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2. Spokesman for the Disenfranchised
- University of South Carolina Press
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2. Spokesman for the Disenfranchised I wanted a piece of the pie. Jesse Pearson When Rev. De Laine was assigned to Society Hill Church in 1940, a major change was in the making for church members. A hydroelectric plant was being built nearby on the Santee River. By the time he arrived, the basin of one of two planned reservoirs had been cleared and its dam built. Work had just begun on the second basin, the one that would become the future Lake Marion. Within a few months the enlargement of World War II hostilities caused the hydroelectric facility to be declared necessary for national defense, and its completion became urgent. The eight-mile-long Santee River dam was hastily finished , and the last of its massive gates closed on November 12, 1941. The water impounded by the world’s longest earthen dam began to flood adjacent areas before the basin had been completely cleared. Each rain pushed the water farther inland and the imprisoned water flooded the Santee’s tributaries, inching higher as it lapped at support pillars of rickety wooden bridges. Covered with canebrakes, prickly brambles, and thousands of stumps and dead trees, the basin floor was hidden by the deceptively gentle surface of the new lake. In the five years after the dam’s gates closed, the water obliterated the rickety bridge where River Road crossed Church Branch beside Society Hill Church and the adjacent Society Hill School. At first people used the bridge to ford their way across the water. As the water got deeper and the bridge couldn’t be seen, they used the bridge railings as markers for the old road. However, when the tops of the railings sank out of view, the people were cut off from the other side altogether, leaving those who lived on the far side of the water as much as five or six miles by road—a half-hour wagon journey—from the church and school. Rowboats were pressed into service to make the trip shorter. When Robertha Mack was a student at Society Hill School, she walked four miles to school, crossing the Church Branch bridge. After she graduated from Before 20 eighth grade in 1941, she was hired as the school’s first cook. When she got married , she quit the job. By that time the lake was almost filled. The edge of the water was within a thousand feet of Society Hill Church, and she had started paddling a boat across, just as some others did. Most adults feared the boat trip, remembering the numerous perils that lurked unseen below the water’s placid surface. As time passed, their concern about the water subsided. They carried on with their daily lives as always, adjusting their activities to the rhythm of the seasons. In August, when limp brown tassels signaled the ripeness of the corn kernels, the leaves were also ready to be stripped from corn stalks for fodder. It was the time of year when many children from “up north” visited their grandparents and cousins “down on the farm,” safe from temptations of the big cities. One Sunday during the August after Mis’ Robertha got married, Viola Johnson ’s grandson drowned while the Society Hill congregation was in the church. Unnoticed by the grown-ups, the boy and several other children had slipped out and gone to play by the water. Mis’ Robertha recalled, “Mis’ Viola’s grandson and another boy got in the boat and went out. According to the other boy, they were fooling around, daring each other to jump in the water. The one that drowned was just visiting his grandma for the summer. I believe he thought he could swim over to her house just across the water. He took off his clothes and jumped in.” Shuddering, she continued. “That boy never did come up. His body got caught in some of the stuff that was covered by the water.” The tragedy had nothing to do with school. Except for where, when, and how the drowning happened, it might have been dismissed as “just one of those things.” However, Rev. De Laine was inside Society Hill Church at the time, and he knew that, by failing to restore a satisfactory travel route, the authorities had left a dangerous condition behind. Always the teacher, he was particularly worried about the children who came to the nearby school. If another bridge wasn’t going to be built, he thought that at least a...