Folly Beach - Dorothea Benton Frank [63]
“That’s pretty cryptic.”
“Yes. Because I think people should draw their own conclusions about others, especially when it comes to relabeling Charlestonians with aristocratic backgrounds.”
“So, what you’re really saying is that anything less than veneration of Mr. Heyward could be considered desecration of something sacred?”
“Exactly. Look, among other things, here’s the guy who allegedly put Charleston on the map again with Porgy and Bess.”
“What do you mean allegedly?”
“DuBose published the book Porgy in 1925, not the play.”
“Then who did? The Gershwins?”
“Nope, the play Porgy appeared on Broadway in 1927. Gershwin’s play didn’t run until 1934. And you should know, DuBose dropped out of school at fourteen and went to work in a hardware store. Then on the docks. Then in insurance.”
“But Dorothy went to Harvard . . .”
“My goodness! Miss Cate Cooper! You are one quick study!”
“Do you understand this kind of talk is practically treason?”
“What? What did I say? I didn’t say a thing! You did!”
“Holy moly. John, this is serious.”
“Yeah, it is. Would you like another drink? I’m gonna have another beer.”
I looked at the bottom of the inside of my glass to see that I had all but chugged this, my Magic Margarita. I wasn’t feeling magical but I surely knew that John Risley was capable of pulling away the curtains and exposing the Wizard of Oz. I was fascinated.
“Yes. Yes, I would. Thanks. Maybe a glass of white wine? Like a pinot grigio?”
John turned away and scanned the restaurant and after a minute he made eye contact with young Ms. Geier. My wine and his beer were ordered, our appetizers and entrées came and went, and I listened with both ears. I had found a new purpose for the days and weeks ahead. As we talked some more about Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, many other characters of their day came exploding to light, exploding because that was the way John presented them.
The members of the Charleston Renaissance and especially the Poetry Society of South Carolina were like a little army of determined carpenter ants, chewing their way out of the final mounds of Civil War ashes, through the poverty of the Great Depression and into the light of modern day—a new day. Their collective mission was to look to the future, to find everything about it worth living for and to take their artistic colleagues from every discipline of the arts from all over the country, bring them to Charleston, educate her citizens on what was happening in the larger world, and move forward. Whew! Now, there’s a mission statement, if I ever heard one.
When John spoke of these people—John Bennett, Josephine Pinckney, Hervey Allen, Beatrice Witte Ravenel, and others—he became contagiously animated. His eyes danced and he leaned in across the table in conspiratorial whispers when he talked about the alleged private life of Laura Bragg or when he revealed the secrets of Julia Peterkin.
“You make it sound more exciting than Woodstock,” I said and we laughed.
“It was.”
“I want to know everything about it.”
“I’ll make an historian out of you before I’m done. If you stick around long enough, that is.”
“I think I’ll be around for a while.”
Driving home across the Cooper River Bridge, high above the port of the City of Charleston, for perhaps the hundredth time in my life, I was struck by the great beauty of the shipping industry. Even with some of the container ships in their weathered state, I thought they were all beautiful. So many rested below us, docked overnight for an evening of shore leave, waiting for cargo that would come in the morning, waiting for the harbor captain to give them the signal to ship out, just arriving from Belgium or Port Elizabeth, or perhaps bound for someplace exotic like Singapore.
“It’s always something to watch, isn’t it? The port, I mean,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s irresistible to me, too. All those people, all that cargo, coming here, going somewhere else. Nothing stagnant about harbor life, that’s for sure.”
“That’s the attraction, I think.”
“Definitely. That whole industry has