America's southern states
Flat, with tiny windows The Ford Mustang is actually a dizzy car to discover a country in it. And yet it is the only right one here. Even in the 2006 version of the Mustang transforms ordinary men immediately into a James Dean. American is not. And really: On our journey, the "good old boys" will always turn back to our Mustang.
A Southern beauty: the old port city of Charleston
We drive south. The road leads from Charlotte, the city of North Carolina, to the old port city of Charleston on the South Carolina coast. We have twelve days, twelve days, to trace the ancient America, the spirit that is to shape this country to this day, far from the glittering metropolises of New York, Los Angeles or Miami. It all started here in the south of the USA. Here, at the beginning of the 17th century, they invented everything that makes up modern America: the elected town hall meetings, the regular church attendance and the proud conviction that each person can take their own destiny into their own hands - and that they alone are responsible for it. And while in the west and north of this huge country the present often obliterates what once was, the sense of history and traditions lives in the southern states. So if that old spirit of America still exists, we think, then in the Carolinas.
First, we find many churches. Right and left of the country roads low brick buildings with white towers, which are the same as garden sheds from the hardware store. Probably there is a church wholesaler, we joke, to learn later that it is indeed so. Faith is firm in the Christian-Christian Bible Belt, but also very pragmatic: The pointed plastic towers are transmission towers of a mobile communications company. Only the names of the churches ring in the ears: New Life Christian Assembly, Little Rock Holiness Church ...
In between, it is proliferating. Trees, masts, even houses disappear under a dense foliage mat. The country is nestled deep green. Kudzu is the name of the original Japanese creeper that politicians in 1876 at the 100th anniversary celebration in Philadelphia found so fancy that they paid farmers money to plant them on the roadside. The fact that the devil's stuff grows up to 30 inches a day, they had not thought. There are now kudzu chats on the Internet, where annoyed landowners give tips on how best to kill the herb.
Europe in the tropical format
On the former "slave market" one third of all slaves in North America were smuggled through.
Charleston is a run city. Twelve roads across, twelve streets along, cobblestone cobbled streets in between. I automatically slow down, as I did when I was studying in New Orleans and people seemed to be in slow motion. And I immediately fall back into the nasal chant of the language, speak to strangers again with "ma'am" and "sir", become "ma-ma'am" on my part and say so politely "I'm sorry" that Mike Hughes, the photographer, starts counting aloud.
I missed her, that velvety soft air of the southern states. The musty smell of brackish water and plants in a damp heat. Even the cockroaches I missed, the whiz like Matchbox cars over the curbs. At dawn, men in shorts fish at East Battery, the tip of the peninsula where Charleston is built. Like everyone here, they kindly ask how I feel. Good, I say, very good. Mussels crunch under my feet. In the rivers Cooper and Ashley, which frame Charleston, dolphins bounce. On the street, the first horse-drawn carriages of the city guides rattle past our Ford Mustang.
One of them is directed by Sherrie, a 14th-generation blond Huguenot girl who will later overwhelm us with the history of this city.
"It took more than 100 yearsBut after the war with the North, we pulled ourselves out of the mud again, unassisted - that is the old spirit of America, "she will tell me - full of pathos and no irony, we will know everything: that Charleston holy city, because here everyone, whether Huguenot, Methodist, Jew or Catholic, was allowed to build his own churches, and that the port city was the richest city on the continent from 1740 to 1830, because everything that colonies and the later southern states of the USA belong to Indigo, rice and, not to mention, the dark side of the south, the slaves, were loaded here, shipped and of course cleared duty - that here 1776 the first decisive battle of the American revolution was beaten and 1861 the first shots in the civil war between North and South fell That the houses after the great earthquake of 1886 with metal brackets piece by piece were pulled straight again.
But it is still early in the morning. I walk with my coffee over the curved wooden veranda of the "Two Meeting Street Inn".Spanish moss juts from the mighty branches of the Virginia Oaks. Built in 1892, our luxurious bed and breakfast is one of the newer houses in the city. Everything is under monument protection, since the 30's already. For a long time people were too poor to demolish the houses. Now they can not do it anymore. Charleston lives off that it's beautiful. That should remain so. What is not old looks like that, so are the rules of the building authority. Delicate Palmetto palm trees line the streets, behind them Victorian mansions with columns and turrets and pastel-colored narrow townhouses with flourishes. On the verandas, which run through the lush gardens on the side of the houses, the hot, humid summer months can be tolerated even without air conditioning.
