Troubled Water // A Walk Inside the Beast
Mosiah Asad
never been difficult for meto see my home is a smoking gun / a dilapidated plantation turned tourist treat. Coates was right. Charleston is the belly of the beast. what white folks call the Holy City is a shameless parade of gothic charm and broken geechie bonds and sure there are palmetto trees that neighbor oak trees’ whose branches hang low, twisting and curving, trying to touch the ground, trying to tap root and a sweet older black man in a straw hats who wave at me as if they raised me and black men younger than t, but older than I, who lean against tinted Hondas playing dirty south drums, who nod as well, but there are always carriages pulled by panting horses with shit pampers tied below them riding around downtown, with white men giving lectures of revisionist history to tourists from the Midwest and Northeast. And we can’t stand the fucking carriages that pass us by like our rich white neighbors, directing tourists’ attention to the ruins (next to the projects). A white woman approaching me pushes a double stroller and her children grab at the bushes in front of an old lady’s apartment yard we are destined to pass. one baby raises its hand, opens and closes it (a baby wave), and says, “Ba,” and I wave back, and say, “Hi,” and their mama briefly looks up from her phone to give a tight lipped smile as if we do not speak the same language, as if she is not a visitor to streets I grew up gawking at, unspokenly barred from, streets where old black men at food lion would reminisce tell me where they went to talk to white girls. it has never been difficult for meto question these gated communitiesstill named for plantations or the hallowed homes raised on blackbodies silenced beneath. this is an American story. there are sentinel oaks, who know of more, but like tour guides, they tell nothing. but they know of the enslaved, those who wrought the iron and laid the cobblestones, those taken from their enslavers by the City, and equipped with wooden shovels to dig the swamps still named for Native peoples miles long, to mimic serpent, Wadmalaw to Savannah, decades of Charleston sun cemented to the skin with mud and hundreds of Sabbaths spent digging pluff-mud so that with tide and row of enslaved men, white church-goers can boat home, canaling so that Charleston can move its chattel through the chained, canaling so that the palmetto prison is leaked to the southern frontier where t heircaptors were being slaughtered by the Spanish, their homes set ablaze by the Natives, a dream secured it has never been difficult for me to see this is a piece of the Gullah heritage colored by smoked tobacco, pocketed by salted breezes, and the refined, gilded bitterness of syrupy teas, and Urban Renewal and red summers, and sweetgrass baskets made by grannies and sweetgrass roses made by grandsons, and clotheslines draped with headwraps and Cowboys jerseys, and yards where shucked oysters, perloo, and fried fish maw the air. we split the brackish ourselves, troubling the water. few things comfort like this.
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