Month: June 2007

I have gone back to SC four times now since about 1994 and each time I am grateful for the welcome I receive from my relatives.  My first trip back was amazing.  I was exhausted the whole time but woke each morning with positive expectations.  Going back was important somehow deep down to see the place and the people I had known when I was a boy.  And when I did finally, after some driving around in Georgia, get to my see my relatives I was enveloped in a sense of acceptance and warmth.

Why should they have paid such kind attention?  After all I had been in no real contact with them for about 40 years. I didn’t really ask myself that then.  But now I would answer by saying, well, we were and are family.  I was WB’s son and that was enough for them to go out of their way the way they did.  And perhaps they were curious a bit about me as I was one of those children of the prodigal son, WB, who had gone off to California while they had all stayed at home, many still living within forty minutes of each other by car in upper Carolina and now a bit in North Carolina.

When WB left in 1955 he lost immediate contact with all that family, and so did I.  We were in California very much the “nuclear” family, mom, dad, kids and dog, with no extended family anywhere about.  Back there though there’s lots of extended family, living in what politicians might call family values territory.  And family is valued, though I don’t think the family thinks about it that way.  Family is just there.

I don’t know how frequently the many members of the family get together or actually see each other.  But I do think they are always aware of each other and have a pretty good general idea of what might be happening in one portion or another of the family, who is having a baby, or who is getting married, or who has come down with something, and who has moved, and who got a new car.  And while it would not do at all to pretend things are all hunky-dory between individuals in the family or that they all like each other or something like that, I do think in times of trouble the individuals would try their best to overcome their personal feelings and help out if they at all could.

As I was told frequently while growing up, blood is thicker than water.  In a growing and changing world, where it becomes increasingly hard to be recognized by anybody, family recognizes family.  And being recognized is tremendously important, and additionally in places like SC where the government provides very little for the people; people must provide for themselves and family can take up the slack. Psychological recognition and, more in the past than today, economic need held family together.

I can see better the importance and the function of the extended family partly because I was not raised back there with all that extended family about.  At the same time, with all that family about, one could easily spend one’s every waking moment thinking about family, gathering news of family, doing for family, and visiting family, with the result as one relative suggested, it becomes easy to forget that there is anything beyond family, that there is a bigger or other sort of world out there of people who do not think, or feel, or believe as family thinks, feels, and believes.

In places like California.

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On the way back from the services for Joan, a number of us stopped to take a look inside Grandma’s old house, built in the early thirties. 

South Carolinians, I conclude, take their eating damn seriously.  Their idea of lunch is my idea of dinner; and their idea of dinner is on a whole other plane.  We went with a cousin to a K and W’s near Simpsonville, SC, for lunch; this is a chain of cafeterias located in West Virginia, Virginia, North and South Carolina.  For about 3.50 I got a heaping plate of white rice covered with country steak and gravy.  For just over a buck I got a side of black eyed peas; I had something else too…maybe a little salad.

Carol and I ate with another cousin, at the original Stax in Greenville, home of the famous deuces wild breakfast, two apparently of everything.  I had a club sandwich that covered one half of a large platter and on the other half was a heaping mound of French fries.  Also in Fletcher NC, Carol and I had lunch with another cousin at a local place called the Acropolis where I ordered—over my cousin’s warnings—the lamb gyro platter with Greek salad. Damn, another huge amount of everything, and I ate it all for 7.95.

And sweet tea.  Wherever you go–sweet tea.  I grew up on sweet tea as a matter of fact, and the only place I have ever found it is back there in the South.  I order iced tea in California and they bring you this tea with ice in it and nothing else.  With sweet tea, you boil some water and dump three or four teabags in it and let it seep and boil till it is practically black, and then you put in a heaping cup of sugar and add water to stretch it out a bit, and put the whole thing in the refrigerator and let it cool. 

