The Personality of American Cities Part 11

Here, then, is the new Richmond, riding stoutly upon her great hills and shooting the tendrils of her growth in every direction. For she is growing, rapidly and handsomely. Her new buildings--her wonderful cathedral, her superb modern hotels, the fine homes multiplying out by the Lee statue--what self-respecting southern town does not have a Lee statue--all bespeak the quality of her growth. But her new buildings cannot easily surpa.s.s the old. It was rare good judgment in an American town for her to refrain from tearing down or even "modernizing" that Greek temple that stands atop of Schokoe hill and which generations have known as the Capitol. The two flanking wings which were made absolutely necessary by the awakening of the Old Dominion have not robbed the older portion of the building of one whit of its charm.

It typifies the Old South and the New South, come to stand beside one another. In other days Virginia was proud of her capital, it was with no small pride that she thrust it ahead when a seat of government was to be chosen for the Confederacy, that for a little time she saw it take its stormy place among the nations of the world. In these days Virginia may still be proud of her capital town--it is still a seat of government quite worthy of a state of pride and of traditions.

8

WHERE ROMANCE AND COURTESY DO NOT FORGET

"You are not going to write your book and leave out Charleston?" said the Man who Makes Magazines.

We hesitated at acknowledging the truth. In some way or other Charleston had escaped us upon our travels. The Magazine Maker read our answer before we could gain strength to make it.

"Well, you can't afford to miss that town," he said conclusively. "It's great stuff."

"Great stuff?" we ventured.

"If you are looking into the personality of American cities you must include Charleston. She has more personality than any of the other old Colonial towns--save Boston. She's personality personified, old age glorified, charm and sweetness magnified--the flavor of the past hangs in every one of her old houses and her narrow streets. You cannot pa.s.s by Charleston."

After that we went over to a railroad ticket office in Fifth avenue and purchased a round-trip ticket to the metropolis of South Carolina. And a week later we were on a southbound train, running like mad across the Jersey meadows. Five days in Charleston! It seemed almost sacrilege.

Five miserable days in the town which the Maker of Magazines averred fairly oozed personality. But five days were better than no days at all--and Charleston must be included in this book.

The greater part of one day--crossing New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the up-stretched head of little Delaware, Maryland--finally the Old Dominion and the real South. A day spent behind the gla.s.s of the car window--the brisk and busy Jersey towns, the Delaware easily crossed; Philadelphia, with her great outspreading of suburbs; Wilmington; a short cut through the bas.e.m.e.nts of Baltimore; the afternoon light dying on the superb dome of the Was.h.i.+ngton Capitol--after that the Potomac.

Then a few evening hours through Virginia, the southern accent growing more p.r.o.nounced, the very air softer, the negroes more prevalent, the porter of our car continually more deferential, more polite. After that a few hours of oblivion, even in the clattering Pullman which, after the fas.h.i.+on of all these tremendously safe new steel cars, was a bit chilly and a bit noisy.

In the morning a low and unkempt land, the railroad trestling its way over mora.s.s and swamp and bayou on long timber structures and many times threading sluggish yellow southern rivers by larger bridges. Between these a sandy mainland--thick forests of pine with increasing numbers of live-oaks holding soft moss aloft--at last the outskirts of a town.

Other folk might gather their luggage together, the vision of a distant place with its white spires, the soft gray fog that tells of the proximity of the open sea blowing in upon them, held us at the window pane. A river showed itself in the distance to the one side of the train, with mast-heads dominating its sh.o.r.es; another, lined with factories stretched upon the other side. After these, the streets of the town, a trolley car stalled impatient to let our train pa.s.s--low streets and mean streets of an unmistakable negro quarter, the broad shed of a sizable railroad station showing at the right.

"Charleston, sah," said the porter. Remember now that he had been a haughty creature in New York and Philadelphia, ebon dignity in Baltimore and in Was.h.i.+ngton. Now he was docility itself, a courtesy hardly to be measured by the mere expectation of gratuity.

The first glimpse of Charleston a rough paved street--our hotel 'bus finding itself with almost dangerous celerity in front of trolley cars.

That unimportant way led into another broad highway of the town and seemingly ent.i.tled to distinction.

"Meeting street," said our driver. "And I can tell you that Charleston is right proud of it, sir," he added.

