by Matt Weiland
But the past is not what it used to be, either. Two leveling forces—Republican politics and Hurricane Hugo—have recently managed to homogenize the state and, I fear, relieve the fundamental tension of South Carolina.
Throughout most of the South in the eighties, the old-line Southern Democrats were being driven from office by a wave of new Reagan Republicans. The populist presentation of this new Republican was very working class, very pickup truck, very red-neck, very upstate. It was the Moral Majority and Baptist preachers. It was NASCAR and trucks, guns and dogs, lots of church-going. There was not a lot of party-indulging or looking the other way for a bit of pot-smoking. While there was some cotillion-attending and society dancing, not so much since the new Republican was trying to shed the country-club image. The appeal of the new blue-collar hard-working Republican red-neck became so engaging a symbol that I started seeing him far outside the South. In the early 1990s, I began to see the Confederate flag on pickup trucks in Connecticut. Young Republicans everywhere saw in the red-neck a pure emblem of the American rebel in political revolt against all that Democrats had come to symbolize—deficit spending, bureaucratic incompetence, internationalism.
The appealing character of the Southern red-neck became attractive to everyone. Lewis Grizzard was the first to work Tobacco Road for jokes, doing for red-necks what Erma Bombeck was doing for housewives.
Now we live in a world of red-necks—Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Foxworthy, King of the Hill, Larry the Cable Guy, Bill Engvall. One of SIRIUS Radio’s most popular business moves was wrangling the “Blue Collar Comedy” Channel. After this kind of comedy’s stunning success in movies, concerts, books, and DVDs, SIRIUS issued a press release when it happened in 2006, boasting, “Blue Collar brand expands to satellite radio.” Red-neck is a brand now, like shampoo.
And people adopted that brand, especially politicians. George Allen was a fake Southerner who served as the senator from Virginia, but grew up in California. As a young man, he moved to Virginia, developed a twang, and got so far into character he publicly ridiculed a dark-skinned man as “macaca” and lost his job.
The most famous fake Southerner, of course, is George W. Bush, born in New Haven, Connecticut; reared amid the breezy glades of Kennebunkport, Maine; schooled at Andover, Yale, and Harvard—as Yankee a pedigree as one could possibly imagine. Yet as a young adult he moved to Texas, learned to speak cowboy, got hisself a pickup truck, found a hat, and just a few months before he began his presidential campaign, he bought that Crawford ranch.
Red-neck chic happened all over the South. For a lot of us, it was amazing throughout the 1980s to watch the diverse South suddenly get so quickly homogenized and then encased in the tacky amber of RC Colas, squirrel pie, and mayonnaise Jell-O molds. I grew up eating and doing none of this stuff, and yet, everywhere I went, I was suddenly expected to share my presumed expertise on Coca-Cola as birth control, the recipe for roadkill gumbo, and the pleasures of incest.
Outfits like the Center for the Study of Southern Culture opened for business and it seemed that one side effect of their existence was to stamp one popular version of the South across the land. There was no room for an Elvis-dissenter anymore. We were all hound dogs now.
In Charleston, I just assumed that our native arrogance would serve as a bulletproof shield to this change. But these flattening forces proved inexorable. Sure, the bachelor balls are still held, but the pickup trucks are everywhere. The emphasis is on the good old boy. Friends I used to sail with and who never got anywhere close to a NASCAR race when we were little now insist to my face that they’ve always loved the Darlington 500. The Charleston accents of my generation now ring with an unconsciously Bushian twang. Folks who used to tell me belittling jokes about hicks now send me emails headed, “You may be a red-neck if …”
These delicate differences that defined South Carolina (and the rest of the South, too) have been composted into a giant steaming mulch pile of faux Republican red-neckism. And yet, Charleston could easily have pulled out of even this sweeping cultural shift, except that in the middle of it all came the most powerful hurricane in decades: Hugo. Late one evening, in September 1989, I watched it come ashore on Nightline in my apartment in New York City. Ted Koppel had on some goofy professor of meteorology who was standing in a wind tunnel to show us the effect of hurricane winds. They turned on the machine and ratcheted up the speed to simulate what Hugo was doing right then to my hometown. I watched as the professor’s cheeks melted into rubber and started beating the back of his head.