No wonder I am a caffeine head.  I started drinking sweet tea as a kid and drank it all through the time I lived with my parents.  I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee as a kid, since that was an adult drink and would stunt my growth.  But what the hell, pray tell, is the difference.  Maybe coffee cost more. I remember now I made sweet tea and our particular touch to sweet tea was adding to it, along with the sugar, a small container of frozen lemonade.  Clearly, this stuff was the original energy drink. 

I had a special lunch at Aunt Addies.  It was pretty hot, on a Sunday afternoon, as I recollect, and Aunt Addie wasn’t up to fixing lunch for everybody.  But earlier in the day, I had admired some of Uncle Ed’s tomatoes that were sitting on a sideboard ripening in the sun.  I picked one up said it smelled like a real tomato.  Uncle Ed said I should eat one before I left.  When it seemed like we were fixing to go, Uncle Ed said I should eat my tomato and did I want to make a tomato sandwich out of it.

Now I don’t remember having ever eaten a tomato sandwich, but I must have because as soon as he said, tomato sandwich I knew what to do.  Take two pieces of white bread, slather them both with mayonnaise; sprinkle pepper over the mayonnaise, slice the tomato as thin as possible, stack the pieces high so you use all the tomato (if it’s on the small side), salt the tomato.  And put it altogether.  Damn that was good.  Carol took a bite and wanted her own tomato sandwich.  So we ended up staying another hour as we all ate tomato sandwiches and drank sweet tea.

I am talking so much about food because I gained about six pounds in ten days in SC.

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That’s Aunt Addie’s house on Chipwood off Lisbon Road right near Mountville, SC. 

I wanted to find something on local history so Carol and I went to an independent bookstore in Greenville SC.  I couldn’t find much but located a picture sort of book on Laurens County.  Honestly, how this book got published I don’t know.  I certainly don’t recommend it; it’s called Images of America: Laurens County.  It had pictures of the damndest things. For example the entire graduating class of ought 7 with no names just a picture of unknown people, or for example, John Langston, described as a substantial citizen but with no indication whatsoever as to why he was or what he did to make him so.

I did find out that Laurens was possibly originally called Laurensville and that it was divided into five townships, variously:  Laurens, Dial, Waterloo, Sullivan, Scuffletown, Hunter, Cross Hills, Jacks and Youngs.  So cousin Jacks Tingle was named after a Laurens Township.  Ora is mentioned very briefly as part originally of the township called Scuffletown.  No explanation is given for this odd name, though one supposes a family named the Scuffles lived there.

Mountville is mentioned as a community that sort of sprang up on its own and as having probably the oldest church in the county.  I think Uncle Douglas may be buried there. Anyway, don’t buy that book.  If you see it, just pick it up and look at the pictures while you are standing there.  And then put it back where you found it.

Healthful eating has not caught on in SC;  indeed the restaurants of SC seem to be engaged in counter-programming against all those healthy trends coming out of places like California.  How else to explain a restaurant chain that flauntingly calls itself Fatz?  I ate at Fatz; the food was medium good and the portions enormous.  They start you out free of charge with some flavored rolls that have been deep fried.  Carol ate all of them.

All of the visiting Tingle brothers ate breakfast at Ryans in Laurens right across from the WalMart; this is a chain of different styles of restaurants.  The one we went to was all you could eat forever and ever.  They had a separate room for smokers.  I went in there to take a puff and found myself in a room with four other smokers—all workers at the restaurant and all black—I don’t know how long it’s been since I was in a room with four other smokers. 

But laws are being passed and challenged and passed again restricting smoking in public places and bars.  One of the workers sitting there said, “Are they trying to take all of our pleasures away from us.”  Carol and I went back to Ryans at seven or so for dinner, and the guy who had defended his right to smoke was still working.  He looked really tired and had the horrible job of just standing there behind the steak and ham and waiting for people to come up and tell him what they wanted.

 All you can eat for 8.99.  With sweet tea or soda pop extra. 

According to the Laurens picture book, that’s the oldest church in Laurnens County, located in Mountville near Duncan Creek.  I don’t know though if the structure pictured is still extant.

