Page xiii →Introduction

The plans for Carolina Currents began in early 2019. Conversations with Luther F. Carter, president of Francis Marion University, led us to imagine a scholarly publication dedicated to South Carolina. We envisioned an interdisciplinary, “public-facing” project that would maintain the high standards of a peer-reviewed journal but remain accessible to a variety of readers. We also wanted to publish scholarship with purpose, the sort of essays that would allow readers to understand the complicated interactions between the state’s past and present. Equally important, we hoped to focus attention on those regions and populations that have received little scholarly attention. Such an approach would help our publication realize its motto: “Understanding for the Common Good.”

Francis Marion University is an ideal institution for such an undertaking. In addition to fostering a dynamic scholarly community, the university celebrates the state’s rich multiplicity of cultures and focuses on serving those who might otherwise be neglected. For more than fifty years, the faculty and staff have taken great pride in Francis Marion University’s commitment to the Pee Dee and in the fact that our student body accurately represents the richly varied demographics of our region. We are also deeply committed to serving the community through extensive outreach efforts and our many successful centers of excellence.¹ A publication devoted to the entire population of the state and dedicated to improving civic understanding complements the most important facets of the university’s mission.

Established in 1970, the university has always been integrated and inclusive. Still, the campus contains vestiges of the state’s worst history. The university is located on land that was once a plantation, and reminders of that past survive. Our residential students walk by a cemetery where enslaved people are buried. The DNA that lies beneath the ground almost certainly matches that of some students whose family connections to the area predate emancipation. School children visit our hewn timber cabins, which once housed the families of enslaved workers. Seeing these features, one realizes that the land itself has undergone a remarkable transformation, progressing Page xiv →from a site of oppression to a place of opportunity. In many ways, the cemetery and cabins remind us of the importance of our work. As educators, we strive to build something better for those who will come after us. Relics of past oppression insist that progress is possible, that our work has meaning within and beyond the classroom and library. Carolina Currents extends our efforts. Recovering and preserving stories from neglected communities, it promotes nuanced understandings of the state’s cultures. It reveals both what connects and what separates the many citizens of the state. Most important, it reminds us of the abiding humanity and intrinsic dignity that unites all people.

Among the many questions we faced at the beginning of the project were those concerning publication. From the beginning, we knew we needed a partner. The University of South Carolina Press was, of course, the ideal choice. Established in 1944, the press has a proud history of publishing distinguished works focused specifically on South Carolina. Equally important, the press has long offered an impressive catalog of scholarly and creative works that dovetail neatly with our focus on diverse peoples and cultures. Well-known books, such as Jonathan Green’s stunning Gullah Images and Representative James E. Clyburn’s thoughtful autobiography Blessed Experiences: Genuinely Southern, Proudly Black have set a standard for more recent offerings, including Elizabeth J. West’s Finding Francis: One Family’s Journey from Slavery to Freedom and June Manning Thomas’s Struggling to Learn: An Intimate History of School Desegregation in South Carolina.² These and similar works define the press’s commitment to accessible, meaningful scholarship that captures the fullness of the state.

Once a formal agreement between the press and Francis Marion University was reached, the work of assembling an editorial board began. The board would need representatives from a variety of disciplines. It would also require scholars committed to connecting the academy to the public. Among the first to sign on was Echol Lee Nix Jr., associate professor of philosophy and religious studies at Claflin University. A graduate of Morehouse College, the Vanderbilt Divinity School, and Boston University’s School of Theology, Dr. Nix saw genuine value in the purpose and scope of Carolina Currents and looked forward to writing biographical essays about several overlooked civil rights leaders. Our email correspondence and telephone conversations were both encouraging and directive, and I looked forward to working with Dr. Nix in the coming years. Tragically, Dr. Nix died in an automobile accident in September 2020, before the first volume had taken shape.

Page xv →Christopher E. Hendricks, a distinguished scholar and public historian from Georgia Southern University, also agreed to serve on the editorial board. His generosity was followed by that of Eric Crawford, associate professor of music at Coastal Carolina University; William Bolt, associate professor of history at Francis Marion University; Samuel M. Hines, professor of political science, The Citadel; Laura L. Morris, assistant professor of English, Furman University; Shevaun E. Watson, associate professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Mark M. Smith, Carolina Distinguished Professor of History, University of South Carolina; and Felice Knight, assistant professor of history, The Citadel. The members of the editorial board have helped sharpen the focus of Carolina Currents and have provided invaluable guidance in reviewing submissions. Their thorough, attentive work has helped move the project from concept to reality.

