she didn’t. I was more than uneasy when I went out after lunch to have a look about the town and passed her maroon mustard-yellow-leather upholstered sports car standing in front of Mrs. Atwell Reid’s white house in Landgrave Street.
I didn’t really expect Jennifer would come for me, but I had a pretty good idea that if she didn’t Phyllis Latimer would, and that I would be got out to Strawberry Hill some way or other. But Jennifer came. Promptly at four-thirty she drove up in a coupé that looked even dingier and sandier and older than it was in the line of elaborate limousines with Northern licenses and uniformed chauffeurs in front of the Villa. I came down the stairs between the white columns with their painted urns full of spring flowers to meet her. She gave me a perfunctory smile with her facial muscles. Her eyes were wary and resentful, and her face a little pale still. She just missed being rude, but it was taking an effort, even with three hundred years of Charleston breeding behind her to make being gracious as automatic as breathing.
I got in her car. Her hand on the gear shift and her foot on the clutch were sure and smooth. That somehow always makes me feel better about people, and I didn’t particularly mind that she never bothered about the stop signs at intersections as we went along the South Battery and turned into Ashley Street. We passed Colonial Lake—Rutledge Pond, the natives call it—and went through the blinking yellow light by the Art Gallery without either of us saying a word. As we turned at Cannon Street and took the short cut across the marsh through the line of palmettos to the Ashley River Bridge she said,
“I don’t want my aunt to sell Strawberry Hill.”
She said it as if she’d been trying to get it out, but also as if it had popped out suddenly when she hadn’t expected it to.
“I’m not trying to buy Strawberry Hill,” I said evenly.
“I know you’re not,” she retorted. “Phyllis Lattimer is—and you’re the opening wedge.”
At the end of the palmetto row she slowed down, glanced around at the main road and shot across in front of an oncoming oil truck onto the bridge. The slanting afternoon sun painted the marsh grass along the blue river toward the Citadel mauve and yellow and brown.
“You don’t think she’s offering to publish Aunt Caroline’s memoirs for nothing, do you?”
I’ve learned over a period of years that if you can’t think of anything to say, it’s best to say nothing. In this instance that’s what I did.
“I know it means a lot to my aunt. She’s been writing them for years. Maybe they ought to be published . . . but it’s not fair, it’s just not fair!”
Just what the connection between selling the plantation and publishing the memoirs was, I didn’t know and I didn’t care to ask. That the two were connected in Jennifer’s mind was enough. The idea that it was the furniture in Strawberry Hill that Phyllis was after apparently hadn’t occurred to her.
“Is that why you won’t let her in the house?” I asked. “—Phyllis, I mean?”
She turned right on the Ashley River road where the signs on the left point to the road to Folly and on the right to the great gardens along the Ashley.
“That’s one reason,” she said shortly. “There are plenty of others.”
We went along through the sparse sub-suburban dwellings, past the scattered blue-shuttered Negro cabins with their chicken yards and gay pink flowering peach trees, until we came to that lovely stretch of great live oaks with their long smoky festoons of Spanish moss, this side of St. Swithin’s Creek.
“Oh, can’t you see, Diane Baker!” Jennifer cried, with a sudden almost fierce poignancy. “Can’t you see? We’ve owned Strawberry Hill for three hundred years. It’s the land, and it belongs to us, and we belong to it! My family raised indigo and rice on it . . . the people on it were theirs . . . they were using it to make life, not just to spend a few months in the winter playing on it. It’s just twelve hundred more acres to shoot over to Phyllis Lattimer—it’s everything, everything, I tell you, to me! I won’t let them sell it to her!”
I heard myself saying, smugly, “But if it means comfort for your aunt, and your mother . . .”
“Comfort!” she cried hotly. “Is comfort the only thing left in the universe? Did the people who saved it from the Spaniards and built it up and fought three wars to keep it . . . did they go around bleating about comfort? If they had, the Indians would still be shooting wild turkeys with bows and arrows and there wouldn’t be any Strawberry Hill!”
There was so much in what she said, and she said it with so much youth and so much passion, that I was ashamed of myself.
“I’d rather die in poverty,” she cried, “than sell out year after year, just because we’re too supine to work and make the land work when anything will grow on it. Just look at it!”
She waved her hand at the teeming sub-tropical growth on both sides of us, stretching forward and back as far as we could see.
“Other people are doing it. It’s just because we’re too lazy and too spoiled and unintelligent! It’s wrong, I tell you, to waste it. If it were barren and poor, it wouldn’t be . . . but it isn’t, it’s marvellous!”
She stopped abruptly. We’d come to the narrow stone bridge on St. Swithin’s Creek that divides the broad tract of land that comprises the two plantations, Darien and Strawberry Hill, on the Ashley in St. Swithin’s Parish, before you come to Church Creek and St. Andrew’s in St. Andrew’s Parish. The whole grant had originally been Darien, but it had been divided, Phyllis had told me once, by Miss Caroline’s great-grandfather in 1760 and the smaller plantation given to a widowed daughter who called it Strawberry Hill. It had descended with Darien itself to Miss Caroline’s father, who’d left them both to her, his eldest unmarried daughter. As they’d always been in the same family, they’d always kept the single entrance through a fifty-yard double lane of old moss-draped magnolias until it crossed a narrow inlet. It divided then into a wide “V” down two long avenues of live oaks to Darien on the left and Strawberry Hill on the right. We turned in, Jennifer and I, through the old mauve brick pillars, newly painted, with their great carved stone acorn capitals painted fresh clean white, and the elaborate iron gates new shining black, and crossed the bridge.
The avenue to the left was swept sandy-smooth and leafless, its wide grass borders under the moss-hung oaks trimmed and immaculate. A small white shield at its entrance said “DARIEN.” The avenue on the right was blocked with a weather-beaten rail gate in the old crumbling brick wall overgrown with yellow jasmine and tangled creeper. I’d seen it many times, of course, from this end, but I’d forgotten about it. And what a wilderness it was—all overhung with moss and flowers so sweet the sense faints picturing them. Was it Shelley who said that? It was true of all this.
Jennifer unlocked the padlock and opened the gate. I drove the car in and stopped while she closed the gate again and came back and took the wheel. Her firm little jaw set. The contrast of Phyllis’s avenue into Darien and this one into Strawberry Hill made her struggle to keep it so hopelessly tragic. She said nothing however. It wasn’t the traditional Southern lady acting as if the fried fatback were the turkey stuffed with capon stuffed with duck stuffed with doves sort of thing. It was much more human . . . I’d asked for it, and I was getting it, and I could take it and like it.
4
Ahead of us for half a mile stretched an overgrown cavern of live oaks hung with cascades of pale wisteria and thick festoons
