In a Sweet Magnolia Time

by Wintner, Robert;

  But all was not cheerful in Mudville. Oh, the place had a soul of its own; it talked back, echoing my mumbles and murmurs as if to remind me of my foolishness. That house would outlive me surely as nature would carry on post-Covingdale, indifferently or otherwise, so I moved officially out to what I considered the beginning and the end of what this Lowcountry is, which is nature, so the carrying on could begin while I was still around to enjoy it.

  “I’m Arthur Covingdale,” I’d tell the marsh from time to time in those first days out, watching the flats rise in the falling tide. I watched she crab and Jimmy snuggle in the mud and whole crowds of oysters pop and squirt—watched them up close like I hadn’t seen them before.

  I was a white male, fifty-eight, stronger than I’d been in years, hardly affluent but humbly independent on paper. I didn’t need to rise at dawn or head out in the freezing salt spray or bloody my knuckles on crab pots or feel my limbs go numb, unless I wanted to feel the thaw by noon, heart and hands. The marsh populated with souls, with characteristics, appetites and inclinations. She crab and Jimmy clawed at the detritus and ate as the clumps dissolved. I too reached and fed. It was the climate, I thought, the thick air and slow pace that let the years slip by, meaningless but for numbering regrets. Past and present got fused in the region on a promise for more of the same, dead ahead.

  Charleston is still a fossil; time is the Southern glacier. Whatever changes here is first considered a hundred years. Then the little town grumbles forward reluctantly, its ancient lunacies crumbling to the sea. Then with considerable ballyhoo, we are revealed and reveled anew for adapting yet again to modern times. Don’t we?

  My floe drifts from the day Waties Waring got buried at Magnolia Cemetery. The distance between now and then seems greater every year, though in the long view the years seem one and the same, evenly quartered by the seasons.

  IV

  Jim Cohen

  The road south out of Charleston even then penetrated a thicket of franchise food lights and traffic swarming like flies on road kill. It didn’t feel like the old South or the new South or any South but the one South of how it used to be, going ugly to uglier to ugliest of all time and uglier still, till you’d swear they brought in the ugly consultants from the Great Progressive North to get things so far along and then pressed a might further for the more, more, more of the thing, because enough is never enough, unless you’re unpatriotic, and because nobody around here could have thunk up anything this dog-ass ugly. The view made me feel ugly just passing through, heading into the core of it, down Savannah Highway past the International House of Pancakes headed toward the K-Mart with plenty of free parking. Jim Cohen pointed to his usual spot for peddling Promise Land Produce across from Bessinger’s Barbecue, where the produce Cadillac had sat like it was built there and not meant to move ever until today, when he pressed his luck and maybe proved it wasn’t.

  Things aired out some in a few miles, back then, and the bridge over the Stono River flattened into a causeway crossing tidal marshlands to the horizon. It was a road again at the forest on the far side and ran on south through a long tunnel of live oak boughs down Johns Island to another bridge crossing over to Hoopstick Island that sits in the middle of Church Creek. Hoopstick is hardly an acre of marsh grass on a sharp bend marking the point where the creek changes names; it’s called Church Creek to the west and Bohicket to the south, seaward. Church Creek was freshwater with largemouth bass in the cypress roots and knees until the south side of Hoopstick Island got blown and dredged in 1915 to make a shorter sail from Charleston. The new route cut two hours off the trip. The cypress died of salt intrusion, and the bass disappeared, giving rise to my first real sense of loss. I was a child of six, but you can’t underestimate the sudden loss of what deeply impresses a child. One season it was monstrous bass out of Church Creek, and the next year we couldn’t go, just because we no longer had a reason.

  Moreover, crossing the rivers south of Charleston you sensed a division between the time consumed and the timeless. Charleston remained engaged in futility, striving for more, even if only more chitchat over things that wouldn’t change because nobody wanted them to, not then, not now, not ever. Not a mean place, rarely cruel or gothic and never lynch-mob minded as most Northern accounts portray the South; it was only a village, nosey, dull and proud of its age. What isn’t 17 this or 18 that is either English or embarrassing. Time is frozen there, on display.

