Coastal Carolina Quotes

There being no direct route to Savannah from Charleston, I followed a zigzagging course that took me through the tidal flatlands of the South Carolina low country. As I approached Savannah, the road narrowed to a two-lane blacktop shaded by tall trees. There was an occasional produce stand by the side of the road and a few cottages set into the foliage, but nothing resembling urban sprawl. The voice on the radio informed me that I had entered a zone called the Coastal Empire.

a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later?

There’s a place where the bees make purple honey.” He listened. “The North Carolina Coastal Plain. The sandhills. No one knows for sure why they do it. But it’s real purple. It glows. It’s like proof, Patch. There’s magical things out there just waiting on you.

Algren’s book opens with one of the best historical descriptions of American white trash ever written.* He traces the Linkhorn ancestry back to the first wave of bonded servants to arrive on these shores. These were the dregs of society from all over the British Isles—misfits, criminals, debtors, social bankrupts of every type and description—all of them willing to sign oppressive work contracts with future employers in exchange for ocean passage to the New World. Once here, they endured a form of slavery for a year or two—during which they were fed and sheltered by the boss—and when their time of bondage ended, they were turned loose to make their own way. In theory and in the context of history the setup was mutually advantageous. Any man desperate enough to sell himself into bondage in the first place had pretty well shot his wad in the old country, so a chance for a foothold on a new continent was not to be taken lightly. After a period of hard labor and wretchedness he would then be free to seize whatever he might in a land of seemingly infinite natural wealth. Thousands of bonded servants came over, but by the time they earned their freedom the coastal strip was already settled. The unclaimed land was west, across the Alleghenies. So they drifted into the new states—Kentucky and Tennessee; their sons drifted on to Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma. Drifting became a habit; with dead roots in the Old World and none in the New, the Linkhorns were not of a mind to dig in and cultivate things. Bondage too became a habit, but it was only the temporary kind. They were not pioneers, but sleazy rearguard camp followers of the original westward movement. By the time the Linkhorns arrived anywhere the land was already taken—so they worked for a while and moved on. Their world was a violent, boozing limbo between the pits of despair and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. They kept drifting west, chasing jobs, rumors, homestead grabs or the luck of some front-running kin. They lived off the surface of the land, like army worms, stripping it of whatever they could before moving on. It was a day-to-day existence, and there was always more land to the west. Some stayed behind and their lineal descendants are still there—in the Carolinas, Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee. There were dropouts along the way: hillbillies, Okies, Arkies—they’re all the same people. Texas is a living monument to the breed. So is southern California. Algren called them “fierce craving boys” with “a feeling of having been cheated.” Freebooters, armed and drunk—a legion of gamblers, brawlers and whorehoppers. Blowing into town in a junk Model-A with bald tires, no muffler and one headlight … looking for quick work, with no questions asked and preferably no tax deductions. Just get the cash, fill up at a cut-rate gas station and hit the road, with a pint on the seat and Eddy Arnold on the radio moaning good back-country tunes about home sweet home, that Bluegrass sweetheart still waitin, and roses on Mama’s grave. Algren left the Linkhorns in Texas, but anyone who drives the Western highways knows they didn’t stay there either. They kept moving until one day in the late 1930s they stood on the spine of a scrub-oak California hill and looked down on the Pacific Ocean—the end of the road.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order,

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.39 While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act,

I think the one thing that the Women’s March definitely proved was that this was not a coastal movement. There were marches that happened in the heartland. Like Oklahoma City has never seen a march that is 15,000 people strong, right? That is unheard of. Kansas saw marches of like 8,000, 9,000 people. South Carolina. Some of the biggest marches were actually not on the coast. Chicago was the third largest, with over a quarter of a million people. Saint Paul, Minnesota, was over 100,000. So we broke records in all of the different cities that we were in.

Tom had automatically picked up the oily rag that lived on the corner of Grey’s desk and, with a dexterous flick, snapped a fat fly out of the air and into oblivion. “Dead whale garnished with mint? That should cause my blood to be especially attractive to the more discriminating biting insects in Charles Town—to say nothing of Canada.” Jamaican flies were a nuisance but seldom carnivorous, and the sea breeze and muslin window screening kept most mosquitoes at bay. The swamps of coastal America, though…and the deep Canadian woods, his ultimate destination… “No,” Grey said reluctantly, scratching his neck at the mere thought of Canadian deer flies. “I can’t attend Mr. Mullryne’s celebration of his new plantation house basted in whale oil. Perhaps we can get bear grease in South Carolina. Meanwhile…sweet oil, perhaps?