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Last year about this time while in Ora, SC I spent a number of hours trying to locate the spot on a river or creek where I had nearly “drowned” when I was in second grade.  I thought I had located it on the Enoree; I even wrote a song about it with the word Enoree in it, but during this past year in a visit with Joan, I mentioned what I had done.  And she said, what did you do that for?  Thinking I guess that I made too much of having nearly died while she was supposed to be watching out for me. And then she said, anyway it was on Warrior Creek.

 So during our last day in the Ora area, I made Carol ride around with me while I tried to locate Warrior creek.  I found Warrior Creek Road and drove on it on and on through what appear some land of the Cherokee Nation (hence I guess, the name Warrior Creek) but had no luck at all locating any body of water near Warrior Creek Road; finally I came back out on the main road well above Ora, and driving back what do I drive across, but Warrior Creek.

So I got out of the car and took these pictures.  The Creek is low perhaps because of the extended drought, and this is not the spot where I nearly “drowned,” but this is Warrior Creek. And I must have nearly drowned on it somewhere nearby.  Indeed, I regret having not turned off onto a dirt road with the sign “Slippery Rock.”  I would bet that gave public access to the Creek.

Also I drove back to North Greenville Community College today and took these pictures should some doubting Thomas not believe there really is a Tingle Residence Hall.

 

I don’t know why—maybe it was money for gas, or time lost to make money, or a general inability to enjoy ourselves—but we did not when I was a child in Ora SC travel very much, if at all.  I don’t remember even having gone to Clinton which was maybe in those days 15 minutes away by car.  But I do remember us having driven a considerable ways to visit some relatives. I didn’t know where this place was back then, but I now know it was a place called Tigerville north of Greenville by 15 minutes maybe.  That would have been a lot of travel back then close to two hours, I bet, what with what the roads and cars were like back then from Ora to Tigerville.

Actually Tigerville is more a name than a place, or let’s say if you did not know the name you would in all likelihood not know you were in the place, since there isn’t anything to suggest that there is a Tigerville exactly.  But we went there because that’s where Uncle Neal lived with his wife and two sons, at that time back in the early 50’s.  Neal’s wife, Doris, was a school teacher and the sons were Rusty and Jacks (yes, Jacks).  They were roughly parallel in age to me and Brother Steve and I remember having enjoyed playing with them, though I have no idea what we did since we had none of what people might call toys.  I suppose we ran around and looked at things.

Carol and I went to Tigerville escorted by my cousin, Lucy, to find located, where once there had been nothing, the campus of North Greenville Community College, directly in front of Uncle Neal’s House.  I did not know fully understand the intensity of the relation of the Tingles to this college—a Baptist College—until driving onto the campus I read across the top of a building the name of my cousin, Jacks Tingle, and then further around back found the Tingle Residence Hall.

I don’t remember there having been any college there at all when I  was a child but there must have been something there or maybe it appeared after my time, but that is where Uncle Neal became an ordained Baptist Minister and later worked through the ups and downs of the college over the years as head of facilities, I think it was.  Later on, no doubt because of the location of the college and his father’s involvement with it, Jacks Tingle gave the college a lot of money.

Jacks has a lovely house located in a lovely piney woods right next to the college.  The house is situated in such a way as to produce what in California might be called a view.  Views are rare lower in the state, but around and north beyond Greenville one is heading into North Carolina and the Smokey Mountains. Jacks at one time was the owner of many, many Burger Kings and that’s where the money came from to help out the college so that now there is a Tingle Residence Hall.

Jacks has suffered several strokes so we did not drop in unannounced at his home, but earlier in the day, we did, down in Greenville, drive by Rusty’s nice brick house.  He was out front doing something to his car, so we stopped.  I can’t say had I seen Rusty on the streets that I would have recognized him; it has been 50 years more or less since I last saw him and people do change over 50 years. But as we talked I remembered his presence and understood why I had enjoyed playing with him and Jacks.  He is a good guy.

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A road in the rain outside Charleston.