I got worried.
I called my sister on the telephone at about quarter of midnight. She was in her house with her family and my mother. I had called earlier that day and my mother had insisted that hurricanes weren’t really that big a deal. Now, this is all I heard: “Can’t talk now, brother, trees have fallen on the house, opened up the roof. Hugo is in the house. We’re retreating to the back rooms. Pray for us.” Click.
I ran around my New York apartment in total despair. I called my friend, Gus, another Charlestonian across town. He was already talking to another Charlestonian, John, and they were gassing up a car to drive home and save their parents. They picked me up and a few minutes later, we were on I—95, traveling near twice the speed limit. Driving through the night, we arrived in Charleston, miraculously, at lunchtime the next day.
Part of the way, we took a back highway we thought might be less clotted with fallen-over trees and on that drive we saw true Lowcountry horror. Entire swaths of longleaf pine trees laid over uniformly on their sides, as if some vengeful giant had decided to sit down on the Francis Marion Forest. Everywhere, images of powerful destruction. Those big interstate signs? Balled up like green tissue on the side of the road. Ancient live oaks, half a millennium old, lifted right out of the ground, lying unnaturally on their sides. In curiously cleared-out areas, we saw eerie orange fluff snagged in the nearby trees—baffling for a moment until we realized we were looking at insulation and all that was left of a mobile home.
For Charlestonians, it is safe to say, Hugo was taken in stride. After all, Charlestonians were used to it. We all grew up looking at Matthew Brady’s famous pictures of the collapsed heaps on Meeting Street, the rubble left by so much Civil War cannonade. We all grew up looking at pictures of the charred houses after the Great Fire. We all grew up looking at snapped church spires from earlier storms, or the hideous Depression-era photos of Market Street, populated only by man-sized buzzards snacking on dead cats.
What was Hugo but another in a long line of these? Wouldn’t we weather this? Rebuild? Hold on as our ancestors did? I stayed in Charleston for two weeks, helping my sister’s family clear a half dozen trees off her house. And when my mom and I finally got downtown, her house’s first floor was filled with water, the ancient family rug buried under five inches of mud. We shoveled it out and set to fix things. Everyone in town was up to the same work. It’s what Charlestonians did—start the slow journey back to normal life.
Only one thing was different now. It wasn’t slow this time. This time there was massive amounts of insurance money (over $2 billion) to rebuild houses and lots of FEMA funds to fix everything else (roughly $300 million). The Federal Emergency Management Association. For years, we’d always derided it as the Florida Emergency Management Association.
Now Charleston was suddenly on the receiving end of all that insurance and federal money. Within a year, the town was more spruced up than it has been since Ben Franklin started a newspaper there. Everybody had a new paint job, the bricks got repointed, every house was refurbished pretty much at the exact same time. This had never happened and suddenly the architectural jewel of the South was photographed everywhere, written about everywhere, seen by everyone. A slow trend of noticing Charleston that had begun with the Spoleto Festival and a PR campaign delicately drawing the upstate/Lowcountry distinction (“South Carolina’s Best Preserved Secret”) now picked up galloping momentum. Outsiders, really rich outsiders, looked at these
old beautiful houses and started bidding up the prices.
Poverty, which had long protected the city from outside markets, was gone. The city was all gussied up for the first time, and the sales started to click. I remember hearing that my cousin Ashmead’s house was up for sale and, sitting in New York, I flipped to the back of the New York Times Magazine to see one of those quarter page ads. His house was selling for close to a million, an unheard of sum of money. I called friends to marvel at it without realizing this was no anomaly to celebrate but a bull market starting to stampede. Within the decade, Charlestonians sold their city right out from under themselves. (In 2003, Ashmead’s house went for $6.9 million.)