  Jim Cohen may have shared these and other reflections on life and changing perspective on our drive south. I watched the countryside change shape and color, going that late in the day from gray to yellow as the sun broke through a cleave in the clouds, then to orange and gray again as the fissure closed and the river gained speed, emptying headlong to another slack ebb. I watched the scenery, taken yet again by its overwhelming beauty, its marshlands to the horizon asking the most difficult question thereabout: Why has it been so long since you last feasted your eyes on this beauty you were born into? Jim looked straight ahead. They say beauty becomes a common denominator, a baseline from which greater beauty is required, in which the beautiful rush may again be felt. May be, and I suspected straight ahead was the direction he most often stared, because it was the direction most integral to his survival.

  Another twelve miles from Church Creek is Rockville, the summer village for those who can afford it. No franchise food lights here, only a Negro grocery, deserted, and a piccalo four miles up, Johnston Baby Grand & 66/Beer, Moonpies, Slim Jims, RC, Penrose Sausage, Can Corn Beef, Pickle Eggs & Sundries. They got Vienna (vy-éena) Sausage too, and pickle pig feets, but nobody ever bothered with updating the signage, because everybody knew. Hell, you could see the pig feets sitting right there on the counter, big old gallon jug with the toenails sticking up just over that white film covering the brown water. People mulled outside among the cars, carrying on, young people mostly, and the stovepipe smoked.

  The dirt road a mile before Rockville is easily missed since it opens between two live oak boughs reaching across from either side, drooping down and arching again back up like thousands of others along the roadside, twisting and groping to close the opening, barely wide enough for a Fleetwood Brougham but with room to spare for a Mercedes, which worked out fine when Jim informed me that the Cadillac wouldn’t fit and didn’t need to no how, because that’s where the produce would be sold, meaning right now, on the road rightchere. So we backed and forthed. He got out for the finagle, so we could signal and yell at each other, ignoring each other and yelling some more until I got it right. What the hell he had to yell about I don’t know. I was behind the damn wheel, so what’d he expect, I’d do it his way?

  All I wanted was to unhitch that pile of junk from my car and get home, though the afternoon was sorely beautiful out there, and home waited like a solitary confinement, maybe self-imposed but I plain did not want company that evening and couldn’t even go for groceries without running the gauntlet of stares and whispers and the boldest, meaning most compassionate, among them asking in confidence, How you making out with this?

  So maybe it was easy and natural to give on in and do as I was told when Jim pulled two folding chairs from the produce Cadillac and with one big foot shoved the winter crops from where the back seat used to be to where the trunk used to be, saying he hadn’t used them for years, trunk lids nor back seats neither one, and frankly couldn’t see much sense of driving a truck when he could ride in a Cadillac. He told me to sit down and enjoy a spell.

  Seemed too near the road, practically in it, but then that hardly mattered with no traffic. So we sat much as we’d sat on the drive down, in silence, till he broke into a story, his story, neither solicited nor in the least prompted by me, leaving me to wonder why. Didn’t I get enough jabber in town, and didn’t I want free of it? But I got to say, old Jim could spin a yarn and seemed to have a load on his chest and seemed to want a man like me, meaning white, meaning town-bred, meaning a man unlike himself, to pour this one into.

 
So I sat, willing to give him five minutes, or ten or even twenty, and his mellifluous way of telling a thing, spinning the yarn with one hand while at the same time carving up the language like a chef on a turkey with a real sharp knife in the other. I followed him as best I could, not minding what parts I couldn’t, feeling easy for the first time all day, fitting in with the time and place after a rough go with something or other I couldn’t quite get a fix on. But then I grew up here, so of course I could get a fix on it, that language and way of seeing things as unavoidable as the mud and the tides; I knew the problem full well and heard it round about in a telling of a different complexion from any I’d heard. So I relaxed for the listen. Hell, I had time.

