Sullivans Island-Lowcountry 1 (7 page)

started down Middle Street toward the small business district. It

was a sticky Saturday in the middle of June and we’d been out of

school and shoes for about three weeks as another summer got

under way.The United States was in the midst of the Civil Rights

movement, which as far as we knew was something happening at

lunch counters in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Montgomery,

Alabama. When Medgar Evers was murdered, we thought for a

moment how that could happen to our daddy, but he was white

and nothing like that ever happened around Charleston. We

were frightened, but we were just kids and not focused on it.All

the same, violence was everywhere that summer, in the newspa-

pers and in our house.

S u l l i v a n ’ s I s l a n d

35

Because of the high attrition rate of our housekeepers, we

hadn’t ever had a stretch of time to consider the grave injustices

done to the Negro population at a close look. But the world

was evolving in front of our eyes and we were changing our

minds about a lot of things.

Revolutionary acts became part of our everyday existence.

For example, our father, the same man who lost control of him-

self with the terrifying velocity of an earthquake, had taken ice

water and cigarettes to some chain gang workers on the Island

last week when he knew it was too hot for them to be in the

sun. The same irrational man, who had just now left his eight-

year-old baby son in a crumpled heap, had a heart for justice and

compassion in the outside world.

“Gotta get gas,” he mumbled, pulling into Buddy’s Gas

Station.

He got out of the car, slammed the door and went inside

the store.Timmy and I stared at each other.

“It’s safe to talk now,” I said.

“Jesus, what in the world could’ve happened?”Timmy said.

“Who knows? I hope Henry’s not bleeding all over the

floor or he’ll go crazy about that too!”

“Susan, he really
is
crazy, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said,“but he’s more unreliable than crazy.”

He came out with a beer can wrapped in a small brown bag.

We watched him take a long drink and heard him ask the man at

the pump to check the oil. He opened the door and got in, leav-

ing his legs hanging outside, and drained the beer. He crushed

the can with his left hand and tossed it in the trash barrel.

“Two points,” Daddy said.

We exhaled a small sigh of relief. He was calming down.

“Good one, Dad,”Timmy said.

“Your brother, Mr. Timmy and Miss Susan, is enough to

drive me right out of my skull.”

“What’d he do?” I asked nonchalantly, as though this were

normal behavior, which it was for him.

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“Sadie quit,” he answered.“I gave him the belt.”

Sadie was our housekeeper. She was the third one to quit in

a month.

“Because of Henry? What happened?” I asked, even though

I was sure we’d hear anyway. I knew from experience that the

faster he got it out of his system, the faster he’d get over it.

“Your brother, little Mr. Henry the entrepreneur, was selling

tickets for all his juvenile delinquent friends to watch poor Miss

Sadie use the outhouse through one of the loose boards.”

“Oh, Lord,” I said,“that’s not nice. Plus, it’s disgusting, if you

ask me.” No one was asking, but Daddy sucked his teeth in

agreement.

“Ah, man! I can’t believe he did that! I liked Sadie! She

made the best red rice I ever had!”Timmy said.

“So now, we gotta go the whole way out to Snowden and

find us somebody else because your momma says she can’t raise

her children without help.” He made another noise with his

teeth and tongue that sounded like
snncck.
“I gotta pay this man.

You kids want a cold Coke?” He raised his eyebrows at us, half

smiled and peeled a dollar bill out of his wallet, handing it to

me.“Hurry up, ’cause time’s wasting.”

“Yes, sir!” I said.

The money for the Cokes was his way of apologizing for

beating the daylights out of Henry. I thought that was a pretty

pathetic gesture, but I grabbed the money anyway. He was relaxed

now, and I scampered out of the car and ran inside. Nothing like

a little alcohol to improve his disposition, I thought.

The low light in the store caught me off guard and I bumped

into a man coming out.

“Watch yourself, little lady!”

“Sorry!” I said, and hurried through the stench of his beer

breath and the smoke-filled room to the bar. “Two Cokes,

please,” I nervously asked Buddy, the proprietor of the only bar

on the Island.

Every kid on the Island knew that it was
Sin City
in there,

S u l l i v a n ’ s I s l a n d

37

even if you were only a kid buying a Coke.There was card play-

ing and a pool table in there. The Island men went there to

escape the world and no woman, save one, that I’d ever heard of,

would be caught dead inside of Buddy’s.That one,Alice Simpson,

happened to be our next-door neighbor. My momma said she

was a disgrace to all women. I thought that was stupid; I mean,

maybe she liked to play pool. And besides, why shouldn’t a sin-

ner have a place to go besides hell?

Buddy rattled around inside his cooler and put the two bot-

tles on the counter. While he fished around for the bottle

opener, he eyed me up and down. “Getting kinda grown up,

ain’t ya? Gone be asking for a Pabst Blue Ribbon pretty soon,

isn’t she, fellows?”

The two old goats at the end of the counter started laugh-

ing and I felt my face flush.

“Yeah, right, very funny,” I said, not caring what they

thought.

Don’t you know these old buzzards started laughing and

whistling real low? God, what a bunch of jerks! I grabbed the

bottles, mumbled some thanks and ran out of there as fast as I

could. Daddy had the car running and waiting by the curb.

“Come on, girl! It’s hot as Hades in here!”

I jumped in the back with Timmy, slammed the door and we

took off over the causeway to Mount Pleasant.When we crossed

the bridge, Daddy speeded up the car to sixty-five. He liked to

drive fast. The marsh air came flooding through the open win-

dows, blowing my long hair into a mass of damp tangles. Some

old geezer on the radio was crooning like a sick cat. It was

Daddy’s favorite station and I wasn’t about to ask him to lower

the volume. In spite of the possibility of instantaneous death,

Timmy and I couldn’t resist the temptation of making faces at

each other and silently imitating the singer. Daddy cut his eye at

us in the rearview mirror and I could tell from his back that he

was smiling by the way he shook his head. He let his arm rest on

the windowsill and I knew that, for the moment, all was well.

