Madame Margot: A Grotesque Legend of Old Charleston

By John Bennett Gre and Harlan Greene

John Bennett's classic tale, based on Gullah folklore, is set in antebellum Charleston, where a desperate mother sells her soul to ensure her daughter's happiness. With a new introduction by Harlan Greene.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Jan 11, 2004
• ISBN: 9781439676981

John Bennett Gre

Harlan Greene is a native of Charleston, and the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction. His novel What the Dead Remember won the Lambda Literary Award for best gay male fiction, and his current novel is The German Officer's Boy. He has also published on Charleston literary figures, slave badges, and early American Jewish history. He has published in such magazines as Art and Antiques and Metropolitan Home and is considered an authority on Charleston history, being interviewed on National Public Radio, the BBC and other international sources. He has served as assistant director of the South Carolina Historical Society, director the North Carolina Preservation Consortium and is now affiliated with the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston.

Book preview

THE STORY OF MADAME MARGOT

by Harlan Greene

THE STORY OF MADAME MARGOT, as its marvelous opening sentence suggests, is a very odd one indeed. Readers experiencing it for the first or fiftieth time are instantly transported in time to a town of Mediterranean manners and Caribbean ways (surely one of the best capsule descriptions of Charleston) and are held captive, as if in the thrall of a hallucinatory drug, as the drama of dreams, desire and the devil unfolds. Paralleling the tale—in a dark underworld of its pre-existence—is a still odder story: that of its creation and how John Bennett, the man who saved it from oblivion (for it is a true story in its way) and fashioned such a lush and extravagant setting for it, was nearly destroyed for his efforts by the very city he had tried to please.

One of the most ironic parts of the whole saga is how pure and adulatory the author’s motivations were. Born in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1865, John Bennett had never seen the South and, in fact, had met very few African Americans before he arrived in the city of Charleston, South Carolina, in November of 1898. He would become an acknowledged source on African American folk life, language and lore in the coming years, but now he was known only as a successful author for children for his book Master Skylark. He was working on his second children’s book and was visiting the Smythe family of Charleston, whom he had met in West Virginia some years before.

Bennett stayed with them for a few weeks and then moved into a boarding house, settling down in Charleston for the winter. With the passage of time, the city got into his blood and Susan Smythe, the youngest daughter of the family, worked her way into his heart. John Bennett and Susan Smythe were married in 1902, and from that time on, he was a permanent resident of the city.

Charleston, and in fact the South as a whole, at the time had no great number of writers or artists, nor was there a strong body of writing yet about the area, depicting it as it was with all its flaws and fascinations. Southerners and non-Southerners alike were in love with the image of the fine colonel and his lady, the evil carpetbagger and the happy child-like black picking cotton for Maussa. It was a world that had never existed, but people believed in it nonetheless. Like kudzu this fantasy grew and grew, engulfing any attempt to render the South realistically.

Now living in the South, Bennett realized this, but at the same time he could almost understand this paralysis, for it was as if realism could not exist in the hothouse atmosphere of Charleston at the beginning of the twentieth century. Navigating the streets was a magic trip; threading his way through Charleston’s Byzantine network of courts and alleys, Bennett came under the spell of the city’s barbarous and bizarre beauty. He was fascinated by what he saw and heard. (He’d write a description of these streets and what they meant to him, publishing it in The Reviewer in 1922. For the first time, it is reprinted here.) He became intrigued with Gullah, the language spoken by the local African Americans—a patois containing Af-rican words, with out-dated words spoken by Welsh and Irish and British overseers from whom slaves had learned English, all grafted onto African grammar. Although Bennett was not a formal scholar—he had not even finished high school—he was highly intelligent and he knew that local African American culture in Charleston and the Lowcountry deserved study and investigation.

So while he worked on his fiction (he published a novel with a local setting, The Treasure of Peyre Gail-lard, in 1906) he kept researching local lore. At the same time, he published a scholarly article on the Gullah language and he had already begun collecting African American spirituals. In 1903, he had given a lecture on Spiritual Songs of the Old Plantation to the City Federation of Women’s Clubs in Charleston, saying that these were the only real folk songs this country has produced.

At this time in America, and in the South particularly, such a view was pretty shocking. African American culture was not considered worthy of serious study. Indeed, the concept of there being any such thing as African American Culture would have been labeled poppycock or worse. (A year or two before Bennett’s lecture, at the Negro Pavilion of the South Carolina Interstate and West Indian Exposition held at Charleston, a statue depicting the African Americans’ contribution to America had shown blacks in mostly servile positions.) Bennett, however, knew better and, mostly on the sly, he kept meeting with the Smythe family servants and their friends and acquaintances—many of them ex-slaves. Bennett had an open mind. He was not invested in a defense of slavery, nor did he need to prove white superiority. As an outsider, he could discern fascinating possibilities where many natives saw nothing at all. (He saw a whole language where other whites in town just saw bad English.) So in the evenings, and in stray moments on long summer afternoons, he’d sit out back while the servants and others smoked and he’d listen to the stories they told and he asked them countless questions.

It was Walter Mayrant, a man Bennett had helped get out of trouble, who approached Bennett and asked him about this interest of his. Mayrant and a friend, Caesar Grant, had been paid by a white man to move lumber from one spot to another. The white man was really tricking them into stealing it for him—and Mayrant and Grant, though innocent, were caught and taken to court. In this era, being black was almost a guarantee of being found guilty. Bennett had saved them from this and they saw his generosity and sincerity. (Bennett would later credit both Mayrant and Grant for particular tales in his collection of folk tales, The Doctor to the Dead, and he would paste in a picture of Mayrant in at least one copy of that book.)

Why is it, Mayrant asked Bennett, that white men are always trying to get the black man’s knowledge? He was curious to know why Bennett was spending time with him and others. Isn’t he satisfied to know what the white man knows?

Bennett was able to convince Mayrant that he had no surreptitious end in view, no wish to ridicule or betray, but was sincerely fascinated with what they had to say. From that hour on, Bennett recorded, he and Mayrant were in entire rapport. And through his confident introduction, I was able to meet and secure much curious lore from other men and women not in my employ. These folk, Bennett discovered, were veritable storehouses of fable, myth, fantasy, and parable, folk wit, curiously shrewd and distinguished.

Soon after his arrival in Charleston, Bennett began to hear little bits and pieces, just echoes really, of stories that had been told long before the Civil War and were now on the verge of being silenced entirely. These fragments of fable and myth [were] already far decayed and rapidly passing out of existence when Bennett came to town. Kicked about from gutter to gutter, straying like an alley cat from squalid court to squalid court, they had been abandoned and disowned. What was left had to be retrieved from trash cans, gutters and dustbins of the city’s