Front Porch

How much influence did the evocative landscapes of Charleston, South Carolina, have on the young Edgar Allan Poe, who spent time there as an enlisted man and used it as the setting of his famous story “The Gold-Bug”? Sullivan’s Island, by Michelle Van Parys.

Few people besides Charlestonians and literary experts know that Edgar Allan Poe spent about a year in 1827 and 1828 on the outskirts of the Holy City, while stationed on Sullivan’s Island as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army. Fifteen years later, Poe made Sullivan’s Island the setting for his famous story, “The Gold-Bug,” a dark tale about hunting pirate treasure. When he had had enough sand, sea, and drill, Poe got out of his enlistment and moved on. That’s about all most of us know about Edgar Allan Poe and Charleston, South Carolina.

But as Scott Peeples explains in this issue’s first article, a paucity of facts has not prevented the fanciful from concocting a richer story. Charleston inspired Poe, we are told. It was there that his haunted, tragic, gothic, and delusioned sensibility first found the darkness to flower in. Charleston was the home of Annabel Lee, his poetic beloved, and the site of her “kingdom by the sea.” Someone declared she was buried there and produced an illegible map to her melancholy tomb—rather like Captain Kidd’s treasure in “The Gold-Bug.”

Without bothering to refute these too-apt legends, Peeples asks why Charleston and its visitors have been so susceptible to them from the 1880s to the present. A school of Lowcountry romantics has longed for a haunted past since at least that time, he tells us, and a partnership with Poe has clearly buttressed their fascination with tragically doomed aristocracy. It’s true, of course, that tragedy has long stalked Charleston’s stately lanes, ever since yellow fever raged and its port anchored the North American leg of the African slave trade. And Poe watched from Fort Moultrie when the city’s elite mounted their crazy campaign to “nullify” the federal tariff laws, a course that ultimately led to Judge James L. Petigru’s immortal pronouncement that “South Carolina was too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” None of this appears in Charleston’s preferred Poe mythology, but we shouldn’t single out the city for that kind of omission. After all, Charleston’s antebellum proclivities only opened the path that the rest of the South would follow soon enough. There’s plenty of haunted madness to go around.

From Charleston, we move on to Atlanta, a very different city, to see a little-known facet of its business-obsessed culture of self-improving get-up-and-go. From the 1920s to the early 1940s, the Rev. J. M. Gates was a spell-binding preacher at Mt. Calvary Baptist Church in Atlanta’s Rockdale community, a black, working-class neighbor to the much tonier district around Auburn Avenue, “the richest Negro street in the world.” As Marko Maunula recounts, Gates’s fame as a preacher spread far beyond Atlanta through his best-selling sermons, recorded on 78 rpm disks and marketed on “race labels” nationwide. Gates was renowned for hellfire and brimstone (“Hell Bound Express” was a big favorite), but he also stood out for his meticulous lessons for rural migrants on how to navigate the urban, Jim Crow environment. Work hard, he preached. Be respectable. Women, remember your manners. Men, improve yourselves. Attend church and shun vice. Above all, make white paternalism work by staying credit-worthy, patronizing local white-owned businesses, and boycotting chain stores. Today, Rev. Gates’s recorded sermons survive as aural reminders of Booker T. Washington’s gospel, “Put down your bucket where you are.” Side by side, haunted Charleston and self-made Atlanta make a striking pair, each one styling in its own mythology.

While I was proud of my home, I was also learning that powerful stereotypes about Appalachia had arrived in places...