I was born in a beautiful place with a haunted past, and consequently
I've spent most of my adult life homesick and geographically ambivalent.
I write these lines from Land's End, Saint Helena Island, South
Carolina. I'm staying at the same funky beach cottage I loved
to visit as a child. Like so many Southern houses, it's mostly
porch, and I look out on a lush and watery landscape: live oaks,
palmetto trees, a placid gray stretch of sea. Down on the beach,
where the Beaufort River meets the Port Royal Sound, fiddler crabs
scurry past an elegant egret. In November 1861, the island's planters
gathered at Land's End to watch the Battle of Port Royal Sound.
When it became clear that the Confederate cannons at Hilton Head
couldn't even reach most of the Union fleet, the white citizens
of Saint Helena fled -- but most of their slaves refused to go
with them and stayed on, free at last.
I abandoned the Carolina low-country in 1969, when I was barely
17. I was hell-bent for Manhattan, but every time I came home
to this landscape I was filled with longing. I'm filled with it
still. The sky, golden and purple by turns, has changed a hundred
times today. In the distance a low rumble sounds: It could be
one of the islands' razzle-dazzle electrical storms, or it might
be the Marine rifle range at Parris Island, across the river.
My difficulty perceiving which is which mirrors the way I've always
confused the geographical and political landscapes of this county.
I grew up in the nearest town, Beaufort, on Port Royal Island.
It was, and is, a picture-postcard place. My siblings and I spent
long afternoons tramping through piney woods, picking honeysuckle
and blackberries, deliciously terrified by the possibility that
we might meet wildcats or alligators. We came home flushed and
drugged from the dense damp heat. We lived in paradise -- unless
we were sunburned or covered with bug bites, which we invariably
were, and then our long night was spent in purgatory. When we
went to the beach, we might swim with porpoises, or the lifeguards
might call us from the water as a shark approached. The light
on the sea oats was otherworldly, the sea breeze sublime. But
we were always braced for storms, and in 1959 my family took shelter
from Hurricane Gracie in the high school gymnasium, where the
roof collapsed.
You see the pattern of my ambivalence.
I was the middle child of seven but the first born in the South,
and I claimed the role of Southerner despite my cultural ignorance.
My Yankee parents were tickled by Beaufortonians: the old men
in the Ocean View Café who spent the morning flirting,
cackling, telling stories; the society ladies who chatted with
exquisite false warmth. And they were frustrated by the exaggerated
accents, the slow-motion strolling, the way they couldn't buy
a cocktail unless they drove to a restaurant in Charleston that
had paid its bribes.
Beaufort, some 7,500 souls when I was growing up, held rich
and poor at a short arm's length from one another. We lived in
rude shacks, wobbly trailers, sweet cottages, grand mansions.
Nearly every afternoon I rode my bike along a stretch of tiny
tract houses rented by enlisted Marines. The houses grew bigger
the closer I got to Beaufort Bay where, beginning in the 18th
century, planters and cotton merchants built big pillared houses
angled to catch the breeze, their verandahs gracious and imposing
in equal measure. Because these islands were occupied so early
in the War Between the States (as my social studies teacher called
it), the great old houses were spared the destruction that befell
much of the South. Downtown Beaufort looked like a movie set,
and when I stopped on the bluff under a live oak festooned with
Spanish moss, I was an actress, playing a drawling, worldly Southerner.
If I was acutely aware of wealth and poverty, I was also pretty
sure my family's identity wasn't based on economics but on religion.
We were Catholics in the Protestant South. My father, a civilian
psychologist who screened recruits at Parris Island, drove to
work with a carpool of Catholic men, including my godfather J.
Carroll Stevenson, a 1946 Notre Dame alumnus and a charmer. Our
little church, Saint Peter's, was the center of our earthly existence.
Along the coast Catholics were plentiful enough to thrive. Though
we were officially designated a mission parish, we had three nuns
imported from New York and three priests -- a pastor and two curates
-- all witty and sophisticated enough to leave me with the mistaken
impression that Catholics were by definition intellectuals. We
were a jolly, social bunch: Catholics drank and smoked and danced,
and my Baptist friends were scandalized by our raucous ways. In
the summer we bunked at Camp Saint Mary's, on the Okatee River,
where we recited the Magnificat at picnic tables and met Catholic
kids from upstate who told us they tried to keep their religion
quiet, on account of the Klan. My mother insisted on the opposite:
We must let people know we were Catholic, and if we accidentally
wore a bit of orange on Saint Patrick's Day, back we went for
greener clothing.
Saint Peter's graveyard was full of Irish names, and between
local and Marine families we covered a good range of romantic
foreign forebears. But we didn't have a single African-American
family, and neither did any other white church in Beaufort. Segregation
was baffling. We all shopped side-by-side in the Piggly Wiggly,
but when we went to the doctor we huddled in separate waiting
rooms. I was ashamed when we sat downstairs at the movies -- no
wonder the boys in the colored balcony threw popcorn at us. The
only puzzle was why they didn't throw down worse. Behind our piano
teacher's house sat the squat slave quarters. Ghosts roamed our
town.
