South Carolina isn’t red, it’s orange

The Palmetto State is in Donald Trump’s sway (but not entirely)

South Carolina, bless its seceding little heart, has some wonderful beaches. But to get to them, if you’re driving, requires traversing highways that take you past some pretty bleak landscapes: scruffy, clear-cut pine forests, weather-beaten mobile homes with junkyard lawns, cow pastures dotted with decrepit barns and rusting harrows.

The occasional grand, white-columned mansion that you see just underscores the income inequality that’s afflicted the state since the time of slavery.

It was on one of these roads to the Atlantic coast last Saturday that I spied a Donald Trump store. I say “a” Trump store, not “the,” because when I did a smart phone search later, hoping to pinpoint its address, I discovered there are least six other Trump stores in South Carolina.

The one that I U-turned to photograph didn’t have any Trump Bibles — that’s the ex-President’s exclusive side hustle — but it had pretty much everything else a Trump-worshiping/Biden-hating traveler could want, including signs that read “Joe and the Ho Must Go” and flags that substituted rows of assault weapons for stars and stripes.

I didn’t go inside. A sign on the grounds said “Patriots Only.” I’m not unpatriotic, but I suspect we would have disagreed on the meaning of the term.

The mere existence of the store — and others like it — makes a statement. We’ve had campaign buttons and such for more than a century, but never a President, or ex-President, so heavily merchandised. It’s a Trump precedent, a dubious first, like his weekly pep rallies while in office and his poisonous refusal to acknowledge the reality that he lost his 2020 bid for reelection.

The sheer ugliness of the store, the cultism and insinuations of violence, threatened to cast a pall over our Easter weekend at the beach.

Thank God, then, for Aunny’s.

Aunny’s is a little soul food cafe on the main drag of Georgetown, the last town of any size we passed before getting to the ocean.

We stopped for a quick bite and found — well, you could say redemption. Not for ourselves, for South Carolina.

It wasn’t just that the food was good (I had speckled butter beans with okra, candied yams, and mac and cheese creamy as a souffle), it was what was on the walls.

Yaruban murals.

Portraits of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, the Obamas, and Elvis.

Framed vintage photos of farm hands black and white.

The clientele was that, too. Black and white, 1/2 and 1/2 like the ice tea choice.

There is hope for South Carolina.

There is hope in South Carolina.

There’s probably hope for us all.