Carolina Chansons: Legends of the Low Country — Acknowledgments and Preface

1922 TO JOHN BENNETT

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The thanks of the authors are due to the editors of _The London Mercury_, _The North American Review_, _Poetry, A Magazine of Verse_, _The Reviewer_, _The Book News Monthly_, and _Contemporary Verse_ for permission to reprint many of the poems in this volume.

Grateful acknowledgment is also made to many friends for first-hand information and for the loan of letters, diaries, pictures, and old newspaper clippings.

PREFACE

In a continent but recently settled, many parts of which have as yet little historical or cultural background, the material for this volume has been gathered from a section that was one of the first to be colonized.

Here the Frenchman, Spaniard, and Englishman all passed, leaving each his legend; and a brilliant and more or less feudal civilization with its aristocracy and slaves has departed with the economic system upon which it rested.

From this medley of early colonial discovery and romance, from the memories of war and reconstruction, it has been as difficult to choose coherently as to maintain restraint in selection among the many grotesque negro legends and superstitions so rich in imagery and music.

Coupled with this there has been another task; that of keeping these legends and stories in their natural matrix, the semi-tropical landscape of the _Low Country_, which somehow lends them all a pensively melancholy yet fitting background.

Not to have so portrayed them, would have been to sacrifice their essentially local tang.

To the reader unfamiliar with coastal Carolina, the unique aspects of its landscapes may seem exaggerated in these pages; the observant visitor and the native will, it is hoped, recognize that neither the colors nor the shadows are too strong.

These poems, however, are not local only, they are stories and pictures of a chapter of American history little known, but dramatic and colorful, and in the relation of an important part to the whole they may carry a decided interest to the country at large.

Local color has a fatal tendency to remain local; but it is also true that the universal often borders on the void.

It has been said, perhaps wisely, that the immediate future of American Poetry lies rather in the intimate feeling of local poets who can interpret their own sections to the rest of the country as Robinson and Frost have done so nobly for New England, rather than in the effort to _yawp_ universally.

Hence there is no attempt here to say, "O New York, O Pennsylvania," but simply, "O Carolina."

The South, however, has been "interpreted" so often, either with condescending pity or nauseous sentimentality, that it is the aim of this book to speak simply and carefully amid a babel of unauthentic utterance.

Nevertheless, the contents of this volume do not pretend to exact historical accuracy; this is poetry rather than history, although the legends and facts upon which it rests have been gathered with much painstaking research and careful verification.

It should be kept in mind that these poems are impressionistic attempts to present the fleeting feeling of the moment, landscape moods, and the ephemeral attitudes of the past.

Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded.

Above all here is no pretence of propaganda.

As some of the material touched on is not accessible in standard reference, prose notes have been included giving the historical facts or background of legend upon which a poem has been based.

These notes together with a bibliography will be found at the back of the volume.

If the only result of this book is to call attention to the literary and artistic values inherent in the South, and to the essentially unique and yet nationally interesting qualities of the Carolina Low Country, its landscapes and legends, the labor bestowed here will have secured its harvest.

DuBOSE HEYWARD--HERVEY ALLEN.

Charleston, S. C.

December, 1921. CONTENTS

PAGE

Preface 9 _Poems_ Séance at Sunrise 17 Silences 20 Presences 23 The Pirates 25 The Sewees of Sewee Bay 34 La Fayette Lands 38 _Legend of Theodosia Burr_ The Priest and the Pirate 42 Palmetto Town 50 Carolina Spring Song 52 _The First Submarine_ The Last Crew 54 Landbound 65 Two Pages from the Book of the Sea Islands 66 1. SHADOWS 66 2. SUNSHINE 69 _Negro Poems_ Modern Philosopher 72 Upstairs-Downstairs 73 Hag-hollerin' Time 74 Macabre in Macaws 75 Gamesters All 76 Eclipse 81 _Poe_ Edgar Allan Poe 83 Alchemy 86 Osceola 88 _Ashley River Gardens_ Magnolia Gardens 89 Middleton Garden 92 _Cooper River Legends_ The Goose Creek Voice 95 The Leaping Poll 98 The Blockade Runner 101 Beyond Debate 111 Marsh Tackies 112 Back River 114 Dusk 117 _Prose Notes and Bibliography_ On the Chimes 121 On the Pirates 122 On the Sewee Indians 124 On La Fayette 125 On Theodosia Burr 126 On "The Last Crew" 127 On Edgar Allan Poe 128 On "Marsh Tackies" 130 Bibliography 131 CAROLINA CHANSONS