There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.

Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth.

Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

The University of South Carolina has always played a role in my life and the intellectual life of South Carolina.

Comely was the town by the curving river that they dismantled in a year's time. Beautiful was Colleton in her last spring as she flung azaleas like a girl throwing rice at a desperate wedding. In dazzling profusion, Colleton ripened in a gauze of sweet gardens and the town ached beneath a canopy of promissory fragrance.

Together they spent their whole lives waiting for their luck to change, as though luck were some fabulous tide that would one day flood and consecrate the marshes of our island, christening us in the iridescent ointments of a charmed destiny.