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Museum of Resistance and Resilience

Scenes from Broad Street

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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.
Read the full text here.
Charleston, By Vashti M. Grayson, full text
Do you know Charleston?
Nestling neither in, nor out,
But just on the edge of South Carolina?
In 1937, ]she was a charming, ancient lady,
sitting primly erect and proud
In her slightly dusty, antique Chippendale,
Behind blinded, curtained and protiered windows
In the long crowded back parlor
Of her crumbling, unpainted mansion:
Romantic, with its dampy underground passages
And secret twisting stairways,
Its panelled Cypress walls and beams
Firmly secured with hand-wrought pegs;
Distinctive, with its Spanish blue marble steps
Carved iron balconies; recessed intricate gates
And solid doors deceptively leading to pillared porches;
A graceful, narrow house
Stretching lazily over the low marshy shore
Where the sky-blue Cooper and swamped-edged Ashley
Slip into the uneasy sea.
“Charleston, by the sea”...
An antiquated lady with fading blue eyes
And wrinkled, sun-burned skin;
With magnolias, jasmine and japonic;
With azaleas, oleanders and crape myrtle
Tumbling luxuriously from her dry wispy hair.
She sat in her billowy, yellowing dress
Magnificently splashed with scarlet poinsettias,
Shedding in all her fading glory
A warmth of rich beautiful memories.
Dozing quietly; nodding gently;
She lived her life again in moldy dreams;
Dreams of Secession and War;
Dreams of bitterness between Up-Country and Low-Country;
Of desolate abandoned plantations;
Of lost rice and indigo cultures;
Of the prosperity of the seventies, eighties and nineties;
Of flourishing phosphate factories and lumbers mills;
Of the coming of the Yanks to reclaim the empty land;
Of the restoring of gardens and filling of mud-flats;
Of busy wharves filled with disgorging ships, and
Heavy laden freighters patiently waiting their turns
at the humming docks.
Ah, those were the good old days!
In 1983,
The old lady often woke from her dreaming and napping,
And with tottering reluctant steps walked
To the windows facing her groups,-and saw
Warehouses 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 daughters 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 daughter 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 never have sent them North.”
Again the oldy 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.”
Then, munching her grits and boiled shrimps,
She asked for “Mauma” and her children
In the houses in the backyard; in the choked courts;
In the decaying dwellings and the slanting shacks.
Her children cleared their throats and
breathed deeply before they said:
“Mauma’s old and weak. She’s fast dying.
Her children are with us still, but
they're not like Mauma.”
“They don’t like to wash and iron.”
“They don’t like to nurse and cook.”
‘They’d rather work for the Government.”
The old lady clucked her tongue against her teeth
and shook her head mumbling:
“Watch them and remember the Reconstruction.”
Suddenly, in anger, the sea threw a torment
Over and around the oldy last.
White and black alike cowered in the folds of her skirts.
And the old lady remembered the cyclone of eighty-five.
She remembered the cyclone of eighty-six.
She forgot the Reconstruction and hatred,
and her white and black children joined hands
to restore her buildings and her history.
Once more, the old lady sat nursing
her memories and her traditions.
Her sons and daughters went as usual
to Broad Street and to the government offices.
Their cousins took up the trades.
Mauma’s country kin came to town and
sold their wares in the picturesque bandannas
while her children left for the “North,”
or worked in factories or at trades.
All was well in the old lady’s house and grounds.
In 1941,
the monster War reared himself to unheard of
magnitude, and brandished his bloody sword,
as he stood straddling the whole of America,
with one gory boot in the waters of the Atlantic,
and the other in the waters of the Pacific.
The old lady's children frantically explained to her
the threatening danger of attack from the sea,
by airplane and submarine.
Scoffingly, the old lady bade them organize
the women in groups to feed, house and clothe
large crowds of civilians who might lose their homes, and
large troops of soldiers who would come to guard
the water-front and the port.
One of the daughters asked in a frightened voice:
"What shall we do about Mauma's children?"
"Organize them, too," the old lady counselled, and
added, "Get the ones with education and leisure."
"But, Mother, they want to be called 'Mistress',"
her daughter demurred.
"Well, call them Mistress over the telephone, and
don't call them anything before your friends."
So, it was settled, and her daughters dashed around
in cultured panic,
taking courses, donning uniforms and indulging
their hysterical imaginations.
They prepared for blitzkrieg, fire and famine.
Mauma sat in the kitchen, quiet and smiling;
her daughters served, as much as the old lady's daughters
would allow, but their imaginations
went no further than slavery; lynching; segregation;
prejudice and daily humiliation.
They had a patriotic duty to perform.
They could bear any disaster that came.
Gradually, America and her Allies mustered
their great strength and painfully pushed
the threat of attack and invasion back from
Charleston's marshy shores.
The old lady and her daughters relaxed.
The little old lady went back to her dreaming
of the War between the States,
of the turbulent Reconstruction;
but she was weaker than before, and older.
She slept more hours now than she was awake.
When she showed interest in the things around her,
it was with Mauma's children she was concerned.
She was told:
"Her nephews from the North who are soldiers
stationed here give us a little trouble."
"They are resentful of our ways here.
They resist our traditions and laws, and
mutter something about
dying here for their own principles, rather than
dying abroad for international principles.
Mauma's older sons are still digging ditches, and
carrying heavy loads, but
they're joining unions and
they're quoting the Constitution;
they're even questioning the Primaries.
And, Mauma's daughters have all left the kitchen.
They're building ships, airplanes and guns.
They're wearing slacks, flowers in their hair,
good clothes; and they flourish twenty-dollar bills
in the markets and our best stores."
The old lady sadly murmured:
"Watch them and remember the Reconstruction."

Her children sought to cheer her up with the War News.
"Mother, we are winning the war on both oceans."
"Your grandsons are marching to Berlin."
"Your grandsons are bombing Tokyo."
The old lady sniffed petulantly:
"Twaddle, don't tell me about the war.
We always win the war.
Tell me of the city and state elections;
tell me of Mauma's children;
Those are the important things in our lives.
You must remember to keep the votes in your hands;
to keep Mauma's children in their places, and
to keep Washington out of my house and grounds."
In 1944,
her daughters and sons tenderly lifted her
from her straight-backed chair and laid her
in her great Colonial bed.
They tightly closed the blinds, and the drapes
and the heavy oaken doors
to shut out the sight of the throngs of
Up-country whites and Negroes who came
from the plantations and farms
to work in the Navy Yard and War Industries,
who over-ran the venerable house
and trampled down the flowers as
they parked their trailers on the lawn.
Her children sealed the windows
to bar out the sounds of tearing down old buildings
and raising modern structures;
to shut out the voices of a few of the old lady's own sons
who shouted and pled with their brothers
to let go of the Past;
to forget the Reconstruction;
to save the family from decay;
to clean up politics; improve schools;
rebuild shipping; reclaim the harbor;
establish industries for Peace;
to become a part of the United States.
The old lady heard the tumult of change;
She heard the rumbling of stifled tension;
she heard the disturbing talk of her children, but
she was safe and warm in her bed of delusion.
And there she still lies; in the last days of her life.
She intends to hold on to breath as long as she can.
Struggle will only shorten her last sweet hours.
Covering her small ears with her alabaster hands,
she feasts her dim eyes on the old splendor of her room,
which is just as it was in her prime.
She knows it will remain so as long as she can hold
on to breathing.
Her children will preserve the sentiment which is
her very breath.
They will restrain the surging movement of progress
at her very door,
so that the old lady may die with beauty and with dignity,
in her long narrow house
nestling like a shining shell
in the watery palms of two rivers
that flow into the uneasy sea.