Most of us can say where we were when some big historic event happened. Well, I can also tell you where I was the very first time I ever read Roger Pinckney. Yes, that first paragraph of his was just that good.
When I first discovered Roger,I had just recently started writing for this storied publication, and so had committed myself to reading every issue cover-to-cover, to learn more of the editorial elan and, more importantly, the people involved in its production. His first paragraph was so hilariously excellent, I instantly stopped reading, walked directly to my office and launched an email saying more or less “You have to connect me with this guy.”
Thus began a wonderful friendship.
Or, more fairly, a friendship combined with Old Southern mentorship, and that second term might need some explaining, but it’s critically important. Roger was 19 years my senior and thus, in theory, could have created me. Rumors that he did are unfounded.
In the Old South, such generational gaps carry social significance. We fell into a system where we usually talked as equals, but sometimes he was the senior generation addressing the junior. It worked, in part because he was a consummate mentor and friend to all mankind and, in part, because I’d already been introduced to the proper way to conduct such interactions by another, remarkably similar Old South mentor, 25-plus years before. I did my best, and he tolerated my occasional failures, him once observing: “You about halfway understand. That’s pretty good for a Yankee.”
Under such rubric, we got to know one another. Our frequent emails became regular hilarious phone calls reviewing one another’s writing.
Eventually, I got the invite to Daufuskie Island, his home.
For those uninitiated, Daufuskie was a foundational feature of Roger’s life. He’d been raised nearby in Beaufort, South Carolina, immersed in the people, the culture and the sporting life of the Lowcountry. Indeed, his family had ties going back 160-plus years to the island itself—he was “Roger Pinckney the Eleventh.” He wrote extensively about the island and its people, both in fictionalized form and in reality, publishing 15 books. One such non-fiction book bears the magnificently partisan title The Right Side of the River, meaning that everything else in the entire world is on the wrong side.
He furthered his ties to Daufuskie by creating and running a guided bus tour of seemingly every historic crevice of the place, often involving his ancestors. Indeed, the island effectively became part of his name: his no-pauses-outgoing voicemail was “This-is-Roger-Pinckney-on-Daufuskie-Island…” and likewise his various video clips have that same introduction. He became an activist in preventing Daufuskie—or as he often affectionately abbreviated it, “Fuskie” — from becoming another damn resort. He cordially despised what he christened “Hilton [Head] Hell” just across the water, and all those who had wrought it, to include incisively ridiculing and brilliantly cuckolding them in his fiction. Ultimately, Roger was bestowed in print with the title “High Priest of Daufuskie Island,” and he was unquestionably the island’s most rockstar resident.
Upon that first invitation, like a complete idiot, I did not immediately drop what I was doing and haul flatass for the coast. The usual storm of career/pressing nonsense bumped that trip way down the list. Finally, three years later, I had some other business at a military base semi-close to him, and so I went.
Seemingly by design, it’s hard to get to Daufuskie. There is no causeway. There is no vehicle ferry. There is only a personnel ferry, with a 50-pound gear limit. As I tore down my heavy base camp bag for the ferry trip, I identified two things that were critical, past the ultra-basics. First were the many copies of his books that I wanted him to sign. Second was a gift of a “flight” of smallish bottles of bourbons. I remotely parked at the ferry terminal, yanked the fuel pump fuse from the Raptor to thwart the felonious aspirations of any locals, and took a shuttle bus to the dock.
Before we boarded, I surveyed my fellow travelers, and it was instantly apparent that nobody on the ferry was someone to worry about. To the extreme contrary, I learned that anybody going to Daufuskie was friendly, relaxed, prosperous and happy. Many had dogs. I struck up a conversation with the dog owner right next to me. In the course of it, I noted her dog’s name on his collar: Pinckney. Perfect.
It is a surprisingly long 50 minutes to get there. As I arrived at the end of the near-two-football-fields-long dock, I finally laid eyes on The Man His Own Self. He was just exactly what any of us would have hoped for. He was craggy, unkempt and big-grinning in welcome, with visible bonhomie on his weathered and whiskered features. It is perhaps unfair to compare him to Hemingway, although many have, but to my eye, Papa Himself had just rolled up in a s#!tbox Toyota, with a jagged, home-rolled cigarette hanging out of one corner of his mouth. That image will live forever in my memory.
