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By Root 1393 0

of 2010, I did, beginning with the Heywards. My first discovery was that DuBose was a high school dropout and that Dorothy was very well educated, having studied at Columbia University and Radcliffe College. Then I discovered the huge economic disparities between them. Dorothy was a wealthy woman and DuBose was comfortable at the time they met but he had grown up in poverty. I ran across a copy of her birth certificate, on which her name is “Dorothea”—my name—and letterhead that stated she lived on Fifth and Twelfth in Manhattan—my old address—and that she was a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, and so am I. I began to wonder if Dorothea/Dorothy wasn’t trying to tell me something, and if so, what was she trying to say? I then discovered a letter from a friend to her, calling her “Dottie,” which my friends and family have called me all of my life. Every time I turned around, it seemed I was bumping into another coincidence or similarity. Okay, I thought, there’s a story here and I’m going to try and tell it. Who was Dorothy Heyward?

The most interesting and curious fact of all might be that because she survived DuBose by many years, what is in those boxes at the SCHS is there because it was what Dorothy wanted us to know. Every single letter from her to DuBose is absent. Perhaps he did not save her letters or perhaps she disposed of them. We will never know. But scores of letters from DuBose to her were carefully preserved. It appears that Dorothy wanted us to have a one-sided conversation with DuBose, not her. It is my opinion that Dorothy always wanted DuBose to be the celebrity, the icon, the one who was remembered and revered. She loved him that much.

It is a matter of historic fact that Dorothy herself adapted DuBose’s book Porgy for the stage and that she also had a great hand in creating the adaptation of Mamba’s Daughters for the stage, the two most successful works with DuBose Heyward’s name attached to them. But she shied away from taking credit for herself and, in fact, spent her widowhood making sure that DuBose’s name appeared in the credits of all of Gershwin’s productions of Porgy and Bess so that his estate would receive the royalties that were due.

And, finally, while Dorothy Heyward seems to have gone to great lengths to disappear into history as “just a girl from Ohio who wanted a career on the other side of the footlights,” the facts appear to be different to me. True, she was diminutive in the extreme, and the fact that she was from Ohio may have rendered her more easily dismissed by DuBose’s crowd, but Dorothy Kuhns Heyward was a powerhouse, who married into one of Charleston’s most prestigious families and spent her life doing everything she could for the man she fiercely loved. Theirs may be the most powerful love story of the Charleston Literary Renaissance.

For those who want to learn more about the Charleston Literary Renaissance, I offer the following reading list:

Renaissance in Charleston: Art and Life in the Carolina Low Country, 1900–1940, James M. Hutchisson and Harlan Greene, editors

Mr. Skylark: John Bennett and the Charleston Renaissance, by Harlan Greene

DuBose Heyward: A Charleston Gentleman and the World of Porgy and Bess, by James M. Hutchisson

A DuBose Heyward Reader, James M. Hutchisson, editor

Folly Beach: A Brief History, by Gretchen Stringer-Robinson

The Morris Island Lighthouse: Charleston’s Maritime Beacon, by Douglas W. Bostick

A Talent for Living: Josephine Pinckney and the Charleston Literary Tradition, by Barbara L. Bellows

The Devil and a Good Woman, Too: The Lives of Julia Peterkin, by Susan Millar Williams

For those who want to read the work of the writers of the Charleston Literary Renaissance, I offer the following reading list:

Sea-drinking Cities, poems by Josephine Pinckney

Three O’clock Dinner, by Josephine Pinckney

Mamba’s Daughters: A Novel of Charleston, by DuBose Heyward

Porgy, by DuBose Heyward

Peter Ashley, by DuBose Heyward

Carolina Chansons, by Hervey Allen and DuBose Heyward

The Doctor to the Dead: Grotesque Legends and Folk Tales of Old