Page xv → Introduction

Christopher D. Johnson

Among the most powerful responses to the attacks of September 11, 2001, is Billy Collins’s “The Names.” At the beginning of the poem, the speaker spends a rainy night pondering those who died in his home city: “I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,/Then Baxter and Calabro,/Davis and Eberling, names falling into place/As droplets fell through the dark.”¹ Over the course of the poem, the speaker identifies a victim for each letter of the alphabet and then reaches a somber conclusion: “So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.”² The power of Collins’s poem originates in both its detail and its lack of specificity. On one hand, the poem pulls the victims out of a statistical aggregate and restores their individuality. On the other, it reminds us that the names themselves—“Kelly and Lee,/Medina, Nardella, and O’Connor”—tell us little.³ We do not know ages, genders, or professions. We do not know who each person left behind, only that they are now gone. In this way, absence defines the loss, and the unanswerable questions raised by the poem show the scope of the vicious assaults. More important, Collins pulls the events of September 11 away from concerns about national security and toward the personal. He reminds us that the victims were people whose lives—perhaps as unremarkable as most lives—had meaning, value, and dignity. The attacks were profound not only in global and national terms but also in human terms. The destruction of the World Trade Center, Collins insists, was more than a national tragedy; it was 2,753 individual tragedies.

Collins never allows the victims to speak, but their silence is resounding. The historian Howard Zinn takes a somewhat different approach. He calls on his readers to awaken the “silent voices of the past, so that we can look behind the silence of the present.”⁴ For Zinn, history has the power to “untie our minds, our bodies,” but only if we acknowledge those who have been left out of the historical record, only if we allow ourselves to hear quieted words.⁵ The essays in this volume take up the work of Collins and Zinn. They recover histories that have been forgotten, erased, or appropriated. They challenge us to replace simple narratives with nuanced understandings. Most important, they honor the humanity of the enslaved, the maligned, and the misunderstood.

Page xvi →Several of the essays emerged from a brilliant symposium hosted by the Francis Marion University chapter of Universities Studying Slavery (USS) in February 2023. USS was founded at the University of Virginia in 2016 and currently has over one hundred member institutions, including seven from South Carolina: The Citadel, Clemson University, the College of Charleston, Francis Marion University, Furman University, the University of South Carolina, and Wofford College. The consortium seeks to share “best practices and guiding principles” for individuals and groups engaged in “truth-telling educational projects focused on human bondage and the legacies of racism.”⁶ The 2023 symposium, organized by a committee ably led by Dr. Erica Johnson, brought together scholars from across the region. It was not, however, a typical academic conference. There were community members, librarians, public historians, archivists, and students, several of whom presented papers and all of whom shared an interest in learning more about their own histories and those of their neighbors. Although much of the research focused on universities’ complicity with enslavement, there were also papers on adjacent topics, including the history of slavery at Hobcaw Barony; the development of an African-American historical walking tour in Lake City; the desegregation of Wilson High School in Florence; and archaeological excavations at Jamestown, a postbellum Black community in the Pee Dee.⁷ The Center for Civil Rights History and Research at the University of South Carolina provided an expansive exhibit titled “Justice for All: South Carolina and the American Civil Rights Movement.” The symposium ended with a splendid walking tour of downtown Florence led by Professor Louis Venters.

For those accustomed to discipline-specific conferences, the USS event was invigorating. Many of the papers were collaborative, often involving undergraduates. Each session was full, and the energy and enthusiasm were palpable. There were abundant questions and a strong sense of common purpose. Community members whose work lies outside the academy used personal remembrance to fill gaps in the historical record. The students, many of whom were making their first scholarly presentations, received guidance from generous scholars eager to encourage a younger generation. At lunch, there seemed to be more sharing and discussion than eating.

The symposium reminded many of us of how meaningful humanities research can be when it connects to people’s lived experiences. It also reminded us that collaboration needs to extend beyond academic credentials and disciplinary boundaries. Our communities are filled with experts of serious intention working diligently to recover important histories. These Page xvii →researchers are amateurs, not in the condescending way in which the word is often used but in its original meaning of someone who undertakes a task for love rather than profit. Those of us who are professional scholars need to respect their knowledge and skills. We need to welcome them into our conversations, share what we have learned, and value their perspectives and discoveries. The ivory towers that still exist don’t need to be razed, but their doors and stairways need to be opened.

