Story by Ann M. Jastrab

Photographs by jon o. holloway

I’ve spent weeks with jon driving through the rolling greenness of Newberry County, South Carolina, where the town of Chappells once thrived. I am amazed by the sweetness of the air, as if no industry existed anywhere near and as if no pollution had ever been produced let alone introduced to the area. At first I think I’ve been in Los Angeles too long, but then I realize that the land has simply reclaimed what man once built. We speed along the back roads, some dirt, some paved, the wisteria blooming on the decrepit porches of abandoned houses. I have the windows rolled down in the truck despite the cold and I stare out at a landscape that is growing wildly and erasing the traces of man. Our destination is old Chappells, a town lying along a white chalk road that dead ends in the Saluda River which seems to be forever shrouded in blue mist. Thick kudzu forests strangle the shells of old wooden and brick buildings. There is a feeling in the air, something akin to tragedy, but it is blown away on the clean air.

We wander to the nearby post office (which is the size of the studio apartment I once had in Manhattan), and I find out that Chappells is no longer officially a town since it lost its charter. The government tried to take the zip code too, but the twenty-five citizens of Chappells fought to retain it. These twenty-five people (the postmaster’s guess at the population) also hold onto the memory of how it used to be. When "cotton was king," Chappells was the capitol of the cotton belt: 2,000 people bustling down that main street, hotels, shops, banks, visitors pouring out of trains, black folks and white folks getting along, everyone prospering; it seemed like it could never end. Then blight and disaster: the boll weevil in 1923, flash flooding which washed away the bridge to the town, the Great Depression hit earlier here than anywhere, a fire that destroyed half the buildings, a tornado which razed the other half (the only intact building, the train depot, was carefully moved in 1973, only to be leveled shortly thereafter by a cyclone), the trains were rerouted and the tracks torn up; the stacks of railroad ties are still piled down by the river as a reminder of what once existed. I hear all this and think initially that the town has been beaten into submission, but throughout my days of exploring, I discover something else: a vitality that keeps the sense of loss at bay.

Located less than a mile from old Chappells on route 34 is Scurry’s Country Store. Even at dawn the place is packed. As we pull up in front of the store in the blue light, we nearly run over half a dozen dead turkeys lying on the pavement. Carl Enlow and his Chihuahua, Buster, are inspecting the birds. Back in the day, he used to hunt with that dog on his shoulder, "best damn bird dog ever." (I try to imagine the aging Buster flushing out a covey of quail when he is no bigger than my foot). Inside, Sis is cooking in the tiny kitchen; during all the hunting seasons she has no time to rest. Her specialty is "hotdogs with the works" and while I wait for mine I browse the shelves and scan the walls. There is a bulletin board with Polaroids of various people holding up their trophies: numerous men with giant striped fish, a woman who looks scared holding up a perch the size of her torso, a sixteen-year-old boy with forty limp rabbits (one is draped over his shoulder in a comical way). Carl comes in and tacks up a new photograph of three men kneeling behind four turkeys with long wide wings and iridescent necks.

The door opens with a bang and the silhouette of a large man fills the entire frame. John Scurry has been out on the tractor all day, but claims he’s not a farmer though he owns all the surrounding land and is in the process of planting it. He is red-faced and big in his overalls and he sits heavily in one of the four chairs surrounding the wood stove in the center of the store. Though his last name is Scurry, his family hasn’t owned the market in probably fifty years. Soon Sis is handing a hot dog to John while Gene, her husband, is settling down next to him with his own hot dog. Carl shuffles in and takes his position while Everett Sumner comes in with swinging arms and booming voice. The four of them sit eating hotdogs while I stare in amazement at the wall behind them. It is covered with four sets of deer antlers, one buck’s head, a hornets’ nest, some inflatable beach toys, a poster of a Budweiser girl as well as a large black and white photograph of the four of them in the same chairs eating hotdogs ten years earlier.

Time stopped somewhere, but it’s hard to determine when.

