By Tayler Simon - (Hopkins, S.C.)
We turn off the main highway and make our way down the long back road to the country. I am most likely asleep for the long car ride back home after making the journey of at least 25 minutes to town to get to anything in Columbia. We are heading back to the country.
We turn off Air Base Road and head down Cabin Creek Road. We finally turn down the bumpy driveway I learned to drive on when I was 13, park in the backyard, and enter the house through the back door. I couldn’t remember any time when we had even opened the front door, but you know that if you were a friend or part of the family. We finally made it back home.
While my permanent address wasn’t located in Hopkins, South Carolina, I consider myself from there. My great-grandparents on my maternal grandmother’s side tilled the soil as sharecroppers. My great-grandfather on my maternal grandfather’s side owned land in the country, which he gave to his children. The soil there is in my blood.
In 2022, 83.3% of Hopkin’s population was Black, 5.28 times more than any other ethnicity in the area. And just like my grandfather who still lives in Hopkins, there are mostly older Black people living there, with a median age of 53.9, the younger people migrating to Columbia or other surrounding areas.
Both of my parents came from rural South Carolina towns: my mother from Hopkins, South Carolina, and my father from Hartsville, South Carolina. Both left for the big city of Columbia looking for better opportunities than the rural nothingness they felt like they came from. My mother especially experienced a level of trauma that was growing up in poverty.
“We didn’t have a working toilet sometimes living in that house.” There were times when they had to use a makeshift outhouse in the backyard, my grandfather throwing their waste across the field. Because of this level of rural poverty, my mother doesn’t have many fond memories of growing up in Hopkins.
According to the census in 2018, 16 % of South Carolina’s population experienced poverty, compared to the national average of 14.1%. The counties with the most poverty are the most rural. Hopkins specifically has a poverty rate of 17.8%.
Fast-forward 15 years, and my sister and I find ourselves growing up in Hopkins, spending every day after school during the week at my grandmother’s house. It was a different one than my mother's, but only on a different street. Every day, we took that long back road to the trailer on Cabin Creek. Sitting on almost two acres of land, this small dwelling held so much love. But our grandmother was strict when it came to playing outside.
Even though we grew up with enough wide open space to play and explore, there were dangers lurking. The neighbors next door had Rottweilers that they kept locked behind a fence. They would sometimes get out, and dog biting was common in those parts. My mother talked about being locked behind their chain fence growing up, supposedly because the neighborhood kids weren’t a good influence, finding mischief my grandmother didn’t want my mom or uncle to be a part of.
My grandfather still lives in Hopkins, once again changing houses to another location down the street right before my grandmother passed. We have to drive by the land where the house where I once grew up sat. Today, a house has been built on it with an eight-foot privacy fence surrounding all sides, a fortress. My grandfather told me white people live there now.
I started to think about the fences. There were the fences that held the dangerous dogs, protecting us from them. There was the fence that held my mom and uncle in the house they grew up in, protecting them from getting the trouble from the neighborhood kids. What was the purpose of the fence that surrounded this house owned by white people on a street primarily inhabited by Black people?
Many people think gentrification only happens in urban centers. Gentrification is “a process of neighborhood change that includes economic change in a historically disinvested neighborhood —by means of real estate investment and new higher-income residents moving in – as well as demographic change – not only in terms of income level, but also in terms of changes in the education level or racial make-up of the residents.” In 2022, the median property value in Hopkins was $94,600, and the rate of homeownership was 78.8%. As of April 30, 2024, the average home value is $205,602, up 5.4% even from the past year.
I remember seeing an influx of new subdivisions popping up all over Hopkins. White, middle-class folks feeling the squeeze of high housing costs within the city found themselves moving to more rural areas where they could own more land for much cheaper. I kept thinking that this was the beginning of the end for this rural Black community. If Black people can’t afford to live here, where will they go?
“Gentrification is often associated with displacement, which means that in some of these communities, long-term residents are not able to stay to benefit from the new investments in housing, healthy food access, or transit infrastructure (Chapple, K., & Thomas, T., and Zuk, M., 2021)”
Even though my grandmother kept all her charges on a tight leash, there were some elements of freedom. “The neighborhood kids got to roam all over. It was a different time. It felt like your kids could ride their bikes and walk around whenever they wanted. It was safer,” my mother recalls.
There is still a beauty in rural communities like no other, especially the Black ones. There is beauty in the way that my mom, uncle, and grandpa talk about the history they have with the people in their community and how everyone knows everyone. There is beauty in the way we can drive down the street and always blow the horn at someone passing by. There is beauty in the way people always extend their love to you even though they don’t know you, but they know your people.
Regardless of my mother’s memories of poverty and us spending time in the house, I still associate Hopkins with a certain level of liberation. I think of my cousin running across the field between their home and my grandmother’s house when she learned to walk. I remember riding bikes down the hill, even though I didn’t learn how to ride until I was 12. I remember picking the really green grass, even though I didn’t realize it was wild green onions. I remember the night drives during the pandemic to my grandmother’s grave when I wanted to talk to someone who would understand me.
Rural communities suffer because they lack the resources and conveniences urban centers have. When I was in high school, I dreamed of one day when I could finally escape the small town of Columbia. But there is a certain magic in staying and planting roots in rural areas. Even though rural areas lack the amenities and resources, there is a way that community comes together to take care of one another to make up for the difference, creating a soul that is sometimes missing in more urban and suburban areas.
I am nervous to see the future of Hopkins. I don’t want to see my grandfather’s friends who still live in the community get pushed out because they can no longer afford to stay there. I am afraid that as more and more middle-class and wealthy people, as well as out-of-state investors, come in, they will buy up all the property from Black people who have owned the land for generations. Even if we decided to finally provide more resources and improve connectivity to the city center, this might still bring even more people into Hopkins, turning this rural Black community into something else.
All I have to hold onto from Hopkins for now are my memories of sky and grass, and my dreams of my grandmother sitting in her Lay-Z-Boy in the house I grew up in.
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