Sitting Up with the Dead, page 21
Charleston, you know, is a peninsula, it’s practically surrounded by water. And back in those days you had black beaches and you had white beaches. And you know when I go into schools and tell the students about this, they just sit there with their mouths open. “How could that be?” Well, that just shows the absurdity of the whole system. How in Sam Heck are you going to be able to separate the water? But they would have these poles going out— I don’t know how far — into the water, and whites swam on one side and blacks swam on the other. And that’s the way it was …
I was the plaintiff in the local school desegregation suit… I was a senior that year in high school. And they dragged their feet and dragged their feet, and before you knew it I graduated. But my father, in his infinite wisdom, very quickly changed my name to my younger sister’s name — my sister’s four years younger — and she was able to see it through. So she ended up desegregating the schools in Charleston …
When I was fifteen I was in the group that desegregated — or tried to desegregate — the local lunch counters … We prepared for several weeks. We did a lot of role-playing, and we chose a day there was no school, so everybody would be available … And we dressed up and we were driven downtown, and there were twenty-four of us in the group … Word got out that we were coming, but we had a contingency plan. We diverted to another facility. And those folks had not been warned. We walked in a straight line all the way to the back — I don’t know about Kansas, Liz, but in the South blacks were allowed to shop in dime stores, but they had lunch counters, and you couldn’t eat at the lunch counters. So we got there and we sat down. And of course they were taken for a loop, they didn’t know we were coming. And they told us to get up, we don’t serve you. And threatened to call the police. We still didn’t move. They poured ammonia on the whole counter — you know how strong ammonia can be? — to try to get us to move. We still didn’t move. We ended up sitting there, without getting up to use the restrooms and without eating anything … for five and a half hours at that lunch counter. And then finally they said somebody phoned in a bomb threat. Which was kind of stupid — Yes, there’s a bomb threat, but employees are walking around the store, people are in the store. Yeah, right. We were arrested at that point. We were taken down to the city jail. I think one of us was fingerprinted, then they just said, this is ridiculous. So we were bailed out… that was my first time going to jail.
My second time was about three years later — by that time I’d graduated from high school and gone on to undergraduate school in Missouri. Well, I was home for the summer. And by this time — we’re talking 1963 — the movement had really escalated. We were having these nightly mass meetings at the churches. And they served two purposes. One, to keep people informed of what was going on. We had the boycott, people needed to know which stores not to go to, and so on. And they also served the purpose of keeping up the momentum, so people wouldn’t get too relaxed, and would continue to be pumped up about the movement. Anyhow, at that point, our local newspaper — it’s still very, very conservative, but not as conservative as it was back in those days — they kept publishing these very slanted stories about the movement. Well, we decided, we’ll get them, and we planned a silent protest. Of course it was all done very spontaneously. We marched from the church down to the Post & Courier building. Well, when we got almost there, they said somebody threw a rock. This was never, ever proven, but it gave the police a reason, and they just started snatching people, just grabbing people out of the crowd. And I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, so I got snatched …
They put us on this bus, like a converted school bus … I think there’s humor to be found in every human situation, and this is no exception. They forgot to lock the back door of the bus. And so when some of the guys realized this, they jumped out the back door. They didn’t run home — the whole point was to be there to protest — so they just came right around to the front of the bus, where they got arrested again. I know some guys who were arrested four times that night… You know, didn’t I see you a couple of arrests back? … Well, finally they locked the back door and they took us to the city jail.
That city jail is just the most horrible thing. It’s not even open anymore. They called it the Seabreeze Hotel. It was right on the edge of the Cooper River. It was the dinkiest place. There were thirty-one of us. I think there were sixteen girls, and they put us all in one cell. Of course it was summertime, so it was hot, so hot. It was awful. We were there for three nights and four days. Of course, no privacy whatsoever. I think there was one toilet, two beds … Anyhow, the NAACP bailed us out, and that was pretty much the end of my Civil Rights activity.
