Beautiful City with an Ugly Past

Last week I spent four lovely days in Charleston, South Carolina, once the grandest and wealthiest city in the South, and still home to some of the prettiest streets I've seen anywhere. The lower ends of King and Meeting streets offer hundreds of beauties, but Church Street is the richest with treasures, including, as one would expect, many fine churches, one of the oldest theaters in the country, and gorgeous homes. Charlestonians' love for their city's architectural history is evident; several hundred colonial buildings still stand, and about two thousand antebellum buildings remain, many of them in outstandingly fine shape. One can walk miles down centuries-old streets and see one well-maintained historic house or church after another. One sees exceedingly grand "urban plantations," wrought iron gates and decorative work to rival those of New Orleans, dramatic palm trees, and tall classical columns. Some of the fancy wrought iron work served a more sinister purpose than simple adornment or added security for the inhabitants—metal window covering and tall gates or walls topped with pointed spikes made escape by slaves more difficult.

Other homes, at least as beautiful to my eye, are the more modest merchants homes on cross streets like Tradd Street. All over town one sees the one-room-wide "Charleston single houses" placed with the narrow end on the street, allowing houses to be close together on narrow lots. Typical lots were only 40 to 50 feet wide. Single houses feature front doors that open not onto their houses themselves but onto verandahs (which they call piazzas) to allow private and expansive outdoor spaces in which to spend their hot, humid summer afternoons and evenings and to provide ample shade and ventillation to cool the interior in sunshine or rainy weather. One sees Charleston single houses everywhere in every size and all states of glory or, if one travels into North Charleston, into sad states of disrepair.

That anything survives of Charleston's architectural past is something of a miracle; the city has lived through hurricanes (and suffered terrible devastation in 1989's Hugo), the Revolutionary and Civil wars, fires, earthquakes and a cyclone. It was right in the thick of things during both of our country's major domestic wars; indeed, the "war between the states," as one woman at St. Philip's Church still refers to it, began in Charleston's harbor, at Fort Sumter (itself worth a short boat trip and an hour's visit). (Fort Sumter's tour guide referred to the Civil War as "the unpleasantness.")

For one who loves visiting houses of worship and graveyards, Charleston provides a feast. There are several grand Episcopal and Anglican churches in town worth a visit, including St. Philip's and St. Michael's, the latter having provided solace and a place of worship to both General Washington and General Lee. Both offer perfectly maintained interiors and colonial box pews of the sort one also finds in colonial churches in New England. Their churchyards feature wonderful gravestones from as far back as 1730. The gorgeous Circular Congregational Church, a Romanesque stone church with a correspondingly lovely churchyard, is quite unusual and, despite the massive, fortress-like construction, feels welcoming because of the soft curves of the exterior. This church's graveyard is the oldest in the city, and still has one grave from the 17th century. Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim Synagogue is the country's second-oldest and the oldest in continuous use, and home to the American Reform Judaism movement.

I was surprised upon reaching Charleston and driving down King Street, the city's main downtown commercial thoroughfare, to see how much the city looks like a Caribbean island: so many tall, elegant plastered buildings in pastel colors surrounded by palm trees. South Carolina's state tree is the palmetto, and these elegant palm trees can be found everywhere. The city and surrounding plantations were established by many planters and traders who moved here from Barbados and the Bahamas, and the climate here is subtropical, so it makes sense that it should feel so connected to the Caribbean.

Dubose Heyward grew up in Charleston and wrote a book, Porgy, about the poor black Charlestonians of Cabbage Row; he turned the story into a libretto and George Gershwin came down to Charleston to spend a summer writing the music to the beautiful "folk opera" Porgy and Bess. One can walk past two of Heyward's homes and see where Cabbage Row once stood, though now the area is full of grand historic houses and endless plaques declaring the historical significance of the area, and no trace of the laboring blacks who once lived and worked here. Indeed, all of downtown Charleston is surprisingly white now, despite having been built largely by the skills of a once majority-black population. Indeed, as many as 80% of all slaves brought to America came through Sullivan's Island in Charleston's harbor. The slave trade and slave labor are what made Charleston the wealthiest city in the Southern colonies, and the first major city in the South. This beautiful city was built quite literally on the backs of the first black Americans.

The South Carolina Lowcountry was a melting pot for several cultures, and one major influence was the Gullah culture. The Gullah language, an English-based dialect rooted in African languages used by African-Americans of the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, has been in use for more than 300 years, and has been kept alive because many of the speakers have been geographically isolated on barrier islands. The Gullah people brought their extensive knowledge of rice and indigo farming to South Carolina when they were kidnapped and forcibly taken from their West African homelands to the colonies from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Slave labor was not the only important thing they provided to those who enslaved them; slave "owners" also took advantage of their extensive agricultural knowledge and put it to use. Many of those captured and forced to leave Africa brought with them basket-weaving skills that were of great use in storing agricultural products and in general household organization in the American colonies. The tradition of coiling and weaving sweetgrass baskets continues today, and in the public market and in other spots around town, once still sees African-American local women weaving and selling these baskets to tourists.

Carolina gold rice and indigo were two of their most important export crops, and Carolina's economy, like that of all Southern colonies and later states, was based heavily on agriculture, and the only way to be able to afford to run labor-intensive agricultural plantations and make the vast profits plantation owners had come to expect was to do it on the backs of slaves. The city of Charleston and the entire state were once majority black; before the Civil War the swamps were cleared, canals dug, plantations planted and harvested, homes built and maintained, food cooked, babies tended, clothes mended, horses shod, iron wrought, water gathered, and washing done for hundreds of thousands every day by people housed in leaky huts or in hay lofts or who slept on kitchen floors in cooking houses. The babies they tended and the cosseted young mistresses they dressed and fed slept on five-foot tall feather beds next door, filling the chamber pots that their darker-skinned property would empty for them the next day, before polishing the white folks' silver, making their candles, and decanting their wine.