“I don’t have a home, Mom,” I answered. “I can’t have one. It’s too late.”
“It’s not too late,” she said. “You’re a military brat, son. Because your old man defends this country, you’ve got a right to claim any town in America as your hometown. Any town. It’s your choice.”
“I don’t know a single soul in Beaufort, Mom,” I said.
“It’ll take some work on your part, son,” she said. “You’ve got to earn a hometown.”
I took my mother’s advice to heart, and I buried myself like a wood tick into the arteries and the historical tissues of Beaufort, South Carolina. There was nothing Beaufort could do to stop my invasion of its cells. In six months, I found myself maddened with the love of this water-ringed town. The curve of the Beaufort River still remains the prettiest change of pace and direction I have ever seen a river have the innate good taste to make. The founding fathers of Beaufort agreed with me and put one of the loveliest towns in America on its high banks, and they lined Bay Street with a row of kingly mansions that look like a row of wedding cakes when viewed from the river. Within a month, I would roam the halls of Beaufort High School with classmates who lived in some of those breathtaking houses. The town had an immaculate feel of welcome to it, and I enfolded myself into its silky embrace. I have never looked back.
Most of the books I have written have been psalms and cards of pure, unalloyed praise of Beaufort, South Carolina. Before the town took me in, I had no idea that geography itself could play such a large role in the shaping of a man’s fate and character. Because of the Marine Corps, I had entered at last into the country that was going to become the landscape of my entire artistic life. The great salt marsh spreading all around as far as my eye could see has remained the central image that runs throughout my work. I cannot look at a salt marsh, veined with salt creeks swollen with the moonstruck tides, without believing in God. The marsh is feminine, voluptuous when the creeks fill up with the billion-footed swarm of shrimp and blue crabs and oysters in the great rush to creation in the spring. The marsh taught me new ways that the color green could transform itself into subtle tones of gold as the seasons changed. The people in the Low Country measure the passing of the seasons not by the changing colors of the leaves of its deciduous trees but by the brightening and withering of its grand and swashbuckling salt marshes, the shining glory of the Low Country and the central metaphor of my writing life.
On the first day of school at Beaufort High School, the teacher of my life, Eugene Norris, presented himself to my junior English class. A kid on my left whispered that Gene’s nickname was Cooter. The marines in my life had all carried nicknames like Bull, Wild Man, and the Great Santini, so it was a pleasure to welcome a man who was named after a water turtle. Gene Norris was the anti–Don Conroy the antitoxin to childhood days so filled up with a screaming, out-of-control male. Gene was dapper and soft-spoken and good-humored, and in the first month, I found myself riding shotgun next to Gene as he drove me around the streets of the great cities of Charleston and Savannah, telling me the history of mansions and the names of the nearly mythical families who inhabited them. “Let’s ramble,” Gene would say, and we’d visit every antique store in the Low Country. During our rambles, Gene taught me to prize rarity and delicacy and craftsmanship. I learned about porcelain and coin silver and Empire furniture and Wedgwood, and I learned to recognize the furniture makers of Charleston above all others. For my mother’s birthday, Gene helped me select a gift that was within my slender budget. When my mother unwrapped the celery glass that, to me, was beyond beautiful, I said with a burst of pride, “It’s an antique, Mom! A real antique.” That celery glass sits in my writing room today, and I cannot pass it without thinking of my pretty mother or the sweet-natured man who came into my life when I needed him the most.
The first mansion that I visited on the Point, Beaufort’s historic district, was the Christenson house, where Gene rented a second-story room with a veranda and a view of the Beaufort River. While driving around the Point, Gene would tell me a story about almost every house we passed. “That house was built in the late 1700s. It’s fine. Very fine. Its wooden paneling is one of the glories of South Carolina. The old woman who lives in the house across the street is just crackers and can’t even tell you her first name. Over there lives a common drunk but his wife covers for him by telling everyone he’s got the flu. Poor man’s had the flu going on thirty years. That house is called the Castle. It’s got the most beautiful staircase in Beaufort.” Passing another house, Gene whispered that the family had migrated to Beaufort as carpetbaggers after the Civil War but had managed to overcome this shameful origin by becoming valuable, first-rate citizens of the town.