By fall of 2019, we were ready to begin assembling the first volume. We developed a list of potential contributors and sent a call for papers to department chairs across the state. Colleagues and friends distributed the call for papers at regional and national conferences, and soon we began receiving inquiries and a few essays. Then COVID-19 hit. As universities moved online, libraries restricted access, and archives closed, scholars—especially those with school-aged children—found it impossible to research and write. The work slowed but never stopped. Generous professors agreed to write book reviews, and referees continued to provide cogent assessments and thoughtful suggestions for the few articles that arrived. Enthusiasm for the project remained high, but the realities of pandemic life stalled many emerging essays. Eventually, of course, things got better. With masks, social distancing, vaccines, and effective antivirals, academic life slowly crept toward a new normal. Essays began arriving more regularly as scholars found the time and resources to finish works that had languished over many difficult, frightening months. And so this volume took shape.

Collectively, the essays fulfill the promise of our original proposal. Arranged in a loose chronological order and covering topics as diverse as dessert recipes, drama, civil rights, and foreign affairs, they provide detailed discussions of overlooked aspects of South Carolina life, demonstrating how the past has shaped the present and showing how the state has slowly inched closer to those cherished ideals of acceptance and understanding. In these still uncertain times, when loud voices foment fear and angry populists call for division and mistrust, the essays advocate for better possibilities. They also urge us to recognize the scholar’s responsibility not only to face the public but also to provide context and perspective, to remind readers that Page xvi →although our current challenges may be unique, the struggle to create a more equitable, just, and humane society is not.

The collection begins with an autobiographical essay by Thomasina Yuille, a retired Navy chaplain and independent scholar. Tracing her efforts to verify that her great-great-grandfather was, in fact, Colonel Asbury Coward, the eighth superintendent of The Citadel, who enslaved her great-great-grandmother, Ellen Coward Hargrove, Yuille offers an intriguing narrative. Part detective story, part family history, Yuille’s narrative explores the complicated legacies of South Carolina’s past. Coward was a force of oppression, a man who sought to extend the state’s right to deny others’ humanity. But he was also a family member. Although we will never know its true dynamics, his relationship with Ellen Hargrove was certainly coercive, if not violent, yet he remains an inescapable part of Yuille’s heritage, and his physical features appeared in the faces of those who loved and cared for her. Without erasing or simplifying this thorny history, Yuille finds peace through compassion and understanding.

Christopher Hendricks provides an engaging examination of early nineteenth-century cuisine. Structuring his paper around Mary Randolph’s 1824 recipe for southern rice pie (recently confirmed to be delicious by the members of the Southeastern Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies), Hendricks explores how historical foodways both celebrated and obscured different kinds of knowledge. Randolph’s cookbook, The Virginia House-Wife, recognizes the significance of domestic craft and provided its author with a respected position within the public sphere. At the same time, her work elides the skills of enslaved workers who were captured in West Africa specifically because they knew what plantation owners did not: how to grow rice. Hendricks’s adept analysis reveals a complicated cultural web in which a seemingly simple recipe is both an instrument of empowerment and an inadvertent tool of oppression.

Playwright and scholar Jon Tuttle recovers a long-forgotten play, Modern Honour, by John Blake White, who is best known for his historical paintings. White’s 1812 play provides a sentimental rebuke to South Carolina’s dueling culture, arguing for a gentler society where disputes are settled peacefully and lawfully. Tuttle’s analysis suggests that, then as now, the South Carolina stage served as an instrument of reform as well as entertainment.

Robert Alston Jones continues the discussion of representation and appropriation through his examination of Bernhard Heinrich Bequest, a nineteenth-century German immigrant to Charleston, who later played an unlikely role in Lost Cause propaganda. As a young man without many Page xvii →opportunities, Bequest worked briefly as a Confederate blockade runner. After the war, he rose to prominence as a local businessman and civic leader. Bequest eventually acclimated to the dominant culture in which he lived, but he was almost certainly never the daring swashbuckler willing to risk it all for a racist ideology, as Ellison Capers claims in the noxious Confederate Military History.

