Free Folly Beach by Dorothea Benton Frank Page B

and potatoes. Anyway, surprises and miracles happened in my kitchen on Folly Beach. And no one ever died from my catch-as-catch-can cooking skills, well, no one I knew of anyway. As a rule, small portions of blandness did not kill.
    Oh, sure, breakfast was easy enough to put together—a few fresh eggs from Romeo, the island egg man, a slice of toast, a glass of juice. Or cereal! What an absolutely brilliant invention were cornflakes? With sliced banana? Even I could handle that. And our midday dinner wasn’t completely beyond my capabilities either. I just always kept it simple because of our budget. Besides, DuBose and I kept a strict regime, being ever-vigilant of our health. On Sunday, if we weren’t invited to dinner with friends or his mother, I might bake some chicken or pork chops with steamed rice and maybe I’d boil up a head of broccoli. No cream or sauces. Nothing spicy. Our digestive systems would have rebelled. We were not accustomed to much more than a little butter or the smallest sprinkle of salt.
    When the day was at an end and I had to produce yet another meal I always wished we could just forget it. And sometimes I was just so tired. Another meal? Didn’t I have a full-time job, a young daughter whose care was almost solely mine, and a house to run as well? Sometimes, when I was on the verge of exhaustion, I wondered why women found managing a household so attractive and that’s when I would think about Jo Pinckney and just how smart she really was to never marry. Honestly, some days it was all just too much, especially when my head was deep in the process of creating a new story.
    But on most days I took my domestic duties in stride. DuBose wasn’t fussy about the state of the house or his meals. Often, I made sandwiches or plates of sliced leftovers from the previous day. If there were any to be had, that is. If I did not plan for leftovers, which I never seemed to calculate quite right, there would have just been more cornflakes! It seemed to me that I should’ve been able to come up with a more satisfying plan, so sometimes I served a dinner meal for supper and just quick sandwiches for our midday meal, especially if my writing was going well. To stop writing around noon to cook a hot meal usually meant my workday would come to an end, because it was hard to change gears and cook and then change them again to return to my writing table. This is sounding confusing, even to me, but the point is that I felt that the more time I spent out of the kitchen the better it was for our health, our finances, and our careers.
    Oh, those were the days! Such sweet days! DuBose and I were married for seven years before we were finally blessed with a child we brought home at first to our farm, Dawn Hill in Hendersonville, North Carolina, and then to our little cottage surrounded by pines and live oaks on Folly Island. The days we spent with Jenifer on Folly are still the happiest ones I can remember. She was such a sensitive child, prone to inexplicable forgetfulness and episodes of vagueness, well, we hoped the salt air would be good for her.
    Maybe it was the latter part of March, 1934? Well, it was the time we were waiting, almost pacing the floors really, to hear if and when Mr. Gershwin would grace us all with his royal presence. At my urging, DuBose had been writing to him all the time, enticing him with stories about the exotic and primitive practices of the Gullahs. He told him that he had a Negro church he desperately wanted him to come and visit. The members of this congregation danced something called the “double clap” when they were moved by the spirit. I had seen it and it was indeed powerful, in fact, I had seen people faint from the frenzy of it. DuBose was certain the dance and the music had survived intact from their African roots, because there was nothing like it in the whole canon of American liturgical music.
    And there was another, more sensual kind of dance he discovered as well. He