Here are notes and photographs taken from Joanna's research notebook whilst in Charleston. Although not directly linked to each other, they give an overall view of her experience in Charleston. Click on the photographs to see an enlarged version.

Setting for the novel

A girl said to me, "I told my mother, 'Mama, I have to leave the South. I deeply distrust these traditions - I can only have them on my own terms'."

 

Women in a meeting convened to discuss issues relevant to my novel:

"We don't want to be good daughters of the patriarchy!"

 

A grandmother said to me, "The emphasis is on breeding and manners. No amount of money can make you quality if you don't act like quality."

 

From A Southern Belle's Handbook:

No nylon gloves
No velvet to be worn after St. Valentine's Day
No white shows after Labor Day
Never date your sorority sister's ex-husband until three years after the divorce

Charleston Then and Now

A Southern-born, much travelled woman said to me: "The south is so regional. The larger world does not, quite simply, exist..."

I got transfixed by the infant graves in St Michael's Churchyard - 6 children dead, to one couple alone, between 1832-1844. Otis and Denzel were only 7 and 8 weeks, Ada a year, Sarah just an "infant". Heartbreaking.

Charleston Scenes

Southern vocabulary:
Big = fat
Coming up = growing up
Commencin' to = beginning to
Directly = soon
To fix = to prepare

Words beloved by Southern women:
precious
pocket book
icebox
Daddy

The things that grow in South Carolina are unbelievably exotic to the English eye - flowering quinces and plumbago, fever trees and crepe myrtles, banana shrubs and tea olives, and magnolias so scented that some people said that in spring they almost overpowered you...

I walked Charleston's streets solidly for ten days - brick streets, cobbled streets, streets lined with magnolia, and walls curtained with Confederate jasmine, past houses painted the colours of sugared almonds, and locked wrought iron gates giving glimpses of secret gardens...

There were so many flags hanging from the houses - US flags, blue flags with "Liberty" on them, the Carolina flag with the palmetto tree and sickle moon. And you could see the West Indian influence in the houses, blue and rose paint, jalousies, a kind of weird architectural rickettiness.

Wetlands

The ACE basin, those world class wetlands south of Charleston, are strange and magical. I saw swamps and sweetgum and red Russian thistle: I saw the ghostly, dreamy plumes of Spanish moss: I saw alligators and snow white egrets and wood storks like goofy herons.

Women in a meeting convened to discuss issues relevant to my novel:
"I find relationships between women in the South so complex. There's so much backstabbing and sabotage..."

"It would be pretty hard to proclaim yourself a lesbian round here"

"I hate having no natural interaction with blacks..."

"Men in the South have this huge sense of entitlement..."

 

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