The number of super-wealthy software jockeys and corporate chieftains who wanted to own a “Charleston house” overwhelmed downtown. (Confession: My family talked my mom into selling her modest place and moving across the Cooper River.) The exodus began and my regular visits home often had me bypassing the very part of town where I grew up. Instead, I found myself in Mount Pleasant or out on Wadmalaw Island or renting a house on the beach.
Now when I go downtown, it’s like taking a walk on a Hollywood set. The houses are all, still, extremely well maintained. They are painted every year after a hot summer of salty wind. The slate roofs are perfectly set. And the new immigrants in Charleston have a name: house collectors. These words are uttered with withering disdain (in Mount Pleasant and Wadmalaw). The phrase refers to those itinerant plutocrats who bought the houses and maybe show up in the spring, when the air is still cool enough to sit out on the porch. Their friends fly in aboard their private jets, they hold a big party, and then they are gone. The emptiness they leave behind is palpable. The city I grew up in pedaling my bike everywhere has almost no bikes, kids, or people—other than organized tours—walking the streets. We used to make fun of the John D. Rockefeller—built Potemkin village of a colonial town called Williamsburg, Virginia. But increasingly—and it pains me to say this—the new Charleston with its swarm of tour guides in tri-corner hats or hoop skirts looks a whole lot like it.
The loathing of these outsiders has even wormed its way into the law. One of the great ladies of historic Charleston, Phyllis Walker, helped to create a new kind of property covenant called a “primary resident easement.” It attempts to insure that homes will only be sold to locals or at least to people who intend to live in them for most of the year. But it’s probably too late.
With the Great Charleston Diaspora, the old city feels scattered around itself, out on those islands and smaller towns where the older folks (like my mom) now live, as if in waiting. I get the sense that the old Charlestonians believe that the house collectors will eventually feel the local disdain for their drive-by love of our architecture and eventually sell their places at a tremendous loss back to the people who have always lived there and then go away.
I’m not sure that’s going to happen. The free market has ended a very long reign and, with it, has alleviated the tension that defined the state of South Carolina. Charleston is no longer a place. As the real estate ads put it so brutally, Charleston now is a “lifestyle.” Anybody with enough money can live it. For the first time in a long run, Charlestonians and South Carolinians have to wonder just what “there” can be salvaged now amid the exploding Floridian sprawl of generic golf courses, cookie-cutter marinas, and gated communities with cotton-candy names like Reverie on the Ashley, The Preserve at Fenwick Plantation, Sable on the Marsh, and, my favorite for sheer naïveté: Rivertowne.
A while back, I was interviewing the former CEO of PepsiCo. In the opening chat of the conversation, he detected a bit of a Charleston accent come out of my mouth and asked me where I grew up. I told him.
“Oh, I love Charleston,” he said. Yes, I replied, it is unquestionably a beautiful place.
“I have a house there,” he told me. Oh, I said, where? What street? He seemed surprised.
“You would know the street?” he asked. I told him that everyone downtown knows every street, every house. I could draw the entire downtown tomorrow from memory with as much precision as James Joyce could draw Dublin.
“Meeting Street,” he said.
“Ah! Where? What number?” I replied.
“Oh, come on,” he laughed. “You’d know the number?”
Pretty much, I insisted. My friend Parker lived at 76 Meeting and Canty was 40-something. Charlotte was in the 30s probably, and the Bennetts, too. The Hawks were at number 1—
He stopped me, apparently in awe. I explained to him that this was nothing to anybody who grew up there. The place just isn’t that big and we all grew up running in and out of each other’s houses.
“I don’t know the number,” he confessed. “I haven’t yet visited the house in Charleston. I’ve never been there.”
