By Pam Clements
/ Flash /
Crushed oyster shells, attractive crunchy walking paths, exist all over the South Carolina lowcountry. Bleached white by the sun, they are attractive, and when combined with low-branching white oaks with their trailing moss, they are evocative of the region’s moonlight and magnolias mythology – its beauty deceptive, corrosive, and yes, seductive. The place I first encountered such paths was White Point Gardens at Charleston’s Battery Point, which commemorates, in fact celebrates, the first shots of the Civil War fired by Citadel cadets on Fort Sumter. Here, the oyster shells gleam, white bones in a puzzle. The seawall at the Battery is fringed with pink and white-flowered oleander bushes, which coincidentally, are both beautiful and toxic, not unlike the city’s complex history. White Point was also the site where the infamous Stede Bonnet, the notorious eighteenth-century pirate, was hanged, adding to the romantic atmosphere of danger and derring-do.
More prosaically, oyster shells formed the parking lot of Crosby’s Seafood, a small building backed up to a dock for shrimp boats threading through the marshes between the mainland and Folly Island. I taught freshman English to one of the Crosbys, a third-generation member of the shrimping family. At the time, he was determined to go for the big time, thought he was headed to law school and a possible political career. The last I heard, he had become one of Charleston’s foremost event planners and public relations experts. As glossy, sharp, and white as oyster shells.