Reminiscences on the Deep South, birthplace of the Confederacy and various other instances of political unrest throughout history, centered on Charleston, but travelling all the way to Bath, England for insights - Van takes us on another journey to the heart of the American South.

“That parking deck is like a sauna!,” she called out to an overweight man with thinning hair; he grabbed the middle of his shirt, tie and all, and squeezed it together. “Hot! Is it hot enough for you?,” he looked in my direction and she looked over him disapprovingly at me. I looked at the elevator that dinged with transition and I used it to escape the answer, the people and DC in general. I work on a hill, and was hurtling up in a metal box ever higher, but my thoughts were down to 114 inches above sea level, Charleston.

Cruising smoothly down a road with metal sheds and chipped paint—why did no one in the South ever bother to repaint? To renew, to continue. Its heart had been ripped out long before in the Civil War. Like a tsunami, where water that had always been there rushes to shore, and suddenly the sea is sand.

I had always felt life had continued pleasantly along, cruising majestically until sunset where a new generation stood at the ready, grabbing the baton to continue the race, perhaps with sleeker shoes. The South in my mind was an evolving organism, its agrarian heritage feeding a slower life, a gentler life—perhaps now being choked by a bastard conception of itself contributed by NASCAR and suburbia, but that is another article.

This is not the case when visiting the Lowcountry. Here was a grand south. It wasn’t coarse or burly. Rather, a place of medieval roles, and satin and show. It was Bath, England, circa 1750. The rich of London would chart over rolling green hills to an oasis of wealth, a place to be seen, a social calendar to be kept; and now, a lifestyle extinct—personal empires bearing a class made completely for leisure. This is the life preserved by the architectural board of Charleston. And their pride forced silence as this life died with shots fired indignantly on Fort Sumter just across the bay—the baton never passed on. Like Bath, their memory is preserved in stone and brick and tattered dresses in glass museum displays. The architecture captures the spirit, and visitors, as they do in Bath, stroll along its edges breathing in its dust and listen to preserved memories.

Money, if studied, should be admired for its compounding interest. The South’s ebullient lifestyle had compounded into deadlock. Spiked barbed iron replaced ivy along the windows of Charleston’s finest homes on the eve of the Civil War; whites feared a slave revolt at any time. Instead the Civil War came, and afterwards for one hundred years, life moved on in a trance. Some remained, most survived, but the city’s warmth was snuffed right out. Now it is in the business of preservation—it realizes what was there and the war that pride let fight killed it. And now it preserves what’s left for a state and country to remember. Before the cannons there were slaves and these slaves on rich soil brought wealth for a lifestyle attested to through architecture—with the slaves freed and schools integrated, a new economy has developed with money returning to remember what was and preserve what’s left.

The concierge drew a squiggled line on the map, “Don’t go past here at night, in the day your fine, but not at night, it’s dangerous at night.” The northern neck of the Charleston-peninsula is in transition. Money is providing renewal, transition for all of the Lowcountry—the coastal region of Charleston through Savannah. Later at checkout another hotel employee added, “I live down the street from a crack house and a house that just sold for half a million; we’re in transition.” Go see it before it’s all polished up and the lines grow longer.

-Van
June 2005