Laborers

Charleston, South Carolina, where I just spent three days was the site of the opening salvo of the Civil War. It preserves parts of its planter architecture and has a curiously ambiguous relationship with the plantation culture that brought it about.

It’s striking to an outsider how fascinated South Carolina remains with Confederate wartime heroics. The seafront peninsula is dotted with statuary lauding their exploits as is the Fort Sumter monument in Charleston harbor where the secessionist forces shelled the federal garrison in April of 1861.

No one doubts that slave labor built the city’s marvels, and the tour materials are pretty explicit on that topic. At the same time, the museum curators can’t resist including a long quote from a defender of slavery telling off that Harriet Beecher Stowe as a cheap librettist. Our tour guide explicitly promised not to tilt towards one side or the other as he related the facts for fear of ruffling sensibilities of anyone in the tourist crowd.

The same defensiveness filters into individual conversations too. Questions about Obama drop into uneasy silence or quick clarifications that the state is just like anywhere else: ‘Some people like him, and some people don’t.’ But South Carolina doesn’t feel like just another of the 50 states.

Governor Mark Sanford was making national headlines during my visit by trying to turn down federal stimulus money, arguing that the state needed first to reduce its debt burden. He even has the state Republican Party riled up as ideology doesn’t usually interfere with the prospect of getting federal dollars to flow into the home districts.

Sanford argued that South Carolina was heavily indebted and that he couldn’t control what happened to most of the federal largesse because the state constitution provides for a weak executive and a powerful legislature. But he could dictate the terms of one portion and had determined not to spend it. That was the money for public schools, which—by mere coincidence—would benefit the state’s large black population.

My work involves the burgeoning numbers of Latino immigrants throughout the South, and we had the opportunity to attend a bilingual public meeting on the state’s new immigration law, which severely penalizes employer and employee alike for the use of undocumented labor. The hall was jammed with over 200 Mexican and Central American laborers who sat transfixed trying to quiet their squirming children while lawyers explained the many ways South Carolina had devised to stack the system against them.

Tomato farmers out on the sea islands haven’t planted this year because the new fines for hiring illegals are too stiff to risk, and vigilantes are eager to phone up the police to denounce the crime. Locals repeatedly assured me that no white or black citizens would spend any part of the blistering summer picking tomatoes for $2.50 a bucket either, so the crop simply won’t be grown this year.

I suspect the local Lou Dobbses will be indignant if tomatoes go to $5.00 a pound and will find a way to blame someone else, like maybe the meddling government in Washington, for it. A place that glorifies its secessionist past and continues to call the practice of chattel slavery a ‘peckuliar institution’ from yesteryear probably will be slow to appreciate the irony.