Low Country

by J. Nicole Jones

  Granddaddy had millions of his own secreted away through investments both known and unknown. He and his brothers had moved up from small-time motels to high-rise hotels and golf courses, had a stake in Holiday Inns from Virginia to Florida. Keith, before he went on the run, from both more hardened criminals than himself and the lawmen after the whole lot, as the family stories go, bought one of the first hotels operating in Myrtle Beach, right next door to the very first. He and his wife turned the Yachts Club into the first high-rise hotel along the Grand Strand, the Yachtsman, which is still there, and while not as nice as it once was, cannot be beat for location, at the mouth of the pier at Fourteenth Avenue North and only a few blocks up from the SkyWheel. The Ferris wheel dreamed up and constructed after I left spins over Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which was built during my childhood beside the Pavilion at Ninth Avenue. The Pavilion was the most beloved eleven acres in South Carolina. There bloomed the antiquated rainbow lightbulbs around names of carnival rides spelled out in mosaic mirror tiles. GALAXI and MIND SCRAMBLER twinkled between echoes of roller-coaster laughter and descending screams and the nearby crash of ocean waves for sixty years. The Pavilion is gone, but Ripley’s has recently expanded to include a Haunted Adventure that is open year-round, no longer just at Halloween, and a Maze of Mirrors. The man himself, more popular than President Roosevelt and known as the “biggest liar in the world,” drew his fame as a cartoonist for William Randolph Hearst during the Depression. He illustrated oddities he claimed to have seen that were called “fairy tales for grown-ups.” Twice a day, tickets are available for tourists to watch bored mermaids with zippered pink tails twirl around an aquarium tank before drying off to catch a shift waiting tables.

  My great-uncle Keith might have had a touch of clairvoyance when newly christened Myrtle Beach amounted to a few raised shacks, a handful of hotels, some stray cows and goats ambling on the sand. Does not the very word inspiration herald direct and immediate influence from the gods? If such a reach provokes discomfort, then let us call it a prediction. A dream. A bet. A place in time where my imagination meets his. Framed by the dunes, I see his black hair, the same as his brothers’, my dad’s, my brothers’, mine, parted to the side and blown out of place by a breeze that ruffles his tie, nearly the shape and width of a child’s kite. As is the style of the time, he wears alligator-skin loafers, and they sink in the fine grains of quartz, smaller and softer underfoot than the hardier sand sucked up from the ocean floor and deposited heavy and rough where the surf breaks. These cool crystals came down from the Appalachian Mountains by natural, elemental means millions of years ago. Even our sand is from someplace else.

  “One day,” says Keith, recalls my dad, and when I close my eyes, I hear and see it all, too, “this beach will be lined with hotels.” And he was right. His legacy now is the Myrtle Beach of spring break and regional family vacations. First hangovers and holes-in-one at Jurassic Mini-Golf. Perhaps not as elegant as the seaside he envisioned, which did exist, however briefly. The luxurious, marble heights of the Ocean Forest Hotel, built in 1930, hosted celebrities from what gets called the Golden Age of Hollywood. It looked like a real castle, not the plaster ones at the theme parks and golf courses around town. Nana once told me she saw Clark Gable on the beach with his pants rolled up to his knees, and I could only bring to mind the image of Drunken Jack the pirate. Like the Pavilion, the historic hotel was torn down for no good reason. The implosion, in 1974, turned the whole town into sightseers for a day.

