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!

Lowcountry Gumbo: Bluebloods, Natives, Pirates!

Mary Woodward Hutson (1717-1757) whose very proper portrait this is, hardly came from what some Charlestonians would call ‘proper’ stock. Her grandfather, and mine, many generations ago, was Henry Woodward, an Englishman who arrived near Edisto Island in 1666 with a group of wealthy men on expedition from Barbados. He was left on the Eden Isle to make friends with the natives and to rustle up some trade for the King. His is an heroic tale that involves being kidnapped by the Spanish, and rescued from St. Augustine, by the buccaneer Robert Searles (for more on this tale see the book Twenty Florida Pirates by Kevin M. McCarthy. Henry worked as ship’s surgeon, and subsequently charmed kings, pirates and priests, and no doubt, the ladies. His legacy is one of daring and mystery. He wrote letters back to John Locke, in England, about the culture and the religion of the Indians, which interested the great philosopher. I like the letter where he talks about the glitter of gold on the bottom of his Indian moccasin, mica no doubt, the stuff I played with, as a child, in the creeks of North Carolina and what we called ‘fool’s gold’. “The man that most students of South Carolina Indians would most like to interview would probably be Dr. Henry Woodward, an Englishman who … was left by the Robert Sandford Expedition (in 1666) in exchange for an Indian called “Shadoo” as a sort of early cultural exchange program. He was not left against his will, but remained voluntarily. He returned to England in 1682 and was something of a celebrity.” - from Chapman J. Milling, Red Carolinians, p 55.

Henry Woodward’s story is fascinating to me, just different from that of his grandaughter, the pious and devoted Christian that Mary’s diary reveals her to be, published in London after her death, by her husband, The Rev. William Hutson. The testament to their character is the survival, of not only her diary but his, here at the South Carolina Historical Society. Just steps down the street are their large, beautifully carved slate tombstones in the historic graveyard Circular Church on Meeting Street, stones that have miraculously survived wars and fires and earthquakes. Mary Woodward Hutson’s portrait, and that of the good pastor, William Hutson, were painted by Jeremiah Theus, the early colonial painter, who arrived in Charleston in 1740. Many of the portraits he painted hang across the street at the Gibbes Museum of Art. These paintings hang beside each other in history, secure in the tall pink hall of this grand and beautiful architectural wonder of a place. The Fireproof Building, at 100 Meeting Street, houses the collections of the South Carolina Historical Society. Inside is an oval stair hall, lit by a cupola, with stone stairs, cantilevered through three stories. The building, the architect, and more of the stories the society protects and preserves here, are deserving of another tale, on another day.

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.