We traveled from Baltimore to Hilton Head, S.C., talking to local leaders, educators and small-business owners about the importance of community, especially among black Americans.
Children play at a back-to-school drive hosted by Elev8 Baltimore.
In the early Friday evening hours teeming with possibility, the humidity spills slow and thick over West Baltimore. So heavy that even moving through the air calls for purposeful steps. But on the playground at Sandtown-Winchester Achievement Academy, the mood is light.
Students spill out of the opening of a slide, their laughter reverberating off the plastic. Some get their faces painted, roses blooming out of the corners of their eyes. Backpacks are piled up near the D.J. booth, where 2000s-era rap hits play.
Pizza boxes are emptied almost as quickly as they are introduced to the eager hands holding empty plates. It’s all part of a school-supplies drive organized by Elev8 Baltimore, a nonprofit that offers educational resources for children in grades five through eight and their families.
Sandtown-Winchester Achievement Academy opened this year, after two of the district’s schools merged. The hope is that, as one institution, the students will benefit from better funding.
Adults stroll by, dabbing the sweat from their foreheads and occasionally bobbing along to the music. Leon F. Pinkett III serves this district — the seventh — and is present today in an oversized blue T-shirt and a baseball hat, its bent brim hanging over his eyes.
“The problems we’re facing here aren’t just law-enforcement issues,” he says, speaking of Baltimore broadly. “You can’t arrest your way out of these. You’ve got to give people jobs. You’ve got to make sure kids are getting educated.”
People endure, Mr. Pinkett says, children sprinting through the grass around us. He isn’t too focused on the rhetoric beyond the city limits. He sighs when even considering it. “You know, my mother used to teach me this scripture: What our adversaries mean for evil, God will turn around for good.”
On the basketball court at Frank C. Bocek Park in East Baltimore, a haphazard game of one-on-one unfolds. After a long, high arching jump shot, the ball careens off the rim and spins to a corner of the court. One of the players lazily sighs before jogging after it, and the scene repeats itself. The writer D. Watkins watches from a bench, rolling a basketball back and forth with his designer sneakers, at one point shouting, “All y’all gonna do is shoot jump shots?” then throwing his head back and laughing.
This is his neighborhood, down the hill. The former N.B.A. All-Star Sam Cassell used to play here, Mr. Watkins says. All of the Baltimore basketball legends came through this park. In the grass beyond the basketball hoops, a youth football team prepares for the first game of the season. The pop of small helmets colliding blends with the percussion of the rattling orange halo when met with another wayward jump shot.
Mr. Watkins walks with a slow but easy gait. He shoots on an empty hoop opposite the game, which has begun to resemble two bodies leaning into each other for the sake of some rest. His shooting form is that of someone who once played well. He did, in high school, before giving up the game.
While lining up for an elbow jumper, Mr. Watkins points at my shoes and tells a short story of how Baltimore’s voracious appetite for the Nike Air Force One saved the silhouette from extinction in the ’70s. He talks about buying back parts of his old neighborhood so that it can be saved by the specter of gentrification.
He gestures at a building to our left and says he’s aiming to buy it. Its windows are worn-down boards, and the door is nailed shut. Mr. Watkins wants to make it what it once was: a community center. Something for the kids in the neighborhood to have to themselves.
The Baltimore Crimson Tide, a youth tackle football team, at practice.
It’s 1 a.m. at Shake and Bake Family Fun Center, a recreational facility with a skating rink and a bowling alley, and none of the skates have been rented. Everyone here tonight brought their own, which they wear like natural extensions of their bodies.
Snap City at the Shake and Bake Family Fun Center.
Tonight is the start of Snap City, an annual event that draws skaters from all over the region. This is its eighth year, and the first back at Shake and Bake since it closed for renovations in 2017.
“A lot of us learned to skate here,” says Chris Douglas, an organizer, as people file onto the rink. “This is our home. I’ve been in this skating rink for over 20 years. It has kept me and my friends off the streets and out of trouble.”
