Low Country

by J. Nicole Jones

  “Now, one year, I lost fifty pounds, and he bought me a fur coat. Sometimes he’d say, ‘Jackie, if you lose thirty pounds by December, I’ll buy you a diamond,’ which he did,” she said with pride I couldn’t take away. “You know you’re always beautiful to us, Nana,” I told her. It was true. I saw in pictures how she’d aged, but they never seemed to reflect the woman I knew well. My memory replaces her white hair with flaxen blond, her hearing aid with big gold clip-on earrings.

  At the pageant, I remember sitting backstage and sweating under the weight of heavy makeup. The dizzy sweet smell of hairspray so thick that the residue glued all the fallen sequins and sloughed-off powder to the floor. A scent oddly metallic that gave me a headache and brought me back to a scene from a hunting trip to Marion with Dora and her family. Miss Dorothy asked us to convey something to Dora’s father out in their shed, and we skipped off in obedience. Dora seemed not to notice the sprays and streams of red across the concrete floor, but I recalled watching little red shoe prints appear where she walked over to her father, who was dressing a deer he’d shot. The buck’s decapitated head hung from a hook on the ceiling. Drops of red dripped from the fur on what used to be its neck but was now only ragged, dangling skin leading up to open eyes. Blood dripped, and ended in tiny splashes on the floor that seemed as if they would be loud but were not loud at all. Is that even how you skin and dismember a deer? Dressing it by undressing it one layer at a time. The images have merged perhaps with scenes from the horror movies I watched with my brothers and cousins that I should not have been watching. In the back seat of the car on the way back to Myrtle Beach, I declared myself done for good with pageants.

  Dora and other classmates still competed in those pageants, but I began telling anybody who would listen that I would go to college. It must have seemed a boast as grating as crinolines in so young a kid, but the part of me that still clung to fairy tales and ghost stories knew the power of repetition, and so I reminded myself as often as I could. For Nana especially, her education had guaranteed nothing, perhaps even was a mark against marriageability. What Southern man wanted a wife who knew more than he did and had a piece of paper to prove it? I wanted that piece of paper and the freedom it offered. I was told once by a cousin, “Your brothers can go to college.” And by Granddaddy, “Your husband will go to college.”

  Nana had a pageant portrait made for my parents. For years, it hung over Uncle Jack’s old piano, over the smaller picture of me in my competition bathing suit. A couple of feet tall, it took some strength for me, at sixteen, to remove from its place on the wall and tear the heavy portrait paper in half and then into little pieces. Sweating and sticky afterward, the rhythm of tearing and breaking so soothing. The broken glass cut my hands and that felt good, too, like when I used to stick my hand out the car window and catch spikes of rain in my palm. It felt like the only way to extricate myself from the patterns I saw around me. Stories, like anger and ghosts, come more alive with every repetition. Almost all stories, unlike memories, are told in the predictable rise and fall of tumescence. Men imagining what has fallen into their laps. Here we chuck out Aristotle in favor of the forms of women who tell stories shaped like themselves that history made a point of forgetting. The stories of women, like their bodies and lives, are fuller, rounder, softer. Prone to repetition. Like love. Like songs. Like ghosts.

  Take, for instance, the ghost of a woman known as both Mary and the Lady in White. The Lady in White is said to still be seen running into the waves on nights when the moon is full. There’s a boat tour out to Edingsville Beach to try to catch sight of her. She lived in a beachfront cottage on that remote end of Edisto Island, with her husband, a fisherman who spent long stretches at sea in the 1880s. As you may have seen coming, unlike poor Mary and the rest of the island, a hurricane had its eye on our lovely coast with its eyelashes of sea oats. She knew, as the wives of sailors just know, that her husband’s ship had sunk, and at first light after the storm’s passing, she raced to the beach and saw, however improbably, the body of her husband floating beyond the waves. She was last seen running into the surf to retrieve his body and is herself accounted thereafter drowned. Dragged under by the storm’s riptide or her own grief. Without a husband, what was there to live for, I guess is the moral of the story.

  6

  _________

  The Ferry or the Road?

  I ACCOUNT IT PAST TIME TO HIT THE ROAD AND get out of Myrtle Beach for a while. How easy to get stuck there, even on the page. We are on our way to Charlotte, the Queen City, named for a queen of Britain, where downtown is called uptown and the ghosts are friendly.

