By Scott Graber
It is Thursday, and Hurricane Milton is moving out into the Atlantic Ocean. This morning we have a wind whipping through our magnolias. But I have my coffee and the sense that things could have been worse.
When Susan and I arrived in Beaufort (1970) there didn’t seem to be much worry about hurricanes. There had been a devastating, no-named hurricane in 1893; then smaller hurricanes in the 50s and 60s, but nothing that left any physical or emotional scar tissue.
My own sense of hurricanes was informed by Hurricane Hazel (in 1952) that wiped-out our family’s second-row cottage at Ocean Drive Breach, S.C. I wasn’t living in South Carolina when Hazel made landfall; but for years I listened to my grandmother talk about the Sahara-like scene she witnessed when the National Guard let them return.
In those days there was no FEMA, and I don’t think anyone had insurance. There was flood insurance but I don’t think it covered hurricanes that were a combination of water and wind. But in the 1950s creosote pilings, pine and plywood were not otherworldly expensive; and most cottage owners rebuilt within a couple of years.
After Hazel my family would spend the month of June in this rebuilt cottage; usually in the company of my North Carolina cousins. But these month-long visits never included my father.
The formula for my family was that dad would find a nearby graduate-level course, something dealing with tuberculosis or tularemia at, say, Wake Forest, and my mother, her sister, their children and our grandmother would jam ourselves into our second-row cottage.
Even at age 8, I knew my father and my grandmother did not like each other. I felt a tension when they were in the same room; that tension sometimes exploding into a shouting, slam-the-door argument over something as inconsequential like my repeated sunburns; or my grandmother’s fat back, grits and gravy, ham hock and deep-fat-fried dinner entrees.
In my old age I have pondered these two decent people, wondering why they could not stand each other. These days I’m thinking it was probably my father’s home state, Ohio, and the fact that Ohio produced William Tecumseh Sherman.
My maternal grandparents were both from Eastern North Carolina, born right after the Civil War, their fathers veterans of that war. Some may know that General Sherman came into North Carolina after burning his way through Georgia and South Carolina.
Some know that Sherman’s Army lived off the land; taking the chickens, pigs, mules, silver service and china from the farms along his route. He burned the cotton bales; and if there was any resistance his “bummers” also burnt down the house, the barn and sometimes raped the female occupants.
These forward-riding, free-range scavengers did their stealing because the Army’s Quartermaster, Montgomery Meigs, could not keep Sherman’s Army supplied as he fought his way into Atlanta, across South Carolina’s Salkehatchie Swamp and into Fayetteville. Sherman’s justified his scorch-the-earth-cleansing by saying that these stay at home farm-folk were complicit in the this great sectional treason—and, by the way, were slave owners.
The last significant battle in this campaign was fought near Bentonville, N.C.
Sherman, a very good tactician and thinking he had won the war, did not believe the Confederate general, Joseph Johnson, would attack him below Goldsboro. When Johnson did attack Sherman’s right flank, Slocum’s Division took most of the blow and significant casualties when almost everyone thought the war was over.
But Sherman’s ragged, undisciplined carnivores stopped this last rebel advance and then gave Sherman an opportunity to encircle the Confederate army. But for some reason Sherman stopped, he hesitated, and that hesitation allowed Joe Johnson (and perhaps one ancestor) to escape.
My father — the child of German coal miners — was raised on the Ohio River. He came of age in the Depression, graduated from Ohio State University and won the state tennis championship. His dreams of becoming a professional were obliterated by World War II; but that war did give him a Southern bride and their mixed, North/South marriage somehow survived.
But my father could not overcome the memories of the burning and devastation inflicted by Sherman’s “bummers” — many Southerners believing that making the women and children pay this price, or any price, was barbaric. I’m sure my maternal grandparents fell into this unhappy, unforgiving category.
It is my recollection they would not speak Sherman’s name.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