Dwayne, the M.C., has been the voice of these skate nights since the ’80s; he runs around with fluorescent sunglasses bouncing on his forehead, greeting everyone he sees as if they’re family.
Inside the rink, the skaters form glorious chains of rhythm. Some reach out into the distance, waiting for an arm to hold on to.
Mel’s Café is just west of what was once called Vinegar Hill, the oldest black neighborhood in Charlottesville, Va. Former slaves set down roots in the area after the Civil War; Vinegar Hill began to blossom during Jim Crow, when businesses elsewhere in the city wouldn’t serve black customers. The area became a center of black social life, with its music venues and barber shops and markets.
Mel Walker in the kitchen at Mel’s Café.
In the mid-1950s, Vinegar Hill’s land became valuable to Charlottesville, given its proximity to both downtown and the University of Virginia’s campus. The city took a vote on whether to demolish and rebuild the area; many of its residents couldn’t pay the poll tax, so they couldn’t vote. In 1964, it was decided that the neighborhood would be bulldozed. The following year, the entire neighborhood was reduced to a pile of rubble. Black families were assigned to various public housing complexes by the city.
When gentrification is talked about, it is most often in relation to material loss — the things that people can see and attach themselves to. A building was here, and now it is not, or a home has become something different. What weighs heavier among displaced people is a severing of lineage and community.
Mel’s Café has been in this same location for 35 years. Mel Walker, the owner, still shows up for 14-hour workdays and cooks in the kitchen. But now there’s a sprawl of fancy brick establishments in the neighborhood: vintage shops, fancy restaurants and hotels. Mr. Walker shrugs. “It happens everywhere, I guess.”
People come in and shout with the familiarity of family members. A woman walks in to order wings, and Mr. Walker playfully laughs — “you again?” — while scribbling her order down on a notepad. Danny Glover has been in here, he says, “but I don’t really care none about who people call celebrities. I treat everyone the same.”
Women in colorful dresses fill Charlottesville’s First Baptist Church. Kris Bowmaster is a bit more dressed-down, in a polo, jeans and sneakers.
He is one of the congregation’s few white members present today, and the only white member of the choir. When asked about his vocal skill, he replies modestly. “I’m just showing up every week and trying to do my best,” he says.
Deacon Donald Gathers wants to talk outside, even with the sun here climbing to its most ferocious peak. Some of it has to do with noise. But it must also be said that the members of the congregation oscillate between unencumbered warmth and a type of skepticism or concern.
This is an old black church; its congregation first organized in 1864. Worshipers have gathered in this building on West Main Street since 1831. Originally it was put up with mud walls, Deacon Gathers says.
Comfort with the unfamiliar isn’t a luxury in black churches anymore, not after 2015, not after 2017, not even if the unfamiliar faces are also black ones. Still, people are quick to open their arms wide for hugs, letting their hands linger afterward to say God bless you.
Outside his work at the church, Deacon Gathers is a Black Lives Matter activist. Not far from where we stand, talking and wiping off our sweat on the church steps, there is the newly named Heather Heyer Way. The alley’s brick walls are decorated with chalk spelling out broad and optimistic messages about hope and love. Deacon Gathers held a sunrise worship service on the morning of the protest two years ago. “We had 300 to 400 people packed in here at 6 in the morning on a Saturday,” he says. “Just to worship and prepare ourselves to look the devil in the eye.”
The congregation is mighty and the church is doing fine, but there are concerns about attendance. A large portion of this, Deacon Gathers says, comes down to a single issue: parking. The church doesn’t have its own lot, but it has an agreement with the train station for now. Members can park there on Sundays and Wednesdays. But it’s a bit of a walk from the lot to the church steps, and for the aging members of the congregation, making that walk can be difficult, especially when there’s weather. Also, the lot is for sale.
