Low Country

by J. Nicole Jones

  Everyone she was related to, which is a lot of folks, and a few she wasn’t, told Nana to leave him. “He’s my husband,” she said as she always and only ever said. Nana was no gold digger, but she was both too smart and too pretty not to be aware of the value of her beauty as a useful asset. The Joneses had their money by then, and were known for being a little dangerous. The thrill of danger gets awfully mixed up with the butterflies of love, though I have no doubt she loved him no matter how much he hurt her. I can feel the cool white tile of her living room underfoot as I imagine her telling the story of how her grandfather on the Hardee side was swindled out of their family land near Galivants Ferry, where the alligator- and cottonmouth-filled swamps that flank the Little Pee Dee River dry out into fields of tobacco farmland loomed over by crumbling plantations. As told to her by her parents and she tells it, too. A neighbor figured he might expand his acreage by accusing my great-great-grandfather of sleeping with his wife. That way, this neighbor could shoot dead my great-great-grandfather and buy off both judge and jury. Then he would be free to kick the grieving widow off her land. So the story goes.

  I took the liberty, however, as she must have done, too, of interpreting this tale as a reminder that resources included husbands. A husband would have been the most valuable resource. As she’d say freely, perhaps in contrast with me, she “developed early,” and was a Hitchcock blonde by age fourteen at a time when there was nothing better a woman could be. Even if she’d gone on to get her college degree, she was first and foremost a creature built to love who wanted to be loved in return. In a land ruled by men, an open book is not as safe and half as warm as open arms. As she built a small kingdom out of her children’s and grandchildren’s adoration, perhaps the skin of reality stretched thinner and thinner, so that a realm owned by women built between letters and pages could be penned with growing ease to temper the harsher dimensions of her married life.

  More important, she was in love, as she said. She had won a scholarship to Winthrop College, an all-girls school upstate in the red-dirt piedmont that she attended for a semester. Her mother and sister sewed her a single skirt and blazer, as they were too poor to buy any of the required uniform. After her first semester, her own daddy had a heart attack, and she gave up on college to go to work as a bank teller to support her ailing parents. Someplace in the world there is a language wherein the word for man translates the same as the word for burden.

  Nana kept on her coffee table next to the photo albums a book of folktales and ghost stories from the Low Country. The author, a woman, I remember noticing, claimed on the inside that a librarian at the Library of Congress told her that South Carolina is the state with the most folktales in the whole of the U.S. Nonetheless, it was a thin volume with its title in white letters over a photo of live oaks and their Spanish moss in which I found the tale of Alice Flagg, a ghost story I’d heard from Dad and Uncle Leslie many times by candlelight on stormy evenings and before their dinner shifts at whatever seafood joint they were working at the time. Finding this well-known oral story printed on paper served to amplify the power of all the other oral history I’d heard in passing. It seemed to mean that everything I’d heard was true. You will kindly forgive my retelling if you have heard this story already.

  Dr. Allard Flagg was a young and respectable Low Country physician, and he and his mama and sister, Alice, lived in a white plantation house known as the Hermitage. I went to visit the place as a girl, and maybe I forgot to hold my breath going past the family graves, as I have carried Alice’s story with me. Her grave, a flat slab of marble on the ground, is marked only with ALICE. Alice fell in love, as pretty young girls are supposed to do, but her brother found the object of her adoration, a turpentine salesman, unacceptable. Dr. Flagg sent Alice off to boarding school in Charleston, where she took down with something called “country fever,” which the dictionary will tell you is an old-timey term for malaria. She was shipped back to the Hermitage, where Dr. Flagg, in treating her, discovered a ring on a yellow ribbon that she had tied around her neck. While Alice was hallucinating with fever and heartbreak, her loving brother took her engagement ring and threw it into the swamp. Naturally Alice died of malaria, or to spite her brother as I would interpret, though heartbreak is the scientific cause of death usually given in the stories. She’s spent the last two hundred years walking the gardens of the Hermitage looking for her ring. I guess jewelry lasts longer than romance in the afterlife, too. Rereading the story as a girl from Nana’s recliner, my mind of its own accord saw Granddaddy as the controlling, vindictive doctor, and Nana as the lovesick belle who walks the earth looking for, if not her lover, the evidence that she was loved.

