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  • From Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir by Mamie Garvin Fields and Karen E. Fields
  • Anna Gasha (bio)
From Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir
Mamie Garvin Fields and Karen E. Fields
Copyright © 1983 by Mamie Gavin Fields with Karen Fields. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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“Negroes used to be kept from certain places unless they worked there,” Mamie Garvin Fields recalled about the racial segregation that permeated her childhood hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. “The Battery was one of those places.” The Battery is a stretch of stately homes of the city’s White elite, lining the confluence of two rivers and forming a scenic esplanade. The area was typically off-limits to Black Charlestonians, except those who worked as street vendors or domestic helpers for the mansions (in Lemon Swamp, Mamie Garvin Fields shares her recollections of the temporary work she held as a seamstress in one such house, and the power dynamics she observed there based on racial and social differences). Preservationists must recognize these conditions that restrict Black existence within and use of public space, and consider how heritage sites have been or continue to be exclusionary. Courtesy of The Charleston Museum, Charleston, South Carolina, https://www.charlestonmuseum.org.

[End Page 118]

Lemon Swamp and Other Places is the product of a collaborative project between a grandmother, Mamie Garvin Fields (1888–1987), and her granddaughter, Karen Fields (1945–). The resulting book recounts Mamie Fields’s experiences as a Black woman navigating the Jim Crow–era South into the early twentieth century. The memoir holds particular appeal for preservationists, since it features Mamie Fields’s careful descriptions of the buildings and landscapes around her—she was attuned to the built environment perhaps due to both her father and husband working in the construction trades. Indeed, Fields considers how the skills of Black American craftsmen in the South had been “brought out of Africa,” thus connecting the enslaved people in the United States and their descendants to their African heritage and claiming a unique creativity with origins distinct from, albeit inflected by, the White American milieu.1

Given that the book itself is the outcome of a process of intergenerational transfer of memory, it illuminates the motivations and nuances of how the two women negotiated their relationship with their roles as historians. The excerpts presented below are divided into two sections: the first is from the book’s introduction and epilogue, both written by Karen Fields, while the second comprises passages from the body of the memoir, as told by Mamie Fields. The former best describes the original impetus, rationale, and procedure for undertaking this project of compiling a historical record. Karen Fields also delicately describes the different conceptions of the past she ascribes to herself and her grandmother, underscoring the historical value of lived experiences beyond the histories made up of dominant political events and names.

The second section combines various episodes that relate to Mamie Fields’s reflections on and reactions to the built environment and history. First, she recalls her father’s participation in the Labor Day parade as part of his union of Black carpenters. Their creation of a spectacle—effectively upstaging their White counterparts—can be read as Black reclamation of public space, against the grain of segregationist attempts to circumscribe Black expression and define Black decorum.2 Fields then transitions into an episode in which she helped guide W. E. B. Du Bois on a tour of Charleston. Du Bois chides [End Page 119] his guides for only showing him places demonstrating, in his eyes, White supremacy. Fields credits Du Bois for her newfound awareness on the importance of “tak[ing] pride in our own accomplishments,” and how that can be manifested in the built environment. The next scene provides context that may explain Fields’s initial selection of the “conventional,” White sites to show Du Bois: Fields describes the overwhelming prevalence of the Confederate, White supremacist ideology taught to her and her peers at school. In this sense, Fields had been deprived of a formal introduction to heritage removed...

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