  Hurricane Hazel prompted a construction boom, and Keith began to make good in the hotel business. He and his wife had bought the Yachtsmsan, a club they turned into a high-rise hotel. One local history book hints that its buyers were men of ill repute. Practically ungodly is how it describes the new owners, my relatives, the moonshiners and gamblers. Liking the feel of the hotel business, Uncle Keith, with four of his brothers, bought the Gay Manor Motel from their father, Harvey, and they bought franchising rights to Holiday Inns between Richmond, Virginia, and Miami, Florida. He was arrested with a ton of marijuana in his car at one point, and according to the rumors, went on the run from the government, drug dealers, the mob, or all three at the end of his life. He just up and disappeared after setting up chains of hotels and motels across the South. Only Uncle Jack knew where they were hiding. Keith sent letters to his mother, Ol’ Mama, that Dad found in a shoebox at Nana’s house. “Dear Mama,” he wrote, “I’m sorry I haven’t written. It’s been dangerous where I am . . .” Dad and Les remember the FBI coming to their house, led by a Mr. Armstrong, to ask if Granddaddy or the rest of the Jones brothers had any idea where he was hiding. They’d sneak out of bed in their striped pajama sets and press their ears to the walls to listen to G-men ask Herman, Wilbur, Wendell, Jack, and Ralph about their eldest brother, Keith.

  My granddaddy claims his crowning achievements as a pair of high-rise hotels, the Sandcastle in central Myrtle Beach, and the Sandcastle South, down toward Garden City. Each is done up as a mauve stucco tower with indoor and outdoor waterslides and a lazy river. The lazy river was always my mom’s favorite, and when it seemed like the family was on good terms, or he was out of town, she’d take us to ride its slow circles on sticky yellow inner tubes. I never liked the feeling of being dragged along with only my butt in the water and no say in where I was headed, but she’d close her eyes with one of my baby brothers asleep on her chest and go around and around. It was one of the few times she seemed truly at peace in my childhood. I myself would stand up inside the inner tube and fight the current by walking the other way. When I got to middle school, I refused to get in at all and hid with a book under a tent of damp beach towels.

  Granddaddy moved his office to a ground-floor corner of the original Sandcastle and did business with a view of Ocean Boulevard and the National House of Pancakes on the other side of the parking lot. The hotel indeed looked palatial, and countless afternoons when Mom could not chaperone us napping on the lazy river, I led my brothers and cousins, a company of five or six boys, and we skipped across crosswalks at King’s Highway, down Ocean Boulevard, past the pier, and crashed the pool. We took turns anointing one another’s cheeks with runes in rainbow shades of zinc oxide that doubled as war paint. If ever asked whether we had parents with us or were perhaps hotel guests, we said our grandfather was Ralph Jones, and that was that. If a belt was guaranteed later anyway, we might as well get a few good cannonballs in, and we counted on his employees being as afraid of him as we were.

  Though we had free rein at the pool, my parents enjoyed fewer perks of his wealth and spent most afternoons and evenings working at a rotation of pancake houses, seafood buffets, and bars, with the occasional odd job, usually painting houses or doing construction, thrown in as the expenses of living and consecutive children required. Dad’s regular daytime gig, before heading out to tend bar or play a show, was managing his uncle Herman’s Pancake House in Garden City. My brothers and I spent more time at Nana’s house than at our own. Nana glowed surrounded by all of her grandchildren, and she watched us most days while our parents worked. We basked in her supernova-style love, rays of sun without the burn, until we got picked up by our parents or lashed.

  Right about when Granddaddy started making plans to buy the Sandcastle, he figured it was high time to move his own family up, if only for appearances. They sold their small house on Thirty-third Avenue across the street from Myrtle Beach High School and next door to the even smaller house of Nana’s sister Sue. The neighborhood had been where all the boys went to school and where Nana and Sue every day traded town gossip and snapped beans on their porches with their mother, May Ella, who lived with Sue. Nana and her elder sister Sue were as close as opposite siblings usually are. As olive and dark as Nana was blond and fair, Sue was shy and cautious where Nana was the life of any party, until Granddaddy would notice and threaten her into unnatural smallness. The first night Nana ever spent alone was Sue’s wedding night, and they spent a decade as neighbors during the early
years of their married lives. One early fall day in 1954, Nana got a call from Mrs. Newton down the street. Her husband worked for the FAA, which had an outpost at the Air Force Base in Myrtle Beach, and he’d called to warn that the radar indicated a hurricane had shifted course and was headed straight for Horry County. By the next morning, the eye was expected right over Myrtle Beach. Mrs. Newton had already sent her two little girls to bang on doors and tell as many people as they could. Nana and Sue each saddled their babies onto hips and joined the Newtons going door-to-door. Halloween was only two weeks away, and if they didn’t hurry, there might be no need to throw bedsheets over the kids when it came time to dress up as ghosts.

