Charleston Chill

Last week, my mom and I spent four days in Charleston, our first mother-daughter trip since we bookstore-hopped our way around New Haven when I was pregnant with Finnegan SIX YEARS AGO. 

Avid readers of Read + Roam – Mom, I’m looking at you! – will recall that she’s the ultimate travel chameleon, a woman who claims to love nothing more than aimlessly wandering new cities with me, then expresses a passion for baseball and national parks when traveling with my middle brother Matt, and, later, insists there’s nothing she’d rather do than watch my youngest brother Josh set up endless series of 30-minute long-exposure shots. Where the truth lies – what actual preferences sit beneath her insistence that “What makes me happiest is spending time with each of you” – is something we may never know.

This vacation, like all trips with my mom, was more about the time than the place. The magic is in the chatting – the long spooling conversations that ricochet from superficial to serious and back again. But, for posterity, let’s talk about the place anyway.

Charleston was nice. That’s exactly the right adjective for it – a down-the-middle, pleasant, undemanding, and compact little city. Everything, at least downtown where we spent much of our time, is very deliberately manicured. The streets are cobbled. The parks are verdant. The people are mostly women, polite and lightly accented, and they’re universally clad in floral dresses. Gen Z wears floral skater dresses from Brandy Melville with baby tees underneath. Millennials wear floral Doen sundresses that billow behind them in the breeze. Boomers wear neon-hued floral Lilly Pulitzer shifts. They all wear floral Hillhouse nap dresses (Gen X women – who I uniformly picture as Janeane Garofalo – don’t come to Charleston, as far as I can tell). I’ve never seen so many sorority insignias, so many Kendra Scott necklaces, or so many bobbing blond ponytails in my life.

We ate and drank really well – the entire menu at Chez Nous, a carbonara-style pizza at The Obstinate Daughter on Sullivan’s island washed down with Frose from The Coop next door, tropical cocktails on the rooftop of The Dewberry, and Mom’s first foray into the world of raw fish at Chasing Sage. Our hotel had free breakfast, snacks, and happy hour, so we spent much of our time relaxing on its red brick terrace, our glass-topped bistro table growing crowded with goblets of wine and plates of pickled Okra. The Jasmine bushes were in full bloom, the sun was golden, and the trill of tables full of women on girls’ trips provided a comforting hum of white noise. We went to bed early and woke up early beneath white lace canopy beds (yes, really).

There’s more – so much more – I could have done to make our trip a little less lovely and a little more substantial, but I didn’t.

On our second last day, we walked all the way to the International African American Museum. We read the exterior plaques, lingered alongside the art installations, and stared up through our sunglasses at the formidable architecture, but we didn’t go inside. I picked up a pamphlet for a Black Charleston walking tour, but when the time of the tour conflicted with our Sullivan’s Island day trip, I chose the beach instead. My engagement with Charleston’s racist, confederate, slave-trading history was largely limited to a raised eyebrow at the Uber driver who suggested a trip to Magnolia Plantation.

In the past, I’ve sucked up the complicated histories of places greedily. I’ve been eager to learn from the past, to ‘make space,’ and to repent for injustices perpetuated against innocent people. I’ve looked through the window where MLK was shot in Memphis, stood in the barracks of Dachau, and passed by the Joburg gates that once sorted South Africans into types – white, colored, and black. 

But this time, my desire for comfort was stronger than my urge to pay homage. I needed – in some visceral way I now wish I’d pushed past – not to grapple, or wrestle, or contend with the ugliness and hardness of life. Instead, I wanted to have long chats with my mom while wandering the city, iced matchas in hand. I wanted to pore over farm-to-table menus surrounded by women wearing headbands unironically. I wanted to run laps around a tidal pond rimmed by concrete in the style of Parisian parks, even though that pond was cringeingly named Colonial Lake. And that’s what I did.

Someday, I hope we’ll come back. And maybe, when we do, we won’t just revel in the pretty present, but also properly reckon with the past.

And maybe, next time, we’ll wear floral dresses.