Stepping Out

If you're partying this holiday week and get to dancing, don't forget the steps that made our Holy City famous. The Charleston took the country by storm in the early years of the last century, and like everything to do with such a history-rich city, it comes with a story.

The dance, with its rhythmic stomping, kicking and clapping, is thought to have been derived from traditional African-American dances, particularly one called the "Juba", brought to Charleston by enslaved Africans and passed down through the generations until it had become a kind of neighborhood challenge dance in the city's African-American communities. The tradition moved north during the Great Migration of African-Americans during and just after World War One.

James P. Johnson, composer of "The Charleston"

But it wasn't until 1923 that what we know as The Charleston came to larger audiences with the debut of a Broadway musical called Running' Wild , which included a song called The Charleston written by an African-American composer named James Johnson. Born and raised in New Jersey, Johnson claimed he'd been inspired to write music to fit the dancing he saw by Charleston-born longshoremen who frequented a Harlem nightclub where he was the pianist.

And there may be yet another link to Charleston. The city's Jenkins Institute For Children, an orphanage for mostly African-American children established in 1891, became famous for its Jenkins Orphanage Band, which incorporated dance into their performances. The band toured widely to raise money for the orphanage (which still exists, in North Charleston, as the Jenkins Institute), and James Johnson may very well have seen much the same energetic routine.

The Charleston may have begun as a dance craze, but it's still around today and has influenced other popular dance forms from swing dances to the Mashed Potato. So kick up those heels and stir up another part of Charleston's, and America's, cultural legacy.

Banded Together

Summer brings new faces and new neighbors to the island, if only for the season, but one recent arrival is here to stay - the armadillo. The "little armored one", once confined to Texas and Florida, has been moving north and east as climate change brings warmer weather year-long to the Southeast. First seen north of the Savannah River in the 1980's, armadillos are now present in all 46 South Carolina counties.

The "little armored one", with its nine-banded back

The nine-banded armadillo (Dasypus novemcinctus) is our Southeast variety (there's a three-banded species in parts of South America), distinctly odd-looking with its pig-like snout, nine moveable rings between its shoulder and hip, and 12 rings encasing its tapered tail. Distantly related to anteaters and three-toed sloths, it feeds on insects, scorpions and other invertebrates that it digs up with its powerful claws - and therein lies the trouble in its interactions with humans, who object to the holes and scrapes marring carefully tended lawns. Armadillos are champion burrowers, too, able to dig under building foundations, concrete slabs, driveways, even swimming pools. Livestock owners particularly object to them, for armadillo holes are the perfect size for cattle and horse hooves, with the possibility of broken legs.

Armadillos began appearing on Seabrook Island within the last ten years, and have been sighted all over the island, from near beaches and boardwalks to marshy areas further inland from the shore. (Check out SIPOA's wildlife sighting map to see where they've been spotted.) Preferring the protection of dense undergrowth and shrubbery, they're rarely observed during daylight hours, preferring to forage from early evening and throughout the night while spending the daylight hours in burrows, especially during the heat of the summer. Local predators include bobcats and foxes.

Try and find me......

Armadillos are famous for the ability to roll up into a tight, armored ball when threatened. Lesser known is that the female's litter produced once a year always consists of precisely four pups, all of whom are identical quadruplets. Scientists remain unsure of the reasons for this evolutionary cloning quirk.

Less salutary is the fact that armadillos can be carriers of parasites that cause human diseases like leprosy and Chagas disease, and so should never be touched with bare hands. But they pose no direct threat to humans; and however annoying turf disruptions may be, they help aerate the soil and control insect populations.

Bridge Game

It's likely happened at least once when we leave the island to travel downtown, or to Mt. Pleasant. There we are, making good progress along Maybank Highway toward Folly Road when....the bridge is up. Full stop.

The Wappoo Creek Bridge (formally, the Burnet R. Maybank Bridge) is one of only two remaining movable bridges in greater Charleston, the other being the Ashley River Bridge that carries Savannah Highway over the river. Both are drawbridges dating in their present incarnation from the mid-1950's, although Wappoo Creek's is actually the third bridge to cross what is sometimes called Wappoo Cut, a tributary of the Stono River now part of the Intracoastal Waterway. So while we're stalled at the bridge, we can wile away the time by contemplating the history around us.

We're sitting on what was once part of the McLeod Plantation, which stretched along what is now Folly Road to Harborview Road, along Maybank Highway to the Stono River, and whose more than eight hundred acres now lie under the shopping malls and fast food restaurants of this eastern end of James Island. (A small portion including the McLeod family home survives and is managed by Charleston County Parks as an historic site.) Nineteenth-century travelers between James Island and St. Andrews Parish (what we now call West Ashley) had to cross the creek by steamboat at the McLeod's landing, where the family opened a store selling provisions and dry goods. Even earlier, in the eighteenth century, Eliza Lucas famously began cultivating indigo along the banks of the creek, the first to do so in colonial America.

The first bridge across the Wappoo, c.1903

The first permanent wood-trestle bridge was built in 1899 at the landing, west of the present bridge; a second span replaced it just after the First World War, when West Ashley's development had begun and the Charleston Country Club bought 200 acres of the McLeod property for its golf course. Today's bridge was sited to the east to align it with state road 171/Folly Road.

The drawbridge, with its thirty-three-foot center clearance, is an "on demand" bridge, required to open on request from boaters traveling between Charleston Harbor and Wappoo Cut and the Intracoastal. On weekdays, when a request is received, it will open on the half-hour between 9am and 4pm on weekdays, until 7pm on weekends. Despite the frequent traffic backups and grousing from motorists, there have been no publicly revealed plans to replace the bridge. Depending on the amount of waterborne traffic, the opening and closing process can take fifteen minutes or more, so rely on patience and a sense of history to pass the time.