I don't recall racial segregation ever being mentioned in a
sermon at Saint Peter's, but it was discussed often enough at
our dinner table. My father didn't preach -- he was too much the
psychologist -- but he let us know he regarded civil rights as
the moral imperative of our time and our place. We were stunned
when workmen removed our beloved soda fountains from the drugstores
downtown, so they wouldn't be integrated, and one Saturday we
gaped at a pathetic little gathering of the Klan. In the back
streets, and out on the islands, the poverty was as striking as
the sunset on the salt marshes: Many descendants of slaves lived
in shacks that lacked plumbing or glass windows or both. Beaufort
County, with its antebellum mansions and plantation houses, was
also so poor that it was the subject of the first congressional
hearings on food stamps.
We had no sit-ins in Beaufort -- the counters, after all, had
been removed -- but in 1960 the first African American elected
to office in South Carolina since Reconstruction joined the Beaufort
County Council. Martin Luther King Jr. paid visits to the Penn
Center, the thriving community center on Saint Helena's. And when
our segregated schools were finally placed under a "freedom-of-choice"
plan in 1963, a brave teenager named Roland Washington integrated
Beaufort High School all by himself. White townspeople raised
funds to open a segregated academy and asked my father if he wouldn't
consider sending his large brood. He answered that he wouldn't
dream of sending his children to a private academy, just when
we'd have the privilege of attending integrated public schools,
and he said it so graciously he might have been a Southerner himself.
The first African-American students at Beaufort High were paragons
of dignity and converted more than a few segregationists -- but
I'm still not sure how they kept their patience or their sanity.
I remember a shy, wan boy who claimed he'd "shot him a nigger"
and vivacious white girls chiding "nigger lovers." I also had
white friends who were transformed, utterly, by integration. But
when I graduated, my school was still disproportionately white
and deeply conservative about all matters social and political,
ranging from the approved fashion label to the conduct of the
Vietnam War. If I chafed against the ongoing lessons in How to
Be a Great Lady (lesson one: bat those eyelashes) and railed against
the Small-Mindedness of the South, I suppose I secretly rejoiced
that my little rebellions looked outsize in Beaufort. It didn't
appear that I was doomed to be a Southern belle anytime soon.
Besides, Beaufort attracted its share of artists and eccentrics,
all merrily defining themselves against a rigid social code. And
much of the town's easygoing warmth was not false at all: Beaufortonians
had learned how to roll with the tides and the winds and the changing
times.
When I imagined leaving Beaufort, I already missed the light,
the gnarled old trees, the creeks and marshes and ocean. I even
missed the disapproval. As I packed for New York, a friend's mother
said, sweetly: "Now, Val, don't let us turn on the television
and see you marching." I would remember her words a couple of
months later, when I looked into a camera's eye at an antiwar
demonstration. I felt a little guilty, a little smug. Those early
years in New York, I thought I was fast-forwarding through life,
catching up on all I'd missed in the South (foreign films! bagels
and lox! Greenwich Village!). But I longed for Beaufort.
After college, I dawdled in New York for one long summer, deciding
whether to return. My father had died suddenly a couple of years
before, and surely one of the reasons I finally moved back was
to mourn him properly, to contemplate his own ambivalence about
this place. The year he died, he was working on a manuscript about
Parris Island, where interviewing 17-year-old Marine recruits
preparing to ship out to Vietnam had made him seriously consider
pacifism for the first time in his life.
That year of my return to Beaufort, I taught at a brand-new
technical college, where my classes were almost evenly black and
white and full of frank, angry, forgiving talk about race. It
was a hopeful time to be living in the South, possibility crackling
everywhere. I was trying to write fiction, struggling with it
every night after teaching, and beginning to imagine a lifetime
in South Carolina. But I hedged my bets, and when I was accepted
to graduate school I headed back to Manhattan. Ambivalently.
If I weren't going to live in Beaufort, I would have to write
about it -- so I did, in five novels about a town called Due East.
I still write about Beaufort, a little compulsively, though it
isn't my place to claim anymore. The population of town has doubled
now, and the county is bursting with military retirees. Natives
cringe at the carriage tours rolling past the big houses, but
the annual Gullah Festival, celebrating the culture of African-American
sea islanders, is a hit. My favorite bumper sticker reads: We
really don't care how you did it up North. There's more money
than ever in Beaufort, and less dire poverty, thank God -- but
you can still drive down most any country road and see a rattletrap
trailer next door to a dream house out of Southern Living.
The novelist Pat Conroy -- who taught me at Beaufort High in a
classroom full of adoring students -- helped make this town famous,
and now it really is a movie set: My family members have been
extras in more films than I can count. I was dumbfounded when
Showtime made a film based on my first two novels and filmed it
in North, not South, Carolina -- didn't they know I'd promised
everybody parts?
I'm still drawn to my hometown, still fighting my attraction.
When I come, I spin fantasies involving funky cottages and old
age. I stand on the shore, listening to the rifle range where
young recruits train to go to Iraq, and can't help but think of
my father's dilemma during his last war. Geography is not just
topographical -- a place is social and moral, too, history and
politics and landscape all tugging at each other, and our birthplaces
can bring us solace and drive us to distraction. Beaufort still
haunts me, and so I imagine it over and over, recreating it till
I think, for a moment, that I've made my peace.
Valerie Sayers is a professor of English at Notre Dame. Her
five novels include Due East and How I Got Him Back.
(January 2006)
