In the Down Low

Jan. 14-17

We are well into the low country, and it’s beautiful.

The drive south from Santee on Monday took maybe two hours and a half. 

Hilton Head Island is a little more than 20 miles from exit 8 on I-95 in South Carolina. We arrived before one with no difficulty.

Pat and Bob waiting for us, and we shared a light lunch.

We took it easy in the afternoon and later Bob made a chicken casserole for dinner. Cheese, gravy and mushrooms, mashed potatoes on the side, a couple of glasses of a California red. This was good stuff.

Bob wanted to watch the basketball game, Syracuse (his home team) vs. Duke, which is top-ranked. Syracuse must have known Bob had put on his orange school jersey to watch, because they won in overtime with a 95-91 upset.

First stop on Tuesday was called Greenery. A short run down the highway 278, it’s a combination plant nursery, antiques dealer, and knick-knack store. Joanna wanted to buy cotton stalks to put in a vase by a window in her house. 

They were sold out and gave us directions to another store where Joanna might have better luck.

Greenery has two old wood-frame buildings. The principal one had an unusual, but somehow familiar interior. the center of the main room was open to the roof beam. It was surrounded by a plank balcony.

Was this a redesigned stable or small barn? Why was there a bumpout with a window at one end of the big room?

I asked the lady at the register. It is an old church. The company bought it years ago for $600 and had it transported by barge and then carried to its present foundation.

Pat had tried to to take Joanna there on Monday, but couldn’t get past the firetruck blocking the driveway. A parked car had lost its brakes and rolled into the bushes by the building next door.

As far as we could learn, no one was injured, but even so, there were cops and emergency vehicles all over the place.

Next stop was Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park. It’s a local park on the site one of the earliest American towns built and run by emancipated slaves. 

The town was named for Ormsby Mitchel, the Union officer in charge of the Department of the South, the Rebel territory occupied by the U.S. Army.

The park sits under sprawling live oaks and palmettos, drooped with Spanish moss, next to a vast salt marsh at the mouth of a stream with the folksy name Fish Haul Creek.

The entire low country here is spooky because of those trees and that moss like a torn veil. Mitchelville’s history makes it spookier.

Early in 1862, months before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Mitchel on his own hook declared all the slaves free in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, the area where he had jurisdiction.

Mitchelville became an experiment in the self-sufficiency of the former slaves. 

There are replicas of the small wood-frame houses that families occupied and of a church that would have been a focal point for the community. This would have been a foundation for the Gullah culture that has thrived here.

There is also a bench provided by the writer Toni Morrison where visitors are invited to sit and think about the history of the place and the people. 

From Mitchelville, we left the island to visit the old town in Bluffton, a few miles away. 

This is a living town of bungalows and big houses with galleries. Like most places here, it’s framed by trees festooned in moss.

At the Red Piano art gallery, we met the owner, Ben Whiteside, who is the Southeast representative of Stephen Scott Young, a painter who divides his time between Florida and the Bahamas.

Much of the work on display is museum quality. Young’s work is realistic. Much of what we saw were portraits, frequently of people standing in front of tropical walls, doors, or windows. 

The subjects are rendered in extreme, photographic detail, which gives the works a dreamlike feel. They often portray youngsters in front of aged backgrounds—the paint peeling from the wood, a crack in the stucco.

Their youth contrasts with the signs of age. Their dark skin contrasts with the pastel and white of the buildings and the clothes. 

We stopped for lunch at a bar behind the gallery. The hit was an IPA from River Dog, a local brewer. It was fragrant and tangy, a strong and unusual flavor. 

We got to the Coastal Discovery Museum about 10 minutes before closing. 

A temporary exhibit consists of artwork, mainly paintings and also some sculpture, by various members of a locally based family named Palmer. I only had time for a fast walk-through.

The museum also has natural history exhibits, including a sea turtle skeleton.

Dinner was at a southern comfort food place called Annie O’s Kitchen, where they served a number of low-country standards. 

One of those is shrimp and grits. I’ve had it before, flavored with Old Bay and celery seed. That wasn’t bad, but this was completely different and much better, made with bacon in the gravy and, as far as I could tell, no Old Bay.

Joanna had fried chicken with mashed sweet potato.

