Excerpt from “Charleston”
In 1938,
the old lady often woke from her dreaming and napping
And with tottering reluctant steps walked
To the windows facing her groups-and saw
Warehouse rotting; docks silent;
business stagnant; and her people poor and hungry.
Returning sadly to her dark parlor, she met
her sons and daughters showing staring strangers
around her house of precious relics and memories;
“They come to see Mother”, her daughter explained.
“And to pay.” her sons added.
The old lady shrugged her shoulders, drew her skirts
around her bony body and her chair closer to the fire;
wove her dreams of a bright aristocratic past
and cast them upon the embers and dying flames.
When the strangers had gone to their hotels,
and her children gathered around her for the evening meal,
the old lady asked: “Where are my grands?”
Her sons and daughters looked at each other
in consternation, and then answered”
“They became dissatisfied with us and
our old-fashioned ways and traditions.”
“They went to Georgia, to Alabama, to Tennessee.”
“They went to New York, to Pennsylvania, to Washington.”
“They never came back from college.”
“We should have never sent them North.”
Again the old lady shrugged and murmured
in her soft, slurring, slightly nasal voice:
“Perhaps it is better they’re gone. You,
my sons and daughters, will cherish the old.
The grands would have changed us too much.”
Grayson, Vashti M. "Charleston." Phylon (1940-1956), vol. 7, no. 3, 1946, pp. 64-69. JSTOR.
Grayson’s poem “Charleston” published in Phylon in 1945, examines Charleston, SC from her point of view. Embodied by a wealthy, white, Southern woman in the text, Vashti presents Charleston as “ancient” and “proud”, cloaked in secrecy and themes of tradition, inheritance, and ignorance. In perhaps the most stunning and telling line, the children of the “Lady Charleston” apologize to their mother for their own children, her grandchildren, not visiting, choosing instead to live and be educated in the North. She responds, “Perhaps it is better that they’re gone. You, my sons and daughters, will cherish the old. The grands would have changed us too much’”. The poem captures the tension between Charleston’s beauty and it’s “delusion” of history, painting, from a Black-American’s perspective, Charleston’s inability, and lack of desire, to change.