March 4, 2024
We leaned over the railing of Greenville’s Falls Park Bridge and watched the brown Reedy River rush over the rocks. Canada geese waded in the shallows, but then the river is not especially deep anywhere. Rivers, strangely, have something to do with the state’s history, and its tragic legacy as the setting for the start of the Civil War.
On a scale of great to picayune, our Reedy River barely registers, it’s more of a stream. Below the city it descends into the state’s backwater country, which, like much of the rural South, has barely been touched by time.
Twenty-seven years ago a friend loaned us a vacation house on Kiawah Island, just south of Charleston. I drove with the kids down I-95 from Virginia, Sandy flew. Crossing the state line at Dillon, we stayed with the interstate to Florence and turned onto S.C. 52, then mostly two lanes through the Palmetto State’s deepest boondocks.
We chugged along the near-empty road, ever southeast, into vernal Low Country forestland through poverty-stricken pockets of the Deep South. Isolated collections of ramshackle clapboard cabins appeared then fell away behind us, along with occasional one-pump gas stations and general stores. Skinny kids loitered here and there or sat on front steps, staring as we passed.
This went on for hours. Our old Buick Skylark wasn’t air conditioned, we sweated as the Spanish moss seemed to close in amidst the stretches of neglect and want, the raw reality of rural South Carolina.
Eventually we crossed the Santee River, the state’s second-longest, and passed giant Lake Moultrie. We skirted massive Francis Marion National Forest. All signs of even primitive civilization fell away. Then suddenly we were on I-26, back in the twentieth century.
The memory of that trek through the South’s underside now registers as unreal as we watch the Reedy flow through hip, prosperous downtown Greenville.
Two years ago we took the usual interstate route, I-385, I-26, I-95 to Hilton Head for a weekend. We left the highway at U.S. 278 and headed east for 20 miles on the well-traveled vacation/tourist route that eventually crosses Mackey Creek to the island. For that short distance the remoteness presses in, woods and bleak outcroppings of Southern bareness and poverty, until the vacation rental signs show up. Nothing much had changed.
The 60-mile-long Reedy becomes a metaphor for what we see, go-go new prosperity against the dark backwoods past. From the southern end of the Blue Ridge it approaches Greenville. Close to town it follows the Swamp Rabbit Trail, a walking and bike path past Furman University and the suburban settlement of Traveler’s Rest. It passes the hulks of long-closed textile mills.
The river is still mildly polluted from decades of industrial runoff. The city has posted signs warning against wading, but kids do it anyway. Still, it offers tourists a nice view from the riverwalk in the middle of town, the highlight of Falls Park. People lounge on benches along the bank, served by a couple of bars. A patch of greenery further along is fine for picnics and, in summer, the town’s Shakespeare festival.
South of the city it passes through Congaree Nature Preserve, a pretty patch of woodland. The city created the Preserve to get some use from the land ruined by toxic chemicals and metals from the river that prevented residential development. Eventually it joins the Saluda River, which widens into Lake Greenwood in Laurens County.
The Reedy becomes part of a network of dozens of minor-league rivers. The Edisto, North Edisto, Sampit, and Salkenhatchie drain the southern tier of the state. Most of the others, including the Black, Broad, and Congaree, are tributaries of the Santee or the Pee Dee Rivers.
The rivers flow uniformly southeast, from the Upstate corner that abuts Georgia and North Carolina through the Midlands and Columbia to the Low Country and its gold coast, Myrtle Beach, Charleston, Hilton Head.
South Carolina, apart from its Upstate share of the Blue Ridge, is a water-soaked state. The rivers are fed by hundreds of tributaries, known and unknown, that maintain the damp soil that was critical for the antebellum Low Country plantation crops, rice, cotton, indigo, planted, worked, and harvested by slaves.
The state’s slave economy created vast wealth for the slaveowners. Slaves built the lovely homes of Charleston and environs, which have become tourist attractions. Imprints of their fingerprints, including children’s fingerprints, can be found on the bricks.
In June 2018 Charleston issued a resolution of apology for its role in the slave trade signed by Mayor John Tecklenberg: “Recognizing, denouncing and apologizing on behalf of the city of Charleston for its role in regulating, supporting, and fostering slavery and the resulting atrocities inflicted by the institution of slavery … “
The resolution goes on to acknowledge that 40 percent of enslaved Africans arrived at the Port of Charleston and that hundreds of thousands of African Americans today can trace their ancestry to Africans who arrived in Charleston. It continues: “notwithstanding the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, institutionalized discrimination continued in many parts of the country … through Jim Crow laws.”
The document pledges that the mayor and city council will work to end discrimination in schools, businesses, and institutions doing business with the city. So there’s that.
We may believe it’s a long intellectual leap to connect our tourist-attraction hometown river with the state’s natural flow of groundwater, rich cash crops, slavery, and war. But two hundred years ago, and less, that’s the way it was in South Carolina. That’s why the rebels attacked at Fort Sumter in 1861. And why, in 2018, Charleston apologized.
On the Road 