Home by another way. A sense of Place.

One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. – Gaston Bachelard

Aren’t we all looking for home? For that one place that wraps us up in familiarity and nurture, a place that will ‘wait up for us’ and take us in? Exactly like we are? My search was long and winding, exciting and heart wrenching. I am headed into honest territory today, inspired by the writing of Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat Pray Love and The Last America Man. Her writing is dazzling, and has me talkin’ honest. This is the story of how I came to be right here, in the Carolina Lowcountry, happy as that black clam my Gullah neighbor, Fred, claims only he knows how to dig for out there in the pluff mud.

The quote above is by the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, whose book The Poetics of Space explores home by talking about sea shells and turrets and our memories of childhood. He speaks of the irony of pulling away while staying rooted, which is no small feat. I am a grandmother now, a Nahna: lucky, thrilled, pinching myself happy at my blessing. I am also, deliriously and contentedly, home.

For what felt like forever, my driving desire was to get away from home, away from the Carolinas of my childhood, from tradition, from what I felt were narrow boundaries of propriety. As the third child in my family with four, I somehow had more permission to go, and as soon as I could get married legally, I did, the only way that I knew, then, to get outta town. I spent blue warm winters in the American tropics, where oranges and key limes grew in the yard, where exotic lizards as big as cats climbed in our backyard tree that bloomed with so many flowers in winter it looked like a giant orange umbrella. In subsequent years, hungry to taste and smell everything this world had to offer, I loved a Canadian photographer I met in Maine because he lived on a perch in Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia and could cook and set up camp, so I got to see Canada and Colorado under the stars. Another travelin’ man took me to dream islands: Martha’s vineyard, and to Baja, the spit of California, that in renegade fashion meanders into the Pacific. I made pilgrimage to Paris with a musician; and a travel writer, knowing my hunger, let me bring a brand new poet lover when cancellations opened at the last minute on his small tour to Italy, where we found a poem about lemons by Pablo Neruda posted on a wall in a lemon grove in Amalfi and where I found fragile hand blown, red, glass cherries to carry home on my lap to remind me of Venice, a place whose magic helped me to recognize the sheer power of one evocative place.

Mine was a rich and rewarding traveling life. Until I was stopped in my tracks. The sound of home was calling to me from a place whose fragrance and flavor echoed generations of my grandmothers and grandfathers and who lived where I do now. From those very traditions I shunned earlier in my life. I was ready to see, to embrace, to love the history and values that yes, are about continuity. But I see it all more clearly now for having gone away. I do not take it for granted and I am surely more flexible for all the challenges of change along the way. This history is fresh to me now; the traditions are my own.

Eudora Welty, the Pulitzer Prize winning Southern writer from Jackson Mississippi, wrote about knowing one place well. She lived and wrote all her life in the one house in a small town. Flannery O’Connor, whose work is also deeply dazzling, said to write about what you know, and she did just that, in Milledgeville Georgia, a small town (worth a pilgrimage). There is so very much to explore in this one very small place in the world, so rich in history, beauty, inspiration. Who knew that all I wanted was right here at home, all along? Ah, to have eyes to see and ears to hear! That is the blessing!

Making Pilgrimage

The Dock Street Theatre

There is a magical corner in the city of Charleston. It is where Queen Street meets Church Street. The corner may be the most drawn, painted, and photographed in all of the city, a favorite of Charleston Renaissance artists Alfred Hutty and Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, and recently, for an artist who camped out all summer, in his van, painting an enormous canvas of the spot. What is the energy that enlivens this place? Certainly, it is the presence of the Dock Street Theatre, which is said to have been the first building built, in 1736, specifically for theatrical performances in America. Later, in the early 1800’s that building was renovated by Alexander Calder (who, some say, was related to Alexander Calder, the artist) into The Planters Hotel. The building complex is the last surviving antebellum hotel building in Charleston. Directly across the street is the French Huguenot Church, built on this site in 1687, which is the only remaining Huguenot church in America. Then there is St. Philips Episcopal Church, whose history harkens from the earliest days of Charles Town, the colony. Her pointing spire and imposing tower, built in the Wren-Gibbes tradition, anchors and reaches to the heavens in this neighborhood, now called the French Quarter. The engraving above is by Alfred Hutty.

This is a place that confirmed for me the power of pilgrimage. Some years ago, after years of searching, documenting, and graphing the ancestors, one of my goals was to find the house where Aunt Elizabeth Blanche Smith Torrans lived in the middle of the 18th century. From the fabulously interesting, and impeccably researched book about her younger brother, Joshua Hett Smith, (who was accused, then exonerated, of treason with Benedict Arnold!) called Accomplice in Treason (Richard J. Koke, published by the New York Historical Society, 1973) I learned that Elizabeth lived with her husband John Torrans at 36 Queen Street. Her younger sister Margaret Smith had married Alexander Rose and lived nearby. Their brother, Samuel, would move later to Beaufort, and three more siblings would eventually follow. Alexander Rose and John Torrans were merchants in the middle of the 18th century when Charleston was a bustling trade center, the hub of the Atlantic trade for the southern colonies, the wealthiest and largest city south of Philadelphia. (By 1770 it was the fourth largest port in the colonies, after only Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with a population of 11,000, of which slightly more than half were slaves) The Smiths of New York were children of Judge William Smith and Mary Dubois Het Smith. Elizabeth’s mother, whose beautiful portrait this is, was French Huguenot. Two of John and Elizabeth’s daughters, Rosella Torrans and Eliza Cochran, would be professional artists, landscape painters, according to David Ramsay, the great physician and South Carolina historian.

