I went out to Hollywood this evening, a short way from the only Piggly Wiggly left in Charleston County. You veer left off Savannah Highway onto State Route 162 just after the combination motel/tile store, head down past Wide Awake Plantation, where one or another actress got married in the kind of celebration of antebellum life that tends to raise eyebrows outside of the former confederacy, and turn left at the Propane distributorship to get to the field.
The former St. Paul’s Academy Country Day School (Mascot: The Rebels. Academy Status: Segregation) campus is in a state of partially suspended disrepair. St Paul’s Academy Country Day closed some years back, as the recession hit it hard. Part of the reason people think of Charter schools in South Carolina as facilitating the fuck out of segregation is because the campus was taken over by a St. Paul’s Academy parent group who got a charter from the state and started operating a public charter school the next year.
The main building is newly refurbished, but everything else on the campus is not. The bleachers are eaten out by termites and rot and blown hard by hurricanes, collapsing into themselves, a cinderblock outline holding up a teetering press box that should probably have been red-tagged by a building inspector years ago. The oak trees tower above and around the buildings, and some more scraggly poplars dot what might have once been a baseball field but is now clearly some kind of agricultural experiment, outlined in scrub brush.
The biting gnats, which the folks with real accents they learned from their grandparents call “noseeums,” were out in force. They coated my partner’s arms, dying in his protective layer of Skin-So-Soft, and gave me a “mi vida loca” tattoo right where a prisoner would probably put his.
It was the hottest March day in the recorded history of temperatures in March in the South Carolina Lowcountry today, and what was left of the grass on the field after the assaults of flood, dry winter, and late freeze was the same orangish tan as the sun over the pine forest ringing the back edge of the campus, and crunched like fall’s first leaves underfoot. The only green was the greedy crabgrass.
The game went well.
