and thought she’d appreciate knowing its whereabouts. And in her mind, going downtown, which was in reality a mere fifteen-minute ride, had become quite the trek. I also just wanted to see how she and Ella had fared during the night. They didn’t need caretakers. Yet. But while I was sloshing around in Dorothy Heyward’s bathtub that morning, singing “Summertime” over and over to the ethers, it occurred to me that considering all Aunt Daisy had done for Patti and me, a little unobtrusive oversight of their days and nights was a tiny but potentially important compensation.

  The front door was locked so I rang the bell and Ella let me in.

  “G’mornin’!” she said.

  “Hey! How’re you?” I gave her a peck on the cheek.

  “Good, honey. Just roasting a pork shoulder and cooking some greens for supper. Your aunt is in the living room with her foot propped up. Finally! I keep telling her she’s got to rest it, but you k
now her!”

  “Yep! I sure do!”

  Aunt Daisy was wearing a sweatshirt from the College of Charleston with a Cougars baseball cap, sitting in a big upholstered armchair, working the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink. I loved that she worked the puzzle in ink. She always claimed it was so she could read what she had written but I thought it reflected her decisiveness. Once Daisy McInerny put it in writing, it was so. I mean in all my life I was always reluctant to argue with her. It just didn’t pay.

  “Well!” she said and put the newspaper on her hassock. “Look who the cat dragged in! How was your dinner with our Mr. Risley? Did you get the poop on his wacky wife?”

  “I’m working on it,” I said. “I just stopped by to see if y’all need anything from downtown.”

  “Sit a minute! Where’re you headed with your pants on fire? Ella! Make my niece one of those cappuccinos! She had a hot date last night and I want her to give us all the juicy details! Here, I got you a key.” She pulled a key on a chain from her pocket and tossed it to me.

  “Ooh! One cappuccino, coming right up!” Ella called out from the next room.

  “Thanks. There’s not too much to tell, really. We went out to the repairman to see how my car’s coming along and some part they need isn’t in yet.”

  “That’s fine. The part my foot needs isn’t in yet either.”

  “Getting restless, huh?” I said.

  “Humph,” Aunt Daisy said. “This gee-dee foot of mine.”

  “You have no idea,” Ella said and put some kind of a microwave coffee concoction in front of me. “Driving me crazy,” she whispered behind her hand.

  “I heard that! You think just because I’m old and decrepit that I’m deaf, too?”

  “Apparently not,” I said and giggled.

  Aunt Daisy’s face softened and she smiled then, her shoulders relaxing. All these two old girls needed was an agreeable buffer. And it had to be annoying to be hobbling around in a cast for weeks on end. I would’ve been impossible to live with.

  “So where’d you go for dinner? Someplace romantic I hope?”

  “Oh please! No, actually, we went over to Mount Pleasant to this very cute place called the Red Drum. It was good. Sort of Tex-Mex meets up with the Lowcountry. I liked it a lot. When y’all feel like a night on the town, I’ll take you over there.” I took a sip of Ella’s version of cappuccino and decided one sip was more than plenty. It was truly wretched.

  “I don’t like to drive at night anymore,” Aunt Daisy said.

  “Me either,” Ella said. “I see things in the street that aren’t there.”

  “Humph! I wouldn’t get in a car with you after dark for all the tea in China,” Aunt Daisy said to Ella.

  “And I don’t blame you but who invited you anyway?” Ella said to her and then turned to me. “Is she turning into a mean old biddy or is it my imagination?”

  “She might be a mean biddy but she’s not old,” I said.

  “Hush your sassy mouth! You’re not too old for me to turn over my knee, you know.”

  Aunt Daisy was smiling but you could sense the Grim Reaper blinking and lurking behind every doorway and in each and every shadow in Aunt Daisy’s house, taking away her freedoms one by one. And Ella’s. That’s how old age was, chipping away at you, bit by bit. If you’re lucky. No one in my family had ever liked to talk about it, to admit they saw changes in their abilities to go and do as they pleased. But I guessed Aunt Daisy and Ella were fed up a little.

  “Well, the dark doesn’t bother me,” I said, “so I’d be happy to drive.”

  “Speaking of night, can we get back to your evening with the professor? Did you have a wonderful time?”

  “Yes, I sure did.”

  “And are you going to see him again?” Ella asked.

  “Yes, I definitely am.”

  “Okay, give us the dirt. Did he try to put the moves on you?” Aunt Daisy said with the most serious face, the kind you reserve for depositions with the FBI.

  “Aunt Daisy! Good grief!”

  “I’m just telling you, my dear, don’t squander your flowers!”

  “What?”

  “Oh, stop it Daisy! Let Cate have her fun! See what I mean? O. L. D.”

  “What’s squander your flowers supposed to mean?”

  “It’s a line from ‘Dusk,’ a poem DuBose Heyward wrote. Read it and see for yourself. Only decent poem he wrote if you ask me. Anyway, you should memorize it if you want to impress Mr. Risley.”

  “I’m not worried about impressing Mr. Risley, Aunt Daisy.” I already took care of that, I hoped but did not say. Nonetheless, I wrote the name of the poem on the back of a receipt I found in the black hole of my purse and hoped I’d be able to find it again.

  “Well, good. I’m just saying . . .”

