The Chronicles Of Willow Point

By E. T. Baysden Jr.

A Lowcountry Family In The Century Following Cotton And Rice

A novel based in the Carolina low country with true stories that occurred throughout the region over a century. Fiction based on truth. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willow Point Partners
• Release date: Apr 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578500591

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The Captain cranked the old pickup, nudged it into gear, and headed down the road that led to the river. It wasn’t much of a road, just two parallel rows of twelve inch planks held in place atop the mud by wooden spikes. Beside him in the cab was Chester, the big black lab that had accompanied him on more of these trips than he could remember. The dog’s breath vaporized in the thirty-one-degree predawn chill as they rode across the marsh watching the mist lift off the Spartina as the sun began to rise. They parked the truck behind a stand of saw palmetto and stepped into the shallow pond.

He saw the flicker of an oil lamp in the duck blind as they approached and the silhouette of Bee Taylor setting the decoys out.

Mawnin’ Cop’m, the old Negro said. Wind be pick up.

Bee was descended from slaves who had worked for the Captain’s father on this same ground. When they were freed, almost nothing in their lives had changed. They had no skills except farming this land and harvesting its fish and game. The captain’s father could not pay them; he had been desperately trying to hold onto the property amid the chaos of Reconstruction. But they could stay on at the place, even farming some plots of their own, and they knew they would be treated fairly and well.

Well den, Cop’m, Bee said. Got Mr. Green along. Mr. Green was a pen-raised mallard drake, trained to swim around and flap his wings while tethered to the bottom, calling attention to himself and the artificial ducks around him. Even Chester knew the drill, swimming right by Mr. Green on his way to retrieve downed birds.

When Mr. Green was in place, the Captain, Chester, and Bee took their places in the little cornstalk-covered blind. Already they were being circled by a flock of ringnecks, not yet visible but with the electrifying whoosh of wings that is one of nature’s most amazing sounds. As many times as the Captain had heard it, it still caused his blood to rise.

Mark, Cop’m, Bee whispered, and began blowing on a duck call that was not much more than a reed inserted into a walnut tube, but it sounded like a duck.

When he heard it, the live decoy raised himself in the water and began flapping his wings and quacking himself. The Captain’s old double gun spoke twice and two ducks hit the water.

An hour later, after this had been repeated several times and the harvest was in the pickup bed, the Captain said Good calling, Bee.

Naw suh, boss, Bee said. Mr. Green do the woik!

Ten minutes later, as the pickup neared the house the Captain saw the government car parked by the kitchen door and he feared he knew what it meant.

Then Frances was racing toward him across the yard. Oh William, she said, choking back sobs, Mackie is missing in action!

ONE

Willow Point Plantation

Beaufort County, South Carolina

His name was William McLeod Pinckney IV. Everyone called him the Captain in deference to his service in the First War when he had commanded the USS Knowles , a destroyer protecting merchant vessels from the German U-Boats patrolling beneath the shipping lanes off the English coast. But the tables had turned and the Knowles herself was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland, forcing Captain Pinckney and his crew into the lifeboats. They lost a dozen men. Those deaths, so many years ago, still haunted him despite that he had been decorated for decisive actions that saved the other seventy men aboard.

After the war he returned to Willow Point Plantation, his family’s farm in the Lowcountry of South Carolina where four generations of Pinckneys had worked the land.

The Pinckneys were direct descendants of Sir John Colleton, the Lord’s Proprietor who first managed the land for the Crown in 1661 when it was known as Prince William Parish. They were among the founders of Old Sheldon Church, which was burned by the Tories in 1779. After the Revolution, the Pinckneys and their neighbors struggled to rebuild it, only to have it burned again by Sherman in 1865. Such was the genealogy of this land.

William grew up cherishing these rivers and marshes, fascinated by the wild things that inhabited them. He fished the tidal creeks for redfish and speckled trout and hunted the waterfowl that came every winter in uncountable numbers to the rice fields and freshwater ponds that lined the ancient Combahee River.

This was a land that could suck your senses dry: the pluff mud’s unique perfume, the riot of colors that changed by the hour in the fertile, gauzy light, the shadows of big birds moving across the ground.

In the brackish ponds along the river’s edge they gathered by the thousands: snowy egrets, white and glossy ibis, wood storks, anhinga and greenback herons. The woods teemed with deer, wild turkey and feral hogs – the descendants of those brought by Desoto in 1540. There was even the occasional sighting of a Carolina panther. Alligators flourished in the freshwater lagoons. It was an explosion of nature everywhere he looked.

