A Writer's Own Dream of America
Edenton, N.C., embodies the past
both real and imagined.
By JAN MORRIS
Until recently an ice cream shop near
my home in Wales habitually displayed in its window
a large volume of the paintings of Norman Rockwell.
They turned its pages every now and then to display
another picture, but the content never varied much.
Year after year that book exhibited to the locals
an ideal state of existence: life in small-town America,
where kindly countermen in drugstores served enormous
sundaes to freckled boys and preternaturally healthy
girls, while the adult populace peregrinated in amiable
commerce in some adorably unspoiled street outside.
We all knew, of course, that it was fantasy—ice
cream men were never so rubicund, those businessmen
outside the window could never be so benignly purposeful,
and for that matter sundaes were surely never quite
so generous. But we looked at those pictures with
a willing suspension of disbelief and loved to suppose
that there really might be such a municipal Elysium
somewhere to the west of us. And marvelous to relate,
not long ago I found it—not in its Norman Rockwell,
1950s New England version, but in a style no less
emblematically American.
I had never heard of Edenton,
on the coast of mainland North Carolina, when, pottering
around the South for a few weeks, I noticed its name
on the map. I liked the paradisiac sound of it, and
I liked the look of its location in Chowan County
on the Albemarle Sound. The road that led me there
was somewhat dispiriting. It skirted the Great Dismal
Swamp and then ran 30 miles or so through fairly loveless
cotton country, where scattered white cotton boles
along the roadsides suggested to me so many scraps
of loutish litter. It was beginning to get dark when
I reached the outskirts of the town, the usual muddle
of regional Americana, and my heart was sinking a
little as I drove into the main street of Victorian
shop fronts.
For more of this article, look for the July/August
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