As I was stowing my bag into the back seat, I thought that an opportune time to give him his sackful of bourbon bottles. Him: “Well, Scottie, I do declare that to be nothing short of providential.”
Where he took us was the island general store, which was the check-in for the tiny one-room house I had rented. We then immediately repaired to The Daufuskie Crab Company. It was on the water, with two covered outdoor bars and plenty of both highboy tables and others with umbrellas. Beyond stood what you would have called a roadhouse, had there been a road. The instant vibe of the place was “William Faulkner got hammered with Jimmy Buffet and decided to open a crab house.”
We grabbed a table within reach of the larger bar. Remember that old show, Cheers’s, tag line: “Where everybody knows your name?” Well, here it was absolutely true. Daufuskie is only about five miles by two, and only has about 400 people. Add in Roger’s colorful nature, his renown writing and his kindhearted manner, and very literally everyone knew him. And it became rapidly apparent that everybody liked him. Some even adored him.
I was on the side of the table closer to the bar. After meeting the friendly barkeep, I asked Roger for his order. A longer pause than you might have thought, followed by the perfect grin. “You might’ve noticed I’ve taken in recent times to calling you ‘Scottie.’ Well, that was in anticipation of just exactly this moment: ‘Scottie, Beam me up!’” It took me a second. Scottie. Star Trek. Jim Beam bourbon. Okay, Got It. And thus, a tradition was born.
We talked about the process of writing, the pitfalls, the ideas, the editors, the industry, where it might all be headed. We talked about the Tybee Bomb—believe it or not, there is a lost 3.8 megaton hydrogen bomb just a couple of miles south of Daufuskie which would wipe out the place we were then sitting. We talked about deer hunting, which on Daufuskie is done driven and with shotguns. We talked about the JFK assassination: his vote was a conspiracy, mine was Oswald alone, which would later lead to us both spending days chasing down a crazy theory of his (it started off great, but ultimately proved unfounded). Oh…and we talked about our interfacing with the fairer gender. As to this last, he allowed how his beloved fourth wife, Miss Biscuits, had “run hard aground with collateral damage” with a health issue, which was why he hadn’t extended an invitation to me to stay at his home. I’d hard wondered about that as we set up trip plans, but of course, under the Old South etiquette, I never would have dreamed of asking.
We concluded that magnificent evening with him telling me “I’ll come around tomorrow, ’bout noontime. Take you for a tour of my island.”
The Daufuskie Crab Company starts early, and I had some breakfast al fresco while both working and forming unrequited designs on my server until he rolled in. As I climbed into the Toyota, he handed me one of the bottle collection I’d brought him, and cracked his own. “Glad you are here.”
Having been brought up in a draconian city, I tentatively offered, to the effect: “Sir, doesn’t South Carolina have an open container law?”
Big grin. “First, nobody here would say s#!t. Everybody knows everybody and nobody is ratting out anybody else ’cause what goes around comes around. Second, it would take better part of an hour to get any kind of law enforcement out here at all.”
Well then. To paraphrase from the whole “When in Rome” thing: “When on Daufuskie….” We toasted and started the tour.
The first thing he did was take me to see Leggy. That was his name for a breathtaking woman who lived in a nicely redone classic Lowcountry style house, not just the gem of the island, but maybe of any island anywhere. Not the house. Her. He’d written about Leggy a number of times, and I was to see he wasn’t kidding. She was seven separate series of southern gracious. As we climbed back in the Toyota to leave, I noted to Roger that there really wasn’t any need for the rest of the island tour, and that it would be perfectly alright if I just stayed right here. He grinned, “Believe you me.”
He next took me through his deer concession. Turns out, despite being an island, there is big population of deer. Much of the island is deeply undeveloped, and they thrive in the deep tangle. In the fall, he has the rights, subject of course to South Carolina law, to go after them. It’s a surprisingly large area, and he generally has a solid haul. Does he bring Leggy venison? Turns out he does.
Then, we go to his home. The house is classic Lowcountry “breezeway” style, with a deep, covered veranda on all four sides, probably with as much square footage as the interior space, maybe more. Roger did much of the work in building it himself, and the architecture befit him perfectly: expensively rustic, rough-hewn in the right kind of way and enormously practical. Sitting, as it does, on the water, the whole structure is elevated perhaps 8 feet to allow for hurricane storm surge. Likewise, the roof is metal and well-secured. It’s set up with ventilation and many huge double doors to allow for summer convection cooling. Some years prior, I’d emailed him when Daufuskie had been hit by a bad storm. He wrote back: “House rode it fine. Ise [original spelling] settling my nerves after the big blow. Daufuskie took a direct hit, the eye right over our house, a great howling in the heavens and a shaking of the firmament, flat Biblical.”
