Maybe the scent of roses, the bright light and the alleged vision of the Blessed Mother at Stella Maris had been a mass hallucination of some kind. I wasn’t sure. Maybe seeing Livvie now had been some kind of desperate act of my unconscious. How could I judge? There was no question that Livvie had visited me in my dream. If she could come to me in a dream, then why couldn’t she visit me through the mirror?
I had this sudden urge to turn and look all around me—to take it all in. The tree coming down, the table of photographs, the old armoire Tom and I had salvaged. Salvage. That was the order of the day for me—my cosmic marching orders.
I threw myself on the couch and lit a Marlboro Light, then put it out after the first puff, knowing I didn’t need them anymore. Okay, I’d go to the drugstore and get the patch to help, just in case I felt weak. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself and what had just occurred with Livvie’s visit. I would pray like mad for Tom and get the whole family to do the same. Better yet, I’d get the whole congregation of Stella Maris to pray. And what of Simon? I already knew the answer to that. The energy I felt made me euphoric with hope. I knew everything was going to be all right. Yeah, even I—cynical Susan Hamilton Hayes—had to admit that just about anything was possible. At last, at long last, I could rest in the sweet arms of peace.
Author’s Note
I could tell you real stories about my family and all the good people of Sullivan’s Island and Charleston and go on and on. I could tell you about how, on the Island, from the last day of school in spring until the first day of school in fall, I knew no kids who wore shoes, just flip-flops that we bought at Miss Buddy’s or Bert’s for twenty-nine cents. And that any kid who owned Keds, especially if they were clean, was immediately branded an intruder from the outside world.
I could wax on about the summer days spent running free with my cousins—filling an empty coffee can with blackberries, wild plums and chainey briar (wild asparagus) and climbing the water towers—and how anyone with a bicycle of their own was obliged to tow kids who didn’t have one. How we spied through the windows of summer renters and smoked stolen cigarettes under their houses in the winter and that our specialty was digging holes to China.
Once we did that at my Uncle Teddy’s and then somebody—one of my Blanchard cousins, I think—got the brilliant idea to fill it up with water and make a swimming pool. The hose was devoured by the hole so, knowing Uncle Teddy would tell our father, we covered the whole mess with some planks of wood. Well, he must’ve gotten suspicious about the hose being pulled from across the yard to under the house. He went down there after supper. It was dark, he moved the boards, fell in the hole and got covered in mud. He beat our behinds with his brown leather slipper and told us to never tell Daddy. His version of a beating resembled the way Ella Wright—a.k.a. Miss Fuzz—who was my Livvie, plumped pillows. We hollered our heads off to make sure he thought it was enough and then we laughed about it for a million years.
If you ever meet my cousin Michael McInerny, he’ll tell you the story about how he and his friends—I guess they must have been nine or ten—caught the biggest crabs on Sullivan’s Island and sold them to all the mothers in his neighborhood. In later years he found out the reason the crabs were so large was that he was crabbing at the Island sewage pipe! What could the family do but give him full credit for pioneering recycling?
And what about the ghost stories? People would tell them at night on dark porches and scare themselves half to death. Of course, I would listen to them and snicker, thinking they should have a big mirror like ours. They would sleep with a light on for the rest of their lives! Yes, that part about the mirror is actually all true.
In the old days, there were lemonade stands and there still are today, and ball games of “half rubber,” which is a Lowcountry version of stickball played with a broomstick and, you guessed it, a rubber ball cut in half. There were shag contests at Folly Pier, before it fell in the ocean, and sneaking into Big John’s and the Merchant Seamen’s Club with fake IDs to drink Singapore slings and beer when it was sweltering outside.
There were friends who went to Vietnam and others who fled to Canada. We burned our bras for women’s rights in the same fires that made ashes of our brothers’ draft cards. We argued civil rights until we were exhausted and then started over the next day. We rebelled against everything we thought was wrong. Good old boys grew long hair and traded beer drinking for pot smoking and Weejuns for sandals. And then, eventually, we buried our parents and became them, clinging to Lowcountry life with all the fervor of an Evangelical Revival, rather satisfied.
So many stories, too many to tell here. We don’t live there now, but maybe someday that will change. Someday I’ll have a home for my family on the Island.
Another time, we will shag, I’ll teach you a little Gullah poem and we’ll argue on how to make use of an entire ham. We will stroll down to the Sullivan’s Island beach at dawn, talking hurricanes, tide tables and sand castles. You will spread your arms in the eastern wind and feel the sun rise in every one of your bones. Once the sand of Sullivan’s Island gets in your shoes, your heart will ache to return. And return you will. You will be one of us. You won’t mind being a little bit Geechee.
As the heat and light of day begin to rise and glow, I’ll feed you a Lowcountry breakfast of warm salted air and, smiling, you will tell all these stories to your friends until you think they’re your own. You will hum this music of so much magic forever. Yes, you will. ’Eah?
Dorothea Benton Frank, Sullivan's Island
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