toward Hirtsboro. The sprawl of south Charlotte spilled seamlessly into York County, South Carolina, and, except for billboards touting fireworks, video poker, and subdivisions with lower South Carolina taxes, there was little to indicate that life fundamentally changes once you cross the border to the Palmetto state.
But it does. South Carolina was the last of the original thirteen colonies to join the union, the first state to leave the union after the start of the Civil War in Charleston, and the last to rejoin the country after the South had lost. South Carolina has always operated by a slightly different set of rules.
Whenever things got slow on the city desk, Walker Burns would send a reporter to troll around South Carolina for a few days. Inevitably, that would produce a fantastic story along the lines of: blacks who weren’t being allowed to vote in a Low Country town that hadn’t yet gotten the word; a funeral home that kept as an advertisement in its front window the embalmed body of an Italian carnival worker (known locally as “Spaghetti”) who had died and been left behind when the show moved on; two NASCAR fans who wounded each other after staging an old-fashioned pistol duel over the question of which was a better race car—Ford or Chevrolet. (Technically, the duel had been written about previously. The new angle uncovered by Walker’s South Carolina bureau chief related to the claim by local officials that taxes should have been paid on the $1,725 in tickets sold to attend the duel.)
Walker says that for every mile you go deeper into South Carolina, you go another year back in time. By his reckoning, by the time I got to Hirtsboro I’d be in the antebellum South.
As I cleared Rock Hill, the subdivisions gave way to peach orchards and rolling hills of red clay. I turned off the interstate near Columbia where the land flattened and the soil turned sandy. In the fields, tufts of picked-over cotton clung to dead, stripped black stalks like tiny flags of surrender.
South of Bamberg, I pulled off the asphalt and onto the hard-packed sand that served as the driveway for a white-painted cinderblock Gulf station, next to the Orange Blossom Motel and Tourist Cabins. I pumped gas and went inside, where a wizened old man whose shirt identified him as “Shorty” smoked on a stool behind the cash register and watched the store, the driveway, and an evangelist on a small black and white television. I picked out a six-ounce glass bottle of Coke and a postcard that had a picture of black field workers piling cotton bales on a truck and the words “Every Yankee Tourist is Worth a Bale of Cotton and Much Easier to Pick.”
“Be anything else now?” Shorty asked, grinding the butt of an unfiltered Camel into an overflowing ashtray.
“I need a pen. Do you have a pen?”
“Do what?”
“A pen.”
“I don’t believe we carry no pea-uns. I mean we used to carry ’em—diaper pea-uns and such but folks don’t hardly use ’em no more. I wanna say we don’t have any.” He lit another cigarette and returned to the TV.
“I mean a pen.”
“That’s what I said. Pea-un.”
“Like you write with.”
“Oh, you mean pin. No, we don’t have none of those neither.”
An hour and fifteen minutes later, I arrived at the entrance to Windrow. Two brick columns and a simple black iron gate marked a dirt road that left the paved highway and went laser-straight through a thick forest of slash pines.
The road was wide and well-maintained and in a few minutes I’d emerged from the pines. The road took a hard left and skirted a flat field of corn stubble that stretched to the horizon. Ahead, on a slight rise, stood the plantation home of Bradford Hall. He had described it as “modern.” What it was was a modern architectural wonder—stark, soaring walls, vast windows of tinted glass, angular porches. About the only thing it had in common with the columned antebellum Scarlett O’Hara plantation mansion of my imagination was its color—white.
Two golden retrievers bounded out the front door and ran up to meet the Honda. They were followed by Hall.
“I can’t tell you how pleased I am that you’ve come,” he said. The dogs sniffed my legs and eagerly wagged their tails. “Tasha and Maybelle agree. I’m sorry my wife Lindsay McDaniel isn’t with me to greet you but she’ll arrive from New York tomorrow. Let me help you with your things.”
He showed me into the house. Its core was a massive two-story living room with a glass wall overlooking the rocky shallows of the Savannah River. A stone fireplace and hearth had been built into the wall but with no chimney to interrupt the view. Instead, Bradford explained, a hidden fan sucked the fireplace smoke down, out, and away. My room was off one of two spiral staircases that flanked the entrance to the living room. From my bedroom, a sliding glass door led to a triangle-shaped porch that jutted out, like a ship’s prow.
We walked out to the porch and looked over the river. “Nice view,” I said.
“Thank you. It does what I intended. The magic of Windrow is the river, the animals, the plants. I wanted to live outside, but inside. I wanted to bring the outside in. There are no curtains. It makes Lindsay rather uncomfortable but the fact is, you don’t need them. We’re pretty much alone here. My father’s place is a couple miles away, at a different bend in the river, but it might as well be a couple of states away.”
He pointed to a battered Ford pickup in the driveway. “We’re on our own until Lindsay arrives tomorrow. Lemme show you around.”
A box of plastic bags, a safari hat, and a well-worn copy of South Carolina Wildflowers sat in the passenger seat. I tossed them on the floor and climbed in.
“My plant-hunting gear,” Bradford said. He wheeled the pickup down the driveway and out toward the main road. “General Sherman came right through here,” he said, sweeping his arm out the window and gesturing across a rolling cornfield that stretched to the horizon. “An English planter started Windrow in the early 1820s as a freshwater rice and indigo plantation. Confederate General Beauregard used the main house as a field headquarters for a while. But when the Yankees came through, they pretty much left the place alone.”
“Why?”
“In a hurry to get to the sea, I suppose. Anyway, it was lucky. My great-grandfather and his brothers bought it years ago for bird-hunting. They had their own railroad line from Augusta and they’d haul everything in—food, supplies, servants, guides and guests—entertain for the season and then return to Massachusetts and New York. My grandfather built a year-round place that my father lives in now. I spent my early years up North and went to school there but Windrow is where I really grew up.”
We turned off the road and cut across the dry corn stubble, kicking up dust as we bounced to the top of a rise. In the distance the Savannah River stretched to the horizon like a piece of silver string. We returned to the road and had been driving about twenty minutes when I asked, “How big’s the plantation?”
“We’re still on it.”
“Oh.”
He pulled to the side of the road and turned off the engine. “I have to tell you, I find it very embarrassing. The size. The houses. The help. The lifestyle. It’s how I was brought up. It’s who I am and I’m proud of what my forebears accomplished. But when you see how people live here, the disparity is appalling. It’s not fair. But that’s not a very popular position in my family.”
“Did you develop this concern for social justice at Harvard?”
“Didn’t have a chance,” he laughed. “Got thrown out after my sophomore year. The administration took exception to some of the plants I was cultivating in the botany lab.”
I laughed.
“It was the times,” he shrugged. “Anyway, I’d already finished all the good botany courses. Let’s head into town and I’ll give you a look at Hirtsboro.”
Bradford started the pickup and did a U-turn. We stayed in the shade cast by the long shadows of the pines as we headed back down the