Today yelp was my friend. It found me a breakfast place in Mt Pleasant, a town on way to Charleston, that was excellent. It was super-crowded on a Saturday morning, but they had a counter that I slid right into. I had crabcakes and eggs and grits! Third day in a row for breakfast grits.
Pressed on into downtown Charleston where I wandered until I found a parking place, which had a broken meter, and I didn’t get a ticket for a whole Saturday afternoon, so hooray for good parking karma!
Walkwalkwalk, stumble onto an art gallery with an excellent show of local women’s paintings. Good art and cuties, just my kind of place. The nice hipster dude behind the desk turned me on to a rooftop bar a block away. I walked the harbor a while, reading the history signs, hit tie roof bar, more waterfront walking, back to the van to kill time till sunset, back to the roof for a killer sunset, more walking, a little driving, to the grungy students section (I knew it had to be around here somewhere) and a burrito place … and that’s it for my big adventure in C-town. Cross the bridge over the XX River and a couple of freeways to the south side of the bay to tonight’s Walmart, which has a dark and creepy parking lot. But was a nice and quiet place to sleep (tho’ I did lock the doors!).
It’s had to get a feel for it unless you’re actually here, but the Civil War just happened yesterday to the folks down here. It’s (I think) mostly a land and money thing – before the war they had it, and after they didn’t, just as simple as that. The Brookgreen Gardens I visited a few days ago – it was four rice plantations back in the day. It happened to have been bought by an effete art lover from New York, lucky us. But folks were so poor that many other plantations were were bought by rich yankees just as hunting preserves. Large scale rice farming is big money, so think about it … one decade the area is very prosperous, full of affluent white folks (forget the slave’s point of view, these folks certainly do!), living the life with cotillion balls and everything that constituted the good life back then. Next decade the place is in ruins, Sherman or some other hard-ass has burned all useful infrastructure, there’s nobody to work the rice fields, to the point that those miles and miles of formerly productive lowlands are good nothing but shooting the ducks that live there. All the young men are dead and everybody else is just poor white folk or former slaves.
Pre-war (ante bellum as they say) Charleston, was the near equal of New York as a financial and cultural center of power, with their great harbor and all that rice money. Ain’t no accident that the War started right here with the shelling of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Big Rice was probably at least as much of a factor in starting that war as Big Oil is in our foreign policy today.
Leave a Reply