Moving into the twentieth century, Cherish Thomas and Meredith A. Love examine Green Book sites within Florence County. Connecting those businesses with traditions of Southern hospitality, Thomas and Love argue that the African-American community made real the best aspects of a culture that sought to oppress and silence them. Through convincing analysis of archival evidence and oral history, they show how Green Book businesses not only served travelers who were excluded from white-owned establishments but also became important gathering places for local residents.

Kerington B. Shaffer and Erica Johnson Edwards also focus on Pee Dee history in their study of student-led civil rights protests in Florence. Through extensive archival research and interviews with community members, Shaffer and Edwards capture a pivotal moment in Pee Dee history. The students, like those in the more famous lunch-counter protests, emerge as heroes, brave young people who took a principled stand and met hostility with dignity and restraint, even as voices within and outside their community urged them to accept segregation.

Shifting from historical analysis to creative nonfiction, Esther Liu Godfrey introduces McKrae Game, a former advocate for conversion therapy, whose ministry reached a level of prominence in the upstate. In time, Game accepted his own sexuality and denounced his earlier efforts to “fix” young gay people. His story calls attention to a particularly dangerous dynamic within South Carolina culture: the harmful confluence of rigid spirituality, restrictive sexual mores, and homophobia.

Faculty from Furman University provide a critical assessment of the Joseph Vaughn Plaza on the campus of Furman University. Named for the university’s first African-American student, the plaza is a site of reconciliation, designed to honor Mr. Vaughn and make current students feel welcome and valued. In many ways, it fulfills these goals, but the authors also point toward potential complications, some of which relate to the physical architecture of the plaza, others to the perception that Furman may have appropriated Mr. Vaughn’s story to promote itself. In this way, the essay provides important guidance for municipalities and universities seeking to build similar memorials.

Page xviii →In the collection’s final essay, Lauren K. Perez and Jennifer L. Titanski-Hooper explore the various ways the current war in Ukraine impacts South Carolina. Using a feminist geopolitical lens, they show the real-world implications of Russian aggression and demonstrate how events thousands of miles away affect the lives of people living in the Palmetto State.

As a whole, the essays explore connections that might otherwise remain unnoticed. They help us understand that our present and future are tied to our past, that place—whether the state as a whole, a particular region, or even a college campus—has meaning that must be recovered and studied. In this way, the essays bring me back to the hewn-timber cabins on Francis Marion University’s campus. My first-year students learn about the skills needed to build them and how those skills are unacknowledged in our histories. I show the students how the cabins were constructed with a variation of the same dovetail joint that has been used in furniture making for centuries. We think about the weight of the green timbers, and how the structures—square, plumb, and level—have survived for at least one hundred seventy years. We also learn a bit about the people who lived in the cabins, and we run our fingers along lines they carved to mark each row of timbers. Those workers, buried in unmarked graves on another part of campus, were almost certainly illiterate, but they had knowledge, much of which is now lost. They built competently with the materials they had, making precise joinery in oak beams twenty feet long and six inches thick. Work that would require cranes and power tools today, they did with their hands, with each other. My students and I search for ways to celebrate the accomplishment of those cabins without expunging the oppression and violence to which they are inseparably tied.

I think about those men and their families, about how different the land is now from when they knew it. Could they have imagined that a plantation of enslavement, segregation, and exploitation would become a place of education? If they had known their descendants would earn college degrees where they planted crops, would it have made their lives better—not easier, but better? Those carved lines haunt me, and I often study the individual timbers, wondering how they were rendered so straight, how the joints were cut so perfectly. I imagine the tools, some as familiar to carpenters today as they would have been to artisans during Shakespeare’s age. Most often, though, I think of the builders and hope that their work, however arduous, however replete with injustice, brought some joy. When the axes, saws, and froes were put up for the evening, I hope that those craftsmen felt the significance of what they had done, understood that they had built a home for Page xix →their families, that their hands had made something enduring and human. Their stories are worth recovering and cry out for preservation. They speak to the horrific, sometimes tragic, history of our state, and they remind us of the possibility of triumph. In that way, their histories share much with the essays contained in Carolina Currents, which also speak to possibilities, even as they gaze unflinchingly at the past and present. And so I am grateful for these stories, grateful for the scholars who have made this volume possible, grateful for all that they have discovered and shared.

Christopher D. Johnson is professor of English and Trustees’ Research Scholar at Francis Marion University. His most recent book is Samuel Richardson, Comedic Narrative, and the Culture of Domestic Violence: Abused Pamela (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023). His current project examines the rhetorical strategies of early-modern biographers.