For my traditional (?) post-Thanksgiving trip with Randi this year, we went to Charleston, South Carolina.
Charleston really is beautiful
Charleston really is a beautiful city, and such a joy to walk around – not just because the sun was out. Our AirBnb was a 40 minute walk from the centre of downtown, through mostly quiet, residential streets, but all along the way we passed local shops and bars and restaurants and people. The contrast with some of the Midwestern cities I’ve visited recently is obvious. And sure, Charleston is a tourist destination: an old city steeped in American history and blessed by a core of old money and narrow, pre-car streets. It is supposed to be nice. But it really does live up to it.
Rainbow road
The best decision we made was to take a walking tour, led by Scott and highly recommended. He gave a great introduction to the city’s history – from its founding as an English colony to the place where the first shots in the Civil War were fired – and didn’t shy away from the story of the native Americans, or enslaved African Americans, which are a fundamental part of it.
We also ate at slightly-pricey-but-delicious restaurants (many thanks to Cecelia for recommending The Hominy Grill, which we visited twice) including honey-coated crawfish hushpuppies, amazing crab cakes and southern fried chicken. And on Friday night we enjoyed the Que d’Keys Duelling Piano Bar – highlights include a reluctant Miley Cyrus cover and discovering that the woman behind the bar was from Bury St Edmunds. (It was also the first and only time that my ride home has been in a pickup truck.)
The sabal palmetto trees are everywhere
But we also wanted to visit a former plantation, eventually deciding on Middleton Place. This is where my feelings are mixed, and I still don’t exactly know what to make of it. Because I cannot imagine a plantation as being about anything other than slavery. That’s the purpose of preserving it as a historic site: to ensure the past is not forgotten, and provide a place where it is talked about, especially with children. Maybe that’s a bad starting point, and it’s just a way to compartmentalise the past and keep it out of mind beyond certain designated places.
Either way, this is clearly not what the owners of Middleton Place think they are doing. As you would expect from the former gardens of very rich people, the landscape is beautiful, and seems to be why people come. We had to assemble at #22 on the map for the slavery-focused tour, and while it’s hard to articulate exactly what was wrong, it just didn’t do justice to how sober the subject should be. It was more of a historical curiosity, safely removed from the present day. No slave cabins have actually survived: #22 on the map was, in fact, constructed after the Civil War for returning slaves coming to work as sharecroppers. This would have been a good opportunity to talk about the legacy of slavery after 1865, but we didn’t. And starting a tour by saying that slavery “has existed for millennia” and “is not just a Southern institution” is not the best way of taking on the responsibility for telling this particular chapter of human history.
I don’t want to suggest that our guide was an apologist for slavery. She wasn’t. She described what happened and answered questions honestly and it could have been a lot, lot worse. But it also could have been better.
Don’t walk down this path. Trust us.
After the tour, we walked down this narrow strip of land – which we probably weren’t supposed to – and Randi almost got eaten by an alligator. So there’s that.
The remains of Fort Sumter
Holding the fort
For our final day in Charleston, we visited Fort Sumter. History lesson: South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union at the start of the Civil War, and later fired the first shot at Fort Sumter where the US Army had hunkered down. Built to withstand the British navy coming from the sea, it wasn’t really designed for an attack in the other direction and they eventually surrendered. Only the base of the structure remains today, but it is a good place to sit and look back at Charleston over the water and be alternately grateful and afraid.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Fruit Ninja
We all have this feeling sometimes
Today was my fourth Thanksgiving but the first time I co-hosted. Thank you to our flatmate Amanda for being so great, and for her mum for coming to see us. Thank you to Jason for being my stalwart Would I Lie To You teammate and to Cat for standing behind me several years ago in Drayton Park and making it very clear the right and the wrong way to make a cheese sauce for cauliflower cheese. I’m sorry I couldn’t remember exactly which was which, but it worked out in the end!
Also had a lovely evening with Catherine and AJ earlier this week, decorating ugly Christmas sweaters/jumpers (in cookie form) and drinking lots of wine. I can’t remember exactly what made me pull this face, but it may have been the lack of American instinct for innuendo.