  5

  _________

  Waccamaw Academy

  I ASKED NANA WOULDN’T SHE LIKE TO FINISH up college, get her degree. Ever the Southern lady, she only said how proud she was of me. Was it the decades of hearing Granddaddy say “Jackie ain’t got the sense” or “Jackie, nobody wants to hear what you have to say” to strangers and family? The shameful sigh of relief in realizing that insults were all for now. A half century of diminishment where there should have been affection takes a toll on the most tenacious of spirit, and to hear her describe herself as Granddaddy would upon breaking a nail or misplacing a phone number brought out, well, speak of the devil. It brought out Granddaddy’s temper in me. “I wish you wouldn’t call yourself stupid-fatugly,” I’d say. I found myself angry with her putting up with his abuses, but I was mad at myself for feeling his anger come out in me. An unfair and even crueler response than the words of a small, petty man.

  My mom and Nana enrolled me, and my brothers too, lest we forget them, in a small private school in Horry County. Mom begged the tuition from her father back in Charlotte, a small humiliation that would change my life. My parents’ income came mostly from waiting tables, and they had put all their savings toward buying a little brown house in Conway. In a small wonder in the biggest county east of the Mississippi, Waccamaw Academy was only a short drive from our little brown house in Conway. I did not realize how big this tiny house was in my memory until the last time I left Myrtle Beach, when I took a detour to drive by the old neighborhood on the way out of town. I could practically see my dad and Jack in his white Cadillac, see the steamboat straight out of Mark Twain that had been docked there throughout my childhood. Is it that the recollection of life from a child’s wide eyes and narrow world feels bigger, or that we were looking down from the peak of our happiness? I was shocked to see our little brown house barely bigger than a double-wide trailer, though still surrounded on two sides by pine forest and kudzu vines, and on the third by blackberry brambles, where a family of black snakes used to live. I recall here a line from Amy Hempel that I cling to as my nana would a proverb. “What seems dangerous often is not—black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence.” Of black snakes, Dad always said, “They’re the good guys.” The only good guys in our story, though take care in their company, as even a venomless bite can scar.

  As children at the little brown house, we spent our days digging holes for no reason at all. We wrestled and fought until Bandit, our collie with a strip of orange across his eyes, pulled us off one another by the neck of our T-shirts. Dad had taught the collie to intervene when it looked as if somebody was getting hurt. We hunted lizards of glow-in-the-dark green on the ringing chain-link fence that surrounded our backyard. Once captured in little palms for cups, we coaxed open their mouths with delicate strokes on their bubbling red throats and let them snap shut on our earlobes and dangle like earrings. We dug holes in the backyard looking for pirate treasure and when none was found, I would become the pirate and offer treasure from the house to be buried. One of the few things Nana ever got mad at me for was burying a bumblebee-shaped broach she had given me made from stripes of black enamel and real gold, its wings twinkling diamonds. She and Mom took their turn as treasure hunters and shoveled up the whole backyard looking for it. Still there like the corn s
nake lost in the house. There was always the family of snakes who lived under the shed and were good for sport. Dad once found us out there using a stick to flip one of these serpents, banded in candy-corn colors, into the air like it was a pancake, and moving quick as an adder himself, ran in quick strides to knock the stick out of my brother Justin’s hand and pull us away. I can still see the stripes pinwheeling through the air, scarlet and saffron spinning brightly against a cornflower blue sky, before it tumbled down to a dusty and stunned landing. “What in the hell?” So unfurled the litany. “Don’t y’all know any better than to be poking at a poisonous snake?”

  He got a good look, once it hit the ground, muttering under his breath counting snakeskin rings with an outstretched finger. “Red on black, friend of Jack. Red on yellow, kill a fellow.” It was a king snake and not the near-identical coral snake, whose bite is the closest thing on this continent to a cobra’s. They are thought of, coral snakes, as docile and slow compared with the muscle of a cottonmouth or the meanness of a copperhead.