The four of them hold court in the circle of deep chairs while people cycle in and out, weigh their turkeys, buy soft drinks, lean on the counter, eat Sis’s cooking and listen to the stories and the laughter and bask in the lightness of the atmosphere of the narrow store. This is the place where the past meets the present and there is no regret here, only reminiscence and celebration. Along with the tales of loss (without mourning) are raucous accounts of wild women and fast cars and corrupt men and bootleg liquor. And as I hunker down in the one vacant seat at Scurry’s, I also learn about the people still in existence who make Chappells extraordinary.

At first, no one will mention Eddie. I listen to tales which include all the familiar founding families’ names and the exploits involving the relatives of each person that’s in the store. Someone is recalling the time the still behind the store blew up and above the laughter, I hear one of the men whisper to Jon, "Have you been to see Eddie Summer yet?" There is a pause in the merriment and everyone’s breath is held for a moment. Upon the exhale we swallow the last of our hotdogs and exit into the bright midday sun.

Eddie Summer is hanging suspended from an upright mechanized chair as we walk in the door. His mother lowers him slowly into a sitting position as the cowbells attached to the machine clang. His father is wearing camouflage and sitting on a brown leather couch flanked by his bird dogs. He holds up the most beautiful gun I’ve ever seen and we all touch it and admire it. Except for Eddie.

Eddie is forty-five and writing his second book…with his eyes. He contracted viral encephalitis when he was nineteen and lost his ability to speak and to move. As a result of the high fever, he is completely paralyzed except for his eyes, which he uses to communicate with his family as well as to write his stories. We follow him as his parents wheel him into the bedroom to type at his computer. Eddie wears glasses with a sensor attached to the rim and blinks his right eye, slowly typing the letters and sentences, painstakingly weaving stories for his books and articles for the Ninety-Six Newspaper. He "talks" to us for nearly four hours and I ask him if he ever gets a cramp in his eye. A noise comes from somewhere deep inside his body that sounds like it could be laughter. He is hidden away at the edge of Greenwood Lake, on the edge of Chappells, recalling scenes from his stolen life and anecdotes from the town of his birth, and giving them back to the people to help them remember what has been lost.

As we leave at dusk in silent awe, we hear cow bells again, but this time it is a herd moving quickly away from the road. It must be feeding time. We get in the truck and slowly follow the cows to their destination. The barn on J.D. Hair’s property. We only make it as far as his house which is strung with blue lights and surrounded by wide-open fields. J.D. greets us in the warmth of his sun porch where cats are happy to spend the day and plants are thriving. His wife, Lilly, slips out to meet us and as the door closes behind her, I see a flash of gold. Seeing my curiosity, she leads me inside to a room full of baseball trophies, hundreds of them. Seven children. Twenty-one grandchildren. Sixteen great-grandchildren. Most of them baseball players. And one in the major leagues, Gookie Williams, Cincinnati Reds. They all used to play ball out in the yard. J.D. would mow the field for them. Field of dreams.

I sleep heavily that evening with six fat moths fluttering against the windowpanes, frogs singing as the night deepens, and a pregnant white moon floating above the sleeping spring trees. The earth is tilting again. Every day there are more lavender blossoms, flowers exploding across the ruined land. I dream of boys in red baseball uniforms running through a hazy sunset in slow motion.

The next day the store is bustling again at dawn with turkey hunters already coming in to weigh their birds. As Sis takes the Polaroids and makes the hotdogs, a stranger comes in and needs help with a flat tire. The stranger is a traveling salesman and talks so rapidly that my years in New York City couldn’t have prepared me for his speech. The men take him in stride, encourage him to stay awhile, sit down a spell, eat a hotdog (which he does), and then Mr. Enlow and Buster get their tools from their house across the street while the other men investigate. It is more than Southern hospitality. It is something more about being generous and supportive, not just of those you know, but of all. I leave with a tender heart and go out to meet more of the famed twenty-five.