Charleston has good cause to be proud of its main highway, with the lovely old houses along it rising out of blooming gardens, like fine ladies from their ball gowns; at its upper end the big open square and the adjacent Citadel--pouring out its gray-uniformed boys to drill just as their daddies and their grand-daddies drilled there before them--the charms of St. Michael's, and the never-to-be-forgotten Battery at the foot of the street.

We sped down it and drew up at a snow-white hotel which in its immaculate coat might have sprung up yesterday, were it not for the stately row of great pillars, three stories in height, with which it faced the street. They do not build hotels that way nowadays--more's the pity. For when the Charleston Hotel was builded it entered a distinguished brotherhood--the Tremont in Boston, the Astor and the St.

Nicholas in New York, Willard's in Was.h.i.+ngton, the Monongahela at Pittsburgh, and the St. Charles in New Orleans were among its contemporaries. It was worthy to be ranked with the best of these--a hotel at which the great planters of the Carolinas and of Georgia could feel that the best had been created for them within the very heart of their favorite city.

We pushed our way into the heart of the generous office of the hotel, thronged with the folk who had crowded into Charleston--followers of the races, just then holding sway upon the outskirts of the town, tourists from the North, Carolinans who will never lose the habit of going to Charleston as long as Charleston exists. In due time a brisk and bustling hotel clerk--he was an importation, plainly, none of your courteous, ease-taking Southerners--had placed us in a room big enough for the holding of a reception. From the shutters of the room we could look down into Meeting street--into the charred remnants of a store that had been burned long before and the debris never removed. When we threw up the window sash we could thrust our heads out and see, a little way down the street, the most distinctive and the most revered of all Charleston's landmarks--the belfried spire of St. Michael's. As we leaned from that window the bells of St. Michael's spoke the quarter-hour, just as they have been speaking quarter-hours close upon a century and a half.

We had been given the first taste of the potent charm of a most distinctive southern town.

"... The most appealing, the most lovely, the most wistful town in America; whose visible sadness and distinction seem almost to speak audibly, speak in the sound of the quiet waves that ripple round her southern front, speak in the church-bells on Sunday morning and breathe not only in the soft salt air, but in the perfume of every gentle, old-fas.h.i.+oned rose that blooms behind the high garden walls of falling mellow-tinted plaster; King's Port the retrospective, King's Port the belated, who from her pensive porticoes looks over her two rivers to the marshes and the trees beyond, the live-oaks veiled in gray moss, brooding with memories. Were she my city how I should love her...."

So wrote Owen Wister of the city that he came to know so well. You can read Charleston in _Lady Baltimore_ each time he speaks of "King's Port" and read correctly. For it was in Charleston he spun his romance of the last stronghold of old manners, old families, old traditions and old affections. In no other city of the land might he have laid such a story. For no other city of the land bears the memory of tragedy so plaintively, so uncomplainingly as the old town that occupies the flat peninsula between the Cooper and the Ashley rivers at the very gateway of South Carolina. Like a scarred man, Charleston will bear the visible traces of her great disaster until the end of her days. And each of them, like the scars of Richmond, makes her but the more potent in her charm.

Up one street and down another--fascinating pathways, every blessed one of them. Meeting and King and Queen and Legare and Calhoun and Tradd--with their high, narrow-ended houses rising right from the sidewalks and stretching, with their generous spirit of hospitality, inward, beside gardens that blossom as only a southern garden can bloom--with jessamine and narcissus and oleander and j.a.ponica. Galleries give to these fragrant gardens. Only Charleston, unique among her sisters of the Southland, does not call them galleries. She calls them piazzas, with the accent strong upon the "pi."

The gardens themselves are more than a little English, speaking clearly something of the old-time English spirit of the town, which has its most visible other expression in the stolid Georgian architecture of its older public buildings and churches. And some of the older folk, defying the Charleston convention of four o'clock dinner, will take tea in the softness of the late afternoon. Local tradition still relates how, in other days, a certain distinguished and elderly citizen, possessing neither garden nor gallery with his house, was wont to have a table and chair placed upon the sidewalk and there take his tea of a late afternoon. And the Charleston of that other day walked upon the far side of the street rather than disturb the gentleman!