  Ah, but how to leave home. It is always harder than you think. Presently, I wonder which route to show. Every going is different, though crossing the river is easier these days. When Nana was a girl, as she would say, and she and her family traveled from High Point, North Carolina, where her daddy worked for a time in the furniture business, to Myrtle Beach—no. I will let her tell it. “When I was a girl,” she liked to tell, “and you wanted to go to the beach with your family, you took an oxcart to the flat ferry, down at Peachtree Landing, and you signaled the ferryman by hitting a piece of metal that was hanging off a tree branch against a plowshare that somebody had strung up.” I heard this account from her more than once, though the first railroad to Conway from the other side of the river opened in 1900. River crossings were at Socastee for the Waccamaw and Galivants Ferry for the Pee Dee. The railroad went over Withers Swash, where children would learn their swimming strokes and fished for flounder. Swash means as a verb to move with violence or bluster, and as a noun, it is a narrow channel of water between sandbanks. Easy to see how swashbuckling came to be applied to pirates. During the height of Prohibition, a boat from Canada was trying to sail around the Volstead Act, as so many did. The coast was full of rum-runners for the same reasons that it appealed to the pirates of the Golden Age. The network of inlets and rivers made hiding out easy. Like the Capitana, the Planter, and many more, this Canadian ship sank in a storm between the shore and the horizon. A partial list of known shipwrecks along the Low Country includes the Lucy Ann, the Horace Greely, the Peace and Harmony, Queen of the Wave, Gem of the Sea, and Freeda A. Wyley, whose broken limbs stick out of the sand at Forty-third Avenue. Hidden by the dunes, between shadows of wax myrtle and sea oats, up to the line of dry soft sand the waves hauled from their churning depths cases and cases of wine and spirits that had belonged moments before to the cargo hold of this nameless ship. The townsfolk of Myrtle Beach spread the word among households as they might news of a hurricane, and brought lanterns and blankets to the beach for a great party the night the alcohol washed up. When it wasn’t the Joneses, it was someone else supplying first one vice, then another.

  It was the poorer folks like Nana’s parents who took the river ferry. A Hardee by birth, she never remembered or mentioned the ferryman, so I will have to improvise after he arrives, as we stand on the riverbanks with our coins in hand, waiting. There Charon appears, guarding this swampy bank, returning those who have pulled a golden bough off a backyard branch. Very nearly the Styx itself. Water black with its own memories. Of dinosaurs. Of the Waccamaw. Of greedy, sickly conquistadors. Of privateers, hired to build settlements by the king of an island far away, who shot a bear for food and called their first outpost Bear Bluff. Of the broken bones of redcoats tricked by Francis Marion, and the ghosts of the hurricane drowned. Is there not another river, besides this most obvious one? The river of forgetting, where spirits wait to be born again in words on pages.

  We will not take the ferry, I think. The route via highway is nearly parallel, so let’s hit the road. Every two or three months, Mom packed the silver station wagon and piled us into the car for the four-hour drive from Myrtle Beach to visit her family up in Charlotte. Dad rarely came on these visits, only for the annual Christmas Day drive and sometimes not even then. Dad kissed the crowns of our heads before we hopped inside Mom’s car with coloring books and litt
le plastic toys from McDonald’s. He’d then walk around to the driver’s side and my parents would say things too low for me to hear, though I tried hard to listen. After a kiss on her lips, he walked back into the little brown house to give either his brothers or Uncle Jack a call, and Mom backed out of the driveway with a swish of pampas grass, which is better for looking than for touching. The fronds will slit open palms and bare feet so that the sandy earth is soaked in blood before you feel the sting. Mom relaxed when we pulled away from the neighborhood, I could tell. Already I didn’t need to worry about her as much. We were soon to be with Grandpa, and I would be halfway free for a few days to be a kid with my brothers.

