You eat the pie
and give me the crust

 

Susan Williams

The manuscript I submitted for the 2001 SCAC fellowship competition in prose was fiction, a novelistic treatment of the great Charleston earthquake of 1886. I ended up writing a nonfiction book instead, co-authored by my friend Steve Hoffius. Steve and I are always pleased when people tell us that Upheaval in Charleston: Earthquake and Murder on the Eve of Jim Crow reads like a novel, just as we intended. Since its publication we have been working together on a new book about Charleston in the 1880s, real-life stories of the seismic shift from Reconstruction to Jim Crow. This is how it begins:

 

A young whale wanders into Charleston Harbor, surfacing to blow twin fountains into the winter air. Droplets sparkle in the moonlight as they patter down. The whale sweeps past Fort Johnson, Fort Moultrie, and Fort Sumter, tracing the path of ironclads and monitors that once fought over the city’s fate. He cruises up the Cooper River, past wharves where ships lie waiting for longshoremen to load them. When the salt water starts to turn fresh he swings back toward the sea.

 On shore, Washington Gadsden climbs the narrow winding steps into St. Michael’s steeple. Gadsden can play any tune by ear, and he loves to add runs and flourishes that test the limits of the bells. He also works as a day porter, moving from one job to another as the members of St. Michael’s take turns keeping him on a payroll. But the bells are more than a job—they are his calling. He has been alive for fifty-six years, but free for only fifteen.

 Gadsden was once the kind of little boy who can’t help making noise. He always carried sticks to beat out rhythms on railings, pots, and glasses partly filled with water. It drove people crazy. But he practiced hard and somebody noticed, and before long he was ringing the bells at the venerable St. Philip’s Church. In 1837 he moved up to St. Michael’s, Charleston’s Notre Dame. He had to stop playing during the war when the bells were sent away for safekeeping. In 1867 he welcomed them home with “Auld Lang Syne.”

 As the gears on the clock tick toward twelve, Gadsden steps to the chime stand. At midnight his hands start to fly over the mechanism, with its eight wooden handles that pull on ropes attached to clappers in the bells above him. “Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a sham; Taffy came to my house and stole a piece of lamb; I went to Taffy’s house, Taffy was away, I stuffed his socks with sawdust and filled his shoes with clay.”

 For most white residents of Charleston, South Carolina, January 1, 1880 is just another day, one more milestone on the journey to recovery after the war. But for Gadsden and other former slaves, the first of January is sacred. It is Emancipation Day, the anniversary of freedom.

 “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus, going on before,” sing the bells. “Yankee Doodle came to town, a-riding on a pony.”  The notes ripple through walls and windows, into cozy, well-appointed rooms where sleepers huddle under quilts. They drift into tenements where the heat of crowded bodies barely keeps the chill at bay.

 Gadsden romps through song after song. He can play hundreds of tunes, and his hearers know the words. “Miss Julia, she loves sugar in her tea, Miss Julia, she loves candy. Miss Julia, she can twis’ an’ turn, an’ kiss them young mens handy.”

 “O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?”

  “You eat the pie and give me the crust, and that’s the way you make me cuss. You eat the meat and give me the bone and then you send this nigger home.”

 The last notes fade away and Wash himself heads home.

 

 Ashmead Courtenay listens to the bells and feels a stab of irritation. Why is Gadsden playing Yankee tunes on old St. Michael’s bells?  Not to mention lewd negro songs. How has that come to be regarded as a great tradition?

 Courtenay has just been installed as mayor of Charleston, a position that requires the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon. Experience, he thinks, has made him wise in the ways of the world. He always tries hard to be polite and tactful. But patient—well, patient he is not. He doesn’t have time for patience.

 Courtenay runs a shipping company that moves cargo and people north to New York and south to the West Indies. In the cutthroat world of international business, keeping up with the latest technology means the difference between success and failure. Steamships now cross the Atlantic Ocean in just seven days. The “speaking telephone” transmits voices instead of dots and dashes. A machine called the “type writer” produces individually printed letters and bills. Ice and cool air can be manufactured using the power of fire and steam. Thomas Edison has patented an electric light bulb that burns for forty hours.

 The new mayor feels in his bones that Charleston should lower taxes and learn to live within its means. But he also knows that the city is literally falling apart, and that you have to spend money to make money. Many of the buildings shelled during the war have been rebuilt. But the city needs paving, piping, lighting, wiring, and cleaning. It needs running water, a sewer system, garbage pickup, and a hospital that decent people will use. Charleston needs to catch up with New York—or at least with New Orleans.