Minerva went on to university, and graduate school, and never lost her fire. When a nonminority person was promoted above her at the Charleston County Library, she filed a grievance and won. Eventually, many years later, she was terminated from her job. “I was fired,” she said, “not because I wasn’t a good librarian or library manager. Instead, I was fired because I REFUSED to be treated like a second-class citizen.”
Tom’s Tale
IHAD BEEN IN CHARLESTON, South Carolina for twenty-four hours and had not seen so much as a square foot of the historic district — the pastel townhouses of Rainbow Row, the piazzas, the gardens, the filigreed ironwork balconies, the harbor views, that made it “probably the loveliest city in the continental United States,” as my guidebook claimed. After I left the homeless shelter, I retreated to a motel on a commercial strip and spent the evening drinking wine and eating rubbery calamari at the bar at Red Lobster. For a short time I wanted to avoid distinction and bask in uniformity (if one can actually bask, that is, in a world entirely lacking depth).
I returned to my motel room to find a new e-mail from Vickie.
Hi Pam!
I was happy to hear from you … kind of like when my daughter writes to me from Korea. The whole e-mail experience is like Christmastime when Santa “leaves you something” — sometimes something that you really want, which, generally, in ordinary life, is acknowledgment from others that you count…
As soon as I finish editing the stories about the Dead Man, Sister Collins, and the Bald-headed Bohannon Boys, I will send them to you …
As I told you when you were visiting me … I am always encouraged when I read the words of the blues songs and can relate to them — there is pain and conflict to Southern life that gets bypassed in discussion. What I mean is: there is a line drawn for no humane reason between blacks and whites as if one suffered more than the other, maybe because the emphasis is always put on slavery. But my own belief puts me in a position to disagree with that. I wish I had better words than I do, and I wish I could articulate my gut feeling when I explain this. There is a common element that connects us (Southerners, black and white) — and I hope it is what disconnects us from innocent Northerners or Westerners. In the South, the blacks and whites are intertwined in wrongdoing — a vicious cycle of hurt. I say that from the perspective of a participant in family violence. When one person (a family or society) commits a violent act on some other person, both people end up hurt. It may take some time for the offender to recognize this, or he may never, but what happens is that the air becomes filled with a tension and a pain, a spiritual hurt … In my opinion the South is full of misunderstanding about itself…
What is important, I think, is if you’re trying to form some opinion about one person in the South, you are usually forced to form an opinion about the whole group first. People say, “What happened to make the South so factious? Are you aware you’re pulling in separate directions?” Some people do know; some people don’t. I think we (Southerners) have an innocence and ignorance that breeds this kind of separatism. My experience has been that too much focus is placed on blame (black), with obstinacy (white) holding back the help it would take to fully integrate a misplaced culture … Nowadays, years after the Civil War, I observe the reverse of what I just said. Blacks are obstinate, and whites blame. Just like family violence, there is a dependence on the other fellow to bend, and until he does, you stalemate. I’ve seen this in my own family, and it is very analogous to Southern culture as a whole. I see no end to the conflict, no matter how much effort is made by the church, the government, or welfare. Granny would have said, “It’ll take the Second Coming to straighten out that mess.”
Well, thanks for giving me something to do tonight. I made a pound cake — used a new recipe — MISTAKE. Warmed up spaghetti, drank a glass of “warm” white wine — MISTAKE, not good … I ended up acting like Granny Griffin. A flea jumped on my foot — I “grabbed ’im” and toted him to the commode, which is the only sure way not to lose ’im once’t ye got ’im ’tween ye thumb and forefanger. What reminded me of Granny was that I TALKED to him all the way to the bathroom! I told ’im: “If you’d a been a smart boy, you would’na got trapped. But no, you couldn’t do right no more’n a rattlesnake can be sweet. And THAT’S what got’che in the fix ye in. Now, heah ye go: swim’r drown’d!!!” Can you believe that? … We had a wild dog hanging around the back porch, and I feel pretty sure he left me with his dear traveling companions …
See you later,
Sincerely, Vickie Vedder
“My theory is that air conditioning revolutionized the South.”