Before buying fruits, look at the number of chilling hours your area gets. Minimum Chilling Hours Available by Region Mountains: more than 1,200 Foothills and Piedmont: 800–1,000 Coastal regions (northern): 600–800 Coastal regions (southern): 400–600

You, a small-town girl from coastal South Carolina, came all the way to Utah to eat octopus? You could throw a rock out of our bedroom window and hit an octopus on the head.

Rose was in existential distress that fateful winter when her would-be earthly master, Robert Martin, passed away. The place: coastal South Carolina; the year: 1852. We do not know Rose’s family name, or the place of her birth, or the year of her death. Such is the case with the vast majority of African and Indigenous American women who were bought, sold, and exploited by the hundreds of thousands. But we can be sure that Rose faced the deep kind of trouble that no one in our present time knows and only an enslaved woman has seen. Rose knew that she or her little girl, Ashley, could be next on the auction block, the cold device enslavers turned to when their finances faltered.

Several years ago a violent storm struck Pawleys Island and the Carolina coast. Two men riding in a car during the storm wondered what they should do. One mad said, “We sure need the Gray Man to tell us whether or not we should leave.” The other man responded quickly, “Well, there he is up ahead! Why don’t you ask him?” And it was! They saw the figure of a man, dressed all in gray, his shoulders hunched up against the driving wind and rain, while he strode purposefully along the island road. They stopped the car near the man. “Sir, are you the Gray Man?” one of them asked out the window. “No!” the man exploded. His head bent against the rain. The men in the car were disappointed. One said, “I’m sorry, sir. You’re dressed all in gray and out in this storm. No offense, sir.” They started to drive on. “Look,” the man in the storm said, “I had a heart attack, and my doctor told me I had to exercise. So I’m going to exercise if it kills me!” And he plodded on. The man was wearing a dull gray, knitted warm-up suit, with the hood pulled over his head. Today we depend on the Weather Bureau for warnings, watches, and evacuation notices in the face of a threatening hurricane or coastal storm. Certainly you should heed these warnings. But if you happen to see the Gray Man—take his advice and leave quickly!

These are the ancestral lands of. . . .' The phrase carries both truth and trauma that can slip past uneducated ears. Indigenous homelands on the Coastal Plain are places of deep connection and remembrance, but they are also places where horrific colonial experiences befell our ancestors. The trauma of those experiences still flows through our communities today. The pain of racial oppression and cultural loss combines with the radical transformation of our homelands, and it haunts us from generation to generation.

Carolina Flores took a sip of her sandía agua fresca on her porch and looked out across the scenic landscape of her lush farm, mesmerized by the clear blue sky overhead, the rows of colorful Swiss chard lined up like little soldiers, and the fields of red onions, ripe for picking. It wasn't strawberry season yet, her favorite, but she loved the calm of the winter months. A cool coastal breeze wafted the fragrant scent of garlic through the air, and Carolina marveled at the contrast between the snowcapped Santa Ynez Mountains in the distance and the food growing on the land. Mi tierra.

The KiKongo language, spoken around the Congo River’s mouth, is one of the African tongues whose traces linguists have found in the Gullah dialect spoken by black Americans today on the coastal islands of South Carolina and Georgia.

Riggs and three colleagues have recently published The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast (2011), which contains summaries from decades of their coastal research. He sees it as a resource for laypeople to understand not just future sea-level rise in North Carolina but also the ways that changing shorelines have shaped the state in the past. “We’re frequently asked, ‘How well do you know what you say you know in this book?’” Riggs says. “And the answer is: ‘We know it damn well.’” He practically growls the last part at me, a marked contrast to his otherwise grandfatherly and professorial persona.

The navy lacked sufficient armed escort ships to sustain a full-scale escort strategy. The admiral proposed instituting a temporary coastal convoy system. This Bucket Brigade, as he named it, escorted tankers around danger points such as North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras and barricaded them in safe anchorages at night.60 Dönitz increased the pace of his attacks, but the Bucket Brigade worked. Losses declined. Dönitz then moved his killer submarines into the Caribbean and continued destroying tankers. With the development of antisubmarine frigates and ship and airborne radar later in the war, the German submarine menace retreated. In the meantime, the United States went to work on a more effective protection for its northeastern oil deliveries: land pipelines, the largest and longest yet built anywhere in the world.

Eventually, North Carolina decided that it would ban state policy makers from using scientific estimates of sea level rise in the coastal planning process.

She reached her hand out and wiped his tears. “There’s a place where the bees make purple honey.” He listened. “The North Carolina Coastal Plain. The sandhills. No one knows for sure why they do it. But it’s real purple. It glows. It’s like proof, Patch. There’s magical things out there just waiting on you.