 The first thing Courtenay wants to do is pave the streets. Out of forty miles of roadway in the city, fewer than ten are covered in stone or shell. How can anyone attract business to a place where some of the most important thoroughfares are nothing but dirt tracks, at best covered with wood planks? The planks that aren’t stolen rot, so that horses and men alike have to struggle to keep their footing. Before you can say Jack Robinson, the streets are back to dust and mud.

 Eventually the whole city should be paved, but that will take time. Everything has been haphazard for so long, subject to the whims of Republican officials who care more about collecting a salary than about being good stewards.

 Courtenay has to admit that even some of his fellow Democrats are not to be trusted. During his two-year term, Mayor W. W. Sale was as lazy and crooked as any Republican. Sale expected to serve as mayor for at least two more years. But then the Courtenay Clubs had formed. Banners proclaimed that the name Courtenay stood for Civilization and Intelligence. The longshoremen came out in force, sporting blue Courtenay Crosses on their shirts. On election day, knowing they were behind, Sale and his cronies tried their best to stir up trouble, even joining forces with the Republicans, an act that amounts to treason.

 Courtenay won. Sale lost. And he deserved to lose. Sale was a blustering bully who didn’t bother to keep records.

 Still, Courtenay can’t help feeling a little sorry for Bill Sale. He will appoint him master of the almshouse—a depressing and degrading job, but one that carries both a title and a paycheck. While he is at it, he will slash the almshouse budget by fifty percent. There is far too much waste there, and the system encourages able-bodied men to remain poor and dependent.

 The News and Courier arrives, bearing a cheerful endorsement: “With the dawning of prosperity has come peace and quiet. The colored population, realizing the fulfillment of Democratic promises, have ceased political wrangles and dissentions. Charleston has passed out of the darkness and into the light. Everybody is hopeful. The people have worked hard, have lived frugally, and have, at length, a government which makes them safe in person and in property.”

 

 The First Regiment of the South Carolina National Guard lines up on Calhoun Street, sporting dark blue uniforms and caps topped with blue and white plumes. Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Dickerson marches proudly near the front. Dickerson is a lawyer, and during Reconstruction, he was a judge. But when the federal troops left, that position went to a white man. Dickerson still practices law, representing poor, unlettered clients who can seldom afford to pay.

 The “colored troops,” as everyone calls them, were given guns and uniforms during Reconstruction and charged with protecting their people. White Charlestonians despise them.

 Crowds turn out to watch and cheer, but today’s observance will be quieter than usual. People who hope to hear public speeches will be disappointed. No one knows what to expect from Mayor Courtenay. It seems safer to celebrate behind closed doors, among friends.

 The churches hold New Year’s services. Banks, courts, and public offices are closed for the day.

 All the cisterns have gone dry. There is no rain in the forecast.

 Fireworks pop like gunshots in a distant battle.

 The whale swims in circles, searching for the sea.

*

 Sallie Chapin stands at the wharf, awaiting a ship that will take her north. She has not been outside her house in a year, since her husband Leonard died. She can’t really afford to make this trip, but Lizzie insisted that she go.

 Almost thirty years ago, Sallie and Leonard Chapin realized they would never have children of their own. They took in Sallie’s niece, Lizzie, and George Wilson, an orphan from the upstate hamlet of Prosperity. Sallie encouraged Lizzie to visit her father, but she did not want George to know that he was adopted. The boy’s older sister sent letters. Sallie kept them from George.

 George W. Williams, the banker, told her she was foolish to raise someone else’s child. At the time, Sallie scoffed, but now she sees that he might be right. Her son is stubborn and ungrateful. As a young man he took to drink—and heaven knows what else. He ran away to sea, sending messages through a friend to let her know he was alive.

 George returned safely from that adventure and went to work in Leonard’s business, selling buggies and carriages. But then he found out somehow that Sallie was not his real mother. He packed his things, changed his name back to Wilson, and moved to Prosperity, where he reunited with his brothers and sisters, married, and had a son. Sallie has written George to ask for help, begging him to pay her back some money she loaned him. She has told him more than once that their home is about to be foreclosed.

 Not a penny, not a word came. The silence was deafening. She has never seen her grandson.

 Sallie knows she was hard on George. But how can he be so cold? His hostility hurts her even more because she loves boys.  In fact, she once wrote a book for boys, Fitz-Hugh St. Clair, the South Carolina Rebel Boy. It was published in 1873, before the worst of her troubles. The hero was everything she had hoped George would be—an upstanding southern aristocrat who would not touch drink. Sallie likes to say she wrote it to make sure that southern boys could read the truth about the South. So much of what was published after the war was full of horrible lies. The South was depicted as a place where men were casually shot dead in the street, where everyone drank from morning until night, where white men whipped and raped colored women without a second thought.

