Low Country by J. Jones (books to read in your 20s .txt) 📕

had the freedom to leave at all, to imagine a life outside of her marriage, must have been seen as an act of generosity on his part instead of a simple choice on hers.

I knew May mostly through boxes of British chocolates and strong black tea she shipped to Mom regularly, the Union Jack on the packaging reminding me of Nana’s British doll, with the tall fuzzy hat. Mom’s half Englishness was masked by her Southern accent, but for the cups of PG Tips and Twinings loaded with milk and cubes of sugar that were excellent for stacking into replicas of the Tower of London and Windsor Castle. I traveled to meet May once, when I was five. Grandpa offered to pay for his daughters to visit their mother, to bring one child along, and my strongest recollection of her is of a trip to the beach at Brighton. The carnival along the wooden boardwalk reminded me of the spinning rides at the Pavilion, but the weather was cold and leaden. No humidity or peaking blue sky. May led me down to the beach, which I could hardly believe was covered in smooth flat stones. She let me fill shopping bags full of rocks to show my brothers, and they became too heavy for either of us to lift. My other memories from the trip are less trustworthy. I may have gotten lost in the hedge maze at a famous castle, and it is possible, though less so, that I ran my fingertips over giant lily pads in a room made of glass. These scenes are mixed up with the souvenir-booklet photographs that Mom and her sisters returned with, and whose pictures I pawed through near-daily for years, until they were lost when we moved from the little brown house, along with the corn snake that slipped out of Jason’s aquarium a few weeks before moving day and that Mom never bothered looking for. He escaped every now and then, and I pressed towels between the carpet and door so he couldn’t crawl into my room, checked under my pillow and blankets before sleep, and took flashlight rays to the darkness of my book bag until he was recovered. I have wondered since if the future residents discovered him coiled in a shoe or in a drawer. Last time I drove by the house, I should have knocked on the door to ask. Wherever we lived, on mornings when I had a test at school, Mom made me a strong cup of Assam tea, and I built castle turrets out of sugar cubes and plopped into my cup in milky splashes the bricks of battlements.

Back in the station wagon leaving Conway for Charlotte, we all sang to the radio, my little brothers and me, with our hands and sometimes our heads out the windows, leaving town on the two-lane highway that winds past the Witch Links golf course, which the Joneses did not own. The sign at the front entrance was carved out of a half-moon of wood. A long-haired crone, cloaked and draped doubly in Spanish moss, a long, needling finger pointing from her whittled and painted hand. Mom would be singing, too, by then. Usually too reserved to do it in front of Dad, the real singer. Singing was life, and we brought him with us when we lamented in lyrics problems we were too young to understand. Our long weekends away, Dad recorded demos in the garage on cassette tapes, before going out to Drunken Jack’s or getting roped into one of Uncle Jack’s trips.

It was as if we had permission to be ourselves in the car. Or was it only after the river crossing, over the newer concrete bridge? We passed the sign for the ferry landing at Galivants Ferry, but I wouldn’t go looking for the plowshare for just about anything down by that water. On through Marion, where my school friend Dora and her family had their hunting cabin. Marion, that village an hour inland from Conway, farther than Cool Spring, and all cotton farms and crumbling old sharecroppers’ shacks. It is a location that will come to play a larger part in my family’s story, so we’ll take the liberty of pretending that on at least one drive to see Grandpa, I had the prescience to take notice of a wide empty field on the northbound side of Highway 501 where lay the future fortunes of the Joneses. Marion the town and the county were named after Francis Marion, the local war hero. In school we had learned that Marion, the “Swamp Fox” as he was commonly known, led a guerrilla war against the British during the American Revolution. George Washington himself was supposedly a big fan, and Marion was rumored to have been quite popular with the colonial ladies, who could not resist the man who strategically led British soldiers to death by snakebite, alligator bite, or mosquito bite in the malarial swamps. Marion was descended from French Huguenots who fled Europe after Louis XIV, the Sun King, declared Calvinism off-limits. Some of these French Calvinists voyaged abroad to South Carolina. Horry County was named after the Huguenot Peter Horry, another pal of Washington’s.

As long as we are on the road, why not take a small detour so readers can see another tourist attraction. “The Holy Ghost is the only ghost welcome here,” reads the old-timey white scrawl on a wooden sign in front of All Saints Church off King’s River Road in Murrells Inlet. While I hate to call anyone a liar, much less on church property, that is just not the truth. The Gray Man is seen not too far from the old Wachesaw plantation that’s now a golf course and gated housing development where Uncle Leslie lives with his family. In the South, manners are wielded like crucifixes at an exorcism. As if it weren’t clear who is welcome where in South Carolina. I suppose politeness works some magic