Ryan Harper LAND of Make Believe

Ryan Harper LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE It is the Emerald City. Scroll through any online list of “top small cities” in the United States, and you’ll likely find Greenville, South Carolina. Talk to citizens who have lived in the city for ten to thirty years, and they will tell you why. So the story goes, when the decline of the South Carolina textile industry began, a handful of local businessmen and government officials led Green- ville through a decades-spanning strategic revitalization project. Michelin and BMW moved their major operations into the Greenville area in the late 1970s and 1980s. Hotels and banks set up shop in the city’s downtown—a downtown which Max Heller, a World War II-era Austrian Jewish immigrant who served as Greenville’s mayor in the 1970s, helped to beautify. The Swamp Rab- bit Trail, which replaced a rail line left over from the Carolina textile industry’s heyday, was completed in 2010 and still is being extended today. This paved, multiuse path runs through the heart of the downtown—notably, through the downtown’s lovely Falls Park, where nearly year-round visitors and residents walk and bike along the Reedy River as it rolls down from the high places. Waterfalls exist all over this region of South Carolina, which is called the Up- state, largely due to the Blue Ridge Escarpment north of town, where the land precipitously drops 2,000 feet—or rises, depending on your orientation. The road that used to run above the downtown falls has given way to the stunning Liberty Bridge, a curved pedestrian suspension bridge completed in 2004. The bridge is the most recurring symbol on municipal signs and Greenville’s travel brochures. Greenvillians like to note that no one knew the falls were there be- fore the Liberty Bridge project. I’ve been told that other small cities send teams to Greenville for consultation, to see how much of Greenville’s success is trans- latable. My spouse, Lynn, and I moved to this New Southern city at the end of the summer of 2014. I often had heard the phrase “New South” in reference to Greenville and places like it. It is as unwieldy a descriptor as “modern,” with which it seems to be helplessly synonymous. According to my sources, the South started being “New” sometime between 1866 and next week. We rented an apartment on the southern terminus of the Swamp Rabbit Trail—about a 152 Ryan Harper five-minute walk to Nicholtown, a historic African-American neighborhood located on the opposite side of the Reedy. In 2011, Nicholtown was connected to the main trail by a series of spurs and short footbridges. We moved inten- tionally to this part of the city. We knew the Swamp Rabbit would be our major exercising and commuting route. We had a hunch that this particular section of the trail, and its connectors, would also afford us access to a Greenville that Wikipedia pages and Chamber of Commerce brochures did not feature. There are a few people who use the connectors. Our local section of the Swamp Rabbit, which extended from the enormous First Baptist Church to the YMCA, was one of the most racially diverse public parts of the city. But the traffic basically ran one way—Nicholtown to the main trail. And it seemed understood that people who crossed over from Nicholtown eventually crossed back. In two years and several thousand miles of hiking, biking, and jogging both sides of the river, I saw about five white faces on the Nicholtown side. On two different occasions during 2014, our first year in town, I biked over graffiti on the main trail near a major Nicholtown spur—swastikas, the number 777, and an arrow pointing up the spur with “GHETTO” written under it. The local press did not cover these incidents. Within months of our moving to the Emerald City, Jacqueline Woodson won a National Book Award for Brown Girl Dreaming—a work of poetic non- fiction based partly on Woodson’s experiences splitting her childhood between Brooklyn and Nicholtown. In November 2014, Woodson garnered national press after Daniel Handler cracked a watermelon joke about his friend and fellow author at the awards ceremony. Poet Nikky Finney—a South Carolina native who recently had won her own National Book Award and who recently had returned to the state to head the University of South Carolina Press— wrote a well-publicized response. So did Woodson herself, in the New York Times. The local press covered none of this. In fact, as I scoured local archives in 2014, I learned that Greenville proper had (or claimed) scant knowledge of Woodson. I myself only knew about the award-winning Nicholtonian, a gay African-American woman from my new hometown, because of the connectors that linked me to non-Greenvillians, non-southerners. In the summer of 