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 road. A heavy sweetness filled the cab.
“Daphne odora,” he said.
“What?”
“That sweet smell is from Daphne odora. Botanists identify lots of things by smell. It’s an ornamental shrub from the Mezereum family. In Greek myth, Daphne was a nymph who changed into a shrub to avoid Apollo’s advances. Her scent lingers, very fragrant as you can tell. Daphne odora is a very difficult plant. Short lifespan and nurseries don’t like to stock it. But at Windrow, it grows wild.”
“It’s intoxicating.”
“I understand she was quite an alluring nymph.”
“Bradford, how’d you get into botany?”
“Call me Brad. Not many kids to play with at Windrow, at least not many kids my parents deemed ‘up to Hall standards.’ So I made friends with the plantation animals, became a vegetarian when I figured out some of them were ending up on my dinner plate, and I started getting interested in Windrow’s plants.”
“It seems like a good place to do it.”
“It is. Botanically, Windrow is in a marvelous part of the world. It’s in a region that’s the northernmost subtropical point in the United States. I have in mind to do a coffeetable book devoted entirely to the botany of Windrow. You have pine trees and palm trees—more plant species than you could ever imagine. The frustrating thing is when you come across something that just doesn’t seem to have a name. Tracking down the facts becomes an obsession.”
“I know the feeling.”
It was mid-afternoon when we arrived in Hirtsboro. The sun scorched with the intensity of a heat lamp, glinting off railroad tracks that bisected the town and split treeless Jefferson Davis Boulevard, a lane on each side. Two blocks of one- and two-story storefronts faced each other across the boulevard. I took out my notebook and wrote down the signs as we drove by: Farmers & Mechanics Insurance Agency; the Great Southern Auto Supply and Appliance Store; International Feed & Seed; a consignment store called Second Time Around; Classen’s Clothes (Come to Classen’s for Classy Clothes!); the First Bank of Hirtsboro (open Monday, Wednesday and Friday) and, in gold letters in old English type, The Hirtsboro Reporter.
“This town looks like the model train set my brother Luke and I had as kids,” I said.
Brad turned off Jefferson Davis and we cruised slowly through the neighborhoods behind the storefronts. Unlike with the train set, there was a right side and wrong side of the tracks. On one side, a few blocks behind the storefronts, fine old homes sprawled on large lots with sidewalks and landscaped yards adorned with huge, spreading magnolias and carefully attended azaleas. In the neighborhoods on the other side of the tracks, peeling-paint shotgun houses sat on small sun-baked yards. There were no sidewalks. The streets were sandy, narrow, and unpaved.
“Savannah County is ninety percent black and always has been,” Brad said. “The land’s good for plantation crops like cotton, rice, and indigo. If you were white, you were a planter or maybe an overseer. If you were black, you were a slave. There wasn’t much else. After Emancipation, people who were here just stayed and there’s never been reason for anybody else to come. The white people, by and large, are descendants of the planters and overseers. The blacks are descendants of the slaves. It hasn’t been that long.”
We returned to the center of town where the diagonal lines of parking spaces angled out from the railroad track like bones from a fish spine. Brad parked his pickup with its bumper sticker reading “Meat is Dead” next to a souped-up Chevelle with a bumper sticker reading “I Have a Dream”—along with a picture of the Confederate flag flying over the U.S. Capitol.
“Let’s stop in at the paper,” Brad said. “I want you to meet the editor.”
A young man with a large waist and green visor stood as we entered. Brad introduced me as a Charlotte Times reporter to Glenn Hudson and told him, “I’ve talked Matt into coming down here to look into the story.”
“Great newspaper,” Hudson said. “If I can help in any way, let me know.”
Out the plate glass window, I watched a boy about seven or eight years old struggle to push a bent and broken bicycle across Jefferson Davis Boulevard. As he got closer, I could see he was crying.
The