  “I think I know what you’re saying. But anyway, by coincidence, we had an amazing discussion about Dorothy and DuBose Heyward at dinner last night, so amazing that I’m taking myself downtown to read the Heyward papers at the Historical Society.”

  “And then what?” Aunt Daisy said. “You gonna write a book about them?”

  “That’s highly doubtful. But I have this nagging question that keeps running around in my head and if I don’t find out the answer it might drive me crazy.”

  I told them what John had told me about the huge disparities in Dorothy and DuBose’s educational backgrounds and that I didn’t quite believe that Dorothy didn’t do more than just help with DuBose’s writing. They looked at each other slack-jawed and stunned.

  “My stars!” Ella said. “I’ve worked in a library all my life. I’ve read everything there is in print about them. I never thought to wonder about that. If you’re right, Cate . . .”

  “It just would be amazing to know, wouldn’t it?” I said. “I’m not sure if it’s true, but maybe I can find out. Anyway, I’m going digging. It will give me something to talk about with John.”

  “Women have to do everything,” Aunt Daisy said. “It wouldn’t surprise me one little bit!”

  “Me either, but then the larger question is why? Why would she do the lion’s share of the work and let him take all the credit?”

  “Who knows?” Aunt Daisy said.

  During the drive downtown I kept thinking about the Heywards. From what I understood so far from John, DuBose, his sister, and his mother’s inherited social standing had been almost completely truncated by their financial deprivation. Basically, like they say down here in the Lowcountry, they were po’. It would have been very important for his family’s pride to try to reclaim their position within Charleston’s circle of old families. So then, if that was true, how would Dorothy, a Yankee from Ohio, fit into that plan? And was there a plan? And if there was one, was it openly discussed and was Dorothy aware? Probably not, I decided, because if I had learned anything in all my years growing up in Charleston, even though I was out on Folly Beach, it was that it was poor manners to speak of your losses and certainly money was rarely if ever discussed. I could see the Heywards stiff-upper-lipping it until such time the society hounds caught the scent of improved circumstances to a degree that would welcome them back into the downy bosom of the circuit. That was the scenario that made the most sense to me. Well, I would see what I would find.

  I located the South Carolina Historical Society’s imposing but compact building with ease. It was right across the street from the Mills House Hotel on the corner of Meeting and Chalmers Street. I parked in the hotel’s parking garage and made my way there, enchanted in the moment by the ancient cobblestones that paved Chalmers Street. How lovely! Cobblestoned streets made me sentimental. Once all the streets of Charleston were probably paved with the ballast of old ships, or oyster shells or just packed dirt. But cobblestones, pretty as they were, were the devil to deal with. They had to have wreaked havoc on the ankles of humans and beasts. I was pretty certain they still sent more than one high-heeled tourist, out for an innocent night on the town, right to her knees. But they wer
e lovely to look at, even the ones that held cement mortar in between their uneven edges. I had never really thought about them before, where they came from and so on. It was sort of like when you lived around New York you never went to the top of the Empire State Building or rode the Staten Island Ferry. You took so much for granted. But it seemed to me then that they looked like river rocks. Maybe they were. I’d have to ask Risley. He’d know.

  I rang the bell on the ancient door and waited for a few moments for someone to answer. I was met by the smiling face of a pretty young woman whose name tag read mary jo fairchild.

  “Come in,” she said, “welcome!”

  “Hi!” I said and stepped into the foyer. “I’m Cate Cooper.”

  “And I am Mary Jo Fairchild. What can I do to help you today?”

  “Well, I was hoping that I might be able to read the papers of Dorothy and DuBose Heyward.”

  “Absolutely! That’s why we’re here. Just sign in there . . .”

  I signed the guest book, followed her inside, and she explained the library’s rules to me. Purse goes in a locker after I give her five dollars, notes are only taken in pencil, no cell phones please, use only one file at a time . . . I thought that it was probably pretty standard protocol, not that I would have known the difference. Believe me. The process I thought would be so intimidating could not have been easier. In no time at all, I was seated at a large table reading a letter from Robert Frost himself to DuBose Heyward. I held the actual letter in my hands. It just seemed too wonderful to be true and I have to say, the moment made me feel a little light-headed. That was only the first file from the first box of documents and I had already bumped into Robert Frost. Amazing! What else was in these boxes? Plenty, I’d bet.

  After Robert Frost, I tackled the file of correspondence between DuBose and George Gershwin, and there were many letters to read. There was one most important one though, the one that would change the Heywards’ life and seal their fate forever. In its text, Gershwin tells DuBose that he is thinking of setting Porgy to music, saying that the story is the most outstanding one he knows of about colored people. I read on. Every now and then I would flinch from the language Heyward used referring to people of color or the condescending tone in his letters to Dorothy but I had to keep reminding myself that he was using the accepted terminology and customs of his day. The 1920s were nearly a hundred years ago and many things were decidedly different then. Life in Charleston was multilayered and each of those strata followed a strictly prescribed code of conduct. I mean, the only time you’d see a black woman in a white woman’s house was if she was doing the laundry. On the other hand, DuBose had no compunction about visiting and participating in an African-American church service and bringing Gershwin there, too. There were social lines drawn all over town, neighborhood by neighborhood, races divided, ancestors compared, judgments made. But more than that, it was as though everyone worried that they were being watched by some invisible Etiquette Queen and King who would pulverize them to charred smoky bits if they stepped out of line.