Their closest neighbors were miles away on other plantations, forced by their remoteness into a hybrid social order, seeing only each other for long periods of time. William was sent to boarding school in the North, his sister Helen to Ashley Hall in Charleston, where they accepted girls at twelve. But both lived for the school holidays when they could return to Willow Point.

TWO

The Citadel

Charleston, South Carolina

(Two Years Earlier)

G et your knob ass up, Pinckney, the upperclassman yelled as he yanked the sheet off the bed and dumped Mackie, the knob, onto the terrazzo floor. Recruiters coming today and I’m looking to get rid of you, numb nuts

William McLeod Pinckney, V (Mackie to most) was the Captain’s only son. He was in his first year at the Citadel, South Carolina’s Military College, where freshman were called knobs and hazed unmercifully by their elders.

World War Two had been raging, in both theaters since Pearl Harbor three years earlier.

Mackie had been protected from the draft by his student status, but that was about to end, as the invasion of Europe now seemed inevitable and the Army needed all the able bodied men it could get. All the services were recruiting at colleges with strong military programs, and the Citadel was one of the best.

War fervor was strongly on the rise in the U.S. and many young men were willing to leave college behind for a while in exchange for a temporary commission and the chance to fly a plane or drive a tank.

Pinckney, the upperclassman said, I don’t know which stinks worse, your feet or your breath. Did you lick out a birdcage last night? You’d better get your sorry knob ass cleaned up before you meet that recruiter ‘cause I’m planning to kick you out the door, limp dick!

Sir, gimme a break, Pinckney said. I’m ready to divorce you too. He was signed up to meet with the Army recruiter this morning, which seemed to Mack the easiest way to irritate the Captain, with whom he was engaged in a sort of contest of wills. As he walked to the parade ground for Morning Colors, he wondered if he had it in him to take the leap. There wasn’t a draft yet, and anyway, he was protected while he was still in school. But he was ready for a break from this authoritarian hell hole, and when he came back he’d no longer be a knob.

The Captain had not been supportive. Son, you don’t know what a war is like, and this one is going to be worse than the last. It was hard not to resent the hypocrisy in the old man’s advice. The Captain himself had graduated from Annapolis and immediately began climbing the ranks of the officer corps, rising to commander and skipper of the Knowles in only ten years, then fleet-promoted to captain when the U.S. joined the war effort and the destroyer was dispatched to protect merchant shipping in the Atlantic where an average of one ship a week was sunk by German subs.

Walking toward the parade field clad in the Class A parade uniform that made him look like a toy soldier from The Nutcracker, Mackie soaked in the ambience of this unlikely place. Lying beside the marshes of the Ashley River, The Citadel was founded in 1842 on Francis Marion Square near the center of the city, and then in 1918 moved out to the river. A sort of Southern sibling to West Point, it had sent young officers to all of America’s wars, beginning with the one against itself. And it seemed poised to do it again.

He was still intrigued by the Romanesque, Moorish-style architecture of the limestone barrack quads: the turrets and balustrades and oval portals spilling out onto open-air courts floored in red and white checkerboard ceramic tiles; the dozens of statues and monuments to great generals and other notable men who had strode these same halls – all of this shrouded, four months a year, in the sticky heat of the Carolina coast.

Hey shit bird, somebody said, and Mackie turned to look. It was Austin Sams, another knob with whom Mackie had bonded through the unimaginable debasement of the first two months. They had a lot in common. Austin had grown up on Derry Plantation near McClellanville, north of Charleston, and shared Mackie’s bond with the Lowcountry landscape and the natural world. What are we doing this weekend? Sams asked.

They had not been allowed out of the fortress for eight weeks following their arrival. When they were finally set free on weekends, they became accomplices in the systematic exploration of the Holy City, as Charleston was known, and especially the dark underbelly of that graceful old town.

They haunted the seedy bars along the waterfront where age wasn’t an issue. They went often to the old City Market, operating since 1804 in a series of roofed, open brick pavilions that stretched for three blocks. It was a sprawling, boisterous pandemonium of every sort of fruit, vegetable, seafood, and game that was in season, plus every sort of craft or home manufacture that the city’s African community could provide.

"I gots beans, red bean, black bean,

all kind of bean," the vendors would shriek.

Frush swump over here, jes’caught.

Got squash, butter bean, tomato jes’ pick.

"Got cantaloupe. Got spots and porgies,

fresh out de creek."

