South Carolina by Jack Hitt

 

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America is a more informal, less grand, and modernized version of a previous project, the WPA American Guide series of the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. The Federal Writers’ Project “put more than six thousand American writers, archivists, and researchers back to work, creating a vivid, detailed, and lasting portrait of America at the time” during the Great Depression in order to fund work and support writers while creating literary maps of the states. Some of America’s finest writers worked on the project, which included hundreds of books and pamphlets. Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey wished to make a book inspired by the ideals behind the WPA Guides, “to describe America to Americans.”

State by State is a collection of 50 mostly personal essays, each about one of the 50 states of the U.S. According to one of the editors, Matt Weiland, “This book started with a hunch and a conviction.” While there are numerous blogs, books, documentaries, and songs about the American states, it still takes a disaster of some sort to remind us about the rest of the country, not just where we live. For example, it took 9/11 for us to remember the fragility of the Twin Towers, the Great Depression to remind us of our erratic stock market, and the effects of Hurricane Hugo to remind us of the seemingly indestructible architecture in South Carolina’s capital. Upheaval is revealed to be a changing force in our lives. For example, Hurricane Katrina destroyed the lifestyles of the people of Louisiana until they were able to reconstruct the thousands of buildings destroyed during the Category 5 hurricane. For the people of South Carolina, more specifically Charleston, this hurricane was Hurricane Hugo.

Out of the essays that I read, my favorite would have to be South Carolina by Jack Hitt. Jack Hitt is a contributing editor to The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and This American Life. He is also an actor, currently performing in a one-man show he wrote called “Making Up the Truth” about his childhood and outlandish personalities and people he has met in his life. Jack Hitt grew up in downtown Charleston, south of Broad Street where “no one ever flew the provocative battle flag of the Confederacy” and spoke “Charlestonese, which is heavily influenced by the African-American speech known as Gullah—a musical way of talking in which the speaker chews up and swallows most of a word while lingering lyrically over the occasional interesting vowel.” His widowed mother and him were “pretty much two of those Charlestonians” who were “wealthy enough to have maid out front polishing the brass door-knocker but too poor to put food on the table.” Perhaps his modest yet refined upbringing in the south is why Hitt has an overall friendly, honestly informative, and helpful tone in his writing.

Three overarching ideas appeared in the essay: Charlestonians vs. upstate South Carolinians, Charlestonian architecture and the aftermath of Hugo, and the secure relationships that Charlestonians have with each other. These ideas were not separate from each other, yet were distinct.

Hitt spends a great portion of his essay writing about the differences between upstate South Carolinians and Charlestonians. For the duration of his essay, Hitt compares and contrasts these two groups, and through this, classifies and divides the South Carolinians and the Charlestonians, seemingly defining his state. Hitt says that, “If South Carolina often told the rest of the country to get lost, then Charleston just as often had the same message for the rest of South Carolina.” The cultural battle between upstaters and Charlestonians is prominent in his piece. As Hitt details the history of the South Carolinians and the Charlestonians, he describes the high-strung tension between “one arrogant, scornful, haughty, supercilious, snooty, proud, puffed-up, peacock of a town—Charleston—and the rest of the state.” He talks not only about how their speech is different, but also how there is a religious split between upstate South Carolinians and Charlestonians.

The division between South Carolina and its capital is clearly stated when Hitt says, “Charleston always strained to draw a sharp line between the aristocrats and the hicks, or in the old language, the bourbons and the red-necks… Charlestonians traveled in Packards, then Cadillacs, then BMWs, while the Piedmont folks drove jacked-up rattletrap trucks to the NASCAR races at the Darlington 500,” and “… the split falls along religious lines, too. Upstate was Baptist and involved a lot of church-going while the Lowcountry was predominantly Episcopalian and considered attendance at Easter and Christmas just fine.”

Hitt describes the antique Charlestonian architecture, what was crumbling architecture before Hurricane Hugo. “The classic Charleston dwelling is called a single house” and he goes on to describe exactly what that is, and he mentions “that Charleston is a little village of antebellum houses.” No other state that I read focused on that, and the architecture of a place certainly is a defining factor. Think about the Romans. We see a building today and we can immediately identify whether or not it was based on old Roman architecture; it’s an integral part of how we see the Romans. However, when Hurricane Hugo reached South Carolina in September, 1989, it wreaked havoc on Charleston’s ancient homes, and this time, instead of “start[ing] the slow journey back to normal life,” the government provided the money for renovations, buffing up the houses like they never were before. “Now when I go downtown,” the author writes, “it’s like taking a walk on a Hollywood set.”