At that very moment it was freeze-drying the sweat on my bare arms and legs. Vickie’s message of the previous evening was still too hot to handle, I had to let it cool, let it become freighted with faces and names, before I could truly understand what she had said. So for the time being, I had decided to become a tourist. I’d wandered into Charleston’s Visitors Center thinking I would take a tour of the city, but was unprepared for the interactive supermarket of options I found. I could take a Ghost tour, a Gullah tour, a Garden tour, a Graveyard tour, an Historic House tour, a walking tour, a bus tour, a group tour, a personal tour. I wound up letting a tourist official decide for me. As it turned out, the tour guide, Tom Dew, and I were the only ones to show up at the appointed place and time. He was all for canceling, until I shamelessly mentioned that I was writing a book. He shamelessly offered to drive me around in his very air-conditioned van and give me his personal take on the city. It was a short, but symbiotic, relationship.
Crowded onto its small peninsula — Tom made a helpful analogy with Lower Manhattan, with the Ashley River standing in for the Hudson, the Cooper for the East River, and Fort Sumpter as the Statue of Liberty — Charleston, as he presented it, was glamorous, insular, and thoroughly seduced by its own superlatives. The oldest English city south of Virginia. (The Spanish were already ensconced when Scotch-Irish immigrants arrived in the late seventeenth century. “There was a big turf war,” said Tom, smiling. “We won.”) One of only three walled cities in North America, the others being St. Augustine in Florida and Quebec City. The richest city in America before the Civil War, with 90–95 percent of white families owning slaves. The biggest slave importation depot in North America. The city that first voted to secede from the union. The only city in the original thirteen colonies that knew, that is, its white citizens knew, how to have a good time.
“We have the oldest theater in the U.S.,” boasted Tom, as we dashed through neighborhoods of old trophy houses, their stucco, brick, and clapboard exteriors gleaming again, thanks to recent tourist dollars. Ironically, it was only because Charleston was so devastated by the Civil War that there had been no money to tear old houses down and build ones. These days, the city’s chief resource is its architecture of antebellum arrogance.
“Prostitution was legal here until after World War II,” he continued. “Up there in New England, while you were waiting around for the afterlife, we in the South had a culture of immediacy. The first act here was the Freedom of Religion Act, which was really the Freedom from Catholicism Act, but it opened the way for incredible diversity. Religious freedom was the greatest marketing tool in the world at the time. See, once upon a time you Northerners were the conservative ones, with a totalitarian grip on religion; we were the liberal free-thinkers, down here in the South. Getting rich was considered a good, healthy thing. Look there,” he pointed, “that’s the First Scots Presbyterian Church.”
As we passed the appropriately somber 1731 building, Tom told me its nickname: the Silent Church. Its bells had been melted down for the war effort, and never replaced. “The saying goes,” quoted Tom, “that for as long as the Confederate dead lie silent, so will our church.”
As Tom drove, I began to sense a tributary of the Mason-Dixon line running down the middle of the van. Nowhere else, apart from Cyclorama, had I encountered such a long shadow of the Civil War. “I guess,” said a friend of mine, who had recently spent time in the Balkans as a refugee advocate, “we had our Kosovo in the nineteenth century.” The comparison hit home. Tom’s vocabulary was still polarized into “we’s” and “you’s.” “I’m a Southerner,” he’d said, “and any Southerner will tell you, deep down, we wish we had won the war, and you had lost.” I appreciated his honesty, but it made me uncomfortable. His “we” not only excluded me, but gave me three choices of sentiment by way of response: guilt, sympathy, or a kind of knee-jerk, adversarial wrath. None of them suited my mood. I felt more uncomfortable with this handsome blond man than I did with Fouchena or Minerva. He certainly bore a greater grudge, but then his people had greater reason to miss the old days.