Happy Thanksgiving!
The Power of the Daleks ©BBC
Good distractions from the unfolding political nightmare:
- Watching the animated reconstruction of Patrick Troughton’s first story, The Power of the Daleks, in the cinema. Actually, I also enjoyed just focusing on the audio and trying to hear it in the living room where it was first broadcast and saved 50 years ago. The story itself was silly but menacing nonetheless, with sneaky Daleks ready to lure credulous humans into with extravagant promises of 100% reliable weather forecasts. And then killing almost all of them.
- Introducing James to Four Lions. I do love that film.
- Playing Pandemic with Randi, Chloe, Aaron and Jason. I was sceptical of cooperative games but this really won me over, even though we were unsuccessful in saving the world from destruction. (Damn you, South America!)
- Finally seeing Catherine and AJ again now that the campaign is over, and trying to uplift ourselves with multiple episodes of The Secret Life of 4 Year Olds. (Conclusion: 4 year olds are frighteningly advanced.)
- Laughing a surprising amount at three improv comedy teams with Randi’s colleague Katie at Friday Night Riot at the Bughouse Theatre. (Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but for $10 tickets at a tiny theatre on a Friday night I wouldn’t necessarily expect to be laughing out loud rather than smiling indulgently. Legitimately funny.)
- Lunching with Luis while keeping an eye on two football matches (real football!) and pooling our limited knowledge about the political situation in France. It would really be a good idea to keep an eye on France.
- Joining the adorable adventures of Newt Scamander and his TARDIS briefcase by seeing Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them with Todd and Carolyn this afternoon. (Although I do share Todd’s concerns about the continued absence of any proper judicial process in the wizarding world.)
If you’re looking for more productive things to do, I am reliably informed that phoning your representatives (not writing or emailing) is the most effective way to lobby them into investigating Trump’s evident conflict of interests, challenging his frightening and unqualified appointments, and generally causing a fuss. (I haven’t done so yet, partly because none of them are really ‘my’ representatives. But I should.)
On Election Day morning, I head out on another canvassing ‘packet’ of doors to knock. The list is designed to identify known Democratic supporters with patchy voting records. Our aim is to remind them of their polling station, cajole them to come out early, ensure they don’t forget. One family is so sick of being pestered that they’ve stuck a cardboard sign to their front door with a smiley face, a voting sticker and the words “I voted today at 8.30am” in felt tip. They are a canvassing dream. But most people are not home, or pretending not to be. I scribble their polling location onto our campaign sticky note and add it to another door.
“What are you doing?” asks a man from his porch. “Hi, I’m Dominic and I’m volunteering with the Hillary Clinton campaign” I repeat for the hundredth time, walking over and straining to achieve ‘friendly’ and ‘approachable’.
“Are you coming to my house?”
Actually no, I explain. His house isn’t on the list. But is he voting for Clinton? He is. I try to shake his hand, and he turns it into a complicated fist bump which I fail to pass but he forgives. He’s maybe 40, and I understand maybe half of what he’s saying. This is not a normal problem for me, and hasn’t come up in any of the canvassing so far. I’m really not sure where he’s from, or what he’s telling me, but after a couple of attempts I realise he’s asking me about my jeans.
I’m feeling sensitive about my jeans, because the previous morning I was threatened off a nearby street by a group of men (plus dog) who objected to my “gay jeans” in the strongest possible terms. But this guy is merely making conversation and I try to think of a response. I look down, look back up, and then – in full and total awareness of the ridiculousness of what I’m about to say – break the silence with “thanks, they’re from Uniqlo!”.
Suffice to say, there is not a Starbucks in downtown Toledo, let alone Japanese casual wear. Many homes are boarded up or demolished. One woman told us about the parks, pools and ice skating rinks which used to exist when she was growing up, but they are all gone now, along with the manufacturing which paid for them. The city is deserted, especially at weekends. Its remaining residents could be Trump’s imagined target audience, except they aren’t white. (On average, Trump voters are actually richer, and live further out.)