Sunday service at First Baptist Church in Charlottesville.
A woman in a coat and winter hat bounds happily up the church steps, yelling a greeting and “good luck on the race!” to Deacon Gathers over her shoulder. When I ask him if he’s running a race, he shrugs and tells me he isn’t before a small grin emerges from the corner of his face. “Sometimes it’s easier to just smile and say ‘O.K.’”
Inside, the service is about to begin. Mr. Bowmaster helps the older members of the choir onstage before they break into song. The pews fill with late arrivals who fall directly into the tune’s embrace before even putting their items down. If you were to fall too deep into the song or the movements of the choir, you might find yourself unlucky enough to miss the young black woman strolling slowly down the center of the aisle with a gold flag swinging at her back.
When she arrives at the front, in the center of the pews, she begins to move with the music and take the flag along with her, its gold streaking through the sunlight clawing its way in through the stained glass. This unfolding of the body’s freedom, in time with a holy song, sends the congregation to its feet, clapping and singing along. A small child sneaks some pens out of his mother’s purse while she is enraptured by the scene and begins drawing on church fliers, seemingly oblivious to the floor trembling beneath him.
Unity Days, a weeklong event that is part of a push for education about racial and economic injustice in Charlottesville, draws members of the community seeking conversation and entertainment.
The Elite Empire majorette dance team performed for Unity Days.
Made in Charlottesville, a free concert, attracts a crowd during Unity Days.
Setting foot on Bennett College’s campus, one might first notice the immaculately manicured grass that stretches in front of all the old brick buildings.
Bennett College has seen enrollment drop dramatically since 2010.
The women at Bennett don’t walk on the grass. They stick to the concrete paths that make a grid around the Greensboro, N.C., campus. It’s so they don’t get used to taking shortcuts, says Ebony Duell, a journalism student entering her senior year.
Bennett began as a school for freed slaves. In 1873, a man named Matthew Austin placed an ad in the Greensboro paper, calling for black people to meet about the establishment of a school. The people came, so the school was established.
Five years later, Lyman Bennett, a businessman living in Troy, N.Y., who’d made his money as a manufacturer of high quality collars, got word of the upstart college in Greensboro, and went to visit it. He donated $10,000, which allowed the school to purchase land and erect its first building. Shortly after his donation, Bennett died of pneumonia, the school carrying his legacy and his name.
All of this is told to me by Mary Anne Scarlett. She is 87 years old and wears a hat with a brim wide enough to cradle all of the sunlight that might otherwise spill onto her face. She has been a fixture of Bennett’s campus since 1929, when she was 9 months old and her father was hired as the first superintendent of buildings and grounds.
It’s somewhat unclear what her role is now. (“I do a PowerPoint,” she says, for new student orientation. “Though I have to change it from time to time.”)
The current state of Bennett College is dire. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools placed Bennett on probation in 2016. In December of 2018, S.A.C.S. voted to withdraw Bennett’s accreditation, based on its declining enrollment (about 300 students, compared to 700 in 2010) and consistent financial hardship.
When the news of the college’s fight to stay accredited broke, a fund-raising effort took off; through local donations and a wide-reaching social media campaign, the school raised $8.2 million, exceeding its $5 million goal. Bennett then filed a lawsuit against S.A.C.S.; a judge allowed its accreditation to stay in place while the legal proceedings play out.
Bennett has a new president, Suzanne Walsh, who is tasked with seeing the college through this latest difficult stretch. She is traveling today; Gwendolyn Sneed O’Neal, who served as interim president, joins us in her place. She is now the chief operating officer at the university. She points out that the struggles of Bennett, in some ways, are rooted in its history, and the place it started from.
“May I remind you, women weren’t generally being educated when Bennett started, not to mention black women,” she says. “When we were coming out of Jim Crow, moving into a period of desegregation, Bennett knew that we had to produce women leaders. What they were instilling in us, as ladies, as Bennett women, was that something that said there are boundaries here, you owned my parents and my grandparents, but you can’t own me. We are ladies. At minimum, we had to be bicultural, at that time. We had to know how to negotiate a segregated society, and we had to know how to do it with grace, dignity, authority, but also expertise.”
