When I tell people up here where I’m from, they throw me side-eye. Virginians nourish a deep-seated, barely-concealed belief that all South Carolinians are secretly insane. I’d like to argue that I’m one of the few same ones, the blue dot in the red sea. I left, I want to say. That has to count for something. But it doesn’t really, or not much. I know how awful South Carolina is. I love it anyway.
From 2009 to 2013, I delivered three children in Columbia, South Carolina. I suffered through difficult pregnancies, miserable with hyperemesis (think morning sickness that never ended and left me bedridden with exhaustion). My first labor would have ended in a C-section but for the patience and grace of a resident OB; for a little while, ultrasound mistakes left us with serious doubts that our second son had feet. My third labor had to be induced due to severe gestational diabetes.
Today, a misstep during those complicated pregnancies would risk killing me. Abortion is now illegal in South Carolina after six weeks (when most women don’t know they’re pregnant), and a bill currently in committee atttempts to classify abortion as homicide, which would render the perpetrator—the woman—eligible for life in prison or even the death penalty.
I could tell you stories about the horrific racism there, too. Truly, it is horrific. Those stories are not mine to tell.
We left the state for many reasons, but chief among them was our children; we refused to raise them in a place that had become so dangerously conservative. My husband grew up in Richmond, and my in-laws live here; I’m beyond grateful to have a real family in town. But I still had to leave the home I love behind, because home had become unliveable.
Is it a betrayal? Ask me to tell you a story about South Carolina, and I can summon up any number of lunatic narratives about barely hidden corruption. I keep a storehouse of too-crazy-to-be-true-except-they-are, ripped straight from the pages of Flannery O’Conner stories. I know stories so bad that I’m smart enough not to type them out. I always understood that the Deep South was rotten to the core, and South Carolina worse than most.
Every time I try to explain why I miss it so much, I come up with empty-handed rationalization. I know the stories there. I love it. I hate it too. I know it’s bad but I can’t help it. Home is a war zone; home is a wound. If you look at it clear-eyed, you’ll shatter to pieces.
I’m glad to go back, and I hate that. God in heaven, I became that person who gets teary over Darius Rucker’s “Wagon Wheel.” That ought to make me ashamed to be seen in public anywhere north of Charlotte. But soon I can wear my COCKS shirt in public. I’ll see palmettos wrapped in Christmas lights, and I’ll be able to buy sweet tea in the gas station. The world will feel right again. Wrong—fundamentally, deeply, terribly wrong, and unjust.
But it will feel like mine.
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