Sweet grass basket.

Sharpen your knives and scissors over here.

Sometimes they met girls from Ashley Hall, or nursing students from the hospital. They would walk with them through the fabulous old neighborhoods south of Broad Street, awash in springtime with azaleas and great swaths of dogwood, the fragrant breezes blowing off the harbor at White Point Gardens, bringing in the scent of the sea.

The magnificent city of Charleston gripped their senses in a dozen different ways, enfolded them like a cloak. The historic mansions on Meeting Street and South Battery spoke of the grace and grandeur of the city in earlier times. Now, three quarters of a century after the Civil War, their owners struggled to keep them painted. Still, it was romantic almost beyond belief.

At a mixer on campus before the Christmas break, Mackie met a girl. Catherine Gaillard’s Charleston family traced its ancestry back to the arrival of Protestant French Huguenots in 1562. She was not beautiful, but made herself attractive through her warm smile and easy grace, which had charmed Mackie right from the start. On long strolls along streets with names like Zig Zag Alley and Cabbage Row, they talked of where they hoped their lives would lead them, places they wanted to visit, things they wanted to see. One night, across Church Street from St. Phillips, she took his hand and led him into the historic graveyard. And there she gave the country boy his first real kiss.

What do you think about kids? Catherine asked him out of blue one day, knowing that she was getting way ahead of herself.

No fewer than five, Mack replied with a laugh. All boys! They’ve got to run the farm one day.

Catherine was not pleased to hear this. She just couldn’t see herself as a farm wife. She couldn’t believe he was serious.

You think the farm will be around that long? she asked.

Well, it’s been going for three hundred years so far, I don’t see what’s gonna change now.

Somehow I thought, you know, with your Citadel degree, you might go into the military like your dad – move back to the farm when you retire. There’s a lot to see in the world. Sitting down there in Beaufort, in the middle of nowhere, just couldn’t be that fulfilling.

Well darling, he finally said. Right now I’m a freshman in college. We’ve got a long way to go before we sort all that out.

Catherine wasn’t worried. She knew she had plenty of time to bring him around. And Mack, well he knew exactly what he wanted to do!

Later, they would take taxis out to the cheap motels on Savannah Highway, fumbling through their early attempts at lovemaking, she more experienced than he. Growing up on a remote farm and spending his high school years at a military school in a podunk Tennessee town had left him more knowledgeable about the real birds and bees than the ones he was studying now.

In 1943, in the perfumed breezes of the Charleston Spring, love was in the air. But so was war.

"How could you do that? Catherine was saying through tears. Doesn’t our being together mean anything to you?"

They were in the Marshlands Motor Inn when Mackie broke the news to her. He knew it would not go down easily, but – being a man – he had wanted to first satisfy his lust.

We were just starting a life together, and you go and join the ARMY!

She wasn’t making it any easier. It was worse than he expected.

Honey, I didn’t really have a choice. The recruiter said that they would start a draft and I could get pulled in, college or not. And they’re making me a second lieutenant and sending me to jump school.

"Jump school? she gasped. You mean parachutes? That makes it even worse. I’ll be languishing away here in Charleston while you’re jumping out of planes?! This tells me you’ve been lying to me all this time. You never loved me at all, did you?"

Catherine, you’ve got to understand. I’ve got to be a part of this. It’s too important to just let it go by. Sooner or later the whole country is going to be in this thing, and I have a chance to at least control my circumstances a little bit. And I could get killed just as easily walking across Europe as jumping into it!

She wouldn’t even ride back into town with him. Just take the cab and leave me here, she said. I’ll call somebody. I can’t go home in this condition anyway.

He begged her to lighten up. This isn’t the end for us, he said. I’ll write every day and they said I’ll get a week’s leave after jump school. You could come down to Willow Point, or I’ll come up here.

Time will cure this, he thought. I’ll miss her, but all this will be over one day.

But what was mostly on his mind was jumping out of planes.

THREE

Fort Dix

Trenton, New Jersey

Mackie’s orders said PROCEED TO BASIC TRAINING, FORT DIX, N.J., and included a train ticket. There was no mention of jump school. Confused, Mack called the recruiting office in nearby Beaufort and asked for the senior NCO. I’m supposed to be going to jump school, he told the Staff Sergeant who came to the phone.

Son, the man said, you don’t go nowhere until you finish basic training, and for jump school you’ll have to pass a special physical, too.

But I thought jump school was part of the deal, Mackie said.