Mary Anne Scarlett celebrated her 65th Bennett College reunion this year.
In the ’70s, when predominantly white institutions, or PW.I.s, began integrating, they took only “the cream of the crop,” Dr. Scarlett says, and gave them full scholarships. By the end of that decade, enrollment had dipped at historically black colleges and universities, including at Bennett; the resources P.W.I.s could offer, in comparison, were hard to pass up.
Now Bennett’s student body is mostly made up of what Dr. O’Neal calls “emerging scholars” — people who struggled academically in high school and could use a fresh start. Ninety-eight percent of them are on financial aid to cover its $28,000-per-year tuition costs. Many of Bennett’s students and alumnae have been the first in their family to go to college. The college can’t afford to lose any of them.
“We have made some key assumptions that have led to some real struggles at registration time,” Dr. O’Neal says, assumptions about technological and financial literacy. “Finally I said in leadership meeting, ‘Wait a minute, we’re making the assumption that these people have computers. We’re making the assumption that they know how to get on a computer and fill out these forms. We’re making the assumption that parents know how to fill out the form for the Parents Plus Loan,’” she says. “We’ve had issues with homeless students, who come here and then don’t have anywhere to go at the end of the spring semester. But we’re not going to decide to not take these students.”
For Dr. O’Neal and Dr. Scarlett, closing Bennett isn’t on the table. The college has had its feet to the fire before. But the bonds are too strong. Dr. Scarlett still talks to her old college roommate, after 65 years. Women still pack the perfectly manicured lawns of Bennett during anniversaries or commencement events. As the Bennett motto goes: “Education for the future, sisterhood for life.”
The sound of a motorcycle’s engine drowns out the quiet noises of meandering families and couples walking in and out of restaurants in a shopping center near the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Chris London III of the Silverback Kings motorcycle club.
As the engine’s sound dissipates, slightly, the sound of René & Angela’s 1985 hit “I’ll Be Good” emerge from the motorcycle’s speakers. Atop the ride is Chris London III, who — with his helmet low and large, dark sunglasses covering his eyes — casts a briefly intimidating energy that dissolves the minute he hops off his bike and smiles wide, shouting loud greetings over the music pouring out of his speakers.
Mr. London, 40, is tall and broad-armed, his muscles pulling the fabric on the sleeves of his black T-shirt. He is the founder of the Silverback Kings; the club’s patch adorns the back of his sleeveless leather jacket, and his nickname (“Breeze”) is stitched on the front. Mr. London is a transplant, celebrating his fifth year in Charlotte. He’s originally from Youngstown, Ohio, and played defensive back at Ohio University in the late ’90s and early 2000s. He has the warmth and joyful patience of a Midwesterner.
A man strolls up to us and asks if any of us watch the N.F.L., before attempting to sell us some of his handmade key chains. Mr. London inspects his wares eagerly, before a small bit of concern spreads across his face. “Well I’m a Browns fan,” he says, rubbing the side of his face. And then, earnestly, “If you come back with a Browns one, I’ll support you. Come back to this lot and find me. I’m around.”
Mr. London started riding about a decade ago, on his 30th birthday. He purchased himself a bike as a gift, despite some initial anxieties. His father was a rider but wasn’t in his life, he says. The bike was a way to feel closer to him.
Rage, a member of the Silverback Kings motorcycle club.
The Silverback Kings are an all-black motorcycle club, though Mr. London is quick to mention that they don’t discriminate. “We’d take a member of any racial background if they were a good fit,” he tells me. “But so far, only black men have been interested in joining up with us.”
