there one afternoon, I noticed a vivid portrait behind the bar. Titled
The Relic Hunter
, it showed the bar’s proprietor scanning the beach with a metal detector. I was struck by how well the portrait captured its subject and asked the bartender about its creator.
“Manning Williams?” The bartender laughed. “Where to begin? As you can see, he’s a first-class artist. Also a college professor. A reenactor. Charleston’s leading secessionist. Among other things.”
In other words, another Charleston eccentric. I phoned Williams from the bar and was immediately invited to his house. Following his directions to a neighborhood north of town, I wondered if I’d becomelost. The area was predominantly black. This shouldn’t have surprised me; statistically, Southern cities were far better integrated than Northern ones. The second surprise was the figure who greeted me at the door of his bland modern home. Williams was a wiry, muscular man of about fifty, with piercing blue eyes, paint-stained fingers and a pointed beard that reached almost to his breastbone. He looked like a roguish rebel officer—a resemblance that was entirely intentional.
“It seems peaceful out there,” he said, shutting the door behind me, “but don’t be fooled. The War is emotionally still on. I call it the thousand-year war. It’ll go on for a thousand years, or until we get back into the Union on equal terms.”
Williams led me into a studio littered with half-empty coffee mugs, half-finished beers, half-smoked cigars. Civil War tomes and copies of a super-hero comic book called “Captain Confederacy” lay propped atop chairs and easels. “This is the work I’m finishing now, though the subject’s something I’ll never be finished with,” he said, pausing beside a large canvas. “It’s called
Lincoln in Hell.”
The oil painting brought to mind Hieronymus Bosch’s inferno in
Garden of Earthly Delights
. The sky was a florid orange and streaked with exploding shells. In the foreground, a gaunt figure in a black frock coat and stovepipe hat strode across a mound of skulls, cannonballs, and bits of blue and gray uniform. Behind him loomed other stacks of bones, with blurry figures perched atop each.
“That’s Napoleon,” Williams said, “and over there’s Genghis Khan.” Like Lincoln, these leaders were warmongering tyrants who had therefore earned a place in Williams’s underworld.
“I’ve done some studies for a painting called
Southerners in Hell
, too,” he added. “It shows a bunch of rebels sitting with their hands over their ears as Lincoln recites the Gettysburg Address for the rest of eternity.” Williams broke into a wide, tobacco-stained grin. “I poke holes in icons. I’m suspicious of all agendas, most of all my own.”
For the rest of the afternoon, Williams prowled restlessly around the studio, delivering a monologue that skipped from the Lost Cause to lost souls to Christian evangelists to calculating how long a pair of wool army socks would have lasted in 1863 (“until the stink became too much,” he hypothesized). Often, he spanned two or threetopics in a single sentence. And every fifteen minutes or so, he’d lasso a runaway thought and rope it back toward his central theme: the ineradicable divide between North and South.
“Take driving habits,” he said, detouring from a discourse on regional voting patterns. “Down here, you stop in a line of traffic to wave someone in and a single car pulls in front of you. Up north, you pause five seconds and ten cars butt ahead.”
Williams hated cars, particularly car tires, and railed against Goodyear and Firestone ads. Again, it took me a moment to see where this was leading. “Car tires are the footprint of Northern industrial society,” Williams said. As a subtle protest, he stuck tires into his paintings—a stray radial, say, perched anachronistically in the foreground of an unflattering portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman.
We were back
The Relic Hunter
, it showed the bar’s proprietor scanning the beach with a metal detector. I was struck by how well the portrait captured its subject and asked the bartender about its creator.
“Manning Williams?” The bartender laughed. “Where to begin? As you can see, he’s a first-class artist. Also a college professor. A reenactor. Charleston’s leading secessionist. Among other things.”
In other words, another Charleston eccentric. I phoned Williams from the bar and was immediately invited to his house. Following his directions to a neighborhood north of town, I wondered if I’d becomelost. The area was predominantly black. This shouldn’t have surprised me; statistically, Southern cities were far better integrated than Northern ones. The second surprise was the figure who greeted me at the door of his bland modern home. Williams was a wiry, muscular man of about fifty, with piercing blue eyes, paint-stained fingers and a pointed beard that reached almost to his breastbone. He looked like a roguish rebel officer—a resemblance that was entirely intentional.
“It seems peaceful out there,” he said, shutting the door behind me, “but don’t be fooled. The War is emotionally still on. I call it the thousand-year war. It’ll go on for a thousand years, or until we get back into the Union on equal terms.”
Williams led me into a studio littered with half-empty coffee mugs, half-finished beers, half-smoked cigars. Civil War tomes and copies of a super-hero comic book called “Captain Confederacy” lay propped atop chairs and easels. “This is the work I’m finishing now, though the subject’s something I’ll never be finished with,” he said, pausing beside a large canvas. “It’s called
Lincoln in Hell.”
The oil painting brought to mind Hieronymus Bosch’s inferno in
Garden of Earthly Delights
. The sky was a florid orange and streaked with exploding shells. In the foreground, a gaunt figure in a black frock coat and stovepipe hat strode across a mound of skulls, cannonballs, and bits of blue and gray uniform. Behind him loomed other stacks of bones, with blurry figures perched atop each.
“That’s Napoleon,” Williams said, “and over there’s Genghis Khan.” Like Lincoln, these leaders were warmongering tyrants who had therefore earned a place in Williams’s underworld.
“I’ve done some studies for a painting called
Southerners in Hell
, too,” he added. “It shows a bunch of rebels sitting with their hands over their ears as Lincoln recites the Gettysburg Address for the rest of eternity.” Williams broke into a wide, tobacco-stained grin. “I poke holes in icons. I’m suspicious of all agendas, most of all my own.”
For the rest of the afternoon, Williams prowled restlessly around the studio, delivering a monologue that skipped from the Lost Cause to lost souls to Christian evangelists to calculating how long a pair of wool army socks would have lasted in 1863 (“until the stink became too much,” he hypothesized). Often, he spanned two or threetopics in a single sentence. And every fifteen minutes or so, he’d lasso a runaway thought and rope it back toward his central theme: the ineradicable divide between North and South.
“Take driving habits,” he said, detouring from a discourse on regional voting patterns. “Down here, you stop in a line of traffic to wave someone in and a single car pulls in front of you. Up north, you pause five seconds and ten cars butt ahead.”
Williams hated cars, particularly car tires, and railed against Goodyear and Firestone ads. Again, it took me a moment to see where this was leading. “Car tires are the footprint of Northern industrial society,” Williams said. As a subtle protest, he stuck tires into his paintings—a stray radial, say, perched anachronistically in the foreground of an unflattering portrait of William Tecumseh Sherman.
We were back
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