They’ll wear haint blue to send off this legendary Lowcountry character | Opinion

Writer Roger Pinckney XI once told me Hilton Head Island had been tastefully ruined.

Then one morning after he’d read the daily news, he emailed an update from sleepy Daufuskie Island, our neighbor without a bridge where Pinckney, and others over the years, have hunkered down to get off the grid, or at least get out of the grind.

He clung so stubbornly to this way of life that he got the governor in a huff when he refused to evacuate for Hurricane Matthew, correctly insisting that the house he built would hold.

When Roger sent me his update, perhaps the news that prompted it that day was a Hilton Head crime per se, such as a shooting. Or perhaps it was a crime per Roger, such as the pouring of another slab of concrete to bury the scrap iron of true Lowcountry life.

But the message he sent me that day was clear. “I take away the ‘tastefully,’ ” Roger said.

His life ended rather suddenly on April 3 at age 77. He’d fallen a few days earlier and cut himself. He got bandaged, but “it went septic,” his daughter told me.

“And like the breath of God blowing over the marsh, he was gone,” said his daughter Laura Anton of Minnesota.

The family is asking people to wear haint blue to a celebration of Roger’s life at Freeport Marina on Daufuskie, beginning at noon on July 10.

By far the best-selling of more than a dozen books written by Roger is “Blue Roots: African-American Folk Magic of the Gullah People.” That folk magic includes “haint blue” paint on houses to ward off unwelcome spirits. It also includes Roger’s personal belief in the voodoo that drifts over his native land like moss on oaks.

When most people would look to a zoning board, Roger was more convinced that slick, modern developers would feel the power of the root when they built over Gullah ways and places.

Roger preferred the Lowcountry of his youth in Beaufort, when boys went down the river, absorbing the ways of nature, and human nature. He also tagged along with his father, the longtime coroner of Beaufort County whose tombstone declares him a raconteur.

His grandmother was a trailblazing female in South Carolina newsrooms of old. As a single mother she had to bang out words to stay alive.

Roger’s mother, Chloe Martin Pinckney, was a pistol. She told me she was very good at pitching a hissy fit. “I gave my children the best thing I could give them and that was to be born and bred in Beaufort,” she said, “and the jackasses have all left.”

She called Roger XI “the bane of my existence” — and surely a writer’s life that included four wives and 15 years on a farm in the far reaches of Minnesota could try a mother’s soul.

But Roger came home to the Lowcountry, and its scenes, dreams and scalawags run through his books, like “Reefer Moon.” And they run through his magazine articles about guns and dogs and wildlife.

Roger was always helpful to me. When the Wood Brothers Store on U.S. 17 in Green Pond closed, it was Roger who could best tell today’s Lowcountry cowboys racing up the river with twin 150 outboards why it mattered.

“You could buy oars, crab pots, decoy strings, snake boots, boiled peanuts, deer corn, cast iron pans, cane syrup and stone ground grits,” Roger said. “So sad.”

Roger shook a fist in the air at life in the fast lane, at authority, at many norms. It aggravated some, but enamored many more.

He leaves four blood children and, yes, a Roger Pinckney XII and Roger Pinckney XIII. But he leaves many more words. He hunted down stories and history like big fish and wild game. He was sometimes an obstructionist but always a conservationist.

The least we can do is ruin this place more tastefully.