On Tuesday morning, December 11, 2012, I rented a Chevrolet Impala and drove out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on I-40 East toward Berkeley County, South Carolina, a former slave plantation region near the coast where Smith photographed his 1951 Life essay “Nurse Midwife.”
Smith’s patented reputation as a sensitive maverick, which took root in his twenties with combat photography in the Pacific theater of World War II, cemented into legend with “Nurse Midwife.” It was Smith’s first assignment after being confined to Bellevue when police found him wandering the Upper West Side naked (or in his boxers; accounts differ) in the spring of 1951. With a new opportunity to prove himself, Smith bucked Life’s editors and South Carolina officials by choosing Maude Callen, a black woman, as the focus of his essay instead of a white subject. He first undertook two weeks of midwife training to gain perspective, then he followed Callen for two and a half months, gaining her trust and friendship. (By contrast, James Agee and Walker Evans spent less time, two months, in rural Alabama in 1936 for their epic book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.) The resulting twelve-page essay in Life inspired $27,000 in unsolicited donations to Callen, helping her to build a new clinic. For the rest of his life, Smith called “Midwife” his favorite story and Callen the most impressive human being he’d ever met.
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I wasn’t sure what I could learn by visiting Berkeley County sixty years after “Midwife” was published and twenty-two years after Callen had passed away at age ninety-two. Before leaving home, I consulted the Duke biologist Matt Johnson, who studies peat moss in Hell Hole Swamp, which is in the center of Callen’s former house-call territory.
The Hell Hole Swamp Wilderness area is part of the Francis Marion National Forest. It first shows up as “Hell Hole” on a 1775 map, which disproves the theory that Francis Marion, “The Swamp Fox,” named it during the Revolutionary War. Somewhere I read that the name “Hell Hole” goes back to the native people who reportedly would not enter “The Hells,” believing there to be spirits at work.
The swamp is a combination of pine savannah and pocosins, Johnson told me. The latter is a uniquely Southern coastal plain ecotype: cypress, or Taxodium, trees rise and loom over a dense understory choked with smilax, locally called “blasphemy vine,” and standing water that frequently has several species of Sphagnum, or peat moss, floating in it.
During Prohibition, the pocosins are where the moonshiners would hide from the authorities. The moonshine economy pretty much kept the area afloat, so to speak. Every year, on the first weekend in May there’s the Hell Hole Swamp Festival in nearby Jamestown. The mascot of the festival is a moonshine still made out of a car radiator. They reenact abductions of moonshiners by the feds.
From April through October the mosquitoes are thick enough to make a dense gray cloud everywhere. It’s a truly nasty place to be, unless you study peat moss. Even then, you need a machete and DEET. But Hell Hole Swamp is a weird place—in the thick of summer, the mosquitoes are actually absent due to the abundance of dragonflies. If you bring some waders and stand in the center of the swamp, it can be a pretty serene experience.
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I peeled off I-95 after passing South of the Border. Driving back roads seventy miles farther southeast, I entered northern Berkeley County on SC-52 heading down toward the crossroad with SC-45 at the little town of St. Stephen. Spanish moss dripped from the pines and live oaks as I passed scenes of abandoned grocery stores, pawnshops, roadside hair salons, rotting wood-plank barns, and the wild, unfarmed fields that mark today’s rural Southern landscape.
During Maude Callen’s midcentury prime, SC-45 and SC-52 formed the axis of her daily travels, with the then-dirt 45 connecting her home in Pineville with Hell Hole Swamp ten miles to the east, and 52 reaching south thirteen miles to Moncks Corner, the county seat with a population of around five thousand. Callen put 36,000 miles per year on her car driving around this poverty-stricken area, which was nearly 90 percent black. Her job was a necessity; the doctors from Moncks Corner wouldn’t go there.
I met a man named Keith Gourdin (pronounced guh-dine) at a trailer-size redbrick post office on Highway 45 in Pineville, which is not a town anymore, just a word on a green sign you pass when driving by. Gourdin was born in Berkeley County in 1940. He and his wife, Betty, have been married since 1962 and live today in a mansion built in Pineville by his grandparents. His French Huguenot ancestors settled in Berkeley County in the seventeenth century and operated several cotton plantations there.
In the past decade, with his farming and land-management slowing down, Gourdin has become a meticulous historian of Berkeley County, combing archives and memories. On top of his pool table, in a foyer with a fourteen-foot ceiling, Gourdin has built a toy model of Pineville at midcentury, replete with replica churches, stores, houses, railroad tracks, and roads, almost none of which still exist today.
As a child and youth, Gourdin lived two miles down Highway 45 from Maude Callen’s house and the clinic that was built after Smith’s essay. When he was sick and needed care, particularly procedures involving needles, he begged his mother to take him to Nurse Maude instead of the doctors in Moncks Corner. She didn’t make you hurt, he said.
Gourdin was twelve years old when Smith’s “Nurse Midwife” story was published in Life in December 1951. The piece created a stir in Pineville. The staff at the post office had to work overtime to handle all of Nurse Maude’s mail, said Gourdin. I remember people talking about how the carriers had to make several extra deliveries per day to keep up with the mail she was getting from around the country. She was getting mail from around the world.
The mail was delivered on a dirt road. Today that road is paved, though seldom traveled. Decay and desolation prevail, just as they did after Sherman plowed through. Maude Callen’s patients have moved to Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, and Wilmington. Her former clinic is forlorn.
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A week before I visited Berkeley County, South Carolina, I learned that in 1936, Time Life’s magnate, Henry Luce, and his wife, the flamboyant Clare Booth Luce, purchased a three-thousand-acre former slave plantation there, only twenty miles from the poverty-stricken region where Smith made “Nurse Midwife.” The Luces made the plantation their vacation estate.
Did Smith know this? Is that why he fought so hard to celebrate Maude Callen amid the pages of Life’s whitewashed Madison Avenue ads, to shove the contradictions in Luce’s face? It’s hard to know. Nothing in the archive indicates that he knew.
In 1949, the Luces donated part of the Mepkin Plantation to the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani of Kentucky, creating Mepkin Abbey. When Henry died in 1967, his body was laid to rest in the property’s gardens. After Clare’s death in 1987, her body was buried next to his. As a serial graveyard explorer, I knew I had to see these graves, which together with Callen’s abandoned and crumbling clinic form an unlikely set of Berkeley County monuments to Life’s midcentury power, which Gene Smith both hated and needed.
I parked my car at the abbey and walked to the garden grave sites under a cold December mist. The understated, serene gardens were terraced in a series of semicircles down the bank of the Cooper River. I stood looking at the pair of Luce gravestones on the highest terrace, an eight-foot marble cross poised between them, while a young monastic sat meditating cross-legged on an oval stone wall that rings the graves.