Listen here, buddy, the Sergeant said, you joined the army at The Citadel back in March. You follow the standard procedure or the only jumping you’ll do is in and out of shit cans on garbage duty at Fort Jackson. We’ll see you at Fort Dix on June 5!

Mackie boarded the train at the little whistle stop in Yemassee, just twenty miles down the road from Willow Point. At seven the next morning it rolled into the army depot at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Outside the train, where a bus sat idling, a senior NCO greeted them with something short of warmth: Assholes and elbows, you pissants – that’s all I want to see getting on that bus!

Oh shit, Mackie thought, it’s knob training all over again! I’ve just traded one nightmare for another one. And I left Catherine behind for this! He could only see this as the worst mistake of his young life.

"Deja vu" didn’t do it justice. It was all happening again – the hair shaving, the yelling, the fitting for stiff new fatigues. He had seen it all before. But the recruits around him were cut from a very different fabric than the knobs at The Citadel. These were the kids of working-class America, from immigrant families, from factory workers, from small farms. They were all trying to hide their nervousness, fear even, but it was written all over them. They were as disparate a group of young men as you could assemble from one country, but they would soon bond under the rigors of training. It was a metamorphosis like few others. Mackie had seen this before, too, and this time he had a head start.

He already knew about making a bed on the bottom as well as the top, about shining brass until he could see his face in it, about spit-shining shoes until they looked like they’d been dipped into molten black plastic. He moved among these things with such ease, these things so foreign to the other recruits, that they soon noticed. He found himself slipping into the role of a teacher, a leader. And he found that he liked it. He was especially careful to remain patient, remembering back to a time when he would have killed for a little understanding from the sadistic upperclassmen at The Citadel. He liked the respect he received from his fellow recruits – that he was part of them, and yet something more.

And he was in shape. The early morning PT, followed by a five-mile run, rolled off him like rain while the others were left gasping, some even collapsing. He even liked the food, the mess hall breakfasts that followed those runs, where the only admonition was Take all you want, but eat all you take! And what a choice there was: eggs cooked every way possible, pancakes, blintzes and French toast, four kinds of cereal, fried apples, biscuits with sausage gravy, rashers of bacon, and the famous SOS (creamed chip beef on toast). Mackie had never been a big breakfast eater, but he turned into one while training at Fort Dix.

The brass told them they had to elect officers, and of course he was a shoo-in for platoon leader. Squads competed against each other for recognition, and Mackie thrived on the competition. By graduation day his squad had captured first place.

He hoped the Captain and his mother would come for graduation, but apparently his father was still harboring a grudge about his neglected advice and so Mackie wasn’t surprised not to see them there.

Shortly after the graduation ceremony, the commanding officer of the base called him in. Pinckney, he said you’ve been a fine recruit and you’re going to be a fine officer. I’m going to sign your promotion to second lieutenant, good until the end of the war. (The war was now raging almost out of control, and the Defense Department had indeed initiated a draft).

Now, the commanding officer said, are you still interested in jumping out of perfectly good airplanes?

FOUR

Fort Benning

Columbus, Georgia

The physical was less grueling than he’d expected. It mostly involved vision and hearing and, of course, blood pressure. And the last of these washed out more people than anything else. One man in his late twenties was also there screening for parachute training and couldn’t get by the test. They finally had him lie on a gurney, not moving, with ice bags on his chest for over an hour. He still couldn’t pass and the other guys said goodbye to him with great disappointment. He was a good guy and had been through everything the others had been through to get there, and now it was all wasted. But he still had his commission, and that was something.

A whole new world was opening for the trainees. Words like riser, static line, and suspension cable ran through everything they did. And the intensity that had been missing from the physical training at Fort Dix was in great abundance here. The long runs, obstacle courses, and more push-ups than they thought a human body could endure were preparing them for survival behind enemy lines and living off the land, if need be.

They were taught how to hit and roll, jumping off eight-foot platforms and relaxing their knees to absorb the impact. There were ropes to climb, whole mazes of monkey bars to swing across by hand, horizontal wind machines to prepare them for removing chutes in gale conditions. And the runs seemed to all be uphill.

In the third week they started jumping from the towers with fixed chutes, first the thirty-four-foot tower, then the 250, alternating with the vertical wind tunnel, which scared them the most. Since week two they had been packing parachutes. Later, they would pack the ones they used themselves. It had been the protocol among paratroopers from the beginning of the Airborne. If there was a problem, you