It was through Gene Norris that I discovered the great motherlode of story that forms the scaffolding of almost every book I have written. I had never come to a town so overripe with narrative. In the fall of that year, I saw an albino porpoise swimming in a pod in the middle of Harbor River. I learned that the white porpoise was called Carolina Snow by the locals, and that it was a sign of good luck to see her. There were black voodoo doctors who practiced their trade for great profit out on St. Helena Island. A fifteen-foot alligator had taken advantage of a spring tide to swim close to a house on the marsh and had killed a small pony before being shot to death by the man of the house. In Beaufort, there were houses still marked by wounded Union soldiers who had signed their names before facing the fearful amputations and hospitals set up in abandoned mansions. Gene showed me a boardinghouse where E. B. White had visited each year, as did Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley as had General Mark Clark of The Citadel.
On Bay Street, Gene stopped his car in front of the Verdier house and said, “On that veranda, Count Lafayette addressed the citizens of Beaufort in 1825 as he made his triumphal tour of the United States of America.” Turning on Craven Street, Gene pointed with great reverence to a two-story house and said, “That is my priest’s house, the Reverend Hardy, who is charged with the care of Gene Norris’s immortal soul.”
“Tough job,” I said. “Because you’re going to hell, Mr. Norris. So is Reverend Hardy.”
“Surely you aren’t telling me that you Romans are so arrogant that you think we Anglicans can’t go to heaven!”
“We sure are,” I said. “We’re that arrogant.”
“I never heard such a thing,” Gene said. “You papists repel me sometimes.” At the next house, he paused and said, “This is the Secession House. In this house, a man named William Rhett met with a group called the fire-eaters and planned the secession of the Southern states from the Union. This is sacred territory to a Southern Civil War buff.”
“Are you a Civil War buff, Mr. Norris?”
“Of course I’m a buff,” he replied. “I had two granddaddies fight in the Civil War.”
“Which side did they fight for?”
“My family is South Carolina born and South Carolina bred,” he said.
“So they fought for the losers.”
“Losers? How dare you call my distinguished ancestors losers, scalawag?” Gene thundered.
As his Buick poked along Bay Street, passing by its row of dignified mansions, Gene Norris told me of some of the great families who lived in those houses—the Fordhams, the Dowlings, the Trasks—and gave me brief histories of each family and the importance they had played in the making of the town. Stories leaked out of every windowsill and doorway we passed. On our left was the Jewish cemetery, which sent Gene into another reverie as he built his tales around the fortunes of the Lipsitz family as well as the Keyserlings and the Scheins.
I must have ridden out with Gene Norris thirty times in the two years I was at Beaufort High School, and I consider the time I spent with him as valuable as any college education could be. He taught me to value the old, to sharpen my eye for the most intricate detail, and to strengthen all the appetites upon which beauty itself fed. But most of all, Gene Norris handed me a different model of how to c
onduct myself as a man, showing me that a man could behave with sensibility and restraint and that a love of language and art could sustain him. Unlike a ride in my father’s car, I never feared a backhand from my English teacher or a cuffed head or blood running down my face for displeasing the marine aviator. My father never talked to me about anything, so I discovered I loved being in a car with a man whose stories issued out in ceaseless tides. Gene Norris spoke with a storyteller’s voice, and it felt like I was sitting next to Homer as he sang out in his blindness the illustrious stories of the fall of Troy. In the end, Gene Norris handed me the key to my first hometown and made it feel like the most sublime gift.
