Southern (Dis)Comfort

We spent last week on vacation in and around Charleston. We’d originally planned to return to New York City where my husband would work and I would see the sights, which is what we did last year, but his company switched things up this year and sent him to Toronto instead, so we scrambled and decided we’d do Charleston this year. I’d never been. And it’s drivable, plus the hotel was exponentially cheaper than a hotel in New York City would have been. I’m bummed, because I wanted to go see everything I missed last year, but Charleston worked out better because my husband wasn’t working, so we got to spend the entire vacation there together.

If you’ve never been to Charleston, you should go. I’d forgotten how big a role the city played in the Revolutionary War. See, when you live in the South, that war takes a backseat to The Civil War, because reminders of The Civil War are everywhere in the South. Like, you pull up at a red light in front of a gas station, look to your left, and there’s a marker designating the site where Sherman’s army camped on their “March to the Sea.” I used to work at a place that backed up against the Kennesaw Mountain battlefield memorial. People claimed it’s haunted by the ghosts of all the Confederate soldiers that died there, but I never saw or heard anything, so I can’t say. Also, I drive past several historic site markers daily, to and from work and I only live three miles from where I work. One of them is a country club that used to be a plantation the Union Army burned around the same time the railroad depot in Atlanta was burned.

But anyway, yeah. Lots of Civil War history everywhere you look, at least in Georgia. Where I lived in Tennessee had less, but what it did have there was very dense, in and around the city of Oak Ridge (which is also rich with a lot of World War II history).

Charleston, though, surprised me for several reasons. I guess I should have been more prepared, but it was vacation and I didn’t want to do homework for my vacation, so all we really did was make a list of things we wanted to see while we were there and places we wanted to go, mostly restaurants for dinner.

Like, we both knew we wanted to see a plantation and take a tour. We both knew we wanted to see the pretty painted houses along the street before The Battery. I wanted to see the slave market museum and my husband said he wanted to see the Exchange Building and Provost Dungeon, which I’d never heard of but it sounded cool, so I agreed to it. My husband found a place to play mini golf close to our hotel. This has turned into something we do, I guess. We play mini golf.

Well, here is the first thing I learned about the majority of people in and around Charleston: they are committed and proud to live in the first state to secede from the Union. I was really surprised. There is even a place outside Charleston called, to this day, Secessionville. I looked it up (because, of course I looked it up) and it’s a historic district. Insert eye roll. It’s even listed on the National Register of Historic Places. And still, it hasn’t occurred to anyone to change the fucking name. And, look—I get that it’s history. The buildings are historic. And, as people who rarely understand what the saying means love to say these days: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

You hear it these days in regard to the removal of statues of Confederate generals and leaders, from the people who want to keep the statues and Confederate names on buildings and bridges and parks. “It’s history!1!!” they shriek when you point out that the Confederate flag is a symbol of treason, then go on to insist that we have to learn from history so we don’t repeat it. Like no one learned anything from the Civil War back in 1865, so we have to keep all these monuments standing, and we can never change the names on bridges and streets, lest someone never learn that slavery was bad and if you’re going to secede from the United States and form your own country based on the fact that slavery is what runs your entire economy, you’d do better not to let your mouths write a check that your asses can’t cash.

Not in South Carolina, though. Not in Charleston. They’re leaving all that shit up.

The South has had very good PR since the Civil War ended, because southern hospitality and gentility are still spoken of like they’re actual things that exist. Let me be clear: that is unadulterated bullshit. I’ve lived here my entire life and you can trust me on that. If you are welcomed into someone’s home here, just know that you have met a lengthy list of criteria that may never be divulged. And don’t ask, either. But no southerner I know is just opening their home and their arms to everybody like it’s what the entire culture down here is based on. And what gets called gentility is cosplay, only without the costumes, because people would look at you funny if you dressed like Melanie Hamilton and picked the kiddos up from soccer practice in your horse-drawn carriage, attended by your darkies.

These days, it’s “Bless your heart.” A lot. And we know that can mean any number of things, but I can tell you I have never, ever seen it used to actually bless anyone’s heart. But people fall for it. The sweet, little old church ladies and the sainted grandfathers who served in World War II and get together every morning at Hardee’s to grumble about the state of the world they created and play checkers—those are character types in the LARPG that is (and always has been) the American South.

“Oh, that Miss Bitsy. She wouldn’t say shit if she had a mouthful!”

“There goes dear, old Mister Melvin off to the VFW for bingo night and the crease in those pants could bend iron!”

Meanwhile, Miss Bitsy thinks “The Coloreds” (she still calls black people that because she is, and I quote, “just set in her ways”) are trying to take over the world and have been since 1865 and doesn’t want them near her for any reason. Mister Melvin drove his granddaughter to the clinic and paid for the abortion when she got pregnant by that Mexican (only he said “wetback”) boy she works with at the Wal-Mart. Bless their hearts, right?

The only people who believe those people are good people are the people who are exactly like them, and they are a dime a dozen in the South. And if they weren’t born here, they move here because they somehow know it’s acceptable to act one way and actually be something totally different. I found this out when we toured Middleton Place outside Charleston. It’s one of the larger and better-known plantations in the area. One of its owners signed the Declaration of Independence. Another one, of course, signed the Ordinance of Secession. The tour guides were equally proud of both. “Slavery was horrible,” one tour guide told us, and gave an exaggerated, theatrical shake of his head. “But here at Middleton Place, the slaves actually chose to stay on and work for the family after emancipation.”

I laughed. We’d just driven 15 miles down a road that wouldn’t have been paved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, past other plantations just as remote, through thick forest and swampland to arrive at Middleton Place to be told that slaves chose to stay there after they were freed. Well, knowing what lives in the swamps of South Carolina—think alligators and venomous snakes—I probably would have “chosen” to stay, too, since the other option might have been death.

It was a truly surreal experience and I think everyone should experience it at least once. I’ll certainly never tour another plantation and be expected to believe that the owners encouraged marriage between slaves (we were told this) because having a family encouraged people to resist escaping. I laughed again. Did it encourage the plantation owner not to sell the husband or the wife or the children? Because we all know it didn’t. Just don’t tell the tour guides at Middleton Place. They’re not ready.