By Roger Pinckney
She left a bag of seedless red grapes, some boutique cheese and a loaf of Italian bread so hard a man might use it to defend himself. Also, a bottle and a mason jar. The jug was a liter of Amador, blended bourbon aged in Chardonnay barrels. We’d put a sizable dent in it the night before and I drank the last of it the next afternoon.
This is South Carolina, y’all, too small to be a republic and too large to be an asylum. The jar was moonshine from the Hell Hole Swamp, flavored with dark rum, just enough to make it look like maple syrup. But the similarity abruptly ended when I cracked the lid. There was such a sudden rush of extreme volatility that I was glad there was no open flame within 40 yards.
Hell Hole Swamp is about 2,500 acres in Northwest Berkeley County, SC, about 30 miles north of Charleston. The name first appears on a colonial map drawn by one James Cook in 1773. Three years later, British cavalry found it aptly named when they ventured into the watery morass in pursuit of Patriot partisans led by General Francis Marion, the old Swamp Fox. Mosquitoes, biting flies and gnats, moccasins, rattlesnakes, copperheads and enough gators to suit most anybody. But it was during Prohibition that the Hell Hole earned its infamy. For the bootlegging amongst the cypress and pines led to the assassination of District Judge and State Senator E. J. Dennis by Sporty Thornley, a tubercular veteran of the Great War who reportedly had all the intelligence of a turnip.
If you google E. J. and get to Find a Grave, it will tell you he was assassinated for battling “the liquor interests,” and he was. But it was other peoples’ liquor interests, not his. E. J. controlled the liquor constables and the revenue agents and ran a racket worthy of the Chicago mob. Agents would arrest any bootlegger upon his orders and seize the whiskey. Then E. J. sold the evidence to his own bootleggers, who sold it again and brought him some of the markup. As an attorney and judge, he would either represent the owners of confiscated booze or have another attorney bring the defendant before him as a judge. In either case, “a token of appreciation” was expected, plus legal fees, while thousands of gallons of Hell Hole moonshine went off to Charleston, a thirsty city from long before then, then, and now.
But the cash flows could not last forever. In 1930, in downtown Moncks Corner, SC, in broad daylight, Sporty Thornley laid a double-barreled shotgun loaded with buckshot across the hood of his car pointed in the general direction of Judge Dennis’ door, and when his honor exited, damn-it-all, the gun went off all by itself. Due to some murkiness of the exact circumstances leading to the judge’s demise, Sporty drew a life sentence rather than the chair. He was gonna die anyway, which he did.
E. J.’s son, Rembert, was elected to the State House of Representatives in 1938 and his father’s senate seat in 1942. As WWII was raging, Rembert said he did not want his candidacy to be thought of as a way of avoiding the draft, so he promised to immediately volunteer if he lost the election. He was doing it for his murdered daddy, and for his aggrieved momma too, as women were unelectable in those days. But he did not have to worry, he was more Democrat than Jesus and he won every election right up until his retirement 49 years later.
Rembert Calhoun Dennis served as chair of the finance committee, president pro tem of the senate. While Chair of the SC Democratic Party, he got a machine politician nominated to run for the US Senate, but his choice was thwarted when voters wrote in Strom Thurmond, the only successful US Senate write-in in US history. Upon his death in 1992, the state named a new office building in his honor, not bad for the son of a crooked judge and bootlegger.
So, I pour myself another dram, just a splash, mindful of the potency, which I judge 190 proof. Locals swear Hell Hole whiskey won’t make you all slobbery drunk, but I am not taking any chances. Slobbery or not, good whiskey is always better if you know the story behind it.