  You can see the gray gleam of Atlantic ocean from the end of the street in their old neighborhood, across King’s Highway and at high tide peaking between the skinny legs of the houses built up on stilts. Other communities went to bed as if it were any other night. Lucky households woke up to the National Guard banging on the door at dawn with instructions to leave now with only the clothes on their backs, and the unlucky woke up amid the blows of Hurricane Hazel, able only to watch the mercury in the kitchen barometer sink and sink and sink and then sink some more. To the lowest level recorded since the Flagg Flood of 1893, which is sometimes called the Sea Islands Hurricane because the eye passed over at the Georgia–South Carolina islands, where Gullah is still spoken today, though less and less. Nineteen fifty-four was only the second year that an official body started gifting hurricanes with names. Women’s names only, and it would not be until 1979 that the United States began to name them as men. Fear is a power that runs deep, and if there is anything women are not allowed, it is power. It is as true as it’s ever been that what power women have from the toils of tenacity or haphazard luck must be taken away once it is noticed.

  After Mrs. Newton’s warning, Nana called up Granddaddy at his office at the Sea Dip motel. “Ralph,” I can hear her pleading his name over the telephone as I have a thousand times. She’d be sitting, with her legs crossed and her foot rocking her up and down. Picturing her in that little kitchen, I see my uncle Mike on her knee, and know a part of her rocking habit to come from the decades of babies she bounced. I can hear Granddaddy rebuff and ridicule her, as I have heard his voice through the end of the phone all my life. “Please come home, come help. At least meet us at the shelter,” she might have said.

  He chose to ride out the hurricane with “his people,” instead of with his wife and firstborn son. It’s not hard for me to conjure the words I’ve heard him say to her. The hardness in the voice of such a soft woman says it all. It says things like “Jackie, I ain’t gonna spend my last moments on earth with you” and “Jackie, you know you’re not smart enough to make it up here in time” and “Jackie, why are you doing your best to make me angry . . .”

  Nana took shelter not just from high winds and storm surge, but from the contempt of a husband who didn’t care to spend with her his last moments on land and life. With her family, she waited through Hurricane Hazel at the Baptist church downtown with her father, a veteran of World War I who’d been all the way to France and fought at the Battle of the Somme, her sister Sue and her husband and baby. Local history notes that someone took an ax to the wooden planks of the boardwalk underneath the open-air pavilion that had been built in 1949, where the electric carnival would go a decade later. The thinking was that if the rising waters could come up through the floor, the ocean wouldn’t push the whole structure down the block, which may have worked. There are reports of similar acts taken in the great Galveston hurricane in Texas fifty years before. The piers and most of the boardwalk along the boulevard broke to pieces and washed away in the storm surge, but the first pavilion was still standing come blue skies.

  Hazel is still thought of as the worst hurricane to hit the Carolinas in that century, the twentieth, though the eye veered north, as they usually do, toward the Outer Banks. The eye made landfall near Calabash, North Carolina, barely a game of hopscotch from Little River. Still, the people of the Low Country prayed hard that morning, and, whether it helped or not, only one fatality was recorded in South Carolina. Hundreds of people from Haiti on up to Toronto had gone to God, drowned in the storm surge and flooding rain, under a high tide brought even higher by a full harvest moon that October. The storm surge reached more than twenty feet tall at the high-tide line, and even as the storm lost power moving northward, Hazel managed to fling a gust that remains the strongest wind ever recorded in New York City, 113 miles per hour. Was it during this hurricane, as tornados plucked pines from sandy flat earth and the ocean moved whole city blocks from one side of Ocean Boulevard to the other, as the town congregated by candlelight to pray in creaking pews surrounded by their spouses surely, that Nana first found comfort in words she’d spend the next half a century spelling out in needlepoint and hanging on her walls? God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .

  About twenty years ago and forty years on from Hazel, the remaining Jones brothers bought cemetery plots for themselves and their wives. In addition to the one-night stands, they all kept a serious mistress on the side, as their father had, and bought them condos and costume jewelry. There are certain words, like the name of F, with which I do not wish to burden my nana, even in these pages. Mom says she first caught sight of F on the side of Calhoun Road, clearly either on the way to or having left my nana’s house. She had a flat tire that I can only rightfully judge as a small act of a god. Nana, who’d spent most of her life suffering blows from Granddaddy, considered his infidelity the most injurious, and like the beatings, just another hurt she had to deal with, a philosophy I found more and more incredulous. What would happen if she let herself get truly angry with him? It was Herman’s wife, my great-aunt Francis, who called her up one day and said, “Jackie, you ought to worry about this one. She’s a waitress.”

  If they had gone in together on a mausoleum just for their mistresses, bedecked and bedazzled with busty come-hither angels, it would not have surprised me. Whatever they planned to do with the mistresses, it is unimportant in the scheme of things, as mistresses are. All of the Jones brothers bought husband-and-wife plots—except for Granddaddy, who bought a twin bed of dirt only for himself alongside that of his family and told Nana she could get herself buried down on the south end of Highway 17 next to where her mama and sister lay. It would be Hurricane Hazel all over again. “Even after they’re both gone, they won’t rest in peace. Jackie’s ghost is gonna be walkin’ up and down King’s Highway lookin’ for Ralph, who won’t care to see her for eternity,” Uncle Leslie has more than once said of his mother’s unwavering devotion to a man who hated her more and more for that very thing as the years kept on. She has always simply said to suggestions that she can do better, “He’s my husband.”

  4

  _________

  Golden Gloves

  EARLY ON, WHEN DAD WAS TRYING TO GET MOM to come around to his advances, he called up Nana at the new house on Calhoun Road for some advice. The timber wolf was gone, after all, a promising step toward courtship. “Mama, I wanna send a hundred white roses to this girl I been seeing.”

  “Well, I reckon you better call up Lazelle’s.” She directed him to the one-room florist shop, extending the syllables in Lazelle’s as she coiled the phone cord around a finger tipped in sherbet-peach polish and gazing at the wisteria vines that wrapped around the awning of her patio. Nana told this story from the same rocking recliner in her living room where she would’ve taken this call decades before. She opened her memory to this chapter as easily as turning to a bookmarked page in one of her library of romance paperbacks that she kept hidden in cupboards and closets around the house. Each of my brothers has had avalanches of bodice rippers fall upon his head when opening forgotten doors. They tumble out of cabinets in cascades of dog-eared longing.

  Rocking with one bare foot nestled in the teal shag carpet and the other crossed over her knee, Nana would sway up and down in her rocking chair
anticipating the end of her own story. “Son, that many roses is liable to cost a couple hundred dollars.” There is coffee percolating in the background and butter beans or cabbage boiling on the stove, which mixes with the moss and roses of perfume. A bouquet of Estée Lauder glass bottles flowers from her bathroom counter. It’s in everything, these green and heavy scents, and so much is folded within them too. The carpet’s since been pulled up and replaced with cold white tile, but Nana would smile her practiced punch line no matter what was underfoot. Every vowel was a wink when she told stories. “He sent her a dozen white roses instead,” she’d say, leaning forward and sliding her bare feet across the carpet or tile, “but I reckon it was enough.” Before we were old enough to chase down pirate treasure, Nana was our good fortune and we hers. “When your mama was pregnant with you, I told all my friends, Alverta and Tommy and Ruby Isaac, that I was gonna make my grandchildren love me better than anything. ‘Well, how are you gonna do that, Jackie?’ they sassed me. I said, ‘I’m just gonna love them that way.’ And I did.” Children pick up on character as clearly as the weather.