Travels with Joey
“Virginia is the North of the South,” my friend Eva told me this morning over brunch in Columbia, South Carolina, and that’s true. Restaurants still serve sweet tea, and people still soften their consonants, but not nearly as much as the Deep South (the dark, troubled heart of America), where I pointed my car this weekend. I sort of had to. My best friend still lives there, and I’m deeply ashamed to say I miss it.
I Miss the LandscapeThe slanted February light broke my heart as I bumped down South Carolina’s poorly maintained roadways; it tilts farther into the golden, the tropical, than the light a scant four hundred miles north. I didn’t realize how wan Virginia’s winter light becomes. I miss the hope of a Carolina winter. It’s more of a brief chill than a proper freeze, a subtle graying instead of Virginia’s prolonged dreariness.
I missed the palmettos, the swamps, the hanging Spanish moss. You never grow out of a landscape. Your heart never leaves your own red dirt, your sandhills, or your home-like sucking quagmires (luckily, I moved into another swamp, but I miss my swamp, too, since my new one is tragically devoid of both bald cypresses and alligators). I stepped out of my car in Congaree National Park and its quiet smacked me across the face. I’d written about it, but I’d forgotten. I almost cried; I’d written about it Blood Cypress, from four hundred miles away, and I got it right:
“Stand on the edge of that swamp, right where water and land become uncertain brothers and that soupy air turns scum-sweet. Gaze back into those cypresses that seem old as bones. The distance goes gray and dim even when the sun shines. There’ll be cicadas shrieking and mosquitoes buzzing, but under it all you’ll hear the quiet. You’ll feel it then. The hair on your neck will rise, and you’ll know it’s watching. You’ll know it’s waiting, too, and if you step wrong it’ll suck you down into that muck with every other lost thing. It was there before us, and it’ll be there after. That’s the real reason they never cut that swampland.”
I knew I missed it, but I didn’t know I missed it that much.
I Also Missed the StoriesIf there’s a story in South Carolina, my best friend Joey knows it. He drove me through the back roads of Anderson County and reminded me of the story of the Laurens County KKK museum.
Downtown Laurens was once home to the Redneck Shop, which called itself the World’s Only Klan Museum. Run by John Howard, Jr., it terrorized the Black population of Laurens, SC, once a site of violent lynchings; the Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the American Nazi Party held meetings there. The shop opened not in the dark ages before the Civil Rights Era, but in 1996.
Rev. David Kennedy, whose great-great uncle Richard Puckett was victim of a brutal lynching in 1911, led a campaign of nonviolent resistance against the so-called museum. He won over the owner of the building, Michael Burden, who sold him the deed with the stipulation that he could take control after Howard died. The shop closed in 2012; Kennedy took control in 2017. Today, the property is becoming a diversity center, and I’m told that Burden attends the church where Kennedy preaches.
All the stories don’t end that well (obviously). When the Dalai Lama flew over South Carolina, he supposedly gazed sadly from the window of his plane. “That land is soaked in blood,” he said sadly.
And another: the Congaree Indians were so thoroughly wiped out by smallpox that nothing of their language remains. A rumor persists: They kept tame cranes in their villages. The cranes were pets, beloved, friendly as barnyard chickens. The secret of their domesticity was lost with the tribe.
Every place has their stories, but I miss my own.
I Kept It in CheckI was able to go back without stupidly overflowing nostalgia by looking at the place like a writer. Did I get the image of winter-dried kudzu right? Did I have the exit numbers correct? I told Joey early on that I couldn’t listen to music. “If I stay in craft mode, I’ll be okay,” I said. “If I give myself a soundtrack, I’ll fall out of craft mode and get introspective.”
So I took notes. I tried to remember the stories. I snapped pictures and bought palmetto pants (my friend Rhodes calls our state flag “the moon-spangled banner,” and I can get behind that). I grabbed a sweet tea at Lizard’s Thicket. I missed my kids and my husband and my Richmond crows. I tried not to look too hard at what’s changed. We stayed inside for two years during Covid, then we moved. Three and a half years changes a lot of things.
Sometimes I wonder if I belong anywhere—I don’t know Richmond well enough to feel at home, and home feels strange, alien. Well, I guess I’ll learn Virginia seems too chipper. But there’s not another answer, not really. You do the best with what you have, even when you feel dis-placed. Not that I feel that way about my house or immediate environs; I love my actual home and crows and immediate tree-neighbors more than the ones in SC, if only because I know them better. But Virginia is big.
Guess I’ll have to try anyway.
