Wagener, South Carolina

You have to go looking for Wagener. It does not sit on the way to anywhere, which in the midlands of South Carolina is less a criticism than a description of most of the map. A few hundred people. Aiken County. Flat country given over to cotton and timber, cut through by two-lane roads that were dirt when he was walking them.

He was born there on April 3, 1924. I have the date from a document rather than from him, which is its own small grief, and I will get to that in another entry.

What the year means

Nineteen twenty-four in rural South Carolina is not a setting you can soften. Jim Crow was not a mood in that place; it was the operating system, written into the schools, the courthouse, the wage, the sidewalk. A Black boy born there was handed a full accounting of what he would be permitted to become before he could read it.

The cotton economy was already failing him on top of it. The boll weevil had come through the decade before and taken the bottom out of the only work the county reliably had. The men who left in those years did not leave for adventure. They left because the arithmetic at home stopped working.

A town is not only where a man is from. It is the first thing he had to survive.

The road out

What strikes me is how early it must have been decided. He enlisted at seventeen, months before this country was in the war, which means the choice was made by a boy who had looked hard at what Wagener could offer him and concluded that a uniform in a segregated army was still the better of the two roads. Read that sentence twice. It says everything about the roads.

He never moved back. Not after the war, not after he married, not after the children came. That was true of a great many men from towns like that, and we are comfortable calling it the Great Migration when it happens to six million people, and much less comfortable sitting with what it means one man at a time — that leaving was the only version of the story with a future in it.

I have not stood there yet. I intend to, with a camera, and I intend to keep whatever I find honest, including the possibility that the house is gone, the road is paved, and the town has nothing at all to say to me about him. Places are not obligated to remember anybody. That is precisely why we write things down.