After about an hour, we stopped and picked up Tom’s beautiful baby — his wife had to go off to work — fastened him into the back seat, and kept touring. Before long we’d left the SOB quarter (among other things, it stands for South of Broad, referring to the oldest and most exclusive part of the city), and ventured into a dismal neighborhood of uniform drabness. Tom pulled up in front of an old masonry building with barred windows, and unsuccessfully tried to find some shade. I focused the air-conditioning vent on my face as he put the van into neutral. “All right,” he said as his son gurgled happily in the back, “I’m going to tell you a ghost story. The city has hundreds of them, but this is the story of Lavinia Fisher. And this, by the way,” he said, indicating the ramshackle building, “was once the city jail.”
THE STORY OF LAVINIA FISHER
In 1822 a woman and her husband were held here while they stood trial, and were convicted during the trial of being murderers. They ran an inn called the Six Mile Inn, which is on the way into town. There was also a Four Mile Inn, and so on …
Their names were John and Lavinia Fisher. You see, a man who was almost their victim escaped and made it into the city, and the police went out and arrested them. They’d suspected them, you understand, because travelers were disappearing. So this huge trial is held. And it’s an amazing spectacle … so many people were intrigued. There’s talk of witchcraft, they think she’s a sorceress. She was the first woman ever convicted and sentenced to die in this country.
Well, the day of execution comes and her husband is hung first. There is a gallows set up with two nooses. And there’s a huge crowd. Over two thousand people came to watch her die. And she was also — this is important too — she was said to be an incredibly beautiful woman. The man who was almost their victim, who turned them in, is a guy named John Peoples. He’s a skin trader, a country bumpkin. He lived miles from Charleston. He’d been saving up this wagon of skins that he was going to bring to the big city to get a better price. And so he stops at the Six Mile Inn to grab a place to rest, and she immediately tries to seduce him. Now he knows that there’s something wrong there, that he isn’t deserving of such an advance. He described her as having long, curly brown hair. She had a very full figure, and big brown eyes. He described her as the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, and said he was not a man that she would be attracted to. So he hides in his room. He makes a pallet and makes it look like he’s in his bed. So when they attack he is able to get away.
The trial comes. The husband is hanged. He’s dangling. She walks up the gallows. She kisses him on the mouth. She gives her dead husband a full kiss. Before he died he blamed it on his wife, he said she made him do it. Well, it’s time for her address. She turns to the crowd, and they said she spoke with a confidence born of insanity. She said, “If any of you here have a message for my devil, you better give it to me now, for I am about to meet him.” And she was hung.
This is where she was kept during the trial. And her ghost was known to return to the jail cell where she was held, from 1822 to 1886. Sixty-four years she was trapped here until an earthquake destroyed the jail. They think that symbolically and physically her vault — the jail — was opened and she was released. And that is why she’s not returned. But notice where we are. We’re in the middle of a housing project. This is low-income housing. But there’s no vandalism. There’s no graffiti. The grounds of this place are never messed with, because the black population is so terrified of this building. You ask people about this place, and they are scared to death of it. This was a Victorian prison. There was a crank in here. People were tortured. Only white people were kept here. The black jail was actually more lenient.
And that is the story of Lavinia Fisher.
I wrote in my notebook, “With Lavinia, who needs plateyes?” I added a few minutes later, “White ghost story in black neighborhood.” I wouldn’t have been thinking in racial terms if Tom hadn’t indicated on the way here that Charleston practiced a kind of de facto segregation. Blacks and whites overlapped for a few middling streets, but two blocks south of the mixing ground lay an all-white world, and two blocks north lay an all-black one. He said that the city had always supported a brown-skinned elite — I thought of Minerva’s family — but that even today the professional classes held few African-American members. There was strife, he said, but there was also “a sweetness here,” as he put it. Charleston was a civil city, and no one forgot it. Minerva, surprisingly, had agreed. She’d told me, “Charleston is just as racist, just as ugly, as any other city in the South. But during the protests they never had dogs. We just don’t do that here. Even the racists were polite people.”
