INTRODUCTION
The names and stories here are as real as the live oaks that dominate the region’s landscape. A few of the storytellers are still living, but most have died since being interviewed. They did you and me the favor of probing and sharing their recollections about their families and friends, and about life as far back as they could remember.
Did they recall everything accurately? Did they tell their stories truthfully? Can we verify what they said? Whatever is represented as a significant historical fact has been checked. Whatever else readers will find are scenes that came into the clearing as the storytellers traveled their memory trails—impressions that lasted half a century or more. Their individual tales overlap and intertwine, and in some cases, the tales come close to contradicting one another. Trying to unravel every mingled thread, to clarify all potential confusion, to nail down every detail would have killed this project. My impression is that if these folk did not tell the God’s truth about how it really was, they at least told it the way they remembered it.
Most of the characters were born in the Lowcountry. Most spent their lives close to where they were born. Those who were born elsewhere either contributed measurably to the cultural mix while they lived here or observed the Lowcountry through unique eyes. What an opera might be produced if one could put these Lowcountry characters on stage to interact with one another and entertain an audience. Men and women, black and white would compose the cast. Hovering in the corners would be the ghosts of the children they once were. The music would range from simple recitative, in which a single character laments a grief or shouts a joy; to memorable arias; to complex duets, trios and choruses about squalls on the sound, fires under the washpots, dances in the society halls, weddings, baptisms and all-day preaching.
For props, the Lowcountry players would need a bateau (flat-bottom rowboat) and a steamboat, an ox and a thoroughbred horse, a handmade fiddle and a grand piano. They would need a patch of okra, Atlantic blue crabs and a wood-burning stove. The scenery would include salt marsh, courtrooms and dining rooms, a few big houses with finely carved mantelpieces and a lot of small cabins with blue paint on the door to protect against bad luck.
Taken together, these characters, all intimately knowledgeable about the texture and the quirks of the Lowcountry in the first half of the twentieth century, present a panorama that will never be seen again. For them, this place has been home. They had the extraordinarily good fortune of knowing it the way it was.