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“Y’all children!”

That was all he said until we turned down Rifle Range

Road. The mood changed in an instant from the liveliness of

spiky marsh, swooping birds and the deep blue of the sparkling

inland waterway to the mysterious, dreamy and haunted world

of the past.The Spanish moss hung in long torn pieces from the

live oaks that covered the road in umbrella shade. Their long

sheets looked like ghosts floating across your path when you

drove this road after dark. I imagined bedraggled soldiers walk-

ing in pairs, coming home from the Revolution or the Civil

War, weary and perhaps wounded, searching for home in the

burned-out countryside.

I felt the spirits of freed slaves ambling along the roadside

with great baskets on their heads filled with Sweetgrass and pal-

metto fronds for weaving more baskets to harvest rice or to hold

vegetables. I saw small loads of just-picked cotton on the back of

a buckboard wagon on the way to market, drawn by the slow

clip-clop of a broken-down horse or mule.

When I came out here to Snowden, the hair on my arms

stood up from goose bumps. Even though my family never owned

a slave in all its history in the Lowcountry, my ancestors had prob-

ably condoned it. Coming here to old plantation country made

me uncomfortable having white skin. In the carefree existence of

Island living, I never had to think about what slavery must’ve

been, but out here in the country reminders were everywhere.

When I really opened my eyes to the landscape, it wasn’t

romantic plantation life before me. It was rows of tiny clapboard

houses tucked under live oaks and pines, most of them needing

a paint job, some of them whitewashed. Old cars were pulled up

in the side yards to rest forever. Rusted bicycles propped them-

selves against the steps while chickens pecked around. Hound

dogs, most of them too old to bark, stood on the porches filled

with unmatched upholstered chairs. But the smell of burning

refuse mixed with the strong scent of pine and rich black dirt

worked like a voodoo charm. It was another world.

S u l l i v a n ’ s I s l a n d

39

I had made this trip with Daddy so many times I could tell

how close we were to Harriet Avinger’s house by the smell of the

cool air and the sounds of the quiet. For as long as I could

remember, Harriet had worked for Aunt Carol and Uncle Louis,

Momma’s brother and his wife. I had known her since I was

born, I suppose.And she acted as Daddy’s employment agency.

He pulled up in her front yard and turned off the engine.

She appeared suddenly on the front porch as though she had

expected our arrival.

“Wait in the car,” Daddy said and got out.

Timmy did, but I was in the mood to explore a little.

“You’re gonna get in trouble,” he said, when Daddy went

inside Harriet’s house.

“Bump you,” I said, closing the door quietly.

Harriet had a garden in her front yard that looked like the

cover of a seed catalog. Right next to the bottle tree, in an area

probably thirty by sixty feet, perfect rows of lush vegetables

were climbing for the sky in the summer sun. Huge melons lay

like green bombs in the soft dirt.

The bottles hanging in the tree tinkled against each other in

the breeze. I had always thought they were her version of a wind

chime until Harriet told me they were for good luck. Some

business about keeping the good spirits around and sending the

bad ones away. Harriet always had some story to tell me about

the things she believed and most of them were seriously weird

but fascinating. I loved them all. She was a Gullah woman, and

all the Gullah women had stories.

Her dogs looked up from their place under her front steps

and then curled back up in their holes to sleep. They had no

interest in me because they knew me pretty well.

We’d had and lost a lot of housekeepers over the years,

mainly because our house was an insane asylum. If it wasn’t

Henry who drove them out with his hijinks, it was Grandma

Sophie with her smelliness, or Grandpa Tipa with his bad atti-

tude or Momma with her misery. She was pregnant again and

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

that was putting it mildly. She looked like she had swallowed

one of Harriet’s watermelons and she wasn’t due for three

months! Daddy thought Momma didn’t need help? Heck, she

could hardly stand up!

I opened the gate of the tiny Garden of Eden and wandered

between the rows. The black dirt was soft and cool under my

bare feet. With soil like this to plant in, no wonder Harriet’s

tomatoes were as big as softballs and her melons were green and

luscious. You could tell by the way the corn was so tightly

attached to the stalk that it was delicious too, ready to shuck and

boil. I peeled back a husk and popped out a few kernels with

my thumbnail. Sweet! I hoped that this time I’d find the courage

to ask for something to take home.

I could see Timmy was all nervous and jerky about me tres-

passing so I tortured him with a deliberately slow but perfectly

timed return. Just as I got back in the car, Harriet and Daddy

reappeared on the front porch of her little house, their business

completed.

Like most houses in Snowden, the frame of her front door

was painted a bright blue to keep out the haints. It always gave

me something to think about, coming out here and seeing how

Harriet lived. I mean, any fool could see she had no money to

speak of, but there was a neatness and tidiness about her whole

place. Her yard was raked, her porch was swept, her dogs were

fed, her chickens were all fenced in and phlox and black-eyed

Susans bloomed on both sides of her front steps. I jumped out of

the car again.

“Daddy? Can I say hello?” I called out to them.

“Sure, come on! But we’ve got to hurry. I don’t want you to

be wasting Harriet’s time.”

Harriet smiled down at me and held out her arms. Harriet

was a tall and thin woman with perfect white teeth. Her hair was

plaited in neat, thick braids wrapped around her head. She wore

a yellow print shirtwaist dress under her apron.When she hugged