If I had to attribute my love of walking to anyone, it would be my grandmother. Grandma Inez didn’t have a car. In fact, she didn’t know how to drive. So, when my parents would drop us off in Charleston for the summer, we walked everywhere. We walked to Piggly Wiggly (a grocery store, for you Northerners). We walked to visit her seamstress friends. And no trip to Charleston was complete without a walk to the Battery.
The Battery overlooks Charleston Harbor, where the American Civil War started. During that time, it served as a defense against Union soldiers, and held ammunition for the Confederacy. Now, it’s a beautiful park filled with enormous live oak and palmetto trees and ghosts of its past, like so many parts of the city.
As a little girl, any mention of the Battery would elicit an eye-roll followed by an internal boring—I knew better than to share those sentiments with the adults. But now that I’ve grown up, it holds precious memories of the time I spent with Grandma Inez. I remember on one trip there, we stopped to rest on a bench. As we stared out to where the sky met the harbor, she told me that as a little girl, she couldn’t sit on the benches in the park.
At that age, I understood what racism and Jim Crow were, but I didn’t realize the significance of that moment until years later. That memory lives right alongside the one of us making red rice, our bodies pressed together as we stirred tomato paste in a hot cast iron skillet.
When I found myself in Charleston for the city’s food and wine festival, I knew I couldn’t leave without visiting the Battery. Luckily it was a mere mile from my hotel, so in honor of Grandma Inez, I walked towards that bench as soon as the sun brightened the morning sky. As I sat in the park, watching the sunlight dance on top of the water, I finally understood why my grandma enjoyed the place. Or at least, I like to think I do.