Accessibility, in fact, has never been more essential. Because of funding provided by Francis Marion University, the USS symposium was a free event that was open to the public. Other crucial resources, however, often remain unavailable to those who need them. Scholarly books are notoriously expensive, and journal articles are frequently locked behind paywalls. For those without access to university libraries, vital materials remain unattainable. Many presses are working to address these issues by making their titles available as free, open-access documents. The University of South Carolina Press has been an important leader in these initiatives, especially through the Open Carolina program, which includes all volumes of Carolina Currents.⁸ Open access, however, is only free to the user. The press still incurs the expenses of production and marketing. The open-access versions of Carolina Currents, as well as the affordable paperback volumes, would be impossible without the generous support of Francis Marion University and the University of South Carolina Libraries.

Accessibility, of course, goes beyond cost. To be useful for a wide range of readers, scholarly work needs to be comprehensible, which presents its own challenges. Academic arguments are often complicated and nuanced. They contribute to ongoing dialogues that can be difficult for nonspecialists to understand, and here lies the difficulty: The aims of scholarship cannot be met by simplifying the complex, but the needs of readers cannot be met with indecipherable works. The trick, it seems, is to clarify without dumbing down. The essays in this volume meet this goal. The authors have worked carefully to avoid specialized terms of art, which often appear to be no more than jargon. They have also sought to explain theoretical frameworks in ordinary language. Most important, several of the essays include discussions of methodology. They show not only what was discovered but also how it was discovered. They do so because the authors want to guide those who are undertaking similar work. Collaboration, they recognize, can take place between a text and a reader.

Furthermore, we recognize that some members of our audience use assistive technologies. To make the volume more accessible to them, we adhere Page xviii →to current ebook-conversion best practices. These include clear document structuring and hyperlinking and providing alternative text for all images.

After the introductory materials and Adam Houle’s powerful poem, “Society Hill,” the volume begins with Aïda Rogers’s discussion of Wheeler Hill, a now-gentrified portion of Columbia. In this work of creative non-fiction, Rogers continues the efforts of the USS. She reveals the complicity of the University of South Carolina in destroying an African-American neighborhood and displacing residents whose families had lived in the area for generations. Today, only a few structures from the original Wheeler Hill remain. There are some extant photographs, and, as Rogers records, the memories of a handful of former residents who still worship in the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church. There are also the paintings of Edmund Yaghjian and the poetry of Dorothy Perry Thompson, particularly Wheeler Hill and Other Poems, a collection she wrote for her doctoral dissertation under the direction of James Dickey. These stirring poems, many of which have never been published, provide an artist’s recreation of her childhood home. Contextualizing the poems within the history of Wheeler Hill, Rogers shows the power of art to both document injustice and preserve memory.

The next two essays also address the actions of institutions of higher learning. Taylor Diggs and Felice F. Knight reconstruct the biography of Arthur B. Mitchell, a free Black man who served as a musician in the Confederate Army and as a fifer for The Citadel. The essay is an expansion of Diggs’s undergraduate thesis, which she completed at The Citadel under Knight’s direction. Rich in archival evidence and sound historical analysis, the essay demonstrates the ability of nonprofessionals—in this case, a student—to conduct meaningful original research when given the right direction. Mitchell’s story reveals the tenuous position of free Black people in nineteenth-century Charleston. His participation in the Confederate cause seems to have originated in necessity, not ideology. After the war, in fact, he became an officer in the National Guard Service of South Carolina, a militia empowered by Governor Robert K. Scott to suppress insurrection and inhibit violence. As a member of this “Black militia,” as it was called, Mitchell had an opportunity to resist the very forces of oppression that he, likely inadvertently, defended. Mary Jo Fairchild engages in similar work as she uncovers the lives of Thomas Peace and his family. Born into slavery, Peace was hired out to the College of Charleston, where he worked on and off until his death in 1887. In the subsequent decades, white Charlestonians appropriated Peace’s biography, as they did Arthur Mitchell’s, to defend the Page xix →ideologies of enslavement and segregation and to wash from themselves the stains of oppression. A highly fictionalized and stereotypical version of Peace, for example, appears in a play from the late nineteenth century, showing that art can be an instrument of deception as well as recovery. Through her meticulous archival work, Fairchild introduces the reader to a more accurate, less romanticized, Peace family, whose lives, both ordinary and remarkable, deserve preservation.

