Blue Highways To My Red State Home

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Somewhere in SOUTH CAROLINA—(Weekly Hubris)—5/23/11—My roots in South Carolina go deep. Eight generations, we figure, my first cousin, Lon*, and I. Lon is a little over 70, but looks about 50, max. We
attribute this, he and I, to “hybrid vigor”—that big dollop of Cherokee we know full well was poured into our mix on the von Boleman side, quite a few generations back. When Lon’s mother, my maternal aunt, was alive, the topic was never broached. But Johnny (that’s right: Aunt Johnny, and there was also an Aunt Bill, short for “Willie Sue,” and an Aunt George) left us just this past year, at 98.

Johnny, a pillar of Greenville’s First Baptist Church (that’s Southern Baptist) had a framed, autographed photo of George W. and Laura Bush in her nursing home room up to the end. I wondered, always, how much that had set her back in (surely) annual donations. (The very last time I saw Johnny, I cruelly whispered in her ancient ear that at least my vote would cancel out hers. I claim to get my meanness from the Smith and Shirley—the English—side of the family; not the Cherokee. Johnny and Bill were both members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and no one in the clan admitted to even their German forebears.)

We don’t talk race or politics whenever I go “home.” We visiting Yankees also don’t drink or swear, which is a feat for my New York City jazz musician husband, who’s wont to yell obscenities at the television set whenever Bill O., Rush L. or Newt G. come onscreen. I mean real obscenities. The air is veritably blue a lot of the time in our Blue-State-TV-room—whenever Rush speaks (or the Mets lose).

But we—both my husband and I— love my first cousin, his wife, Ava; my first cousin once removed (their son), and his wife, and their three small children, my first cousins twice removed. So, we go to South Carolina, every year if we can, and we bite our blue Democratic tongues, and stifle our heathenish f- and s-words; and we willingly trade our glass, or two, of red wine or Sam Adams of an evening, for “sweet tea” and Ava’s homemade biscuits.

We could not disagree with them more, I think, about politics, or race, for that matter, if they hailed from Tehran instead of Upstate South Carolina, but they’re family: the same German and English and Blueridge Mountain Cherokee blood runs in all our veins and, since they’re better breeders than we, dern it all, they’ll beat us out in whatever national election we all vote in. The numbers are on their side.

The road—the back road—from Greenville to Pendleton, where I lived and taught, at Clemson University and Anderson college, for most of the 1990s, is lined with signs reading “Native Boulders,” “Mulch Blowing,” “Screened Topsoil,” “Eager Beaver Stump Grinding,” “Dirt for Sale,” and, right beyond the hamlet of Powdersville, which boasts a Civil War era opera house, “Welcome to Historic Slabtown.” (Slabtown is, of course, populated by mobile homes—trailers, that is—parked on concrete “slabs”: hence, the town’s name. I once published a newspaper, in Pendleton, which advertised a spurious, annual Miss Slabtown Contest. Told you I was mean.)

Pendleton, the town where my former home, a bijoux plantation house built in 1830 for a wounded Civil War officer and his Charlestonian bride, still stands, dates from Revolutionary War days, though most of the structures still standing are (just) antebellum. Dean and I return to Pendleton every year courtesy of Sheila and Jim Noonan, whose own antebellum home could tuck my former place into its watch-pocket. Sheila and Jim usually have room aplenty for us, and we’re glad to visit. We go to Dyar’s Diner every day for an early lunch of fried chicken, field peas, corn bread, collards, sweet tea and peach cobbler. Every day we’re there. I cannot get enough of Southern cooking.

We also revisit all the antique stores in town (a second cousin of mine, Jimmy Pruit, owned one of them, until just recently), and we got a real surprise this year at one establishment. Leaning up against the showcase at Past Times Antiques were two framed linocuts I’d done (and my father had framed) when I was a college freshman at the University of Georgia. Stolen from our family’s summer home on Lake Hartwell, on the Georgia/South Carolina line, some 30 years ago, by kids who broke into the house looking for anything they could sell for drug money—kids the police informed us were killed in a car accident a week after the break-in—these were pictures I never thought I’d see again.

The store’s owner, a former Clemson professor, had found them at a Pickens county flea market, and bought them because he’d liked “my” style of drawing. He very happily returned the prints to me, and I made new ones for him when I returned to New Jersey: the old blocks still render perfect prints.

Whenever I go back “down South,” I always feel keenly the rift between the part of my family that upped anchor and left—for California, for Europe, for Chicago, and for New York—and those who stayed behind.

Those who stayed remained Southern Baptists, vote Republican, speak with a drawl, cook the pants off me, and play both a better game of golf and poker. Those of us who left became Presbyterians and Buddhists, vote Democratic, “married out” (of our race, religion, nationality, or all three), were more broadly educated but are certainly less content with the world; more neurotic; less certain of things in general.

It is what it is. And at least they let me come visit, despite my Obama bumper stickers and the rest of my Blue, Blue State ways. . . .

PS I thought I’d share the most wicked of the South Carolina recipes I’ve purloined on various trips back home. (I can’t divulge the name of the restaurant of origin, or they’d have my hide, but my Facebook Peeps and former Journalism students from Clemson will know the place by its pie.) This dessert is utterly deadly, but just as divine:

“Frozen Peanut Butter Pie”
1 (28 oz.) jar chunky peanut butter
2 (8 oz.) packages cream cheese, softened
1 Cup evaporated milk
1 (16 oz.) package powdered sugar, sifted
2 (16 oz.) cartons frozen whipped topping (or whipped cream, whipped)
3 (9-inch) graham cracker crusts
Commercial fudge topping
Combine peanut butter, cream cheese, evaporated milk, and powdered sugar in a very large mixing bowl (7 quart size). Beat at medium speed with an electric mixer until smooth. Fold in the whipped topping or cream. Spoon evenly into pie crusts. Freeze until firm. To serve, drizzle with warm fudge topping. Makes 3, 9-inch pies.

*My cousins’ names have all been changed, as has their SC city of residence.

This column was first published on 7.27.08.