Andrea Koch only wanted to stay with her family for two or three years. Now son Christopher, who was born here, is already ten. She guides tourists through "her" city. It is not just the elegant flair that holds the Germans here. "Southern hospitality," the proverbial Southern hospitality, is something wonderful - if you can handle it, she says. "Etiquette, culture, conservative family values - this is very much respected here." Nevertheless, the Charlestonians are not stiff. People who insist on their five o'clock tea in the city quickly rush to the beach after work. It fits everything together. The wide, wild, sandy beaches of Folly Beach or the Isle of Palms, where wind and Atlantic waves rattle everything together, are only fifteen minutes from the center of Charleston. "If you want to know which spirit has shaped the people here, then you have to follow the Ashley River upstream," says Andrea Koch. "There are the old plantations."
Tamed wilderness in the Carolinas
Old splendor: the garden on the former plantation Middleton Place
The austere geometric garden curls down to the Ashley River and ends in two ponds that look like butterfly wings. Only the alligator that drifts in it darkens the picture. On Middleton Place almost 200,000 azaleas jostle themselves between ornamental ponds and long camellia avenues. It scurries and scurries, flapping and climbing everywhere. Cicadas roar over it, they sound like half-baked on electric scooters. One hundred slaves are said to have taken more than ten years to create this copy of the Old World in the New. The plantation became a jewel with wilderness and civilization rubbing against each other's edges. Rice fields were planted in the swamps where snakes, malaria mosquitoes and alligators raged. The wilderness has already brought everything back. "When the slaves were freed, no reward in the world would have made them go there again," says Alan, driving us in a coach across the plantation. "The death rate was just too high."
The old big house did not survive the civil warbut the small side houses and some of the slave quarters are still in the shadow of mighty oaks. Inside, imported goods from the 18th and 19th centuries are exhibited on slender, turned legs. Everything came from Europe at that time, from the spinet to the wafer-thin porcelain service. Even the damask fabrics for the four-poster beds. On many of the old plantations, there are people like Kitty Evans. The 70-year-old has been playing the slaves' everyday lives for years in Brattonsville, near Rock Hill. Visitors break into tears and try to apologize to her for the history of slavery, she says. Kitty Evans does not want to vilify the past. "It was the way it was," she says. "But to know where we're going, we need to know where we're from, drive to the coast, to the Gullahs on the Sea Islands, that's the old America, that's what shaped that country."
Golf paradise on small islands
Tee off on one of the many golf courses on the Sea Islands in South Carolina.
The jumbled island of the Sea Islands was once the heart of rice production in America. Now it is solid in golfers hand. Between the short-clad fairways bungalows crouch under oak trees and flowering bushes, in garages are golf carts. "On these islands, almost only Yankees are playing, who retire here," says Golfer Deanne Freeman on Dataw Island. But without the rich Yankees from the north it would still look like 30 years ago. "That was little Africa," says Deanne. After the civil war, the Gullahs, the slaves of the rice plantations, remained alone on the small islands off the coast for more than a hundred years, forgotten by the rest of the country. There were hardly any bridges, who wanted to the mainland, had to row. It was not until 1970 that people lived here talking about a mixture of simplified English and African dialects whose children could neither read nor calculate and who did not know in which country they lived.
Today, the Gullah culture has almost disappeared again. We find them in the "Red Piano Too", a gallery on the highway. On the left and right are garages, opposite the "Gullah Grub Restaurant". In her gallery, Mary Mack, 71 sells what local artists carve, draw, paint, sculpt, model, chisel, glue, or solder.Most of them discovered them, some made them big. The naïve oil paintings of Gullah painter Jonathan Greene, for example, are so sought after that there are waiting lists.
At age 20, Mary Mack had gone from the neighboring island of St. Helena to New York to escape racial segregation. "It was not that much better, either," she says. In many cases, the open racism of the South was even more honest than the hidden of the North. "At least here I knew where I was." She came back 20 years later. "The Yankees just can not cook, soul food, food that warms the soul, only the gullahs can do," she says, sending us across the street to eat. "Take the Southern Fried Chicken with mashed potatoes." We also want to drive into the swamps, says Mary Mack, to where the trees are in black water. "That's the smell of old America to me, that's what it looked like when our forefathers arrived here."
In the swamps
All very natural: canoe trip on the Edisto River
At the Edisto River we leave a canoe in the water. Next to us, five men pack food into their boats and talk shop about our Ford Mustang. Jim Hanks, one of them, will marry tomorrow. Instead of a binge drinking, his college friends Ryan, Brian, Jeff, and Rusty have organized a paddle tour into the swamps. "Do you have the peanuts?" Ryan asks, before he takes off. "I will not drive without them." Hot boiled peanuts are the national snack of southern boys, they say. Jeff, the only Yankee, likes the soft things as much as I do. "We'll take you anyway, it shows how tolerant we are," says Jim. Jeff is the only one with no pistol. "Do you want that only the bad guys are armed?" Ryan asks and grins.