So I set a claim on Beaufort, South Carolina, the first town in America I ever called home. Though I have lived out my adult life in Atlanta, San Francisco, Paris, and Rome, it is the small town of Beaufort that still has a mortgage on my heart. All of my novels smell of the marshes, the pages wet with storm water born in the creeks that feed into the Beaufort River. I wrote the prologue to The Prince of Tides while living on the Via dei Forragi in Rome, aching with homesickness for Beaufort so urgently that I brought the Low Country to Italy. I can go nowhere on earth without hungering for the South Carolina Low Country. I carry its taste in my mouth, and I have smelled its fragrant marshes when I walked on a cobbled road in Ephesus where St. Paul preached a sermon, or when I studied a pyramid near Cairo, or when I contemplated the haunches of a statue of Buddha in Thailand.
I came back to Beaufort County for good in 1993 to rest my soul from the whirlwind that had become my life. I bought a house on Fripp Island, where my mother was living when she died of leukemia in 1984. When the weather is fine, I swim in the Atlantic Ocean twice a day—once in the morning, once again at sundown. One morning, I awoke and found hundreds of snowy egrets surrounding the lagoon that sits behind my house, locked in an elaborate mating ritual that contained the mysteries of dance itself. White-tailed deer roam the island in silent brown herds. From trees in my yard, ospreys hunt mullet in the lagoon. The bones of an enormous sixteen-foot alligator washed up on the island last month. A ten-foot alligator uses my yard as a highway to get to a lagoon that sits on a golf course. We have met, with some discomfort on both sides, on four occasions now.
When friends come to town, I give them my tour of Beaufort in honor of our friendship. It is, quite simply, a continuation of my rides in Gene Norris’s Buick when he could not pass a house without telling me a story about the people who lived there. But now, I have added my own history to the tour. I show the houses where Robert Duvall and Blythe Danner lived while making The Great Santini or the houses where Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte lived while they were filming The Prince of Tides. Then I show them the house where I met my first wife, Barbara, and the first house we owned, on Hancock Street, also where I wrote The Boo, The Water Is Wide, and the first chapters of The Great Santini. I have imprinted my own history into Beaufort and those stories have replaced the ones that Gene Norris told me so long ago in the amazing generosity he brought to the life of a fifteen-year-old boy. At the end of my tour, as we walk to the graves of my mother and father in the national cemetery, I tell my friends that all my novels sprang out of my father’s terrible house, the front seat of Gene Norris’s Buick, and the day that the town of Beaufort took me in, enfolded me into her history, and let me know in all the aching beauty of her streets and gardens that she was proud to have me call her my hometown.
SOFT-SHELL CRABS The first time I ever heard of soft-shell crabs was when I read about the delicious crustaceans in William Warner’s magisterial, Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Beautiful Swimmers. The people of the Chesapeake Bay and not the people of South Carolina learned the fine, patient art of catching crabs about to molt out of their old shells and into their new ones. Once these “peelers” or “busters” discard their old shells, they are among the most vulnerable creatures in the sea, and one of the most delicious.
Nothing is harder to clean than a hard-shell blue crab, and nothing is easier than a soft-shell variety. Take a pair of kitchen shears and cut off the face of the crab just behind the eyes, then lift the shell points on both sides of the crab to remove the gills or the “deadmen.” These look inedible and are lined like spark plugs along the crab’s abdomen. Then turn the crab over and cut away the apron on the rear end of the crab. Rinse the crab with cold water and the dinner bell soon will be struck.
I have also served soft-shell crabs with hollandaise sauce, rémoulade, and tartar sauce, with lemon and butter, and aioli, and have come up with not a single way to spoil this magnificent meal.
• SERVES 2 AS A MAIN COURSE OR 4 AS A FIRST COURSE
⅓ cup all-purpose flour
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon coarse or kosher salt
Pinch of smoked paprika (Spanish variety, not Hungarian)
8 soft-shell crabs, dressed
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons peanut oil (or other oil suitable for frying)
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 shallot, minced
Juice of 2 lemons
2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh parsley or chives
1. Line a baking sheet with wax paper and set aside.
2. Mix the flour, pepper, salt, and paprika in a shallow dish or pie pan. Working with one at time, dredge the crabs in the mixture to coat both sides, gently shaking off excess. Transfer to prepared baking sheet, and repeat until all eight are coated.
