McCLELLANVILLE, S.C. — Highway 17 heading north from Charleston is the kind of funky, low-country trail I love. Roadside vendors sell sweetgrass baskets made in Gullah tradition, and late-summer flora is profuse and aquarium green.
I stop at McClellanville Diner, where photographs on the wall show the boat that last night caught the shrimp you eat today. A window unit blasts cold air into the small dining area, where everyone seems to know — and like — everyone else. “Did you pay for ours, too?” a young woman asks a man who is leaving. He waves and smiles.
After leaving this cove of conviviality, I drive into the town of McClellanville itself, an unspoiled shrimping village outlined by live oaks and well-kept old houses. I make a mental note to write a column about the pretty place later. And I silently thank the fates for my job.
Before I get around to writing the column, South Carolina is in the news. I am sitting in my mother’s Alabama den, half-listening to the local news that she watches religiously at midday. Five bodies. Young children. Garbage bags. Pine Apple.
Pine Apple is a speck of a historic town not so far from where we sit, which is what makes local news vital. Turns out it also was a random choice for a dumping ground for five murdered children.
Their father, from Red Bank, South Carolina, dropped them there. He put his dead babies in separate garbage bags and left them to finish decomposing in the Alabama woods. Then he got back in his Cadillac and drove on into Mississippi.
By evening, the story is national. The awful details bleed from the tube, and we, my mother and I, try to fathom them.
It’s the kind of story you associate with big cities, not small Southern towns. Lexington County, South Carolina, after all, is but a few counties away from the friendly cafe and the shrimp boats and baskets. How could trouble like this brew in such a peaceful place?
I know too well it can. In 40 years in the business, I have done my share of what newspapers call “hard news.” By “hard” we mean serious, the opposite of features or human interest. We mean politics or murder or war or, well, tough stories that have to be told.
This story is “hard” by any definition of the word. It’s hard to watch the details as they emerge. It’s hard to see the paternal grandfather of the five children call his son, who has confessed, “Little Tim.” It’s hard to see the snaggle-toothed picture of one of the children. It’s hard to hear the details of the broken marriage that produced the kids and in the end destroyed them.
Maybe it’s my age or lack of ambition or saturation of the defenses you need to report a story like this. But I am grateful that no editor will be calling to ask that I cover the Mississippi memorial for the lost tots, or the trial for the murdering father or, worst of all, the grieving mother.
I’d rather write about the little restaurant along a blue South Carolina highway. The one that posted pictures of shrimp boats and big fish, and where today, I’m quite sure, the conversation is about a deranged man who killed his own blood and flesh.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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