Life and Island Times
Coastal Empire September 22 2016 – Route Seventeen

Alongside route 17 outside of Savannah Marlow and W spied a house. The frames around its windows and doors were painted blue. Folks, especially in South Carolina’s Low Country and Georgia’s Coastal Empire, have a name for this paint’s soft blue-green hue – “Haint Blue.” Haints are the restless spirits of the dead who, for whatever reason, have not moved on from their physical world.”

These were not your quiet, floaty, sorrowful ghosts; they were the kind you didn’t want to mess with, and the kind you certainly didn’t want invading into your humble abode looking for revenge.

According to legend, the sole thing haints feared was crossing water. Living in an underwater bubble or building one’s house inside a moat wasn’t an option. So, locals chose a simpler – some might say more elegant – solution. They would dig a pit in the ground, fill it with lime, milk, and whatever bluish pigments they could find, stir it all together, and paint the mixture around every opening into their homes. The haints, confused by these watery pigments, would be tricked into thinking they couldn’t enter.

Low Country examples of haint blue

The route seventeen house’s wooden clapboards were warped and gray from old age just like the area’s people. The house sat on concrete pilings a couple of feet up from the ground. The soil surrounding the house had been pounded flat and lifeless, so that nothing could grow there.

Marlow had seen this foundation preparation before back in the 70s when he loved in the marsh country of North Carolina. There the issue was snakes. There wasn’t going to be any bad snakes hiding there on the dirt. Marlow also suspected that now and then turpentine was poured on the ground around the foundation to keep snakes from lurking in the cool space under the house.

As they slowed their car down to peer into the dark shade of a century old live oak that dominated the home’s front yard, they saw a broken down red wagon.

As the car sped up as they passed, their minds slowed down to wonder whether around supper time one could stop there and ask for some food and get invited in. The meal would be pan fried cornbread and maybe some catfish from the nearby pond. Hot bacon grease and vinegar when they had on e or the other might be poured over raw collard greens. There might be some grits too and ice tea with sugar and lemon.

Maybe next time they passed that way, they just might stop and visit this world from their individual pasts. Both had known poverty and isolation but remembered that it had not meant sadness. For a brief moment, they savored memories when potatoes could be made into a feast and a single toy was forever.

Copyright © 2016 From My Isle Seat