Nor is all that spirit quite gone in the Charleston of today. The older negroes will touch their hats, if not remove them, when you glance at them. They will step into the gutter when you pa.s.s them upon the narrow sidewalks of the narrow streets. They came of a generation that made more than the small distinction of separate schools and separate places in the railroad cars between white and black. But they are rapidly disappearing from the streets of the old city. Those younger negroes who drive the clumsy two-wheeled carts in town and out over the rough-paved streets have learned no good manners. And when the burly negresses who amble up the sidewalks balancing huge trays of crabs or fresh fruits or baked stuffs smile at you, theirs is the smile of insolence. Fifty years of the Fifteenth Amendment have done their work--any older resident of Charleston will tell you that, and thank G.o.d for the inborn courtesy that keeps him from profanity with the telling.

But if oncoming years have worked great changes in the manner of the race which continues to be of numerical importance in the seaport city, it will take more than one or two or three or even four generations to work great changes in the manners of the well-born white-skinned folk who have ruled Charleston through the years by wit, diplomacy, the keen force of intellect more than even the force of arms. And, as the city now runs its course, it will take far more years for her to change her outward guise.

For Charleston does not change easily. She continues to be a city of yellow and of white. Other southern towns may claim distinction because of their red-walled brick houses with their white porticos, but the reds of Charleston long since softened, the green moss and the lichens have grown up and over the old walls--exquisite bits of masonry, every one of them and the products of an age when every artisan was an artist and full master of his craft. The distinctive color of the town shades from a creamy yellow to a grayish white. The houses, as we have already said, stand with their ends to the streets, with flanking walls hiding the rich gardens from the sidewalk, save for a few seductive glimpses through the well-wrought grillings of an occasional gateway. Charleston does not parade herself. The closed windows of her houses seem to close jealously against the Present as if they sought to hold within their great rooms the Past and all of the glories that were of it.

Builded of brick in most instances, the larger houses and the two most famous churches, as well, were long ago given plaster coatings that they might conform to the yellow-white dominating color of the town.

Invariably very high and almost invariably very narrow and bald of cornice, these old houses are roofed with heavy corrugated tiles, once red but now softened by Time into a dozen different tints. If there is another town in the land where roof-tile has been used to such picturesque advantage we have failed to see it. It gives to Charleston an incredibly foreign aspect. If it were not for the Georgian churches and the older public buildings one might see in the plaster walls and the red-tiled roofs a distinct trace of the French or the Italian.

Charleston herself is not unlike many towns that sleep in the south of France or the north of Italy. It only takes the hordes of negroes upon her streets to dispel the illusion that one is again treading some corner of the Old World.

Perhaps the best way that the casual visitor to Charleston can appreciate these negroes is in their street calls--if he has not been up too late upon the preceding night. For long before seven o'clock the brigades of itinerant merchants are on their ways through the narrow streets of the old town. From the soft, deep marshlands behind it and the crevices and the turnings of the sea and all its inlets come the finest and the rarest of delicacies, and these food-stuffs find their way quite naturally to the street vendors. Porgies and garden truck, lobsters and shrimp and crab, home-made candies--the list runs to great length.

You turn restlessly in your bed at dawn. Something has stolen that last precious "forty winks" away from you. If you could find that something.... Hark. There it is: Through the crispness of morning air it comes musically to your ears:

"Swimpy waw, waw.... Swimpy waw, waw."

And from another direction comes a slowly modulated:

"Waw cwab. WAW Cwab. Waw Cwa-a-a-b."

A sharp staccato breaks in upon both of these.

"She cwaib, she cwaib, she cwaib," it calls, and you know that there is a preference in crabs. Up one street and down another, male vendors, female vendors old and young, but generally old. If any one wishes to sleep in Charleston--well, he simply cannot sleep late in Charleston. To dream of rest while: "Sweet Pete ate her! Sweet Pete ate her!" comes rolling up to your window in tones as dulcet as ever rang within an opera house would be outrageous. It is a merry jangle to open the day, quite as remote from euphony and as thoroughly delightful as the early morning church-bells of Montreal or of Quebec. By breakfast time it is quite gone--unless you wish to include the coal-black mammy who chants: "Come chilluns, get yer monkey meat--monkey _meat_." And that old relic of ante-bellum days who rides a two-wheel cart in all the narrow lanes and permeates the very air with his melancholy: "Char--coal.