When Hitt speaks about Hurricane Hugo and its effects on the antique, stable architecture of Charleston, he takes us through the events that took place before, during, and after the storm in a way where we further understand Charleston:

“We all grew up looking at Matthew Brady’s famous pictures of the collapsed heaps on Meeting Street, the rubble left by so much Civil War cannonade. We all grew up looking at snapped church spires from earlier storms, or the hideous Depression-era photos of Market Street, populated only by man-sized buzzards snacking on dead cats. What was Hugo but another in a long line of these? Wouldn’t we weather this? Rebuild? Hold on as our ancestors did?”

Before Hurricane Hugo struck, after every major storm that visited their city, Charlestonians would start the steady process of getting back to their standard life. However, after Hugo hit, “one thing was different now. It wasn’t slow this time. This time there was massive amounts of insurance money (over $2 billion) to rebuild houses and lots of FEMA funds to fix everything else (roughly $300 million). The Federal Emergency Management Association. For years, we’d always derided it as the Florida Emergency Management Association.” After Hurricane Hugo, “within a year, the town was more spruced up than it ha[d] been since Ben Franklin started a newspaper there,” and “poverty, which had long protected the city from outside markets, was gone. The city was all gussied up for the first time, and the sales started to click.” The city of Jack Hitt’s youth was gone. “The city I grew up in pedaling my bike everywhere has almost no bikes, kids, or people—other than organized tours—walking the streets.” Something else that disappeared as Hurricane Hugo was cleaned up by the government was the rift between the upstaters and the Charlestonians. According to Hitt, “The free market has ended a very long reign and, with it, has alleviated the tension that defined the state of South Carolina.”

For the author, it happened this way: late one evening, in September 1989, Hitt was in his New York City apartment, watching “some goofy professor of meteorology who was standing in a wind tunnel to show us the effect of hurricane winds. They turned on the machine and ratcheted up the speed to simulate what Hugo was doing right then to my hometown. I watched as the professor’s cheeks melted into rubber and started beating the back of his head.” After running around his apartment in total despair, “I called my friend, Gus, another Charlestonian across town. He was already talking to another Charlestonian, John, and they were gassing up a car to drive home to their parents. They picked me up and a few minutes later, we were on I-95, traveling near twice the speed limit” showing the willingness of Charlestonians dropping everything to help each other out.

As mentioned, Jack Hitt is a journalist. During an interview with a former PepsiCo CEO, the two got onto the topic of Charleston, after the CEO detected a bit of Charleston accent in Hitt’s voice. After mentioning that he had house in the beautiful city, Hitt eagerly asked him, “… where? What street?” Astonished, the former CEO asked if Hitt truly did remember the streets and Hitt responded enthusiastically saying that, yes, he did know the street numbers that he “could draw the entire downtown tomorrow from memory with as much precision as James Joyce could draw Dublin.” Sheepishly, the CEO admitted that he had never been to Charleston before, solidifying Hitt’s idea of “house collectors … those itinerant plutocrats who bought the houses and maybe show up in the spring….”

“‘Meeting Street,’ he [the former CEO of PepsiCo] said.

‘Ah! Where? What number?’ I replied.

‘Oh, come on,’ he laughed. ‘You’d know the number?’

‘Pretty much’, I insisted. ‘My friend Parker lived at 76 Meeting, and Canty was 40-something. Charlotte was in the 30s probably, and the Bennetts, too. The Hawks were at number 1—…’”

In South Carolina, Jack Hitt taps the cultural tension to keep the reader interested. He described these views so well that I couldn’t help but want to find either the root or the result of this tension. You want to continue to read South Carolina to find out more about this tension, and when you’re reading about it, you find out about the intriguing architecture stories and what Charleston has been, which captures the interest of the reader even more. In addition, you discover Hugo’s impact on both the state and the author and his family.

South Carolina will not compare to the WPA American Guides because State by State lacks the money and elaborate planning exerted into the American Guides. From reading Hitt’s essay, I gained an understanding about Charleston, and in hearing about the differences between Charleston and South Carolina, I learned about South Carolina as well. In upshot, South Carolina by Jack Hitt was a very efficacious piece. I received a well-rounded understanding of South Carolina as a state through Hitt’s description of its capital, Charleston because rather than having “no there there,” (he quotes Gertrude Stein) there is a there there.