  “Leave the poor guy alone. He’s just a tired old kingsnake, probably got a family to take care of under there. Go on little guy, go on,” Dad said in a gentle tone for the poor animal. Perhaps he was thinking of the time he was scolded as a child for playing with toy soldiers. He’d knotted shoelaces around the plastic necks of a few traitors and flung them over a chair, only to have May Ella, Grandmama as he called her, scream and run out of the room. Nana took her youngest boy against her side and explained that as a girl, her mother had seen a man hanged from a tree by a mob. We nested under Dad’s arms and squatted down to watch our friend slither home. It was a game we kept on playing even after this scene, and when that king snake decided it was time to wriggle up the social ladder and move on up to a better neighborhood, Justin took to throwing the cat up in the air, which seemed to bother nobody, not even the cat, a brave ginger tabby we called Toffee, who developed gangrene after someone shot a BB pellet into his thigh.

  When we were old enough, my brothers and I were enrolled in school at Waccamaw Academy, named for the indigenous people who built their villages among the loblolly pines in the gum-cypress wetlands and blackwater swamps spilling between the banks of what is now the Waccamaw River and the Pee Dee River and who almost certainly did not wear the feathered and tasseled crown of the school’s sports uniforms, printed in indigo blue on cotton sweatshirts. Before the first Roanoke colony was established and then unaccountably disappeared in North Carolina, before Jamestown was settled and heralded as the New World in Virginia, and a century before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock, a Spanish colony was attempted in 1526, near present-day Georgetown, an hour south of Waccamaw Academy, by the Spaniard Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, an acquaintance of Diego Columbus, son of Christopher. Ayllón, the forgotten conquistador of the Carolinas. He called his settlement San Miguel de Gualdape, after sailing a Spanish caravel from Hispaniola to claim the boggy pluff mud for the Spanish crown. Did it seem a cursed mission, a cursed place from the beginning? The flagship, Capitana, struck a sandbar and sank, and the group’s supplies were lost. The shipwreck is thought to rest underneath North Island near Georgetown, the land itself moved by centuries of storms and shifts to hide the ship from scholars and treasure hunters alike. San Miguel de Gualdape is recognized by historians as the very first European settlement in the United States. The first place in the United States where enslaved people from Africa were brought ashore, too. And the site of the first revolt of enslaved people in the United States. Only a few months into his venture, Ayllón died of some illness, perhaps the country fever that took Alice Flagg, or the smallpox or measles he passed to the Waccamaw, which would kill nearly the whole population and erase their language forever. The few European survivors abandoned South Carolina soon after, until the English came a hundred years later.

  For a while, I searched for the translations of any journals or letters he might have left behind. I have had to settle for secondhand accounts and the journals of Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish soldier shipwrecked near Galveston, Texas, in 1528, after a hurricane claimed his ship. Left for dead, like Drunken Jack, but washed ashore with more faith than rum. He and the few survivors walked for eight years, from the Island of Doom, the name they gave to Galveston, until they found a Spanish outpost in Mexico. The slim purple edition of this account was published as part of a series on explorers that included an abridged account of the travels of Marco Polo, who claimed therein to have seen a griffin, the mystical lion-eagle hybrid, in flight somewhere near what is now Zanzibar or Madagascar.

  So close to the river was Waccamaw Academy that when the banks overflowed from rain, storm, or tides, the football field returned to swamp. Practices and field days had to be adjusted when the presence of alligators on the grass deterred the presence of small student bodies. The yellow speckled necks of snapping turtles were given a reprieve by so many carpooling mothers that a permanent ban was issued declaring NO VACANCY in the classroom aquariums. At the risk of provoking tempers unknown, I advise travelers to leave them be on the side of the road, or to push them into a ditch with the longest nearby stick. They’ve been known to bite off fingertips, and I have watched one of these little dinosaurs eat a fuzzy duckling whole. The sea turtles of our fair coast, on the other hand, emerge gentle and lovely from the cool cover of quartzy moonlit sand to be lapped up by the high tide. As such, they are state-protected tourist attractions, bumper-sticker symbols of pride, and interference earns a hefty fine or jail time.