  The Lowcountry patois is two similar dialects, Gullah and Geechee, both true hybrids of different languages, both based on English but leaning hard on French with some Gypsy and pig latin and a dash of just right twangs in the mix. An untrained ear can’t tell one from the other. Both dialects conform to rules of conjugation, unlike a pidgin or slang that depends on assumed meaning with regular nodding, grunting and snorting by both the speaker and listener. A slang or pidgin has no structure and therefore no precise meaning but rather an understood, or rather presumed meaning, which in most applications comes to less meaning conveyed than what one dog tells another by the smell of his butt hole.

  Gullah do, as do Geechee too, convey meaning far more precisely. I can get by in either dialect, but I can’t stand in the road in heady palaver like the out-island blacks do. They’d know I’m from here, meaning way far south of Jersey, soon as they see me, or, short of that, soon as I speak, but they needn’t see nor hear either one, since they know me anyway and know they’ll not speak a thing past me. But I can’t hold my own; or maybe I can, if I redefine my own, disabusing it from the constant self-assertion required in town, both socially and professionally, though the two most often overlap. What I’m getting at is what Jim Cohen felt compelled to tell me, with no need for my opinion, assessment or two cents otherwise.

  Once upon a time, way back when, no light shone from either bank of Bohicket Creek or above it. Little bitty waves whispered to the black night. The north bank answered in kind and then some: pluff mud squished between toes till feet sank in a soft spot to the knees. Ploosh. A bushel basket pressed into the mud bore a body’s weight, allowing the feet up from the suck.

  They sank shallower till they didn’t sink at all, till they crunched on dull-edged oyster shells. They stopped, and the man they bore bent and reached for the razor edge of good oysters. Clouds rolled from under a crescent moon, and the sliver spilled shadows on the earth. One was man. Two stars fell for his eyes.

  Turning the basket over, upside down, he sat on it as if relieving a great burden. Sighing deeply he pulled the knife from his belt and reached again for oysters. He pried the shell open, deftly cut the muscle, slurped it down and nearly sang down the north bank:

  Shoooooweeee! Dem good!

  Scooting down the bank, drinking John Allston’s brandy from a silver flask, he judged the libation as well: Ahhh … Etchings danced around the monogram A that shone through the filigree. Gulps and gurgles blended with the creek’s babble. Ah … the man said, reaching again and eating again, repeating as necessary in a rhythm rote as the seasons and cycles, content as nature’s interlude of food and rest, until the crescent set, a billion stars thinned, and a voice called as if demanding order on this, the dawn of civilization:

  “Luuuzon!” Branches cracked from up the bank. The man stooped, pulled the basket out from under, turned it right side up and reached again for oysters, big, single whitefoots that chucked into the basket with a dramatic clunk appropriate to such an effort of gathering oysters like these for the folks, up before dawn to take advantage of the low tide, so these morsels might meet the lips of the chosen few.

  The basket filled as the voice drew nigh, as the flood came forth and over it another flood of molten light. Elizabeth Allston stepped clear of the trees onto a limb, breaking it with a snap of authority. Regaining her composure and stopping akimbo, she announced once more, “Luzon!” The man looked up, then down to crown the bushel with three gems, regal individuals that would dare any man or beast to leave things unopened, unslurped and unsavored. Then he raised the basket overhead and let it settle on one shoulder as he faced the direction of the woman now approaching. He would have strode to meet her, but the creek trickling through the oyster beds to the flask at his feet shimmered till both the surface and the flask shone brilliant silver in first, blinding light. Not to worry; with one easy step the flask sank under the big slew foot, mashing it into the mud and removing the evidence of all but the best intentions. The brilliance remaining was no less than sunrise with its magnanimous light that reached across Bohicket and out the Edisto to the sea. “Luzon!” And Luzon’s dazzling grin.

  “Aw, Missy Bet. Gawt dem awshtuh. Look heah. Dem whitefoots … Aw, Missy.” Setting the bushel down he straightened, darker still in sunrise silhouette.

  “What, you pick up one and eat two and call it getting oysters?”