So imagine my thrill, on this pilgrimage to the places my ancestors walked, to saunter, address in hand, to this very magical corner and stand, awestruck, realizing that this very spot was where the house at 36 Queen Street would have been! A quote from a favorite book called The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau, in a chapter where he speaks of this very sort of pilgrimage says that people wonder what you are pursuing when you search for ancestors. He suggests telling the story about the thread. Pilgrimage is to go somewhere looking for the sacred. It is also about making meaning, and being able to see what is often right before our eyes! It’s about finding the ‘under glimmer’ about which, the poet, Basho, reminds us. It is the age old story, the same as the archetypal Greek myth of Ariadne, Theseus and the labyrinth. It is about going out to come back, about coming full circle, about finding the golden thread that leads us to our center.

The Spirit of a Place

“Dead I say? There is no death, I say, only a change of worlds.” – Chief Seattle

The Great Chief’s speech goes on to talk poetically about how those intent on destroying Native American lands (in Seattle) …”when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the white man, these shores will swarm with the invisble dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone…at night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land….Be just and deal kindly with my people…to us the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.” There is some dispute as to whether the great Indian chief wrote this inspiring speech, but, as in art, truth is not always the same as fact.

Charleston, as a place, has its own voice. Have you ever felt that in a place? When I visited Venice, and stepped out onto that earth and water, I felt the palpable presence of the stories of those who had walked there before me. And some years ago I discovered the principles of Chinese feng shui and dusted every corner of my house, and yes, it feels truly different than before I took the time to respect this place, this house.

So many cultures blended together to make Charleston a creole, from its beginning: the English, the Barbadians, the French Huguenot. The native Americans, and the African American cultures certainly revere the ancestors. This photograph is of a Gullah ‘bottle tree’ which reminds us of the spiritual world and is part of the great vernacular yard art tradition of Sea Island African American people.

My own mostly English family told historical stories, and collected the data to rattle off, about who, what and when. It was more of a left brain catalog of historical facts, I felt, growing up. Thinking the ancestors actually lived here now was too close to the superstitious for us, as respectable Episcopalians and Presbyterians. But we knew the stories and the legacy was important. My mother valued that old cedar chest passed down from her Aunt Caroline Martin Arnold, more than most anything in the house. And Charleston had an unusual population that early in her history recognized her value and insisted upon her preservation. The city began the historic preservation movement in the United States in 1920 when they formed the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings.

But there is even more reason I think. There is that spirit that Chief Seattle speaks of, and the one the Africans brought with them. An old song sung in church whose words recognize the Spirit, has a refrain that says “there’s a sweet, sweet spirit in this place.” I think I feel like part of that whole creole mix now, the mix that Charleston always was, and is today, and more and more what America is. There is a spirit in this place.

Why Remember?

“Memory is an act of redemption. What has been remembered has been saved from nothingness. What has been forgotten has been abandoned.” – John Berger, from About Looking

My daughter asked me once, “Why are you so interested in the ancestors?” She was genuinely puzzled, and truthfully, once you get into the genealogical mire of dates and names, it can appear to be mindless preoccupation with past glory. My grandparents’ generation could rattle off the ancestors, and in this part of the country, great pride was attached to this ability. The elders sat the young ones down, or paraded them past the portraits in the hallway, attaching story to the names.

The photograph illustrating this post was taken behind the tombstone of my grandfather many generations ago now, the Reverend William Hutson (1720-1761) who was a minister of this historic circle of a church on Meeting Street. The Circular Church, also called The White Meeting House, it was home to a mixture of Protestant dissenters that included English Congregationalists, French Huguenots, and Scottish Presbyterians. The magnificently preserved slate carved stones on either side of William Hutson’s, are of my grandmother, Mary Woodward, and his second wife, Mary Sarrazin Bryan Prioleau. The graveyard is one of the jewels of Charleston, containing some of the most beautiful headstone imagery in America.

But much of my generation, with the revolutionary eyes of the 1960’s, were just not interested in hearing about history that was complicated by the South’s role in segregation. Consequently, many of us do not know the family histories by heart anymore. But the ancestors simply called me, when I tripped over a headstone of a Woodward cousin, in of all places, Miami, Florida, while in college working on a photography project. One might call it serendipity. I remain motivated by the colorful stories that appear as unexpected surprises, like finding artists among us (more later on 18th century Rosella Torrans!) and I suppose I am hoping to revive the Lowcountry tradition of knowing our histories. Whoopi Golberg said, about her own complicated history as an African American, ” When it becomes habit in us to be able to rattle off our individual histories it will calm our spirits…….” Indeed. The supporting spirits of the ancestors, too, are here, with my every step.

Fresh History

Welcome to my blog about Charleston, South Carolina. A place proud with history, beauty, and art. Sometimes we feel a call, to be, to go, to do. I felt that about Charleston many years ago upon the discovery of a large trunk of letters and photographs about the Carolina Lowcountry, written by my grandmothers, cousins and aunts. I also felt the call to be an artist, even when I was in my teens, when my favorite haunt was a tiny bookstore on an old street in Asheville, where I was living and attending an all girls boarding school. I can remember being deeply moved by poems, by art, even then. Our ancestors are a part of who we are today. The African American culture has understood that I believe more than my own, and have recognized the presence of the ancestors in the everyday, perhaps a practice brought from the traditions from Ghana and Angola. I have been called to this task, to tell some of the stories of this place, not only so I can remember, but so that we will continue to make and tell our own stories. Today I will begin with some that surround these weathered cobbled streets in the French Quarter of this glittering holy city.