2015, press coverage of Palmetto State symbols and competing southern nativities increased. The primary catalyst was the murder of nine black members of Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, committed by a Confederate flag-waving man named Dylann Roof—though at the time of THE CHATTAHOOCHEE REVIEW 153 LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE the shooting, the nation already had been talking more than it ever wanted to about race, after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and, among others, Walter Scott in Charleston. In South Carolina, one effect of Roof ’s actions was the removal of the Confederate flag in front of the Co- lumbia State House—first by an activist named Bree Newsome, later by state fiat. The flag had been flying on the grounds, by state fiat, since 1962. After the lowering in Columbia, other southern states began announc- ing their own monumental redecorations. The press coverage of the removals waned after a few months, but I, like all southern citizens on the ground, knew that the symbols themselves did not wane. Confederate flags became more prominent features of the landscape. They flew from pickups, SUVs, and even the occasional Toyota coupe. Greenville’s Main Street—the charming downtown thoroughfare, the brainchild of Greenville’s bootstrap Jewish mayor, de- signed to recall the Vienna from which he had to flee the Nazis, was a favorite avenue for vehicles waving these flags, especially on the weekends. One would even hear car horns sound out, in Dukes of Hazzard fashion, “I Wish I Was in Dixie.” Of course, the uptick in the Confederates’ visibility had a bit to do with my new perception. I was probably noticing more. But it was not solely new light that increased the number of cars in the parking lot of the Dixie Repub- lic, a store just north of Greenville, on the way to the mountains, that peddles Confederate wares and that had appeared nearly vacant on all of my former commutes. I had kept notes on that site since I moved to the area. Things had changed, visibly. Greenville County is large; like many “urban” Southeastern counties, it con- tains sizable rural areas. It reaches from the mountainous, sparsely populated border of the Carolinas all the way south of Greenville proper. This means, among other things, that whites in the city of Greenville have some handy local scapegoats when society turns indecorous. In 2015, when we saw flag- waving, “Dixie”-blaring trucks barreling through our downtown, it was easy to convince ourselves that these were simply the right-wing fundamentalist hicks who had come in from the county’s hinterlands for the day—and to the hinterlands they would return, at last, to find a lonely hill on which to die. The Dixie Republic was unincorporated in this New South, and it would remain that way. The Vanishing Confederate, planned for perpetual obsolescence, was and 154 Ryan Harper is a comforting character in every New Southern narrative. He is a myth. Rac- ism—even the virulent, violent, Confederate variety—is not simply a phenom- enon among the “uncultivated” hewers of wood. It probably was not mountain folk who tagged Nicholtown’s portion of the Swamp Rabbit Trail with the figures of white supremacy. Dylann Roof grew up in South Carolina’s largest metropolitan area, and his family attended a mainline Protestant church, not a conservative congregation led by a graduate from, say, Greenville’s fundamentalist Bob Jones University. To be clear, to call the Vanishing Confederate a myth is not to say he does not take on flesh. If you travel much in northern Greenville County, you will meet incarnations of him (“he” will be mythically male in most public incarnations). It means, rather, that the Vanishing Confed- erate is a necessary and necessarily misallocated character in the tale the New (white) South tells about itself. In New Southern cities, it is convenient to think of the race problem as a “country” problem because the country is assumed to be dying, the cities grow- ing limitlessly. The New South has bought the nearly ubiquitous American equation of “urban” with growth, growth with progress, urban-growth-progress with inevitability, rurality with stasis, and rural-stasis with imminent, inevita- ble cultural death. That which seeks to thrive in the hinterlands will fail. That which seeks to thrive in the cities will succeed. According to the telos smuggled into the American equation, beefed up by an old white southern conservativ- ism that believes “whatever is, is best,” these failures and successes not only will happen; they should happen. If racists—at least, the real, problem-causing racists—do not live in the city, New Southern whites may breathe a sigh of relief.

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