  Mud sequins clung daintily to her dressing gown, golden locks to satin bodice, adorning the lacey abundance. She tapped a shoe, a sure sign of displeasure and key indication the lie was known. He counted on his instinct and her appetite, deftly shucking a notable select from the summit, just as skillfully severing the muscle and presenting the offering cleanly, neither mud flecks nor shell fragments nor black skin touching the slithery gob. He offered. She took. She examined. He laughed loud as a cock on a fence, “Ha haaaa!…”

  “Luzon!” But she went mum on the slurp and swallow and stayed mum when the oyster slipped back up for a chew or two and mum still for the slide back down. “Mm! Luzon. You say you fixing to load the wagon by morning. Y’ax for two nickels, you get two nickels.”

  “Dem awshtuh,” he offered, offering another.

  “But where you been? Eat oysters all night? Great God, when it come to niggers, Luzon, you about worthless.”

  “Gawt dem awshtuh, Missy.”

  “Git on! And where be my two nickels?”

  “Two nickel?” He scratched here and there.

  “Git on.” So they walked together up the bank, single file, she leading the way and rambling as well over her son leaving for college today and what it means to a young man like John Junior and what paltry little bit a nigger might be expected to do on such a momentous occasion. Luzon grunted agreement under his bushel burden, so she stopped and turned to ask rhetorically just how much time one nigger might need to shuck this here bushel. Nodding profusely again he assured it wouldn’t take but no time at all. She said she’d give him the morning, and it better be done or else. He laughed again across the flooding creek as if it was good as done.

  A hundred twenty years later a descendant’s belly shook with laughter, though only across the flooding ditch across the road from Jim Cohen’s Promise Land Produce Cadillac. Jim propped his legs on the back bumper for the tell, as if the tell was why we came, or why I came at any rate, or rather why I got dragged out there. We hadn’t seen a car in either direction since arriving, but he didn’t seem to care, just leaned over till he liked to fall out his folding chair so he could pass gas, then leaned back, setting in with his feet stuck into the winter crops, Jerusalem artichokes and winter corn mostly, piled in his trunk. He said a man ought to take what he knows is his, even if another man thinks it’s stealing.

  I would have reminded him that the law is the law and does all the thinking in the end, but he was telling, not listening. He said you could call it revenge if you wanted to, but all it is is what it is.

  “All what is?”

  “Fuh true,” he said, pulling a silver flask from his bib pocket and swigging it half empty. He said it was good that I took this time today to join him and give a listen, because he really wouldn’t have the time to spare otherwise. I laughed heartily, because the man told a joke with timing, delivery and a punch line that caught me off guard. I l
aughed short, out of courtesy, realizing Jim’s sincere effort, squeezing me into his schedule like that, as if a bumpkin black’s time could possibly bill out anywhere near the hourly rate of a Broad Street lawyer. “’Side dat, you ain’ do-een nuffin’ better’n watchin’ de judge get de shovel, I sho could use de han’.” That is, he could use a little help unloading, because you can’t expect to sell the damn produce if you don’t unload it from the car. You got to set it up in a display to make it look good. Otherwise, folks won’t want to stop for a looksee, unless it looks good, you see.

  “If you so keen on a display, what in hell we sittin’ around for?”

  “Wha’ you say? We laxin’, man.”

  I would have pressed him further on exactly what folks he had in mind who we were bound to please with a proper display, but he was already tugging a half sheet of plywood from behind the front seat along with another folding chair, requiring me to give up my seat, which seemed propitious, since I was due to take my leave. He saw it coming and said don’t worry, we’d use the bumper to hold up the other end of the plywood. Then he motioned me over, indicating that the best way to teach me how to do this would be for him to do it first, while I paid attention. I laughed again, couldn’t help it.

  No matter who says what about what was or might have been, last year I’d got a hundred dollars an hour, one of three attorneys in town to warrant that kind of fee. Repeat: one hundred dollars for one hour. He laughed too, reaching for a burlap bag from the shotgun foot well and laying it open to reveal a half-bushel or so of oysters. They smelled all right. “Dey good,” he said. “I git a week now. Dey be’s awright,” meaning he could count on oysters staying alive and fresh for a week out of water in winter. He went back in for a squeeze bottle of French’s mustard, set it on the back bumper, reached in his bibs for his oyster knife, shucked an oyster neat and held it steady as a seventy-three-year-old man can while smothering the sumbitch in mustard.