We stomped into the kitchen, which is dominated by lots of things: a big white pine table, Miss Biscuits and a big dog, Mojo, a boisterous Weimaraner mix. Miss Biscuits was charming. Mojo had yet to attend charm school, but probably meant well.
Behind him in the next room over is the mounted head of a big Cape buffalo. Of course, I had to know. He’d faced the buff at close range, but in telling me that, he self-effacingly noted that, “…it hadn’t been charging or anything.” I almost laughed: the violent aggression and tenacity of that species is legendary, to the point that it has earned the title “Black Death.” That the buff wasn’t charging at right that moment is precisely zero guarantee that it wouldn’t in the next instant. To have taken one at close range is a measure of the man.
Of course, we toured his gun cabinet, packed with fine sporting brands, mostly shotguns. Then we toured his office, packed with vintage duck decoys and fishing lures and of course an enormous and eclectic collection of books. Sitting on top of one stack was a beautiful repro of a Smith & Wesson Model 3.
Then we went on with his island tour. There were hell’s own collection of sites that I won’t bore you with, but there are two subsets that are worthy of note because they reflected on Roger’s life. The first were Civil War sites, one being a cemetery and one being a big earthwork that had held artillery used by his great-great-grandfather to blast at Yankees, an effort that proved tactically sound but strategically unsuccessful, with the Union ultimately occupying the island. Roger made no bones about which side he favored. He had once before written to me that, “Scottie, as an unrepentant Confederate, I won’t say ‘indivisible’ in the Pledge.” Indeed, from time to time he had remarked in emails, after some interaction with somebody north of the Mason-Dixon line, “Just the old man annoying Yankees again.”
That might misguidedly lead some people to suppose that he supported racism, but the profound opposite is true. Roger was raised not just with black folk, but in part by them. His grandmother suffered from repeated, debilitating health issues, and when she was out of commission, she employed a local Gullah lady as the primary caregiver to Roger. Indeed, that kindhearted caregiver had filled the same role for Roger’s father, so he’d known her from early childhood. Her name was Elvira Mike, and she imbued Roger with love for her, the Gullah people and Gullah culture.
In both his talking and his writing, it is unquestionable that he loved them and they loved him. Gullah, for the uninitiated, is a blended African culture transplanted to the South’s Lowcountry, and it has many distinctive aspects, including language, music and religious beliefs, among others. He wrote, with reverence of the Gullah, including in his book, Blue Roots, which he dedicated, “For all those people, black and white, that it took to raise me.”
In that regard, he made sure to take me to an historic black church, put up in the 1880s as the freed people gained enough economic traction to do it. He also took me to the Gullah cemetery. Before the first stop, he quietly said, “I don’t expect that I need to tell you, but I will anyway: these are places where your every word and action are respectful.” Yes, sir. Of course, him being the grandmaster raconteur, and no doubt honed by his years of giving tours, he had great stories to go with the sites.
Roger had become known for writing about Gullah folk magic. He pointed out houses that had blue paint around the windows and doors, to keep bad spirits out. And he talked of “roots,” those being a small concoction of spiritual items, said to impart effects, some good, some bad. In a quiet moment, I asked him if he actually believed any of it. He half-grinned and said, “For some people, it’s enough that others believe it, and act accordingly.” I responded with, “That doesn’t really answer the question.” His grinned back, “I have a root doctor on retainer.”
I finally had to leave Daufuskie, although I didn’t want to.
With tragic prescience, Roger saw the end coming.
In the September/October 2022 issue, Roger published a piece he titled “Wintersong.” It took me a bit into it before I figured out his intent. He was, if indirectly, saying goodbye to his family. The piece goes from the reflective to the melancholy. Speaking of the coming deer season, he wrote: “Though none of you will be with me, there is always next year, God willing. I just thought to share my joy, my sadness too.” His subtitle was “You will always be my children, I’ll always be your Pa.” He might have added that, to untold thousands of readers, “I’ll always be your storyteller.”
And to a privileged few of us, “I’ll always be your friend.”