Hey Honey! Oh do stay!

“Oh, Hey, Honey! Oh, do stay!” - about hospitality… in honor of my 87 year old mother, Charlotte Hutson Martin Hawthorne who still keeps the guest room ready. For her, on Mother’s Day.

My mama’s smooth black walnut four poster ‘teestah’ bed, handmade by a furniture maker in Lincolnton, North Carolina she says, and bought for her by my daddy only when my great Aunt Pances told him to, graces the guest room. This is the revered family furniture, with matching queen Anne highboy and lowboy, and turned, tall bedposts with fat round bands like matching 70’s bangled bracelets on upward arms.

The symbol of hospitality, the pineapple, graces doorways, and gateposts in the American South. Down by the water in Charleston, at Waterfront Park, a short walk from the Waterfront Park Pier, formerly called Adger’s Wharf, Charleston’s Pineapple Fountain represents the welcoming hospitality for which Charleston is well known. People in the South are amazingly thoughtful in traffic, and hand written thank you notes still exist. Even America’s most-published etiquette expert, Marjabelle Young Stewart, recognized the city in 1995 as the “best-mannered” city in the United States, a claim lent credibility by the fact that it has the first established ‘Livability Court’ in the country. The virtues of kindness and courtesy, what mama called having good manners, might really be cultural habits worth saving.

I’ve just come to understand that this cultural distinction is connected to what the ancestors called “keeping an open house.” The tradition involves having a guest room, and having homemade pimento cheese, ready in the fridge, to offer guests…it’s about hospitality. Not long ago my cousin Mike Hutson, historian extraordinaire, who lives in El Paso, Texas, mailed me a copy of Florie Hutson Heyward’s (1862-1955) memoir. “Aunt Florie” was sister to my great grandmother, Charlotte Hutson Martin, and her story is about their family and the little community of McPhersonville, South Carolina, just after the Civil War. Their mother, Caroline, died at 36, mostly, I think, of a broken heart over the loss of her first born, five year old child, a son, whose name was Trabue. Her death in 1887 left Dr. Thomas Woodward Hutson a widower with five children to raise. He had served as a surgeon in the Civil War, and now he mixed his own medicines and paid house calls to families in the region, struggling to parent these children and to rebuild the little town of McPhersonville, which had been furiously burned to the ground by General Sherman, and which, eventually, he did. Pay for physican’s services then was slight, if at all. Their house was small, with a bedroom for TW as they called Dr. Hutson, and a guestroom. Outside was a little house that had been the kitchen, which was built away from the house, so as to prevent fires. The five children all slept together here now, bathing in a big tub in the center of the room.

It was tradition to keep that guest room available for guests and no Civil War was going to change that. Dr. TW was ‘keeping an open house.’ This was exactly why, when, even in my mother’s small retirement apartment, at age 87, she must defy logic and keep the guestroom fully furnished, as always, instead of making the room the office she really needs instead. It is that remnant, long remembered, of hospitality, just as Blanche Dubois immortalized in Tennessee Williams’ play Streetcar Named Desire. How much she depended on “the kindness of strangers”. It is what a visitor to the South meant, in the 1800’s, when he remarked that there were few ‘taverns’ to stay overnight. One could knock on a door and be considered an honored guest, and be welcomed, and fed, and ushered into a guestroom at most houses along most routes.

Aunt Florie was writing this, her memoir, during the 1940’s and 50’s, and she described then, how “so and so” did or did not “keep an open house.” Now I understand what she means, and what the tradition of having the guestroom symbolizes. Perhaps this tradition, that my mother keeps, might just be one worth saving, in our current state of economic turbulence. Perhaps, instead of insisting someone “call ahead” perhaps we can pay it forward by responding to a knock at our door, with an invitation in, to a tray of pimento cheese sandwiches, for tea, for connection. We all need each other and our gifts of kindness, now, more than ever.

Diaries. Journals. Morning Pages.

Diaries. Morning Pages. Journals. Ever since I read Julia Cameron’s book, Vein of Gold, I am a convert to her system of writing ‘morning pages’. She recommends writing three pages, first thing in the morning, by hand. Her theory is that we mine our subconscious, the place where our truth lies, in our early waking minutes. I have a favorite Pentel mechanical pencil and it is a ritual I value, and serves as a sort of meditative time. The thought of my descendants reading unedited journals, however, is not exactly the plan.

But I absolutely love this precious journal that belonged to my ‘aunt’ Charlotte Hay, who was born in 1807. She is the first family Charlotte. What a delight it is to have some evidence of what her life was like, which is ultimately the goal I think, for those of us who poke around in family history research. We are always looking for glimpses of who they really were. There are drawings, and verse, penned by friends, in this quite handsome volume, engraved with her name, in gold lettering and “Sold by W.B.Gilley, 92 Broadway, New York.” Charlotte was born in Haverstraw, New York, and moved South when her younger sister, Martha Louisa Hay, married Thomas Woodward Hutson Sr. in 1829. They had old ties to Charleston, Beaufort and the Lowcountry. Her great grandfather was John Gordon, a Scots highlander who arrived early at the settlement at Darien, Georgia, and stayed in South Carolina until the Revolution. He was a merchant, with ships that sailed from the Charleston and Beaufort harbors; his schooner was named “Tybee”. He amassed land from Charleston to Florida. I am intriqued by his story and think about those tall ships sailing the waters off Edisto Island, which they surely did, every time I walk that beach. I wonder exactly where his plantation was, near Charleston, named Belvedere (SCHGM, vol.3,1902, pg 177).

The first entry in Charlotte’s book, from South Carolina, was written from Mt. Pleasant in 1830. Can you imagine what Mt. Pleasant looked like then? It was penned, in the finest hand, by a gentleman friend, signed, Edward, and dated Aug 5. It is a poem to her called A Morning Walk. She never married, and was buried in Boiling Springs, near Barnwell. She still had a Scottish accent, and her sister, Martha, with whom she joined the Stony Creek Presbyterian Church in Pocotaligo, died at just twenty-six, a young mother of three. Charlotte’s friends wrote poetry about the moon, and love, in a calligraphic hand that is slow and careful.

This little book makes me think about the purpose of diaries. Recently, someone published the great writer, Susan Sontag’s, personal journal, after her death. Some of my personal penciled writing is processing stuff, just plain old angst at times. I am not sure Susan Sontag would have been happy about this diary being published. But historically, I am really grateful for the diary writers, that I can read them and get a glimpse of who they were. Maybe even the unedited versions would tell me about how they processed their own joys and sorrows. Recently I was able to find a copy of the diary of my grandmother Mary Woodward Hutson, who died in 1757, at a little bookshop in London, where it was printed, after she died, by her husband, Rev. William Hutson (yay for abebooks.com) She was amazingly devout, and surely her entries were edited. But to hear her voice is really important to me. She is more than a name and a date to me now, and I can hear what she’d say in a way. (She admonished her children, in the mid 1700’s, to “read only good books” making me wonder what bad books were then.) The South Carolina Historical Association, here, on Meeting Street, has the diary of her husband, the Reverend William Hutson, too, which was written while he was minister of the Circular Church. It’s discovery by my cousin, Mike Hutson, years ago in McPhersonville, SC is worth telling. One of the elderly aunts simply handed him a paper bag, and in it was the hand written diary. It had been ‘borrowed’ by the Rev. George Howe for his renowned History of the Presbyterian Church so some of it had been recorded. But now it has been transcribed and studied, and serves to give us insight into Charleston in the middle of the 18th century.

Diaries, Journals, Morning pages. I am still a believer. What do you think?