Low Country, J. Jones [top 10 best books of all time .TXT] 📗

brothers’ apartment, and sang a song written about her and crooned only for her ears. Les had gotten rid of the timber wolf by then, and they had the place to themselves. It is a truth that my brothers and I grew up acknowledging as universal that a stage always means success. He had yet to transition from baseball cap to cowboy hat, from Converse to cowboy boots, and sang from the heart. Mom found the lyrics scribbled on a tornout sheet of notebook paper that was rolled up, tucked inside a wooden jewelry box alongside a mood ring gone a final shade of verdigris, some pocket change, a guitar pick, and a book of matches. Most treasure maps don’t ever get found. Just like in the movies, when she discovered this one almost forty years after it was last seen, the paper had ambered with age and frayed along the edges. Old ink bled the bridges into the chorus, but Drunken Jack’s matchbook portrait smiled still at the love song written on an aging telescope of paper.

3

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Horse Thieves & Millionaires

NOW THAT I AM HALFWAY ON THE SCENE, WE’LL continue our study of historic documents forgotten inside closets, shoeboxes, coat pockets, and photo albums, among which I include love notes, grocery lists, records of sale, old pictures with those wavy edges, lapsed calendars, diaries with years embossed in gold at the bottom right corner of the cover, birthday cards, and fast scribbles across the back of my hand. Let us pull from one such shoebox a photograph of the Gay Manor Hotel, which started it all for the Joneses. A postcard from 1948 in shades of black and gray shows what must have been a white brick building of three stories between Ocean Boulevard, on the south end, and the Atlantic. “670 Miles South of New York, 735 Miles North of Miami” reads a corner of the card, whose parking lot is filled with old, curvaceous black cars. Today it is a pizza parlor in the shadow of the SkyWheel, and a history book says it was started by the Jones brothers, but really it was their father, Harvey, from whom they bought it after World War II. The brothers old enough had all served in the Navy. Harvey Jones had traveled all over doing odd jobs and construction, pulling small-time scams and bootlegging to support his family of sons and one daughter. After they were married, Nana’s mother said every chance she could, “There weren’t any millionaires on our side of the family, but there weren’t no horse thieves neither.”

The Joneses settled in Myrtle Beach from Cool Spring, South Carolina, twelve miles north of Conway and east of Dog Bluff. The money for their first hotel built in the 1930s, one of the first on Ocean Boulevard, came from a gas station run by Harvey’s wife, my great-grandmother Pearl, only ever called Ol’ Mama and acknowledged as the boss. She ran the backroom dealings at the Gay Manor Hotel and the gas station and everywhere else they managed to acquire. Gambling houses and poker dens. Rum-running and burlesque joints. I have only ever seen two photos of her. One in black and white standing unsmiling in a white shirt and black skirt to the floor beside her husband. The second is in color, but tinged the red of photographs from decades past. It’s from a baby shower, my mom and Uncle Leslie’s wife each pregnant with another Jones boy at the same time, and Ol’ Mama stands crinkled with age and thick glasses behind a group of her grandchildren and their wives. I only know it is her from asking. Her voice low and coarse, she was not much for small talk. She drank her share of the whiskey, as likely to pull a pistol as pull you into her arms.

I can tell you little with absolute certainty except that if you want to get rich, try drinking. That is to say, other people’s drinking. Snake oil goes down quick in a cocktail. Harvey Jones had a lesser design, but a design nonetheless, in mind when he took his six sons into moving moonshine during Prohibition, after the war, and into the decades of brown-bag laws that kept alcohol out of reach, except if you knew a guy. They were not alone in the rum-running. Pirates of old favored the Grand Strand and the Low Country for the same reasons it became popular with the bootleggers, and thus anyone else looking for a good time. The water, the inlets and marshes and waterways that changed between storms and by phase of the moon, made hiding out from the law a breeze. Where Harvey and his sons the Jones brothers pioneered perhaps was in combining the bootlegging with their other entrepreneurial endeavors, and putting the money back into Ol’ Mama’s backroom casinos. From the postcard, it is easy to see how big the trunk of a standard car was then. The younger brothers, my granddaddy among them, kept a whole liquor store and a cash register hidden in the trunk, selling and doling change from the parking lots around Myrtle Beach. So go the family stories passed around like a bottle in a paper bag. Whenever an unfriendly cop came rolling by, they simply closed the trunk and drove down the boulevard.

When the law is not on your side, you pour it a drink and put it in the hand of a half-naked waitress. The Jones brothers spent the ensuing decades building more hotels, buying land and leasing it out, creating the golf courses, seafood restaurants, and carnivals that bring the tourists still. It was my great-uncle Keith, the eldest of the six brothers, who had this vision to go grand, to see high-rise hotels and resorts decked out in the hedonistic exoticism of the Cold War. What goes around comes around, so they say, and I have wondered if affluence built on the windfall