Charleston, SC
We recently visited the city of Charleston SC, an interesting and provocative place. A walking tour with Tommy Dew gave us a uniquely southern perspective on history in general and the War of Northern Aggression in particular.
Prior to the Civil War, the cash crop in most parts of the deep south was cotton. In Charleston it was rice. The "low country" geography and climate was well suited to rice cultivation and many rice plantations grew up along the rivers around the city. The West Africans brought with them knowledge of rice from their homeland and this allowed profitable rice production to begin fairly quickly without the normal learning curve.
And profitable it was. Charleston is a beautiful city set on a peninsula with many beautiful homes, most with extraordinary gardens. Plantation owners had second homes in the city and would spend summers with their families in Charleston enjoying the ocean breezes and an apparently permissive culture.
What is often left out in the local telling of this tale is the contribution and suffering of the enslaved people laboring of behalf of whitey. It's easy for us northerners to get a bit preachy on this subject but given the attitude we encountered I see nothing wrong with a few mild observations.
Growing rice was a tough job. Per unit of production, labor requirements far exceeded those required for cotton, tobacco or other cash crops. Slogging for hours through muddy, stinking rice paddies was difficult work.
The fact that this beautiful city and the wealth in contained was built on the backs of an enslaved population is not really acknowledged. Seems odd at this late date. The black folks left sweltering on the plantation whilst whitey enjoyed those ocean breezes isn't mentioned.
Judging this city and its culture after a visit of just a few days may be premature but I just sense a certain rigidness, resentment, and an willingness to change.
By the way, the photo of the green disk is a marker left in the road by a carriage driver to mark a defo or urine deposit. The water wagon, on constant lookout for such markers, then comes whipping by and blasts away the offensive matter so as not to offend the northern white folks being trundled about in the carriages.
posted by jim at 11/15/2010 10:28:00 AM
3 Comments:
Very interesting, nicely written piece. Southerners have a unique point of view that remains central to our nation's inability to move forward.
jimmy any chance you made it out to boone hall plantation? there you really get a whitewashed version of the whole whitey/darkie thing. even better is good old mt. vernon where the father of our country kept a stable of over three hundred darkies to take care of his and martha's needs and desires. george didn't even have any kids (probably from the syph) but he still needed 300 slaves to shine his boots and make him one of the richest dudes in colonial amurica even while his charges were whipped and beaten to keep them in line.
truth is you can't have democracy without a little hypocrisy; somebody gotta do the dirty work so little georgie porgie can live on top of the hill.
and speaking of charleston, have you read conroy's south of broad? not his best novel, in my estimation, but he does attempt to dig into the whitey/darkie mess that continues to simmer in that city almost exactly 150 years after south carolina seceded from the union.
I just started reading South of Broad. Having just been there, it should be fun.
We were supposed to do the Middleton Place plantation but only had time to stop by briefly. I wondered what the black dudes working there thought about their jobs.
In spite of this rampant communication revolution we have, our lives are largely insular and influenced primarily by our families and close friends. It's a bit jarring to see what people are thinking in other parts of the country.
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