Traveling With Mama in the Heat of the South

It was a summer of transitions, of transformations.

My sister was graduating from her college in Rhode Island and moving to Los Angeles. My parents, after a difficult multi-year detour in North Carolina, were moving to San Francisco— my dad had already gone, leaving my parents unhappily living in different states for the second time in two years. I had recently left my soul-crushing job and was planning on moving to Istanbul that September. (I didn’t make it until the end of January.)

We were all excited, but also a little numbed by how quickly all four of us ended up living in different far-flung cities.

My family is deeply in love.

My mother never warmed to Charlotte, North Carolina– too many “bless your heart”s and “have a nice day y’all”s for her cynical Boston sensibility– so spending most of her sweltering summer days alone there was a special form of agony. With my father and sister ensconced in their jobs on the West Coast, I headed down south to make my mama’s summer a little more fun. We would take a weekend road trip, from Charlotte to Charleston, South Carolina.

The Carolinas in July are not ideal. Charlotte and Charleston both are overwhelmingly humid; the air hugs you hot and tight. Everywhere is air conditioned; these are not cities for summertime strolling. They are cities for sitting, drinking tall icy things, traveling in a cool bubble of car radio and cold air. The heat pervades every aspect of life. The way you breathe changes. It is heavier, slower.

This is the heat of the South.

We embraced the heat. We packed giant sunhats and cool cotton dresses and drove on south, to Charleston.

Charlotte can be lovely, but generally it is an uninspiring city, with sprawling suburbs with a few bank skyscrapers in the middle of uptown. Charleston, however, was immediately charming. This is what you want when you visit the South.

The city drawls.

We wandered slowly between the old colorful houses, the moss-draped trees hanging lazily and majestically over plantation-era mansions, the modern cafes and old theaters refurbished into boutiques. The palmetto trees swish and a gentle bite of salty sea pervades the air.

My mother’s red hat was an exclamation mark amidst all the pastel and green. Maybe Southern ladies these days don’t promenade with big-brimmed hats anymore, but my mother is no Southern lady. We wore our hats with pride.

Defiantly we went forth into the heat of South Carolina. We ate icy lemon desserts from street stands and bought bags of juice-bursting peaches. We ducked into air-conditioned stores for coolness, for rest.

We hunted for a mail box to drop a letter, and after determining that Charleston is strangely devoid of these, ended up in the classic post office– a space built for the grand old days when people regularly wrote letters.

My mother had been to Charleston twice before and was eager to show me all the beautiful little bits she’d found in the city. I think my parents hoped for some romantic idea of the South when they moved to Charlotte; Charleston delivers in ways that Charlotte never could. It’s almost definite that my parents would have been no happier in South Carolina than they were in North, but visiting Charleston made my mom swoony anyway. It reminded her of Newburyport, Massachusetts perhaps, a quaint city on Boston’s North Shore. Charleston is full of character, full of beauty, full of delicious cuisine. We ate fresh tuna and avocado-crab ravioli at a restaurant called Coast and drank wine and it was rapturous.

Toward the end of our weekend, I was emphatic about visiting nearby Fort Moultrie after loyally reading the New York Times’ Disunion series around 2010/2011; making all that Civil War history PALPABLE was irresistible. The rolling green was punctuated with unused canons and brick fortifications, and I tried to imagine bloody history springing from this little patch of land. History is rarely far away in a country as young as the USA, and in a region as complicated as the American South.

But the humidity drove us onward from my historical reverie to Sullivan’s Island, a light-blue patch of beach that felt like bathwater. The warm breeze broke through the crushing humidity and we waded shoeless into the surf, giggling giddily.

And then the weekend was over, and we drove through the dusty Southern highways back to Charlotte, to the house that soon wouldn’t be ours, to the home that would soon not be home. Our big hats sat stacked in the backseat, used and discarded. We ate the last of our peaches and set our sights north.