Eating a path through troubled history in Charleston, South Carolina | Mark Hinson

CHARLESTON, South Carolina – My wife, Amy, and I snag the last two seats for dinner at Chubby Fish, a 40-seater seafood restaurant that does not take reservations. It’s first-come, first-served. Be in line when the doors open. It’s unlike most other Charleston eateries, which are booked weeks in advance.

May the dinner odds be ever in your favor.

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I haven’t set foot in Charleston since becoming an alleged adult. In the ‘70s, I came to the Low Country on a family vacation at the start of my teens. My father wanted to show me and my older brother, Randall, the city that started The Civil War when it fired on Federal troops in its harbor’s Fort Sumter.

Boy, that was an arrogant mistake.

In Charleston these days, everything revolves around food and history. Sometimes both, which explains the turkey sandwich at The Swamp Fox, a dining spot named for a Revolutionary War hero around Charleston whose guerilla tactics proved to be a real headache for British troops. America’s past and a chowhound’s paradise. That’s Charleston in 2023.

Robert Smalls had big ….

In this era when American history in school skates around the race issue because it might make some kids uncomfortable or feel shame for the acts of ancestors, Charleston doesn’t try to paint an image of a rosy past. It was ground zero for the slave trade. One visit to the Old Slave Mart Museum spells out the shameful story about how America really lost its innocence.

Driving around the historic neighborhoods of Charleston and gawking at the mansions built by the wealthy, it’s easy to see why the white upper classes in the early 1800s were not keen on giving up its free labor. It takes a lot of workers – gardeners, cooks, cleaners, launders, horse groomers, carpenters, wait staff, etc. – to run a big house. Why pay them a fair wage? Fire on Fort Sumter, instead.

I guess Fort Sumter is still taught in school, but I had to drive six hours to Charleston to learn about Robert Smalls from a plaque near the famous Pineapple Fountain in the city’s waterfront. Smalls, born enslaved in 1839, earned money for his owner by working as a crewman in Charleston aboard the Confederate transport ship Planter.

Before dawn in May 1862, Smalls, 23, loaded his family and fellow enslaved sailors aboard the Planter and took off. He did not get blasted out of the water and instead found freedom when he met up with the Union ships blocking Charleston harbor. Smalls went on to serve five terms in the United States Congress.

Smalls’ daring escape should be taught in every school room across the country.

The human pinball

History has not been so kind to one pre-Civil War personality.

Pro-slavery Vice President John C. Calhoun, who served during John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson’s reigns, is a rural South Carolina native buried in the “stranger’s cemetery.” He is planted across the road from St. Philip’s Episcopal Church on Church Street in downtown Charleston. He could not be interred in the “friendly graveyard,” connected beside the church, because it’s reserved for Charleston-born dead folks-only.

That offers a little bit of insight into the societal pecking order of Charleston, which is nicknamed The Holy City because it has so many galdurn churches.

That did not stop Calhoun from bouncing around after he died of TB in 1850 in Washington, D.C. He was first buried in nation’s capital. Then he was exhumed and transported south to Charleston where he was re-planted in the “stranger’s cemetery.”

At the height of The Civil War, when the harbor was blocked and firebug Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army was on the way, loyal Confederates were afraid the Federal troops would raid Calhoun’s grave and do hideous things to the corpse. Calhoun got dug up again and moved across Church Street to an unmarked plot in the “friendly graveyard.”

After The Civil War was over (the South lost, by the way), the parishioners at St. Philip’s had Calhoun’s remains excavated once again and moved back to the “stranger’s cemetery.”

In the 1960s, there was a movement that wanted to relocate Calhoun once more for re-burial next to his wife, Floride (with an “e”), in Pendelton, South Carolina, in the northwest part of the state near Clemson. As far as anyone knows, Calhoun is still a stranger in Charleston.     

The war continues

Back at Chubby Fish, Amy and I order tempura-fried tilefish, a whole flounder slathered in a sauce I’ll just call Bliss Sauce and a dozen local, raw oysters that are nearly as briny and delicious as the bivalves that once came from Apalachicola Bay. You know, Apalachicola Bay before we humans ruined it with an oil spill, runoffs from agriculture and The Water Wars.

“Why is this place called Chubby Fish?” Amy asks as she drinks a glass of French sauvignon blanc wine.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe the fish name Sarcastic Fringehead didn’t have an appetizing ring to it?”

As I munch on the succulent tilefish chunks, I think of the day’s return visit to Fort Sumter. In the ‘70s, a park ranger didn’t show me the finger marks left by the enslaved kids who molded the fort’s bricks. That was new. A guide also didn’t tell me about the enslaved rowers who ferried the Confederate leaders out to Fort Sumter to convince the Yankees to surrender before the cannon bombardment started.

Enslaved people, who were at the center of the Civil War, were elbowed out of history in the ‘70s. The war was about states’ rights, the agrarian South versus the industrialized North, blah, blah, blah. Enslaved people got written back into the Civil War conversation in my lifetime only to see it chipped back again in the past few years. Rebury them, if you will. 

Yet, one look at the finger marks on the bricks of Fort Sumter says everything anyone needs to know about the Civil War.

Mark Hinson is a former senior reporter at The Tallahassee Democrat. His email is mark.hinson59@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Eating a path through history in Charleston, South Carolina