South Carolina

...it's a "State of Mind"

http://www.joewilson.house.gov/

I want to write him about my state of mind about him, but he obviously doesn't want to read the thousands of love letters waiting to come his way.

I lived in Myrtle Beach for 8 months in the early 90's, and the bigotry drove me out of there.

She was spit upon for holding a door for an elderly black gentleman. She was ambushed and stabbed with a somewhat sharp stick. She held her tongue at the perpetual use of the N word. Her landlady would correct ANY compliment directed at a black by qualifying it:

My wife: "He is a really good principal."
Landlady: "He is a really good BLACK principal."

My wife: "Bill Cosby is a talented actor."
Landlady: "He is a talented BLACK actor."

She got used to this.

The school was almost entirely black. The only whites there were the ones that refused to go entirely without food to send their kids to "The Academy", which was whites only. People would openly admit the education at the public school was better, but they weren't going to send their kids into a building with a bunch of (you know). Her only white student missed about 2/3 of the days because his grandmother said "he's afraid of the black kids". And just where did that fear come from?

She had black, brown, and green construction paper and nubs for crayons. There were no paper products in the washroom. It took them two weeks to get rid of the nest of rats in the wall and six-foot cockroaches were a constant (small exaggeration). One of her students lived in a small two room shack with a pile of clothes in the middle of the main room (eight or so kids). She guessed the other room was for the mother. As she entered the doorway (no door), a pig was leaving. That was the worst place she visited. I went with her on one visit to deliver some toys one of my professors had given me to take down. It was one of the better off places. They had a light bulb hanging from an extension cord with a socket insert that a 12" or so B&W TV was plugged into. They were preparing green beans. As we were leaving, the mother tried to get us to take half of their beans! We couldn't do that. Out of courtesy, we accepted a small bag, enough for one meal. Even with so little, there was such generosity. There are things about South Carolina that are NOT wrong - that was an example.

This was the 1985-1986 school year. Things hadn't changed in 100 years, and it looks like another 24 hasn't had any impact either.

is really beautiful in a jungle-ish sort of way, but I rarely visit my parents' beach house near Beaufort because the area still feels segregated, and the juxtaposition of serious wealth alongside crushing poverty is hard to bear.