Peninsula of Lies by Edward Ball

Author:Edward Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

GAY NECROPOLIS

It was a cool afternoon, a few miles from the heart of Charleston, and Ted Phillips, who’d taken me to Dawn’s funeral, was pointing out a back route to his favorite place, Magnolia Cemetery.

“Today I want to show you a nice little nest of lesbians, the founders of Ashley Hall,” he said, referring to a local girls’ school. Ted was a premium resource for Charleston lore. He’d taken me on walks in the cemetery before, but this time I’d asked for a tour with a theme.

Ted Phillips was wearing a gray sweater and a blue button-down shirt, a tan tweed jacket, and a gray wool hat with a narrow brim. The hat and jacket, plus his slouch, made him look like a disheveled Sherlock Holmes. The role fit, to an extent, because Ted was a former public defender and thus something of an expert in theft and drug crime. (“I’m a recovering lawyer,” he said.) Since quitting the courts, however, Ted had also become something of a necrologist.

For several years, Ted had researched Charleston’s graveyards. It might have been a dreary hobby except that Ted liked the kind of revelations that aired the unseemly truth about the departed. As a result, he’d compiled a host of rumors about the respectable residents of Charleston, a virtual encyclopedia of scandal, which he carried around in his head.

The drive to Magnolia Cemetery took a few minutes, and as we passed a tough neighborhood, Ted pointed and said, “One day I was on one of those streets over there, going to see a client in my role as public defender, and somebody came at me with a gun.” His upcountry accent got deeper. “I recognized the guy because I’d previously gotten him off of some drug charge. He was just holding up the first white person he saw, who happened to be me. When he realized who I was, he said, ‘Oh, Mr. Phillips, I’m soooo sorry. I didn’t know it was you!’ So I told him, ‘Andrew, this isn’t going to do much for your parole!’ But I gave him some money, anyway, because I didn’t want him to feel too bad.”

Ted was still musing about the good old days in the public defender’s office when we arrived at the gates of Magnolia. Stepping out of the car, he lit a Marlboro and surveyed his domain. “Magnolia Cemetery. Laid out a century and a half ago on this old plantation.”

We were standing within sight of the Cooper River. Sweeping his arm across a field of tombstones, Ted went on, “This part was supposed to be wild, so that when you came in you were immediately in the presence of nature. The whole idea of death-in-nature was one of the big draws of the rural cemetery movement, in the nineteenth century. But during the Civil War, Yankee troops set up camp here before they took Charleston. It was wintertime, and cold, so the Yankees cut down a lot of trees, and it was no longer wild when they left.

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