  He raised Mom and her siblings alone after his wife chose her native country and the cool, wet metropolis of London, England, over the sticky, malarial heat of the South. They met at a dance hall in London when Grandpa was stationed near Heathrow in the Air Force, where, as an aviation engineer, his mechanical engineering skills made him too valuable to ship to the fighting in Korea. He loved to dance, for which he had little rhythm or memory for steps, but he did not shy away from looking foolish if he was having fun. May, my maternal grandmother, my English grandmother, the grandmother I met only twice, was as good as he was bad on the dance floor. He sold her and her friends contraband cigarettes that he’d smuggled from the base. His first business, really, lifting cartons of American cigarettes and selling them to English addicts still on postwar austerity. Grandpa spun her around and around that night they met until she was dizzy enough to marry him.

  May was named for the month she was born, the second in a trio of cousins named for all the spring months. She stood five feet tall, but was no less glamorous for it. A redhead with memories of Hitler’s Blitz, of hiding out in the Tube tunnels and sleeping in hammocks strung over the tracks. An unexploded mortar bomb was discovered in her sister’s garden in the 1960s, and all the children, including my mom and aunts and uncle, were evacuated. Eventually May chose queen and country and rusted-out bombs to the active ones of her marriage. After a decade of isolation that led to shameful and hushed breakdowns and whispers of whirlwind affairs, taking off to take care of herself was the best she could do for her four kids. Of her infidelity, Grandpa borrowed the stiff upper lip of his in-laws. “She ran off with the milkman,” he said sometimes. He always drove me to the airport when it was time for me to return to my New York graduate school, and on predawn drives down Billy Graham Parkway, he’d remember taking May down the same road to catch her final flight to London. He’d just started a business selling gates and clocks to local businesses. Repairing the mystical hands that mark time’s passage always seemed a magical gift to me. It is not just anybody who knows how to travel through past and future, to define what is the present. He had made a deal with May. If Carolina Time, as he called his business, failed, he’d bring the kids over to England, and they’d all start over across the pond. Getting out of the car at the airport curb, instead of “Good luck with your dream” or “Thanks for watching the kids,” she looked him in the eye and said, “I hope you fail.” He marked that as the moment that drove him to succeed, but he was always going to succeed. I wondered at first upon hearing this story who would want to live without the loving kindness of my grandpa. That she had the freedom to leave at all, to imagine a life outside of her marriage, must have been seen as an act of generosity on his part instead of a simple choice on hers.

  I knew May mostly through boxes of British chocolates and strong black tea she shipped to Mom regularly, the Union Jack on the packaging reminding me of Nana’s British doll, with the tall fuzzy hat. Mom’s half Englishness was masked by her Southern accent, but for the cups of PG Tips and Twinings loaded with milk and cubes of sugar that were excellent for stacking into replicas of the Tower of London and Windsor Castle. I traveled to meet May once, when I was five. Grandpa offered to pay for his daughters to visit their mother, to bring one child along, and my strongest recollection of her is of a trip to the beach at Brighton. The carnival along the wooden boardwalk reminded me of the spinning rides at the Pavilion, but the weather was cold and leaden. No humidity or peaking blue sky. May led me down to the beach, which I could hardly believe was covered in smooth flat stones. She let me fill shopping bags full of rocks to show my brothers, and they became too heavy for either of us to lift. My other memories from the trip are less trustworthy. I may have gotten lost in the hedge maze at a famous castle, and it is possible, though less so, that I ran my fingertips over giant lily pads in a room made of glass. These scenes are mixed up with the souvenir-booklet photographs that Mom and her sisters returned with, and whose pictures I pawed through near-daily for years, until they were lost when we moved from the little brown house, along with the corn snake that slipped out of Jason’s aquarium a few weeks before moving day and that Mom never bothered looking for. He escaped every now and then, and I pressed towels between the carpet and door so he couldn’t crawl into my room, checked under my pillow and blankets before sleep, and took flashlight rays to the darkness of my book bag until he was recovered. I have wondered since if the future residents discovered him coiled in a shoe or in a drawer. Last time I drove by the house, I should have knocked on the door to ask. Wherever we lived, on mornings when I had a test at school, Mom made me a strong cup of Assam tea, and I built castle turrets out of sugar cubes and plopped into my cup in milky splashes the bricks of battlements.

