Palmettos and Jasmine
Recently, I couldn’t sleep so I woke up and made some coffee. It was dark and cold outside. I had something I was thinking about that was keeping me up and so I thought I’d go and sit alone and watch the sun come up in the front room. Maybe that would help. I thought I’d be alone but then the cat sauntered in to join me, meowing like crazy, the seventeen-year-old cat, I grew up with her godmother. The cat can tell when I’m anxious and she gets close and purrs and rubs her head against me and against the lamp, but doesn’t sit in my lap—she sits on the couch above my head and licks the dandruff out of my hair; or she sits on the armrest and nuzzles my forearm. She’s old and she drools. One of the neighbors’ cars pulls out of the driveway—where are they off to at 5 AM on a freezing Sunday?
I stared out the big windows into the yard but it was still dark. I remembered staring out the same type of windows into a yard at the house back in South Carolina, but in my minds eye, the old house was on the other side of the street, looking the other direction, into the windows I was now staring out of. I tried to figure out whether that house was indeed on the other side and it was like looking into a mirror of a different brick house and a different time because it was a long time ago that I stared out of those windows into that yard and that road, which was steeper and sloped down to a little drainage creek.
There are two prints of paintings my mom has had since I was a kid, that I love. One is Rainbow Row in full sunshine. The other is the Charleston Battery being pummeled by a hurricane.
I grew up in Columbia and my favorite memories are the hurricanes, especially of Hurricane Hugo. I loved when the lights and heat went out and the winds howled and pummeled our little house and we lived with candlelight and blankets for a week and ate seven-layer Jello pudding.
And I remember going outside the day after and so many trees in our yard were down and the power lines were down—the kind of chaos that I haven’t seen since from the other hurricanes—and how my dad and all the men from the neighborhood banded together with their chainsaws and made order from the chaos. I wasn’t scared of hurricanes then or now, I looked forward to them as a break from the dullness and routine of life. We would stockpile water and milk and ice and listen to the radio and wait for the winds to come and howl past our house.
I loved Charleston as a kid, we didn’t go there often. Rainbow Row and the Battery and the Old Slave Market and the cobblestones and palmettos and the important-looking Southern men in their tan suits and Panama Jack hats rushing around town looking busy. It seemed so tropical and strange and at the same time so provincial. The food we ate at the chain restaurants was somehow brighter and more original than the food back home, it felt unlike any place.
I keep a picture of Rainbow Row on a sunny, warm winter day in my heart. I recently read the “bad” Pat Conroy novel South of Broad, and liked it quite a bit if not for the overdone plot, but because it captured that weird cosmopolitan Charleston-ness—the only real cosmopolitan urban experience in the south outside of New Orleans—that I think I glimpsed the very end of as a kid and never really understood.
I have gone back to visit the lowcountry a few times since over the years, some punk shows in the Georgetown suburbs in the early aughts, a hotel room here and there, but haven’t really felt anything or see anything since, it was all gone. All I found has been southern yuppies driving SUVs and aggressive crew-cut guys at kind of fancy “brew pubs”, and the few always-desperate Southern punks slinking around on the edge of town, their whole being emanating that they didn’t live in the big left-wing bastions—their bands, their way of life, small, hidden away in the shadows. When I see them there it’s like spotting some rare animal on a safari, I always sing that This Bike is a Pipe Bomb song to myself: “all these stupid southern yuppies they don’t like to see a punk rock kid with his head held high.”
I went down to Savannah to see if that feeling had just relocated there, but it was not in Savannah either, Savannah was beautiful but made for tourists and art students and rich old money and there seems to be a literal gentrification line where the well-maintained old buildings of the city all of a sudden crumble and then everything is abandoned and boarded up. And when I’m in Savannah touching the live oak and putting it in my hair I always think of colonial Savannah and those tunnels where they would transport Shanghaied prisoners in and out of the city from the ship-docks. I don’t know if that’s historically accurate I heard about it on some historical tour my dad and I were on, there for the last time before he died staying at some moldy old motel with moldy red carpet and heavy drapes, but I always think about those tunnels under Savannah. In my mind, they are wet and mossy and made of old stones and there are torches on the wall and people are sloshing through the water in and out of them.
