Trip of the Tongue (19 page)

I was mortified (if not exactly surprised), but Mr. Brown just shook my hand and smiled. He told me a man named Philip Simmons had worked as a blacksmith for eighty years without so much as a sprained finger. Then one day he'd gone outside, tripped on the sidewalk, and broken his arm.

As I boarded the bus I tried to figure out what the moral of the story was. I wanted to believe he was implying that even very clever people tripped now and then. Or maybe that sidewalks are surprisingly treacherous creatures, something I've believed for years. But, rather grimly, I eventually concluded the only thing Mr. Brown could have meant was that I was approximately as coordinated as an octogenarian.

When I found out later in the tour that Philip Simmons was a successful and widely acclaimed local artist, I was somewhat mollified: I was as coordinated as an
extremely talented
octogenarian. For someone who in junior high had been compared to a brontosaurus, this was actually something of a step up.

Much to my delight, the tour began with an introduction to Gullah. But I was astonished to discover that in the absence of a transcription I was almost wholly incapable of understanding even the most basic phrases. My smug assurance that native English skill would render me effectively bilingual was swept aside the moment Mr. Brown slipped into the rich, lilting tongue. No one on the bus had the slightest idea what he was saying.

He grinned at us, having expected as much. I think perhaps this was as much the point of the lesson as were the basic phrases that constituted it.

Soon thereafter we were heading into Charleston, snapping photos or pressing our faces against the window as Mr. Brown showed us historic site after historic site. Charleston is a city that has for more than a century had a majority African American population, and so there's African history to be found around nearly ever corner. The city is home to historic black-owned business, black churches, and former workplaces of black slaves. He took us to 91 Broad Street, the location of the offices that once housed the first black law firm in the United States, and to 5 Magazine Street, the home of the first black American to receive a medical degree. We stopped in front of Avery Research Center, a museum and archival resource that was originally built to house the city's first free secondary school for African Americans. And throughout the city he pointed out to us the work of Philip Simmons.

Simmons, I learned, was born a few miles outside Charleston in 1912, and his career as a blacksmith began at the age of thirteen, when he left school and apprenticed to an ex-slave. As the years passed and horses (and their need for shoes) fell out of fashion, Simmons began to turn more and more to ornamental ironwork, and it was his skill with gates, fences, and window grilles with which he made his living and found some small measure of fame. Over the course of his life his pieces were acquired by numerous Charleston families and businesses, not to mention museums throughout the world.

Mr. Brown took us to Simmons's workshop, which was as modest a place as you could imagine. We stopped in front of a slightly less-than-mint-condition house, behind which was another house that was in the midst of renovations. Behind
that
was the least stable and well-kept building yet, an edifice best described as a shed. It was in this building, which looked like a junk yard packed inside another junk yard that had been moved more than a few times over a number of years, that Mr. Simmons had fashioned his intricate designs. On one wall, nearly indistinguishable from the worn and rusted tools that filled the rest of the shed, was Simmons's cherished collection of nineteenth-century tools.

When I visited, Simmons himself was not in residence. He was living instead at a nearby nursing home, still creating designs to be fabricated by the apprentices to whom he had entrusted his workshop. He passed away just a few weeks later.

But you can still see his work throughout Charleston, in the nested-heart design of the gate at 91 Anson or the lazy, perfect spirals guarding the driveway at 138 Wentworth. In fact, if you've been to Charleston, even if you didn't realize it you've almost definitely seen Simmons's work. He created so many pieces over so many years that he himself couldn't remember them all. In his later years the foundation dedicated to preserving his work would drive Simmons up and down the streets of Charleston in the hope that he might recognize additional pieces he had crafted long ago.

I must admit that at first I was puzzled by the tour's emphasis on ironwork. It was not, I thought, what I had signed up for. But the more I considered it, the more appropriate it seemed. Philip Simmons left an indelible mark on the city of Charleston with surprisingly little acknowledgment for having done so. Here was a city whose history was linked inextricably with the fates and fortunes of its African American population—many of whom, like Simmons, spoke Gullah—a fact that is decidedly underplayed by the city's tourist literature. Frankly, if you go to Charleston today you're more likely to learn about pirates than the city's generations of accomplished African Americans.