  I spent at least one afternoon a week on the reptile-friendly football field not for love of sport or school spirit, but because bomb threats were called in regularly by bored or ill-prepared students. I have a memory of poking with the end of a fallen brown pine needle the pink wide-open mouth of a Venus flytrap while I waited to be led back to class. Stalking patches of brighter green in the soft soggy grass. The sticky shine of its body unhinged to a summery pink that recalled the sweetness of watermelon and the scent of powdered cubes of bubble gum. And then the surrounding fringe of teeth sharp and thin to cage its meals, or in the case of my memory, closing calm and slow around the tip of pine needles. Here is probably my chance to note that this carnivorous plant, a strange hybrid rare and beautiful, grows only in the swamplands that bridge the border of the Carolinas. If the observations of Ayllón were published in a slim edition alongside those of more famous explorers, would these plants appear as monsters or wonders? Would he have exaggerated their size so that grown men were seen eaten alive by swamp monsters in pages presented to European kings? Looking at its insides so freely offered, I thought then that it looked not monstrous, but like a valentine cut out from stiff construction paper.

  Waiting for the police or fire department to declare the school safe, the whole school stood and looked out into the pine and cypress at the edges of the field. Floating between the tiers of tree limbs, glowing lights are commonly observed in these swamps. Swamp gas and fox fire are the explanations. Those for whom bioluminescence is not magical enough claim one ghost story or another, depending on what suits them. There are the Bingham Lights in Dillon. The Land’s End Lights in Beaufort. Lights of the Old Hanging Tree, from which the eyes of murdered enslaved people do not sleep. Headless soldiers in uniforms blue and gray hold lights aloft, looking for their lost heads. A region in search of reasons for the violence of its past, not ready to give up its ghosts and the guilt that brings them ever back to life. The only orbs of light I can report seeing are the Fourth of July fireworks shot up from the community college next to the Witch Links golf course in Conway. Dad would pile us into the bed of his pickup truck, the one Uncle Jack ran off the road and the one Hank Williams Jr. sings about, with folding beach chairs of woven plastic strips and rusty legs. Our family watched the fireworks pop and sizzle, under the sulfurous spell of gunpowder and a bucket of fried chicken picked up along the way. “Y’all, pile in,” Dad said, directing us to jump into the back of the truck with the dog and ride with him down to th
e bait shop to get cigarettes and candy. On the way back home, I’d rest my chin on the edge of the truck next to Bandit’s, and the wind blew his long, muddy hair into mine. Dad and Leslie managed to find houses just down the street from each other, like Nana and Sue thirty years before them, and the boys and I played with Leslie’s son, Ralph Howard, as another brother. Mom baked pies from blackberries we picked with purple-stained fingertips, our toes as far away from the snaky bramble as possible, as Dad wrote love songs from the couch or a makeshift desk in the garage where the King took it all in. On a bitter cold night many years later, at a bar in New York, Dad confessed that those were the happiest days of his life, and I must concur that it was an idyllic time until it wasn’t.

  The longest I’ve ever lived in one place is still that little, love-filled house in Conway. The spot where we watched fireworks every July is now a fully developed suburb of strip malls, home to vape shops and tattoo parlors and revolving-door apartment complexes of the newly divorced and the new to town. Conway is, like Little River to the north, one of the older outposts in Horry County and far more historical than the newer Myrtle Beach, which was called New Town until 1900, when a contest was held among the county’s turpentine laborers and socialites. The wife of the nearest railroad baron, one Mrs. Burroughs, suggested the winning pick. Imagine that. The wax myrtle bushes that fringed the beach’s dunes are rarer now, pulled up for hotel development. I thought for a while as a kid that the whole town was named for the crape myrtle trees in my nana’s backyard. They flowered always, no matter the season, which I know is not their usual pattern, but I must ask for your trust when I say that on any day of the year, when you creaked open the wooden door painted a glossy, chipping beige, swishes of hot pink twirled at your ears and danced at your heels to lie finally underfoot as you followed the last visitor’s trail of flattened petals to the patio door, where Nana sat rocking in her chair waiting for company. She was the center of our universe then, so why wouldn’t she be that of the whole town? Upon finding for the first time Florence, Italy, on a map, I deduced in the logic of nursery school solipsism that the town was named for the Florence, South Carolina, we drove through on the way to Grandpa’s house. Myrtle Beach has remained true to the spirit of its founding as a town that favors both nepotism and contests, the latter of which are more bikini-oriented these days.