I also went to Oxford, Mississippi and Tuscaloosa and the places like that. But almost the only place I’ve found with that good green feeling—how do you put it, the true Southern feeling that is not a completely full of shit, not a Garden and Gun false front—is maybe Asheville twenty years ago and my hometown of Columbia, South Carolina.
I hadn’t been back to Columbia in 30 years. It’s kind of hard to drive to Columbia from North Carolina. There aren’t any straight highway routes to get there. It’s a very annoying and weird drive and you feel like you’re going out into the middle of nowhere, Rockingham or somewhere, but when I got back there, I was shocked that it looked completely unchanged from when I was growing up—even the little Greek restaurant Zorba’s was still open and the old Piggly Wiggly and our old neighborhood hadn’t gotten fancy or been re-zoned or upscaled, it was just the same as it was before. I’m not sure why Columbia never got the full-press gentrification that Charleston and North Carolina and Savannah have gotten over the last twenty years. When I was growing up I didn’t understand how much nature was around Columbia—we stayed around our neighborhood. I just wandered around in the woods and bushes and streams by my house, I barely knew that Columbia was situated in a bowl of hills, surrounded by rivers and all sorts of amazing natural beauty hidden away back there. It has some of the only old-growth forests in the South.
I went that one time on my weird excavation of my childhood, back to the old house, and it was there, just like I remembered it. I stayed in a rundown Ramada on the edge of downtown. Maybe I went to a bar or something, a random bar, but nothing memorable, the next day there were protests at the capitol, some woman had climbed up and removed the Confederate flag and became a famous activist—and yeah I was just wandered around my childhood neighborhood, during this important historical process.
A few years later, I went back to Columbia to volunteer for the Bernie state campaign—they were recruiting people from the gentrified parts of North Carolina, mostly Duke students, a kind of “going to the people” campaign sending the intellectuals into the backwaters. We took buses down to Hartsville and other parts and it was all very exciting and hopeful and promising. It felt a little bit like the best years of my life resurrected, years that had long passed. And I ended up in Columbia for the final days of campaign and there was a crazy energy and I felt such hope and connection and true belief in this multi-ethnic, multi-racial campaign in Columbia, I immediately felt so much love for all these people involved with it who were born and raised around Columbia, a love I could never feel for an intellectual Northern person or a North Carolina transplant. I don’t know, maybe there is just something unpretentious and real and unassuming about South Carolinians, maybe I related to them from youth and gave them a pass I didn’t give to other, maybe I’m romanticizing or fetishizing them as being better and less annoying than Duke students, but it was great and there was a big event at a hotel ballroom out somewhere out by the highway with lots of dingy motels around it and Bernie lost, badly, very badly, like 30% to 70% or something like that thanks to James Clyburn’s political machine. And I went home and that was that, South Carolina was the nail in the coffin for the Bernie campaign. The media narrative was sealed: “Black people won’t go for Bernie.”
It was all downhill from there.
I spent the night with a couple of military people who were also communists and I liked them a lot immediately, they were open and sweet and genuine and not full of shit. They were younger and into all the new, obscure, weird young-people podcasts I’d never heard of. We stayed up late drinking and talking, and all of it felt so good and right and true and I felt like I was part of something nice for a minute and it felt like the people were getting together, and then it was over, and I haven’t been back to South Carolina since.
The whole Bernie thing has mutated into some kind of strange dark cynicism and hating Joe Biden and hating everything and I don’t recognize it. I am really disinterested in American politics, more disinterested than I’ve ever been, and I’m more moderate than I’ve ever been, and I’m disappointed in the “socialists”—who, losing so badly, have either turned full bore to identity politics or into nihilism, and I guess I’ve turned into just being a moderate Democrat or something like that. The lesson I’ve taken from it all is that America is just not a country that tolerates many things, it is a eye-rolling country and even though there’s a hopeful belief-full veneer on everything, it is also a very practical and normal country and it doesn’t like people who rock the boat or are out there. It definitely doesn’t like big mobilizations of fancy college-educated people with big ideas going out to the hinterlands, and most of all it doesn’t like being told what to do or think or believe by a 5-10% type of person who was born and raised in the cities and internalized the whole discourse there and wants to take it to the suburbs and provinces and spread it among the enclaves out there.