The tour served as a reminder of another way in which the lives and legacies of working men and women are overshadowed by those of the rich and powerful, a phenomenon only exacerbated by the representational inequalities of slavery and race. Tourists don't typically want to tromp about town in search of unassuming lengths of iron; they want to marvel instead at the elegant homes of nineteenth-century planters or the formal gardens of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. If I wanted to understand anything about the role of African language and culture in the region, I was going to have to pay close attention to things that might not ordinarily have caught my attention. I needed to change my frame of reference. Though I'd been to Charleston several times before, I knew now that those visits had shown me just one side of the city. It was time to see the city again, I realized—time to see what I'd missed.

With this in mind, I decided to take a walk. Much later, when I finally made it back to my hotel, I was grimy, achy, and desperately in need of a beer. But I had—to my satisfaction if not to my pleasure—seen things in the city that would forever change the way I viewed it.

I began in the most obvious place, walking down Chalmers Street over by Waterfront Park to visit the Old Slave Mart. The Slave Mart is a relatively new building, constructed in 1859 and located on a quiet cobblestone street that seems an unlikely place for the business of trafficking humans. Before 1856, slaves in Charleston were primarily sold outside the city's Custom House two blocks away, but a city ordinance prohibited the public sale of slaves there, so the trade then moved to “sales rooms” on nearby streets.

One of these “rooms” was the large shed that is now the only surviving slave auction gallery in South Carolina. Originally owned by a man named Thomas Ryan, the shed was once part of a larger complex of buildings that included offices, a detention area, a kitchen, and a morgue. After the slave mart closed in 1863, the auction shed was used as a two-story tenement and an auto repair shop before eventually being turned into a small but intensely affecting museum.

I would absolutely recommend that anyone who visits Charleston makes sure to visit the Old Slave Mart Museum. That said, it's a bit of a downer. By the time I left I was in a genuinely foul temper, having come to the conclusion that the world is more or less a horrible place infested by horrible people. Everything around me seemed tainted by association. The day wasn't balmy, I realized; it was muggy. Those houses weren't charming, I decided; they were out of fashion. And the cobblestone street I had admired just hours before wasn't picturesque. It was a sign of the city's infuriating insistence on clinging to—and dressing up—its past. It should be paved over, I thought. Someone could twist an ankle. I crossed it carefully and with a scowl.

My next stop, the City Jail and Work House on Magazine Street, didn't exactly buoy my spirits. The jail is exactly as sinister and Gothic as you would expect it to be, crenellated and barred and looking as if it has been in this exact state of disrepair since the day it was built. After 1822 any black sailors whose ships were in port were kept here, slave or no, for fear that their very presence could incite rebellion. It was to the Work House, meanwhile, that Charlestonians would bring their slaves to be punished. Sometimes they were merely forced to grind corn by running on a treadmill, but if their owners were willing to pay a twenty-five-cent fee, the slaves would instead be taken into the Whipping Room, where they were stretched and flogged. The walls in the Whipping Room, I learned, were filled with sand to help muffle the sounds within.

Even my trip to the Aiken-Rhett House, one of Charleston's premier historical homes, served as a reminder of slavery. Built in 1818, the Aiken-Rhett House was sold to William Aiken Sr. when the original owner lost five of his ships at sea and had to meet a number of urgent financial obligations. After Aiken's death in a carriage accident, the house was left in the hands of William Jr., a successful businessman and planter and the man who would serve as South Carolina's governor from 1844 to 1846. He and his wife embarked on an elaborate series of renovations and additions, including the construction of a ballroom, an art gallery, and a deeply ostentatious Greek Revival entrance hall, taking an ordinary Charleston double house and turning it into a glittering showcase for one of the state's wealthiest men. Today it's one of Charleston's most popular tourist attractions.