We have the same route and drive slowly downriver. After a few paddle strikes, the boys are on their favorite topic: the "war between states". That's what they call the American Civil War in the South. You know exactly when which general where in which battle against the Yankees fought. And what he should have done to win her. "That was already at the university," sighs Jeff, the Yankee. "Everybody's gas station attendant can do the battles." To the left and to the right, huge bald cypress trees stretch their roots like little islands out of the black water. A white heron accompanies us for a while. "You just have to know that, as a Southerner," says Jim. What else belongs? "The right car," says Ryan. Of course he also drives a Ford Mustang. But an old, from 57. In addition, the civil engineer holds four cows in the field behind his house. Because it belongs to Southern culture, he says. "Real Americans are independent." And: farmers pay less taxes. "I will not volunteer anything to those in Washington!" Ryan says. Anyone who sits in the White House is completely the same. "I do not interfere in their affairs, then they should leave me alone, so we always kept it down here."
But when the sixth neighbor fell in BaghdadRyan reported to the army. "I love my country and wanted to help pull the cart out of the mud." Engineers are usually welcomed with open arms. Not Ryan. He has a Rebel Flag, the flag of the breakaway southern states, on his right shoulder. "They would have taken me with a swastika," he says and spits out a peanut shell. "Our flag wafted over the dome of Parliament in our capital Columbia until July 2000!"
"The old spirit can also be found at the Cherokee, up in North Carolina," says Jim goodbye. "They were here when the first settlers still lived in the London slums."
Solidarity and casinos
With casinos, pubs and souvenir shops, the Cherokee earn the most money.
It is pouring in Cherokee. "That should have been better with the rain dance this morning," says Frieda Huskey of the reserve administration and grins. There is a lot of rain in the Smoky Mountains - the name comes from the clouds caught in the treetops. We travel with Davey Arch, our Native American guide, to the Oconaluftee Indian Village, which looks like a Cherokee village around 1750, past dingy souvenir shops, stuffed with Indian ornaments from the Far East, plastic juggernauts and motels. "The Cherokee lived on small farms, like the settlers later on." Even slaves would have had them. From other tribes, blacks, whites, does not matter.
The wood carver and dancer Davey knows everyone who demonstrates the ancient crafts of the Cherokee in the Indian Village. In addition to old women, girls nibble beads on deerskin or weave intricate patterns into baskets, young men carve deer. Her works are sold in a cooperative of the tribe. "The tribe gives everyone who wants work," says Davey. If you're not in the Village, play in the bombastic open-air play "Unto these Hills," which tells the story of the Cherokee every summer. How they tried to live with the whites until they were forcibly relocated to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi in 1838.Andrew Jackson, the then US president, wanted it that way. "It was about land, gold, power," says Davey. Since then there are two Cherokee tribes. One in Oklahoma and one in North Carolina. "We are the children of those who hid in the mountains and did not join in. Our great-grandparents did not give up their land so easily, fighting was pointless, so they just waited."
"Everyone used to be ashamed of their Indian blood"says Frieda Huskey. But since the big casino funded North Carolina's Cherokee health insurance and studies, and paid out several thousand dollars twice each year, even white Yankees would swear that their great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess. More than 500 people would try to get into the tribe every day. But a sixteenth Cherokee blood has to be. Otherwise you do not belong to it. The Village, the play, of course, is kitsch, says Davey. "But this is how the boys learn our story, as long as we do not forget them, we are strong." Unfortunately, not everyone in Cherokee thinks that way. His cousin, elected chief of the tribe, wants to build a golf course. In the middle of the valley where once stood Mothertown, the great Cherokee city around which all tribal legends entwine. "We could do it like the guy who invented Lake Toxaway," Davey says. "Just took a valley and made a lake out of it." But that's just America. The new America.
Travel Info North and South Carolina
GETTING THEREWith Lufthansa daily from Frankfurt / Main and Munich nonstop to Charlotte, North Carolina. From approx. 830 or 940 euros (www.lufthansa.com).
find accommodationNice Bed & Breakfasts are available from about 90 Euro per night. To book via www.southcarolinabedandbreakfast.com.
INFORMA good guide is "Hidden Carolinas" by Cathrine O'Neal with many addresses, stories, maps and useful tips (from 14.95 euros, Ulysses Press). North Carolina Division of Tourism, 301 North Wilmington Street, Raleigh, NC 27601, Tel. 001/919 / 733-41 71, Fax -85 82, www.visitnc.com, www.northcarolinatravel.com. South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation & Tourism, 1205 Pendleton Street, Columbia, SC 29201, Tel. 001/803 / 734-11 64, Fax -11 63, www.discoversouthcarolina.com.