They have seven members in total, and as we’re joined by Rage, the club’s vice president, they both say that they simply find themselves very selective. They’ve both been in motorcycle clubs that have crumbled from infighting and mismanagement. “I’m big on quality over quantity,” says Rage, who is 49 and has been riding for nearly 20 years.
“You got some of these groups out here bringing in members who don’t even have bikes!” he adds. “We’re not trying to get our numbers up like that. First rule is, you gotta have a bike. You gotta have a sense of commitment. You gotta treat your friends, family, and loved ones right. We can work with you from there.”
Asked about misconceptions that the group gets saddled with locally and abroad, the two men look at each other knowingly. Mr. London pauses contemplatively before responding. “Look, I mean we all …” he begins. “We all give back to the community. We all do Christmas toy drives, and we just did a back to school drive. We all shave and try to look approachable. But still, the first question we get is about whether or not we’re a gang. We still see people trying to keep their kids away from us when we pull up to a place.” He sighs, before smiling a bit and tugging at his jacket. “But I guess there’s some stuff we’ll never be able to change on our own. We just gotta keep doing our best.”
Outside of Blue Blaze Brewing on the west side of Charlotte, the rain is picking up. It’s the kind you wait out, in a car or under some awning. As the water cascades down our rental car’s windshield, a man across the street from where we’re parked stands under his roof as shelter, with his hands on his hips, cursing his newly soaked land.
Pouring rain in Charlotte, N.C.
Malcolm Graham is inside the brewery, holding a small meet-and-greet for his City Council campaign. Mr. Graham represented District 40 in the State Senate from 2004 to 2015. In 2016, he sought election to the House to represent the 12th congressional district, but lost to the incumbent, Alma Adams.
When Justin Harlow, District 2’s current council member, announced that he would not be seeking re-election, Mr. Graham saw an opening. More than 60 percent of the district’s voters are black, and more than half are registered Democrats. The district begins in Charlotte’s Center City and extends west. It is home to more than 100,000 people who are experiencing the rapid gentrification of Charlotte, especially those living in the historically black neighborhoods of the west side.
Amazon has been growing its footprint in Charlotte since its first facility in the region opened in 2014. By the end of this year, an 855,000-square-foot robotics distribution center will open on the west side. Rent has risen along with the commercial and residential redevelopment; people who have lived in the neighborhood for years simply cannot afford to stay any longer.
Mr. Graham is 56, and has lived in Charlotte for the past 38 years, most of them in this district. We talk outside, with the rain slowed to a gentle tremor along the brewery’s metal roof. He embodies the passionate speak of a politician, but also the exhaustion of someone who has seen a city change at the expense of his neighbors. “The city can’t grow out anymore,” he tells me, gesturing toward the gleaming, rain-slick streets.
Malcolm Graham, a Democrat running to represent District 2 on Charlotte’s City Council.
“We can’t annex any more property, so now all of the development is interior development,” he continues. “All of the development is in formerly distressed neighborhoods where 20 years ago, no one would dare go. Homes are being torn down. It’s driving away seniors, and people who have traditionally lived there. I’m not against progress, but people have to be a part of change, and not victims of it.”
Mr. Graham understands that he can’t stop gentrification. The machinery of it is too vast, and too powerful. But he’s attempting to soften its impact. He’s offering home buyer credit seminars to people in gentrifying communities, to give people options other than taking money to sell their homes to developers.
He’s also pushing for low-interest home loans from the city, so that first and second generation homeowners can fix up their homes, instead of selling. Charlotte has to be a place where upward mobility is possible, he says. But, most importantly, it needs to be a place where people have somewhere to live.
Mr. Graham is focused on gun control, too. His sister is Cynthia Graham Hurd, who was killed in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. “We don’t talk about how she died. We talk only about how she lived,” he says. He thinks for a moment, and then summons an old saying: “Sweat and tears are both salty, but they render different results. Tears get you sympathy, but sweat gets you progress.”