Amazingly, the Aiken-Rhett House has not been changed substantially since 1858, and today the Historic Charleston Foundation is dedicated to its restoration and preservation. The lights still use gas, and the downstairs warming kitchen still contains a pie safe. The bedrooms upstairs don't have closets, instead relying on the armoires that were in fashion before hangers were invented. As I walked through the house I stopped to examine fragile pieces of nineteenth-century wallpaper that preservationists had stabilized with steel pins and Mylar backing. I learned that the grass mats the family slaves used to roll out each summer have been cleaned, protected, and stored away. I wondered idly what I would have to do in my life for someone to want to go to so much effort to save my dirty old rugs.

Eventually I wandered out back to the courtyard containing the stables and the slave quarters, which have the dubious distinction of being some of the best-preserved urban slave lodgings in the country. At the time of the Civil War, William Aiken Jr. owned more than seven hundred slaves. But most worked on his rice plantation on Jehossee Island, leaving only twelve or so to work at the town house.

Some of Aiken's slaves slept above the stables, and some lived in a two-story brick-and-stucco building on the other side of the courtyard. The paint has long since worn off the stucco, but the doors and windows are painted a discordant, cheery green. The first floor contains a laundry room and the kitchen where the family's meals were prepared before being transferred to the main house for service. In the days when do-it-yourself firefighting techniques were typically limited to the cunning use of buckets of sand, separating the “cooking kitchen” from the “warming kitchen” was a fairly common practice. It is nevertheless telling that the slave quarters, located just above the cooking kitchen, were afforded no such protection.

On the second floor of the slave quarters a hallway runs the length of the building, and at either end are two larger corner rooms with windows facing out onto the courtyard. Between these are three smaller dormitory-style lodgings with windows that open out into the hall. I remember thinking that the quarters on the end seemed reasonably comfortable—they even had fireplaces. But I suspect that was mostly a relative judgment compared to the cramped darkness of the dormitories, because even the larger rooms, which were sometimes used to house whole families, were only a hundred square feet or so.

Not that any of this could somehow pretty up the fundamental purpose of the building. Even if the rooms were spacious or inviting or colorful, they were still built to house slaves. I mean, the privies in the far reaches of the courtyard might have been substantial brick enclosures with fancy Gothic Revival façades, but they were still privies. And they still smelled.

Now, I don't mean to imply that the entire city of Charleston serves as some fetid reminder of some of the more despicable aspects of American history. I was just looking for it that day. And even so I was unable to wholly ignore the wily charms of Charleston's historic architecture. There were other stories to find here, too, in the circular steel plates I spotted every so often on the sides of buildings, indications that they had been retrofitted for greater structural integrity after the earthquake of 1886. (I hadn't even known that Charleston had earthquakes.) Or in all of the features—stucco, cupolas, piazzas—that were designed to keep residents cool in the subtropical climate. I learned that the city's long, narrow houses are the architectural consequence of property taxes levied based on frontage width. And I saw more than a few buildings with blue doors, a decorative practice that in many cases stems from a Gullah tradition that blue houses are protected from evil spirits.
^am
To many this may sound like mere architectural minutiae, but these were the details that helped me better envision everyday life in nineteenth-century Charleston.

That being said, every time I had managed to forget the city's sobering history for a few blissful minutes, I'd invariably stumble across some new disheartening detail. For instance, seemingly every time I went looking for a piece of Philip Simmons ironwork, hoping to enjoy for a brief moment the fantasy that talent and dedication might reliably be enough to build a life on, that's when I'd find another damn cheval-de-frise.

A cheval-de-frise—literally, “Frisian horse”—was originally a primitive anti-cavalry device first used in the Middle Ages. In its most common incarnation a cheval-de-frise is made by taking spikes or spears and attaching them at opposing angles to a central frame. They are portable, they are sharp, and they are nasty. If you're a Frisian looking to impale a few horses and their riders, I definitely recommend you look into them. But as it turns out, there's also a home version for those worried about trespassers. Just run an iron bar atop the length of your fence and affix wicked little spikes to it. It will make your neighbor's barbed wire look warm and welcoming in comparison.