Even to annoying canvassers, however, people here are kind and generous with their time. One undecided voter appears at his door with his hand over his mouth and apologises for yawning: he was recording a studio session late last night. From his t-shirt and voting priorities, I guess Christian music. He thanks me with ultra-American Midwestern politeness for trying to sway him to Clinton. Another woman gives me a hug because she likes my accent. (She’s into languages and speaks some French, Spanish and Swahili.) In one strange encounter, a man agrees to vote early today because thinks he can make it before 5pm. I’m pleased, but I wasn’t expecting him to literally close his apartment door and walk off to vote the next moment without even stopping to pick up a coat. (Later on, when I see the multi-hour queue at the early voting centre, I feel guilty.)
And then there are the real heroes. Starting, of course, with the campaign team and volunteers who welcome and feed us like family despite us only showing up for the final four days. The young, homeless woman who sees my t-shirt and approaches me with enthusiasm to ask if she can still vote for Hillary. (She’s registered in Detroit, so she can’t.) There’s Monica, standing outside a polling station in support of renewing the city’s zoo levy, who buys us hot chocolate as we hand out Democratic sample ballots. Later, a local Republican and his 14 year old son show up to give out the Republican equivalent. He is kind to us, and we chat amiably, and for a brief moment there is a tiny window into civil democracy which is probably more widespread, even now, than you might think.
My favourite person is the young man who rescues us from the seventh floor of an apartment building, after Randi and I tailgate and then realise you need a keycard to get out as well as in. Pushing my luck, I ask if he’d lend us his keycard for an hour so we can canvass the whole building, and he agrees on account of it being for Hillary.
I thought it might be better to write about these people, who made life better for me, Randi and Christina in Toledo, rather than writing the same thing about Trump you can find on your Facebook feed. It is not supposed to be an uplifting distraction. These are good people who will be hurt by President Trump. They will be hurt in the worst-case scenarios, and they will be hurt in the ‘best-case’ scenarios where Trump is ‘only’ a Republican and ‘only’ does generic Republican things. I am sorry.
Canvassing in Toledo, Ohio
What a moment to be in Chicago. We had the perfect spot at the Begyle Brewing Company last night to watch the Cubs win the World Series for the first time in 108 years, but it wasn’t an easy ride getting there. Randi and I tried watching a couple of the earlier games with Todd and Carolyn, but our presence didn’t seem to bring much luck, and the Cubs ended up down 3-1 in the best-of-seven series. I made plans for Wednesday night on the assumption that there would be no seventh game. But then it all turned around, culuminating in a thrillingly tense finale in which my efforts to actually understand baseball were rewarded bigly.
Sure, my joy is vicarious. It was great timing to turn up in the city just as lifelong Cubs fans got what they’d always wanted. But as we were driven home through a thicket of celebratory car horns and waving W flags, it was clear there was plenty of joy around to share.
Flatmates
Matt, James and Lauren
In non-baseball news, Randi scored free tickets to The Last Wife – a play based on the relationship between Henry VIII and Katherine Parr. As the title suggests, she was the one who outlived him. I most enjoyed its depiction of Henry, a historical figure who manages to tick both the boxes of ‘pivotical turning point in the nation’ and ‘clearly a psychopath’ at the same time. He ends up weirdly lovable, which is what several hundred years of distance can get you. I also completed my duty of showing Randi the Lord of the Rings trilogy and decided that I was going to love Class, the new Doctor Who spinoff, no matter any objective spoilsporting which could be trotted out. (I mean, it’s worth it for the character of Miss Quill alone. She’s great.)
I wanted to write this post now because tomorrow night we’re off to Toledo, Ohio to volunteer for Hillary in the final four days of the election. I fully expect the election of America’s first female President to follow next week. But just in case…. here was the high before the low. Look how happy we were!
Helen on Getting ready for some adventures in China: “Enjoy China! Look forward to hearing all about it. A young woman who worked on our ‘casuals’ staff whilst going…” Apr 4, 12:34