On the way to Kingstree, S.C., there seem to be more churches than homes. Worn-down ones with wide roofs and signs proudly displaying how long the church has been standing.
The Greater Bethel AME Church in Kingstree, S.C.
Since 1908, or since 1891. Some churches are only separated by one building. In one case, the building is a corner store with the words “JESUS SAVES” painted neatly across its side.
And then, there is Johnny Boy’s Express: a gas station, a convenience store and a restaurant all in one.
Outside, well after regular work hours, the sky is a kaleidoscope of indecisive colors — in between storms but also preparing to embrace the coming sunset. A group of black patrons has gathered at picnic tables, the tabs pulled back on their tall beer cans.
Stevie Wonder spills out of the open windows of a tall black truck parked next to the benches, and the men shout and laugh over the melodies. Victoria and Juan, both 34, show up from their respective jobs: her at Captain D’s and him at the local electric company. Juan’s father, Howard, who is 66, is already there; he and his crew have been coming here since the ’80s. Before work, they gather to get some breakfast from inside, and after, they meet up for drinks and jokes.
Hanging out at Johnny Boy’s Express.
Glady Anderson fishing at Boggy Swamp on South Carolina Highway 527.
Teddy, 32, also works at the electric company. He sits on a bench, a cigarette dangling from his hand. It’s good living out here, he says. The people make the hour or so drive out to Columbia from time to time, but mostly, this is all anyone needs. For fun, they race cars down long stretches of empty road. Country racing, Teddy says. Nothing fancy, just two cars and a quarter mile of space.
“Out here, people can just sit outside and drink, and no one worries about you,” Teddy says, while the group explodes into fresh laughter at a round of the dozens getting into full swing. Gesturing toward the Johnny Boy’s sign, he smiles. “It feels really sacred out here. This place is ours.”
Outside the statehouse in Columbia, S.C., the air is stifling and unmoving.
Paris Lavelle and Demar at the first Trans Pride in Columbia, S.C.
Darius Jones is drenched in sweat, which soaks through his light blue shirt as he stands atop the statehouse steps, surveying the scene. A transgender pride flag is draped over his shoulder.
Today is Columbia’s first Trans Pride, the opening event for the weeklong Black Pride event. Mr. Jones, 30, has been president of South Carolina Black Pride for the past four years. He started with the organization when he was a sophomore at Allen University. Today, even covered in sweat and running from station to station to get the event in order, he radiates a palpable satisfaction at how the event has gone. “It was time to bring our transgender community to the forefront of Pride in South Carolina,” he tells me. “We’ve lost members of our transgender community to violence, and the people most at risk should be the people at the front.”
Rev. Robert Arrington, 59, a pastor at the Unity Fellowship Church in Charleston.
In a two-week span at the end of July and the start of August, two black transgender women were killed in South Carolina. On July 20, Denali Berries Stuckey was found shot on the side of the road in North Charleston. Fifteen days later, Pebbles LaDime Doe was found shot in a car near the Georgia border. (At least 19 transgender people have been killed this year in the U.S.) With this in mind, the tone of the festival sits at the intersection of rage and grief, though a feeling of hope rests on the horizon. Mr. Jones says that Columbia is something of an outlier in this red state.
“We have the only City Council in the state who has a hate crime law in the books,” he says. “The second reading will be in a couple weeks and then after that they’ll put it into law. We just need to make sure that gender identity is included, because if it’s not included then our transgender individuals and community are not protected.”
Sasha Wall, a black transgender woman, was killed in 2018.
The crowd at the event thickens as the trees offer up wider patches of shade. Rev. Robert Arrington stays in his chair in the sun, dabbing himself with a towel. He’s 59, and a pastor at the Unity Fellowship Church in Charleston. He says he is the only openly gay pastor in South Carolina; his congregation is very strong but very small. He’s currently at 10 members (“I had a few more, but there was some foolishness,” he says, “and that’s all I’m gonna say.”), and he wants to extend his reach to the transgender community of Charleston, particularly after the murder of Ms. Stuckey.
