I don't know about you, but my mental health requires that I get on the road from time to time, perhaps even as much as is affordable. This has not been a good year for that. Sometimes circumstances simply work against.
But, finally, I did get out of town this weekend, a 60-hour whirlwhind visit to Charleston, South Carolina, a place I'd never been. It was a conflicted visit of contrasts, and, therefore, the perfect visit.We stayed in the condo of a family with 5-6 homes. Like John McCain, this family has more homes than even their closest relatives can quite keep track of. There's this "oh, yeah" thing that keeps kicking in, as in, "Oh, yeah, they also have a house in ___________ ." But relevant to our discussion, they have a condo in Charleston at one of the toniest addresses in town, and we were fortunate enough to stay there.
That address, of course, was centrally-located within "Whiteyville," our family description for that part or those parts of town where the white and reasonably-wealthy have set themselves up for the best living and for a local flavor that is highly-dependent on adapting the customs and cuisines of one or more other races.
Charleston is classic in this regard. The main tourist area consists of fine, often colonial, homes, streets, shops, and restaurants that all cater to the white resident and the white tourist. Given that it's the 21st century, others are welcome to share in the cleanliness and safety of this area, but their numbers among the visitors were small when we were there.
Modern-day Charleston (like, it pains me to say, modern-day New Orleans) offers a kind of living history that doesn't dwell on the integral nature of its slave-centered past. You see the classic homes, even a place where Washington was once entertained, you shop in a main street turned into the mall you left back home, you eat classic, low-country dishes that come from the Gullahs and other blacks who populated the area, but you eat them in upscale, air-conditioned comfort. You travel by boat out to Fort Sumter, a terrific national park by the way, and in your reintroduction to the start of the Civil War, you are only reminded very occasionally that hundreds of slaves were also hauled out to that granite-enforced sandbar to reinforce the walls against potential attack, once the South took control of the fort. You see the attacker of the fort, General P.T. Beauregard's picture displayed much more prominently than the defender, Major William Anderson.
But these are all "Oh, wells" in the context of a vacation to a beautiful, casual summer city at the height of summer when the girls and women all wear sundresses and the hospitality is unparalleled.
Unless you're a food idiot, like me.Because I go to Charleston wanting the best of their food, and everyone I'm with knows it and tries to accomodate me, and so we eat at some incredible places--transcendent shrimp and grits at the Hominy Grill, she-crab soup to die for at High Cotton, authentic Southern cuisine at Jestine's Kitchen. But me, the snob, the educator, the reader, the educated also wants that best fried shrimp in the city that he's read about.
So we have to travel beyond even the tenuous boundaries of Whiteyville to the real Charleston.
We seek out a place called Dave's Carry-Out. To get to Dave's, you have to color outside of the lines. It sits on a corner with no other stores around, no street traffic of hungry tourists, in a space that used to be a hairdresser. It is a non-descript building with a non-descript sign. Inside, there are almost no decorations--a couple of cheap, mismatched tables and chairs, a long wood bench with a cushion on part of it, a few extra chairs around, an old television playing in the corner. There are no signs anywhere for anything. And it is clean, the most noticeably clean restaurant you've ever been in.
There is only one menu, which the owner hands you when you walk in. There is that momentary awkwardness that you always experience when you are the only white people in an all-black establishment. You realize quickly that you are the awkward ones; everything around you proceeds as usual. The girls sitting on those chairs that you think are waiting for their order are only hanging out, the guy eating chicken wings at the counter doesn't give you a glance. For the ridiculously-low price of $7 each, you order two fried shrimp dinners, one with fries, one with chicken perloo rice. And you wait in that same kind of awkwardness because there's no clear place where you're supposed to sit and nothing to do and you aren't quite sure how the transaction, the exchange of money and food will work. Eat in or carry out, your food will come in a styrofoam container.
