By: Cameron MacKenzie
I was recently in Charleston, South Carolina with a friend of mine, walking the beautiful streets and stopping into restaurants for a dozen oysters and she-crab soup. We did all the sights and at some point found ourselves in a museum looking at a small exhibit of cowrie shells. You'd recognize a cowrie shell if you saw one--a smooth dome about the size of your thumb, curling up on the underside with what looks like tiny little teeth.
These shells acted as currency around the world for thousands of years, but the reason they were in a museum in South Carolina was because they were often used in the slave trade throughout West Africa. Collected in the Maldives and shipped across the Sahara by Arab merchants to Europe, slave traders bought people on the coast with cowrie shells for decades, until someone brought in millions of shells from Zanzibar and threw the whole system out of whack.
Charleston is beautiful. The food is incredible, the history is rich, and there is so much money in that town it's almost seeping out of the cobblestone streets. But where, precisely, did all that money come from? What built Charleston in 1670 from a little 'burg in a swamp to one of the most powerful cities in the world by 1865? Leaving aside the fact that about 40% of the U.S. slave trade went through Charleston, the city was also home to a host of families with Vanderbilt-type money, all of it "earned" with the cotton, rice, and indigo harvesting that took place out on any one of dozens of plantations throughout the upcountry.
Suffice to say that my trip was a study of contrasts, because it was only after walking the streets of Charleston that I finally began to understand exactly why the South wanted to go to war–slavery, of course, but slavery was so important because it was the principal engine that created obscene wealth for a handful of elites that lived, for example, in Charleston, and who breathed bright life into its economy. And today, the houses, churches, gardens, cars, bars, the pork rillette and Old Fitzgerald bourbon, the beautiful people and the beautiful life all that money affords is still right there in that old town for you to see, and if you can afford it, you can enjoy it too. Charleston, South Carolina is the cream of America's crop, built on the backs of people bought and sold with shells.
There's a famous short story by Ursula K. LeGuin called "Those Who Walk Away From Omelas." It follows the summer solstice festival of a fantastical city called Omelas, a superior civilization of beauty and light with advanced technology and communal resources, populated by intelligent, caring, sophisticated people. But, so the story tells us, the wonderment of the city is maintained only through the abject suffering of a single child, kept in bondage and filth, in a cell below the city streets. Everyone knows about the child. When adults find out about it they are, of course, horrified, but they choose the stability of the city over the wellbeing of the child. There are some, however, who do not make that choice. There are a few who chose to walk away from Omelas. "The place they go towards," the story tells us in its final lines, "is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist."
I had a wonderful time in Charleston with a wonderful person. We walked all over town and we talked about books and wine and history. We ate in the best restaurants. We read every plaque we could find. We promenaded on the promenade and swung in the swings. I spent my money and I ogled the houses and I bought refrigerator magnets for my kids. And I've struggled to articulate my feelings on that trip since I got back. Another famous writer, William Faulkner, once said that "the past isn't dead. It isn't even past." He was wealthy, and white, and he knew what that meant. Do I, really? Do we?
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