Rev. Arrington feels it’s important to separate religiousness and spirituality. Religion almost killed him, he says. But being spiritual saved his life. When I ask what the difference is, he thinks for a moment, swats at a fly with a heavy hand and turns his speaking cadence toward Sunday morning. “Well, religion is full of laws that no man can do and very homophobic and everything else,” he says. “Spiritual is Jesus. Who Jesus was. He was spiritual because religion put him on the cross, but spirituality rose him up.”
Paris Lavelle also preaches, at a church in D.C. She’s from South Carolina and was recently crowned Miss Trans South Carolina by the Black Trans Advocacy Coalition. “You kinda have that title until you die,” Ms. Lavelle jokes. “So I might keep it for another hundred years.” For the last 10 years, she’s been trying to bridge the gap between the black trans community and the black church. She’s back in South Carolina to strengthen those bridges. “There is a lot of issues here and there is a lot of harvest but there’s not enough laborers,” Ms. Lavelle says. “It’s time to bring laborer to the shrine. It’s time to bring a system. We can be doing 100,000 things, but if we’re not doing it with a system, it’s not going to work. So I’m going to do the work.”
The rally stretches on for nearly two hours. There are speeches, songs and readings. There are honors bestowed upon people like Dr. Ada Stewart, who three years ago shifted her practice specifically to helping trans patients. She’s 59, and came here from Cleveland. She believes that her work is all a part of some divine order. “I think God created me to care for folks who have less resources than I do,” she says. And then she is whisked away into the arms of yet another person, thanking her for saving their life.
Germaine Jenkins founded Fresh Future Farm in 2014 and just recently raised enough money to buy the property.
About a half a mile down Success Street in the Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood of North Charleston, S.C., the women of Fresh Future Farm are celebrating. They’ve been leasing this .81-acre stretch of land from the city since 2014, and just secured the funds to purchase it. Through a Kickstarter campaign, they raised $72,500, way surpassing their initial goal of $60,000. Germaine Jenkins, who founded the farm, mentions this casually while shuffling through the farm store’s opening duties.
It’s a point of pride for Ms. Jenkins, to weave her family into this work. Her children, Anik Hall and Adrian Mack, manage the store and the farm, respectively. Today, Mr. Mack sits on a chair in the corner of the store. His 10-month-old daughter Sierra sits on his lap as she pulls eagerly at strands of his hair, or fascinates herself with a tomato as big as her head.
Ms. Jenkins is 48 now, and has committed more than a decade of her life to understanding the earth and the many ways to care for the food that sprouts from it. She left her job as a nutrition coordinator at the Lowcountry Food Bank in 2009, cut her hair off, and went to Brazil. While there, she became interested in the fruit trees she saw all over the place, and decided that she could plant some back home, thinking Charleston’s climate would be ideal to help the trees flourish.
A compost tumbler on the farm.
Anik Hall, 23, at center, and Tamazha Pilsen, 21, at left, help manage the farm store, which is packed with essentials: juices and dairy products, snacks and — of course — fresh produce.
When she came back in 2010, she immediately dove into training on commercial urban agriculture in Philadelphia, in New Kensington. From there, she began farming in her own yard. “We have point eight one acres we’re standing on right now,” she says, gesturing toward the farmland. “But I started this all on a smaller scale in my own yard. Front yard, back yard, side yard. If we could grow on the roof, we would’ve done it.”
Ms. Jenkins has big plans for the land she will soon own. She wants to add a pavilion, so that she can hold classes and teach people natural farming practices. She wants to bring in fans to cool the space, and a kitchen so that she can bring in a farm chef. She wants to get to a point where she doesn’t have to water her crops every season. The banana trees don’t even know it’s hot outside, she says. They’re going to thrive no matter what, so it makes sense to add more bananas.
Adrian Mack, 20, with his 10-month-old daughter, Sierra.
