The One True Barbecue by Rien Fertel

Author:Rien Fertel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

CHAPTER 8

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South Carolina: The Battleground State

I knew that what could be true of my pig could be true also of the rest of my tidy world.

—E. B. WHITE

Six months after my last fact-finding mission, I was back on the road for the Southern Foodways Alliance to document the faces and places behind the barbecue in the other Carolina. Denny again joined me on the RV, which now sported a decal on the back that officially branded us as the Barbecue Bus. The logo was a surprise gift courtesy of my parents, who, bless their hearts, thought we could use some interstate publicity along our journey. I was too embarrassed to tell them that an additional decal they had made that read “Oink if you love BBQ” maybe went a little too far.

For our swing through South Carolina, I expected to find much of the same: idyllic backdrops for leisurely drives, food that made me feel a part of a place and a people, cordial folks eager to share their stories, a receding whole-hog culture. Nothing separates the Carolinas, I thought to myself while packing my bag, but a direction. But like all good assumptions, it was both half right and more than half wrong.

For a century before the Carolinas became distinct halves, they constituted the Province of Carolina. This was a proprietary territory ruled by an impressively influential roll call of English nobles and politicians looking to make a quick buck through colonization and agricultural development. By 1729, the British Crown bought back their shares and carved two Carolina colonies from the province. Soon after, a survey team, hired by colony commissioners to set a fixed boundary between the colonies, slogged along a diagonal line traced upon a map of the Eastern Seaboard toward their rendezvous with the 35th parallel, the northern latitudinal border that would eventually delineate the South from the Deep South. But the exhausted and often unpaid surveyors abandoned their project twelve miles short of their destination, unintentionally framing the Carolinas’ misshapen, and still disputed, boundary. South Carolina bore the brunt of the survey snafu. Whereas North Carolina’s outline looks bold, majestic—an outstretched arm (or gun, unfortunately) muscularly pointing toward the destiny that would ultimately manifest in the heartland of the United States—I always thought South Carolina looked like a child’s interpretation of a gnarled and battered heart, a crooked little place looking for love.

Despite their shared heritage and history, crossing the border from North Carolina into South Carolina can feel like undertaking an interplanetary hop and skip to the next world over. The Mason-Dixon line, the cultural frontier that once split the northern and southern states, is, of course, the more famous American boundary, but it’s along the serpentine borderline that cleave the Carolina sisters where our nation’s cultural shifts are now most noticeably deep and abiding.

South Carolina revels in its own southernness, as if accepting fate over choice. The identity of the state is fixed, embraced, pushed front and center, determined as much by an adjectival modifier as by history.

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