Daisy and Earl are relaxing on their porch swing despite the fact that they have a hundred and fifty cattle to look after. They are in their mid-eighties and still do all the work on the farm and I stare in wonder at their smooth faces and light demeanor. Jon follows Earl somewhere and I join Daisy near the fence where three dogs that look like small bears romp in the grass. They are surrounded by thousands of daffodils and there are fat, heavy, drunken bees hanging in the air of the sunlit garden. She leans in close to me and whispers, "Mr. Williams, who built the place in 1852, he had two families. One black and one white. After his wife died, he took up with the slave girl…both families are buried in the cemetery over yonder." I look to the river, thick with trees and tombstones, and note the way the light shines on the robust red cows and marvel at life.

On the other side of the lake, Sam Williams is sitting on his porch surrounded by berry bushes, cobwebs, and black dogs. His blue eyes are shining in the bright light. I attempt to sit down and he says, "Whoa, that chair is electrified." I notice a green rubber hose out of which a wire is running all the way off the porch around the side of the house. He explains that the live wire is meant to keep a marauding cat from shredding the cushions. He is smiling, always smiling, despite the hardships of being a sharecropper after his own father had been born a slave. His hands are gnarled from the years of labor in cotton industry, but they flutter and sway and move through the air with eloquence as he recollects the past century. Sam stares across the street to where his house used to stand and where the fields he used to plow with his mule once stretched as far as the eye could see. I follow his gaze to a tangled scrub pine forest and try to envision miles of cotton, but I can’t. I look at Sam’s face and try to imagine both him and the land seventy years earlier.

We stop briefly at the country market and check the bulletin board and notice a photograph of the biggest turkey yet (weighing in at just under 22 pounds) being held by a fourteen-year-old boy with an ecstatic look on his face. We drive to the other business in town to meet the latest additions to the population.

Robert Owens is speaking quietly from his station behind a stack of Tin Tin books and dusty cameras and what could be my grandmother’s jewelry. He owns the antique store next to the post office, which is at the intersection of routes 34 and 39. The store is quiet except for the sound of passing log trucks hurrying by on their way to someplace else. His wife, Kim, appears with her dogs: four cream-colored greyhounds on long blue leashes. They wrap around the side of the building and seem to pull her forward as if she were driving a chariot. Kim has started a greyhound adoption program in South Carolina, Greyhound Crossroads; she is foster mother to over one hundred and fifty dogs and, as Angel, Stubby, Sunshine, and Dolly gather around her, I sense her strength and energy. And one has to have strength to move to a small, O.K., tiny town, where practically everyone has descended from the founding families. She is also a volunteer firewoman. As we follow her to the newly built fire station, she reveals that pretty much every person in Chappells is member; even ninety-year-old Carl Enlow and his dog, Buster, are volunteers.

The closeness of the inhabitants and their mutual support and affection is never clearer than my last evening in South Carolina. We attend an auction, a bring-your-own-thing-to-sell auction, to raise money to renovate the community center. The entire population of Chappells has shown up to participate. The items on the block include picture frames, jars of homemade jam, a tackle box, and even airplane rides. The room is bright and cheerful and the auctioneer has everyone laughing and buying despite the fact that wealth left this area a long time ago. The average age in the room is over sixty, but as the clocks and books and mystery bags disappear, I notice two children racing around, lining up the next objects for sale while simultaneously being mischievous. There is hope in the room, hope for a new generation who will stay and raise their families and keep the spirit of the town alive. Who will climb into the chairs around the stove at Scurry’s Country Store and tell the stories of their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.

The grass is greener in Chappells than any place I know and the urge to stay is sudden and strong. I watch the kids running and hiding and think about the generations that have left and the tragedies that have plagued the area, but then there is that something in the air here and in the vastness of the land left alone since the cotton crop was abandoned. It is a quiet strength, a resilience, and a refusal to disappear. Twenty-five people are holding onto their zip code and their memories and they are as tenacious as the vines that cling to the remnant of their town. As I leave the community center, I breathe the pleasing air deeply and exhale in a cloud lit by the moon. I stand and listen to the ancient trees moaning and I know I can leave because I realize that this town will continue to survive as it has for hundreds of years. The frogs sing as I drive into the darkness, no streetlamps to light my way, only the stars and the brilliant moon.

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