  Back in the station wagon leaving Conway for Charlotte, we all sang to the radio, my little brothers and me, with our hands and sometimes our heads out the windows, leaving town on the two-lane highway that winds past the Witch Links golf course, which the Joneses did not own. The sign at the front entrance was carved out of a half-moon of wood. A long-haired crone, cloaked and draped doubly in Spanish moss, a long, needling finger pointing from her whittled and painted hand. Mom would be singing, too, by then. Usually too reserved to do it in front of Dad, the real singer. Singing was life, and we brought him with us when we lamented in lyrics problems we were too young to understand. Our long weekends away, Dad recorded demos in the garage on cassette tapes, before going out to Drunken Jack’s or getting roped into one of Uncle Jack’s trips.

  It was as if we had permission to be ourselves in the car. Or was it only after the river crossing, over the newer concrete bridge? We passed the sign for the ferry landing at Galivants Ferry, but I wouldn’t go looking for the plowshare for just about anything down by that water. On through Marion, where my school friend Dora and her family had their hunting cabin. Marion, that village an hour inland from Conway, farther than Cool Spring, and all cotton farms and crumbling old sharecroppers’ shacks. It is a location that will come to play a larger part in my family’s story, so we’ll take the liberty of pretending that on at least one drive to see Grandpa, I had the prescience to take notice of a wide empty field on the northbound side of Highway 501 where lay the future fortunes of the Joneses. Marion the town and the county were named after Francis Marion, the local war hero. In school we had learned that Marion, the “Swamp Fox” as he was commonly known, led a guerrilla war against the British during the American Revolution. George Washington himself was supposedly a big fan, and Marion was rumored to have been quite popular with the colonial ladies, who could not resist the man who strategically led British soldiers to death by snakebite, alligator bite, or mosquito bite in the malarial swamps. Marion was descended from French Huguenots who fled Europe after Louis XIV, the Sun King, declared Calvinism off-limits. Some of these French Calvinists voyaged abroad to South Carolina. Horry County was named after the Huguenot Peter Horry, another pal of Washington’s.

  As long as we are on the road, why not take a small detour so readers can see another tourist attraction. “The Holy Ghost is the only ghost welcome here,” reads the old-timey white scrawl on a wooden sign in front of All Saints Church off King’s River Road in Murrells Inlet. While I hate to call anyone a liar, much less on church property, that is just not the truth. The Gray Man i
s seen not too far from the old Wachesaw plantation that’s now a golf course and gated housing development where Uncle Leslie lives with his family. In the South, manners are wielded like crucifixes at an exorcism. As if it weren’t clear who is welcome where in South Carolina. I suppose politeness works some magic on small demons. This is a land where the languid Spanish moss sways on the strong arms of Southern live oaks that waltz in the kaleidoscopic heat haze, and the air is so thick, it holds up the whispers that would elsewhere collapse. The conditions are right. Continuity and silence, according to Wharton, and we’ve got plenty of both. Wachesaw, in the language of the Waccamaw tribe, means “place of great weeping.” Every place sees its share of tears. Then again, there are those places where the guilt is not glued down by the tree sap. In school each spring, my class took a field trip to Brookgreen Gardens, which lies to the south of Wachesaw in Murrells Inlet. It is advertised as a great sculpture garden. A Grand Strand attraction with a petting zoo for the kids and annual light festivals. I, too, am guilty of taking out-of-towners to spot alligators from pontoon boats and to walk between the electrified wings of oak-size butterflies. The grounds are an impressionist blur of moss green on gray and brown tree bark, azalea bushes in magentas and bubble-gum pinks, white marble and oxidized copper that ooze together atop the blue. Images and feelings evoked clearer than history. Naked Dianas hunting. A wood nymph here and there. Dionysus with some wine. Two stallions fighting in a fountain, for some reason. After one field trip, in the eighth grade, my history teacher divided the classroom into small groups, and after distributing buckets and sticks, we were instructed to imagine we were enslaved Africans pummeling the hull off rice, and yet I do not recall learning the legacy of the grounds. Not one, but four rice plantations owned by Joshua Ward, who is accounted the largest slaveholder in American history. On an 1860 ledger, among his estate’s holdings are listed 1,130 people in his possession. It is difficult to look at the marsh water, too dark for divining, and not feel the heaviness of tears, bodies, curses cast into its mud, even now which folks ignore between exhibits about the sculptures and wildlife.