The atmosphere inside the Hilton Head Island High School football stadium goes from calm to frenetic once the lights of the stadium flicker on. The student section swings flags and breaks out into chants that are sometimes synchronized and sometimes simply a blur of language and sound collapsing atop one another. Baby powder billows through the atmosphere.
Cheerleaders at Hilton Head Island High School.
Sarah Beachkofsky, 37, is the director of football operations at the school. Parents have complained about the baby powder, she says. Two students toss more of it into the air while a cluster of them laugh and try to gather the residue of it on their faces. Ms. Beachkofsky shrugs and smiles. “If the parents don’t like it, they can sit somewhere else,” she says. “It’s a big stadium.”
Most high schools in the country don’t have a director of football operations, and most directors of football operations aren’t women.
Coach Beach, as she’s affectionately called, has been doing this for eight years now at the side of head coach B.J. Payne. Ms. Beachkofsky makes sure all aspects of the football program are running smoothly before, during, and after the game. Earlier, while the teams were warming up, she ran around the stadium organizing audio crews and film crews, gathering people and getting them where they needed to be.
Now, in the middle of the first quarter, she’s overcome by a calm that comes and goes whenever a big play unfolds. This is the first game of the season. The Seahawks struggled last year, going 4-7. But this year feels different. There are 16 seniors, and a small handful of them have Division 1 colleges in their sights. Cole DeMarzo, a defensive back and wide receiver, is going to Michigan State. He’s already caught a touchdown and nabbed an interception tonight.
The Hilton Head Island Seahawks are up against the Savannah High School Blue Jackets.
When Hurricane Matthew hit the island in 2016, the players in this senior class were freshmen. The school had to be shut down in early October of that year. There were destroyed homes, evacuations. Some families didn’t return. When the school reopened, the football team didn’t practice. Instead, they went into the community and helped rebuild it.
There are no major league sports teams in the state, and definitely none in Hilton Head. The community comes out when they can on Friday nights, and cheers on the team. The high school is still relatively new, built in 1983. And so there aren’t a lot of legacy alumni who have stayed behind. Hilton Head is a somewhat transient town, so people come and go. Even so, those who remember how the team banded together during the hurricane come out to cheer them on. Cheers that grow as the Seahawks score yet another touchdown.
The team on the receiving end of Hilton Head High’s opening night excitement is the Savannah High School Blue Jackets, who made the 45-minute trip across the bridge separating Hilton Head from the Georgia border, and who appear to have a lot of fight in them, despite being overmatched. From a look at their sidelines, the team is all black. The majority of the school band is black as well — a band that earlier made a grand entrance, the sound of their horns briefly silencing the growing Hilton Head crowd making their way to seats in the moments before kickoff.
Frederico Foster is 38, and graduated from Savannah High in the late ’90s. While there, he played tuba and drums in the band. Tonight, he is kicking off his fourth year as its director, and he is in good spirits, if not a little exhausted. He says that the band prides itself on its sound, no matter what venue they’re walking into. But then, with a smirk, he adds “but the crowd knows who we are. They expect us to turn up a little bit too.”
Savannah High’s pep band.
Still, as the dynamics in Savannah shift, it gets harder to fill out things like the band and the football team. Savannah High is about a third of the size it was in the ’90s. Mr. Foster says that when he was in high school, there were six schools serving high school students in the entire city. Now there are 10, maybe 11. It makes recruitment hard, he says. It can feel like the band is always rebuilding. But they are known for their sound, which fills the entire stadium and drowns out those uneven chants from the Hilton Head student section in between quarters.
The band is harmonious and on point, and the few parents scattered along the visitors bleachers can’t help but sway along.
Savannah High’s football team is smaller and younger than Hilton Head’s. It’s a rebuilding year — and next year might be another rebuilding year. And what a contrast, to have a rebuilding year that simply means getting better at a game you love to play.