3. In a large heavy skillet over moderate heat, melt the butter and oil until foamy. Working in several batches (depending on the size of your skillet), add the crabs to the skillet (do not overcrowd). Cook until a crisp crust forms and the crabs turn a reddish brown color, about 3 minutes per side.
4. Remove the crabs to a warm platter. Working quickly, add the garlic and shallot to the skillet and cook until lightly browned, about 2 minutes. Add the lemon juice and parsley. Bring to a boil, stirring frequently, and spoon mixture over crabs to serve.
ROASTED LEMONS
Preheat the oven to 425°F. Cut the lemons (allow ½ to 1 per serving) in half and brush with olive oil. Roast, cut side up, until the surface is caramelized and the lemon is softened, 45 to 50 minutes. Squeeze the warm juice from the roasted lemons over soft-shell crabs or panfried flounder in place of tartar sauce.
PANFRIED FLOUNDER I cannot order a flounder or sole anywhere in the world without thinking of the first native of New Orleans I ever knew well, Richie Matta. During the day he was a sergeant in the Marine Corps; at night and on weekends he was a rock star. He was mischievous, charismatic, and devil-may-care, carrying an aura of danger with him every step he took. When you were Richie Matta’s friend, his loyalty and devotion to you were unshakable and not for sale. He also introduced me to the world of Cajun seasoning and food.
On a moonless summer night, in the middle of the summer, Richie took me flounder gigging at the end of Fripp Island. We put his johnboat into the Fripp inlet and he fixed a lantern that hung off the bow.
“The tide’s perfect,” he said as he stood and navigated over sand flats, looking much like a gondolier. We drifted over a sandbar where Richie had come across a trove of flounder. Carefully, we traded places, and I poled us across the shallow water on the starriest night of the year. Orion, the Hunter, had left us for the summer, and I longed for his return to the night sky. Richie lunged with his gig and came up with a two-pound flounder that he laid on ice in a cooler. With quick thrusts, he brought six more fish into the boat. Then he demanded that we trade places and we did so again, gingerly. I stood in the front of the boat and saw the lantern’s light revealing the clean-sand bottom of the bar we were passing over. I didn’t see a thing that lived or moved.
“There’s nothing down there,” I said to Richie.
“They’re buried. Look for their shape in the sand. Look for their eyes.”
It was a full two minutes before my eyes adjusted enough to follow Richie’s ins
tructions. I saw the first flounder dimpling the sand. There was a slight, odd-shaped mound in the sand, like the slightly raised women of cameos. I struck with the gig and raised my first flounder into the air.
We took in an even dozen that night. Richie was expert in all phases of outdoor life, and he made a beautifully built fire on the beach at the end of Fripp. He tossed a couple of nuggets of butter into a steel frying pan, then gutted, floured, seasoned, and filleted two of the fish. In those days I could not cook a quail’s egg and took no interest in his preparations for the cooking. The stars were too brilliant and the smell of the marsh, with its aromas of salt and spartina and working tides that took the essence of the mud and marsh grass back to the sea, was something I could never get enough of. Now I am old enough to know I will never get enough of it.
Nor will I forget the delicious one-of-a-kind taste of the flounder we ate that night. The fish were not only good but cooked to perfection, and that meal remains high on the list of top ten meals I have ever eaten.
“Richie, this is fabulous. The best thing I’ve ever eaten,” I said. “What’s that taste?”
He handed me a plastic cup of white wine and said, “That’s Cajun, son. That’s Cajun seasoning you’re tasting.”
Several years ago a woman came up to me on Bay Street in Beaufort and asked me if I knew that Richie Matta had died in New Orleans. I did not and suffered that I had not done enough to keep that seminal and valuable friendship alive. But when the woman gave me such dispiriting news, the first thing I thought of was flounder. • SERVES 4
Four 6- to 8-ounce flounder fillets
Coarse or kosher salt