Five scholars, all associated with the Belle W. Baruch Center for South Carolina Studies, have been working to identify the enslaved people who lived on the land now known as Hobcaw Barony. In their essay, these scholars describe the difficult, often uncertain, process of tracing the names of the enslaved. Equally important, they discuss their methodology in detail. By providing the tools of discovery, they hope to empower others to engage in similar work, perhaps tracing their own family histories. The seven hundred thirty-one names included in the Appendix acknowledge the humanity of generations of people exploited by white landowners on a small parcel of our state that is now celebrated for its natural beauty and twentieth-century history. Like the names in Collins’s poem, the Appendix personalizes the effects of ideologically driven violence. It also reminds us of what has been lost. Many of the enslaved are known only by the Christian names given to them by their captors. Like the young Thomas Peace, they had no surnames. With their authentic identities destroyed, we are left only with ciphers that cannot always be decoded. The sheer volume of names on a relatively tiny piece of land (sixteen thousand acres) underscores the scale of human suffering brought about by chattel slavery. In this way, the essay continues the vital work of the International African American Museum, especially the displays that preserve the African names of those who were enslaved and the Tide Tribute, which honors those who endured the horrors of the Middle Passage.⁹

Michael S. Martin, whose fine book, Appalachian Pastoral, is reviewed in this volume, discusses the nineteenth-century poet, novelist, and travel writer Caroline Howard Gilman. In popular works such as The Poetry of Travelling in the United States and Recollections of a Southern Matron, Gilman defined South Carolina for a wide readership. Her creative portrayals of the South, particularly her treatment of Charleston, emphasize symmetry and balance both geographically and culturally. As Martin shows, Charleston becomes the axis of her vision, and the hierarchical structures that allowed enslavement become the foundation of her imagined social order. In this way, Gilman’s evocative poetry and prose not only recorded her understandings Page xx →of landscape and architecture but also normalized the most toxic aspects of antebellum life. If, as Aïda Rogers argues, Dorothy Perry Thompson’s poetry demonstrates how art can resist a dominant culture, Gilman’s works show how it can empower forces of persecution and exclusion.

Using the history of experience approach developed by Robert Boddice and Mark M. Smith, Michael Emett offers a conflicting depiction of nineteenth-century Charleston.¹⁰ Recreating the experiences of the abolitionist passengers of the Oceanus, who traveled from Brooklyn to Charleston in April 1865, Emett shows how Henry Ward Beecher’s theatrical depictions of slave auctions, which were performed predominantly in white northern churches, defined Charleston. Once again, art becomes a powerful force that controls experience, even the visceral reactions the travelers felt when visiting John C. Calhoun’s vandalized gravesite.

Lakin Hanna and her professor, Erica Johnson, provide an insightful history of the Lamar Bus Riots, a frequently overlooked event in our state’s struggle to desegregate. Using the oral histories of those victimized by the riots, Hanna and Johnson offer a fresh look at the events before and after the violence. Equally important, their research preserves the memories of local residents whose histories and experiences might otherwise be lost. In the volume’s final essay, Eli Kibler, Eva Kiser, and Kylie Fisher explore a separate racial history: the establishment of Asian American communities in the upstate. Using a variety of archival materials, the authors show the impact of nineteenth-century missionary work, much of it associated with Furman University. The first Asian arrivals were students seeking a faith-based education that would allow them to continue the work that had shaped their lives. In time, Asian Americans took on faculty roles at Furman. Others settled in the Greenville area and established businesses, some of which continue to operate. Asian immigrants faced many challenges, including racism and prejudice. Still, their stories are happier than those of the enslaved and formerly enslaved. By recovering this important part of South Carolina history, the authors uncover another understudied aspect of the state’s rich culture.

The review section begins with an essay by Jo Angela Edwins, who introduces seven new volumes of poetry by South Carolina authors. In some ways, Edwins’s work marks a new direction for Carolina Currents. She not only provides the first multi-title review; she also focuses exclusively on creative works. This is a deliberate expansion of our previous focus on scholarly works. South Carolina culture, after all, is defined by artists as well as historians, political scientists, and literary scholars, and creative works deserve Page xxi →recognition. Edwins’s efforts are joined by those of Landon Houle and Natalie Mahaffey, who review works of fiction and poetry.

The essays and reviews contained in this volume represent thousands of hours of research and analysis. They remind us that many aspects of South Carolina culture are yet to be discovered and that all of us can play a part in unearthing the forgotten stories that make up the state’s rich, vibrant, and often tragic past. We are now in an age in which censorship is equated with liberty, in which books are being removed from libraries, and in which teachers fear retribution for acknowledging students’ backgrounds and identities. As we hear loud calls to silence voices from the past, to make our history more reassuring than true, we recognize the importance of scholars and artists who will not allow us to retreat into ease and who show us the importance of forgotten names.

Christopher D. Johnson is distinguished professor of English and Trustees’ Research Scholar at Francis Marion University. He serves as editor of Carolina Currents.