 Sallie tried to set the record straight. She slipped in some history lessons and advised her young readers not to skip them. “We had no quarrel with the Federal Government,” she wrote, “only with the corrupt tyrants who administered it so as to turn the best government in the world into a cruel despotism.”  Whenever Sallie is feeling blue, she likes to reread her favorite review, the one that says her book contains “a force that would make it dangerous if there were anything left to blow up.”

 It is such a shame that young George has not lived up to her example.

Her husband was just as bad. After the war he made a small fortune—and then he drank it up. Sallie tried to get him to stop. She begged, she threatened and wept. She took the children and left for a while. She sent Leonard away.

 Each time he returned from a bender, he swore he would never drink again. However much he meant it in the moment, his resolve never lasted. He simply could not dry out—not for her, not for the children, not even to save his own life. Finally he ruined his health and brought on the stroke that killed him.

 As the ship steams north, Sallie’s spirits rise. If nothing else, she is out of the house, reveling in the blue sweep of sea and sky. When she reaches New Jersey, Miss Frances Willard turns out to be small, bespectacled, and utterly sure of herself. She wants the nation to outlaw the making and selling of liquor. “Do everything!” she exhorts her White Ribbon Army. Work on shutting down the saloons and getting the vote for women. Speak out against prostitution. Bring your message to the streets!

 Miss Willard also wants to encourage negroes to vote, and this perplexes Sallie. Surely no one with any sense wants negroes to vote.

 Sallie expects to do nothing more than listen. But then the testimonials start.

 “My sisters!” one woman cries. “I am a drunkard’s wife. I married a man whom I loved—intelligent, upright, honorable, sober. I will not weary you,” she says, “with a repetition of the common story of the change in my husband’s nature to a moody, morose, abusive husband and father, an object of loathing and terror to those who once were thrilled with delight by the sound of his approaching footsteps.”

 Every confession assures Sallie that she is not alone. Leonard’s smash-up was not her fault. Alcohol is a deadly poison that turns good men into beasts.

 Frances Willard calls Sallie “Dearie” and treats her like a sister.  Sallie starts telling her about the war, when Union soldiers appeared at her house and demanded a map of the city. She gave it to them, she says, but only after she had ripped it into tiny shreds. She talks about how dreadful it has been to live under the brutish rule of scoundrels and negroes. Frances looks unhappy.

 But now, Sallie hastens to add, she and her fellow Southerners want to educate the negroes. She is sure that if Frances spent more time in the South, she would understand the difficulties.

 Frances asks if Sallie will help her spread the gospel of temperance.

 Yes!, Sallie says. Yes! Yes! Yes I will!

*

 Early on the morning of January 7, the whale’s luck runs out. Men jump into boats and give chase, armed with lances and harpoons. Right whales are scarce and whale oil is dear. This monster must be worth a fortune.

 A harpoon plunges deep in his back and the whale tears away, tethered to his enemies by a cable. He is three times as long as the rowboats, looming suddenly alongside them as he breaches. Steam-powered tugboats try to tow him, but he yanks them around the harbor.

 A crowd gathers along the Battery to watch. The ferry maneuvers so its passengers can get a good look. Finally the whale beaches in the shallows off James Island. He rips the door from a tug and smashes the boom on a schooner. Another tug runs over him. The water blooms red.

 For half an hour he fights, twisting and standing on his head. Then he shoots away, 1eaving his tormentors to gape in a backwash of spray. He dashes into Hog Island Channel, then out again. The hunters unleash another hail of blades, bullets, and harpoons. A barefoot man plunges his lance into an artery. Blood shoots from the whale’s blow holes.

 Finally the whale stops thrashing. Someone fires a last bullet into his back. As the sun sets he shudders and lies still. Tugs whistle, the hunters cheer, and the whale’s corpse is towed to Sullivan’s Island.

 Gabriel Manigault shows up to claim the skeleton for the college museum. Men swarm over the carcass, carving off cubes of blubber. Manigault tries to impress them with the need to save every bone. He cuts out the strange staring eyes and drops them into a jar. They are as big as navel oranges. This specimen will dwarf the stuffed birds and mammals that crowd his shelves.

 Whale oil is a precious commodity that has made many a fortune. But this poor half-starved beast does not seem to be carrying much fat, certainly not the eight hundred dollars’ worth that had been predicted.

 Right whales have been hunted so relentlessly that they are now nearly extinct. Manigault imagines the articles he will write, the lectures he will deliver. He will return to take possession of the remains when the men have finished their work.

 A large whale is sighted near the mouth of the harbor, blowing and making a disturbance. People say it must be the dead whale’s mother, seeking her lost child.