Damn Yankee is another local ale. Made by Southern Barrel Brewing Co. in Bluffton, it’s billed as a New England style IPA. It has a mild fragrance and OK bitterness, but not as much character as River Dog.

I also asked for an IPA from Westbrook Brewing in Mt. Pleasant, S.C. The brews at Annie O’s are served in a can. I didn’t notice the label on the can. I just poured the brew into a glass.

This one had some citrusy aroma, but at first sip almost no flavor. I looked at the can. It was another Westbrook brew called White Thai. They served me the wrong beer from the same brewer. It was a witbier, way too light for me.

Wednesday Bob and Pat drove us to Beaufort (Americanized to “Byoo-fert”), which is in the neighborhood of Parris Island, the U.S. Marine Corps boot camp. 

We decided to take the carriage ride through town. The driver and narrator, Kathy, was full of information.

The carriage horse, Angus, was, as she put it, unflappable. That is until we passed a carpenter working with a table saw. There was something about the whine that made the horse want to go the other way, but Kathy got him past it and he settled back into an easy stride.

The metal canopy of the carriage would scrape from time to time would scrape against the low-hanging branches of the live oaks and the Spanish moss.

This is a very colorful area. It’s lush country and yields plenty of food.

The Indians lived here for thousands of years, but so far we’ve come across no traces left of their culture. The Indian cultures that lived here didn’t build permanent structures like those in the Southwest, Mexico, or central America. If there were mound-builders, we haven’t crossed their path in the Carolinas.

The Spanish were here. Then the French. The Spanish came back and for a while Beaufort, under the name Santa Elena, was the capital of Spanish Florida. 

The English eventually took over until the American Revolution. The Carolinas are named for Charles I, the king that Oliver Cromwell executed.

During the Civil War the Union forces occupied the area. The white population, knowing they could be charged with treason for supporting the Rebellion, evacuated, leaving a population of thousands of slaves with no masters. 

One of them was Robert Smalls, who had been trained as a boat pilot. He worked on a Confederate tender that supplied the forts protecting Charleston.

He was very good at his job, to the point that his obedience was taken for granted. 

Get this: The officers and crew left him in full charge of the ship one night when they went into town to party. Smalls was ready.

He put on the captain’s uniform and collected his family and several other slaves. He knew the signals so there was no trouble getting past the forts. He put up a white bedsheet as a flag and surrendered the ship and its cargo of artillery to the Union forces.

He received a bounty from the U.S. government and a commission in the Navy. He commanded the ex-Confederate tender for the rest of the war. He later served in the state legislature after the war.

He later bought his former owner’s house. After his former owner died and left an ailing wife, Smalls took her into his home. 

Kathy said she had come up through the South Carolina school system and had never heard of Smalls until she was an adult. His name had been written out of the state’s official narrative of history.

Beaufort before the Civil War was a party town for rich planters of the region. They built mansions with galleries and ballrooms.

Many were lost in a catastrophic fire in 1907, but at least as many originals are still standing. A few replicas have been built, and at least to my untrained eye, they are indistinguishable from the authentic. Tin roofs, clapboards, brick, stucco, all blend in.

That’s required in the old town by the municipal building codes. One house has a pleasant, but modern blue coat of paint. The owner had to get a waiver from the town to do that.

Bob drove us out of town to a restaurant called Gullah Grub, but we found it closed. Across the highway was an art gallery, Red Piano Too, apparently related to the gallery in Bluffton. It specializes in Gullah art, painting, carving, and handiwork developed by the descendants of freed slaves along the southern coast. 

We went back to Beaufort to Plum’s, where Joanna had an oyster po’ boy and I had oysters and grits, which for me is even better than shrimp.

I finally got to try the Westbrook IPA. I picked up six cans at the Publix supermarket and drank a few while we watched HBO back at Pat and Bob’s apartment.

Thursday morning we went to Plantation Cafe for breakfast. I was pretty well filled up with grits, so I opted for eggs Beauregard.

This is the cafe’s southern take on eggs Benedict. It keeps the poached egg, but subs a biscuit for the English muffin, sausage patty for the Canadian bacon, and sausage gravy for the Hollandaise. It was delicious, no surprise.

How can you go wrong with biscuits and gravy?

That almost brings me up to date. We got to Savannah yesterday, but that is part of another story.

Be well, all, and may the grit in your life be fine.

Harry