SOUTH DAKOTA
CAPITAL Pierre
ENTERED UNION 1889 (40th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From the name of a Sioux tribe meaning “allies”
NICKNAMES Mount Rushmore State or Coyote State
MOTTO “Under God the people rule”
RESIDENTS South Dakotan
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 1
STATE BIRD ring-necked pheasant
STATE FLOWER American pasqueflower
STATE TREE black hills spruce
STATE SONG “Hail! South Dakota”
LAND AREA 75,885 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Hughes Co., 8 mi. NE of Pierre
POPULATION 775,933
WHITE 88.7%
BLACK 0.6%
AMERICAN INDIAN 8.3%
ASIAN 0.6%
HISPANIC/LATINO 1.4%
UNDER 18 26.8%
65 AND OVER 14.3%
MEDIAN AGE 35.6
SOUTH DAKOTA
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
The idea of traveling to South Dakota for vacation had been all mine. I hit upon it one night in my apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I was casually flipping through a glossy travel magazine with my wife, Karen, when I spotted a photograph of a bighorn sheep standing in the middle of the Badlands and gazing seductively at the camera.
“Let’s go there!” I said.
South Dakota had an exotic quality to me, despite the fact that it was located in the center of the United States. It would be like going to another country: Finland, maybe. The Lower East Side, after all, was the epitome of East Coast urban living, concrete and steel and so many orthodox Jews that the elevator in my apartment building had been programmed to stop on every floor during the Sabbath to avoid the proscription on work.
After that, Karen did the research and made the phone calls, occasionally presenting various options about things to do and places to visit—none of which I had any real opinion about. The Badlands: Sure. The Black Hills: Why not? Mount Rushmore: Might as well.
“Do you want to go trout fishing?” she’d ask.
“Sure,” I’d say. “What the hell?”
I’d never been trout fishing before—I’d never been fishing before—but it didn’t matter. The whole trip felt like an adventure and I was up for anything. None of my friends had ever traveled to South Dakota or had ever even considered traveling there—and I liked that. I believed that it revealed in me a certain pioneering spirit.
“South Dakota!” friends would say with alarm when I told them where we were going. “What’s there to do in South Dakota?”
“Trout fishing,” I’d say casually.
When we arrived at the Rapid City Regional Airport, it seemed so minuscule and empty that it reminded me of an elementary school after hours. I took that to mean that South Dakota is also minuscule and uninhabited. To judge by the airport, there were also no black people living in South Dakota. There were, however, American Indians. I knew this because of an enormous exhibit of black-and-white archival portraits that had been donated by the Farm Bureau of Western South Dakota and which took up an entire wall next to the bathroom.
I studied the display. “Dedicated to the good will and better
understanding of all people,” a plaque read. The giant photos were of a reunion that had been held some sixty years ago in Custer State Park for the survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Nine elderly Indian men with grim faces and names like Dewey Beard and Iron Hawk sat in a grassy field, both singularly and then as a group, staring off into the distance toward their childhood selves caught in the midst of slaughter. The Indians were dressed traditionally in long-sleeved shirts with modest zigzag patterns, and on their heads they wore enormous fluffy feathered headdresses. It was billed as a reunion but it didn’t appear to be a festive one. It looked dismal and disheartening, and it led me to wonder if the Indians had been costumed by a Farm Bureau publicist. The whole thing looked more like an unfortunate picnic in which many invitations had been sent but only nine had bothered to show up. Those nine now lamented their decision.
The plan in South Dakota was for us to spend four days in the Badlands and then four days in the Black Hills. Our first order of business, however, was to go grocery shopping. This was no small matter. Karen and I are both vegetarians, or as close to being vegetarians as one can be while occasionally eating chicken or beef, and we had paid extra to have a cabin with a kitchen. Our diet was comprised not just of organic fruits and vegetables, but also of a complicated mixture of whole grains and beans and nuts and oils and rice milk and small wild fish, all of which my nutritionist had patiently counseled me on, and all of which Karen had cautioned me might not be easily available in South Dakota. “All they eat is beef,” she said, “and not just beef but bison beef.” In preparation for our trip, we had briefly considered bringing along with us a week’s worth of brown rice and black beans and agave nectar and other staples, but as the list grew longer we soon saw the impracticality of this. Instead, Karen had discovered online a health food store in Rapid City, apparently one of two in the entire state. So instead of packing our suitcase with beans, we packed it with our eight-quart Fagor pressure cooker, which we then stuffed with our underwear and socks.