My wife notices, on the wall, tastefully framed, an article about Dave's and another soul food place, a quietly-scathing article about how the places like these that serve the authentic food of the area have been pushed away, how the main tourist restaurants have adapted and assimilated these kinds of foods to give visitors a taste of the traditions of Charleston. The article reminds us that places and people like this do what they have always had to do--take the cheapest foods and make them taste delicious.
My wife tells the owner, though I don't think I ever said it, "My husband says you make the best food in the city." "I do," he replies.
But then the shrimp comes, and while we thought we would take it back, when we smell it, we don't want to wait until we return to the condo, so we eat outside on the trunk of the car, three white folks in a black neighborhood, clustered around a Camry, gorging on the best fried shrimp we've ever tasted, dipped only in perfect tartar sauce, sharing a fork to dig out pieces of chicken to eat with the perloo rice. The first bite is no big deal, but then your brain tells you, "Hey, that was pretty good," and pretty soon you're fighting for the fork and shoveling it in. We eat it so fast that in minutes it's over and we just keep looking at each other and saying, "Man."
Simple, authentic food mastered over generations, far away from the white tablecloths of East Bay Drive.
This is in no way intended to be an attack on Charleston. It's a beautiful little city and no different from any place else in 2010, when we all want to think that we have moved beyond our pasts. But I get to see Charleston as a first timer, with the eyes of an outsider, and that is the beauty of travel. If you stay where you live all of the time, you forget about what's been buried there. If you ever knew.
We seek out a place called Dave's Carry-Out. To get to Dave's, you have to color outside of the lines. It sits on a corner with no other stores around, no street traffic of hungry tourists, in a space that used to be a hairdresser. It is a non-descript building with a non-descript sign. Inside, there are almost no decorations--a couple of cheap, mismatched tables and chairs, a long wood bench with a cushion on part of it, a few extra chairs around, an old television playing in the corner. There are no signs anywhere for anything. And it is clean, the most noticeably clean restaurant you've ever been in.
There is only one menu, which the owner hands you when you walk in. There is that momentary awkwardness that you always experience when you are the only white people in an all-black establishment. You realize quickly that you are the awkward ones; everything around you proceeds as usual. The girls sitting on those chairs that you think are waiting for their order are only hanging out, the guy eating chicken wings at the counter doesn't give you a glance. For the ridiculously-low price of $7 each, you order two fried shrimp dinners, one with fries, one with chicken perloo rice. And you wait in that same kind of awkwardness because there's no clear place where you're supposed to sit and nothing to do and you aren't quite sure how the transaction, the exchange of money and food will work. Eat in or carry out, your food will come in a styrofoam container.
My wife notices, on the wall, tastefully framed, an article about Dave's and another soul food place, a quietly-scathing article about how the places like these that serve the authentic food of the area have been pushed away, how the main tourist restaurants have adapted and assimilated these kinds of foods to give visitors a taste of the traditions of Charleston. The article reminds us that places and people like this do what they have always had to do--take the cheapest foods and make them taste delicious.
My wife tells the owner, though I don't think I ever said it, "My husband says you make the best food in the city." "I do," he replies.
But then the shrimp comes, and while we thought we would take it back, when we smell it, we don't want to wait until we return to the condo, so we eat outside on the trunk of the car, three white folks in a black neighborhood, clustered around a Camry, gorging on the best fried shrimp we've ever tasted, dipped only in perfect tartar sauce, sharing a fork to dig out pieces of chicken to eat with the perloo rice. The first bite is no big deal, but then your brain tells you, "Hey, that was pretty good," and pretty soon you're fighting for the fork and shoveling it in. We eat it so fast that in minutes it's over and we just keep looking at each other and saying, "Man."Simple, authentic food mastered over generations, far away from the white tablecloths of East Bay Drive.
This is in no way intended to be an attack on Charleston. It's a beautiful little city and no different from any place else in 2010, when we all want to think that we have moved beyond our pasts. But I get to see Charleston as a first timer, with the eyes of an outsider, and that is the beauty of travel. If you stay where you live all of the time, you forget about what's been buried there. If you ever knew.
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