Char--coal."

If you inquire as to "monkey meat," your Charlestonian will tell you of the delectable mixture of cocoanut and mola.s.ses candy which is to the younger generation of the town as the incomparable Lady Baltimore cake is to the older.

The churches of Charleston are her greatest charm. And of these, boldly a.s.serting its prerogative by rising from the busiest corner of the town, the most famed is St. Michael's. St. Michael's is the lion of Charleston. Since 1764 she has stood there at Broad and Meeting streets and demanded the obeisance of the port--gladly rendered her. She has stood to her corner through suns.h.i.+ne and through storm--through the glad busy years when Charleston dreamed of power and of surpa.s.sing those upstart northern towns--New York and Boston--through the bitterness of two great wars and the dangers of a third and lesser one, through four cyclones and the most devastating earthquake that the Atlantic coast has ever known--through all these perils this solidly wrought Temple of the Lord has come safely. She is the real old lady of Charleston, and when she speaks the folk within the town stand at attention. The soft, sweet bells of St. Michael's are the tenderest memory that can come to a resident of the city when he is gone a long way from her streets and her lovely homes. And when the bells of St. Michael's have been stilled it has been a stilled Charleston.

For there have been times when the bells of St. Michael's have not spoken down from their high white belfry. In fact, they have crossed the Atlantic not less than five times. Cast in the middle of the eighteenth century in an English bell-foundry, they had hardly been hung within their belfry before the Revolution broke out--broke out at Charleston just as did the Civil War. Before the British left the city for the last time the commanding officer had claimed the eight bells as his "perquisite" and had s.h.i.+pped them back to England. An indignant American town demanded their return. Even the British commanding officer at New York, Sir Guy Carleton, did not have it within his heart to countenance such sacrilege. The bells had been already sold in England upon a speculation, but the purchaser was compelled to return them. The people of the Colonial town drew them from the wharf to St. Michael's in formal procession--the swinging of them anew was hardly a less ceremonial. The first notes they sang were like unto a religious rite. And for seventy years the soft voice of the old lady of Charleston spoke down to her children--at the quarters of the hours.

After those seventy years more war--ugly guns that are remembered with a shudder as "Swamp Angels," pouring sh.e.l.ls into a proud, rebellious, hungry, unrelenting city, the stout white tower of St. Michael's a fair and s.h.i.+ning mark for northern gunners. Charleston suddenly realized the danger to the voice of her pet old lady. There were few able-bodied men in the town--all of them were fighting within the Confederate lines--but they uns.h.i.+pped those precious bells and sent them up-state--to Columbia, the state capitol, far inland and safe from the possibility of sea marauders. They were hidden there but not so well but that Sherman's men in the march to the sea found them and by an act of vandalism which the South today believes far greater than that of an angered British army, completely destroyed them.

When peace came again Charleston--bruised and battered and bleeding Charleston, with the scars that time could never heal--gave first thought to her bells--a mere ma.s.s of molten and broken metal. There was a single chance and Charleston took it. That chance won. The English are a conservative nation--to put it lightly. The old bell-foundry still had the molds in which the chime was first cast--a hundred years before.

Once again those old casts were wheeled into the foundry and from them came again the bells of St. Michael's, the sweetness of their tones unchanged. The town had regained its voice.

If we have dwelt at length upon the bells of St. Michael's it is because they speak so truly the real personality of the town. The church itself is not of less interest. And the churchyard that surrounds it upon two sides is as filled with charm and rare flavor as any churchyard we have ever seen. Under its old stones sleep forever the folk who lived in Charleston in the days of her glories--Pringles and Pinckneys; Moultries; those three famous "R's" of South Carolina--Rutledge and Ravenel and Rhett--the names within that silent place read like the roster of the colonial aristocracy. Above the silent markers, the moldering and crumbling tombs, rises a riot of G.o.d's growing things; in the soft southern air a perpetual tribute to the dead--narcissus, oleander, jessamine, the stately Pride of India bush. And on the morning that we first strolled into the shady, quiet place a red-bird--the famous Cardinal Crossbeak of the south--sang to us from his perch in a magnolia tree. Twenty-four hours before and we had crossed the Hudson river at New York in a driving and a blizzard-threatening snowstorm.