This Town Refuses to Die

It began with small hand-printed signs, posted now and then at the foot of the bridge joining this unruly South Carolina sea island to the mainland city of Charleston. Come to a meeting at the high school, the signs invited. Come help the new James Island Residential Assn.

Bill “Cubby” Wilder saw one of those signs. He went to a meeting, then told others what was up. Eventually, Ron Middleton grew interested. So did Inez Brown-Crouch, and Mary Clark, and John Mizzell, and Jack Bryant and dozens of others.

Some were black, some white. Some were just scraping by, some had land and water-view homes. Many hadn’t crossed paths before. All, though, shared something: ire at Charleston’s relentless invasion of unincorporated James Island. Ire--and longing too: for a vanishing world, for human-scale existence, for control over their own lives.

They’d been losing all that, it seemed to them, ever since Charleston--hungering for a broader tax base--started annexing chunks of their historic island more than 20 years ago. Over three decades, densely wooded acres, thick with live oak, had turned to Wal-Marts and Burger Kings and shopping malls. Empty country roads had turned to auto-clogged thoroughfares. Nineteenth century farms had turned to upscale housing tracts.

The wave of progress hadn’t reached all neighborhoods, though. On Cubby Wilder’s Sol Legare, on Ron Middleton’s Grimball, on Inez Brown-Crouch’s Honey Hill, on all the poorest black pockets of James Island, certain citizens were still waiting for paved roads, sewer lines, clean water, street lights.

Just whom do you represent, various mainland bureaucrats asked these islanders when they came to lobby. To be heard, you must represent some group. You must have standing.

That’s just what the hand-printed signs offered: standing. It was Joan Sooy who posted them, Joan Sooy who called everyone to the local high school.

Her words rang out at those meetings. There she stood at the first one in 1983, a sight to see: a big, husky, breathless dynamo, a divorced 51-year-old white woman, a Yankee no less, only five years on the island. We are watching our island disappear, she declared. Once it’s gone, it can’t be recovered. We must protect our island. We must protect our interests.

Those from comfortable neighborhoods, unhappy with clogged roadways, nodded vigorously enough. But those from the poorer black sections understood most deeply what Sooy meant. After all, they were here before anyone else; they were the original James Islanders; they remembered how it used to be.

Cubby Wilder, his father driven from the island’s oyster beds by state regulators, eagerly joined the cause. So did Ron Middleton, fuming over his fruitless battle for sewer lines. Inez Brown-Crouch, wrapped in bright-colored scarves, eyes dancing with mischief, almost sang out her support: “Enough is enough. Let’s get away from that damn plantation mentality.”

For six years they fought isolated battles: drainage problems, tree clear-cutting, ugly billboards, not enough recreation. “Too many damn things to fight,” Joan Sooy would lament. “A microcosm of life.”

Then Sooy stopped complaining. Enough of this, she announced. Let’s hold a referendum. Let’s start our own town.

Eyes widened at that notion. Raffles, auctions and oyster roasts followed. So did a lawyer, a feasibility study and a petition drive. Thus by a narrow margin did the town of James Island, population 18,000, 40% black, come to be in early 1993.

This is not, however, the story of a town’s creation. This is the story of a town’s demise. In January, heeding Charleston’s pleas, South Carolina courts ordered 4-year-old James Island shut down. The end didn’t come easily: Right up until assets were seized and town hall locks changed, those bent on reclaiming a vanished way of life brashly resisted those with a sweeping vision for Charleston’s future.

In truth, James Island--despite repeated court edicts, despite a rash of death knells, despite a judge’s furious threat of contempt charges--even now keeps twitching in its grave. It no longer has officers or funds or a town hall, but it’s still fighting in various courtrooms.

“A renegade little town,” declares Charleston City Atty. Bill Regan. “Almost like a banana republic.”

Gregg Meyers, one of James Island’s lawyers, puts it a little differently: “More like a scraggly Confederate army, fighting on with rags tied around its feet.”

First Shots of Civil War Fired on James Island

References to revolutionary times are unavoidable among those studying the James Island conflict. The first shots of the Civil War, after all, were fired at Ft. Sumter from Ft. Johnson on James Island. From then on--as James Island citizens are quick to point out these days--cannon at Ft. Johnson protected Confederate-held Charleston throughout the Civil War.

Perched on the southwest portion of Charleston Harbor, two miles by bridge from Charleston, James Island represents genuine Carolina low-country. Even some houses built well inland sit on tall posts, awaiting the inevitable tidal surges. Redolent of the past, yet infested by the present, the 10-square-mile island offers strings of fast-food stands backed almost to the edge of lush, overgrown marshes. The remnants of a grand plantation rise around the corner from a Kmart. Affluent doctors and lawyers, drawn by tony new housing developments, bump shoulders with the memory-laden descendants of plantation owners and slaves.

The James Island community, just one year younger than Charleston itself, dates from 1671, when 30 land grants awarded by King Charles II resulted in abundant domains richly cultivated with Sea Island cotton and Carolina Gold rice. The planters’ wealth flowed readily into Charleston, fueling a prosperous center of cosmopolitan culture.

That world, of course, didn’t last: By the middle of this century, hundreds of plantation-owner descendants--14 families in all--were struggling right along with thousands of slave descendants. “The whites were land-poor,” recalls Mary Clark, who dwells still at Clark Point, where her forebears once owned hundreds of acres. “The blacks were just plain poor. We had to rely on each other. We got along.”

Many lived off the land and sea: They fished, slaughtered pigs and cows, grew tomatoes and beans, okra and corn. Cubby Wilder, retired from the Air Force now, recalls earning $3 a day cleaning yards; tells of 12-hour days picking tomatoes for $2.50; Ron Middleton, a retired engineer, describes lugging potatoes on the Dill Plantation for $7.50 a week.

The blacks talked Gullah--an African slave-West Indies way of running words together fast, so plantation managers couldn’t understand--but the whites sounded much like them on the phone.

“Common interests,” is how Inez Brown-Crouch, 57, recalls it. “We all had more in common than not.”

Then the developers arrived, starting in the 1950s. To old plantation families, that meant cash for long-fallow land. “At first, we thought it was OK,” Mary Clark explained. “We’d go take a dish to the new homeowner. Only after awhile did we see they weren’t the sort you’d want to take dishes to.”

Too late. By then, Charleston had turned its covetous eye on James Island. Soon came a new bridge that put the city just minutes away. Then came ever more mainlanders, newly realizing what a nice oasis sat nearby. Country Club Estates II, Harborwood III--phase after phase, the housing developments filled with affluent homeowners. All had sewers, all had street lights.

To Ron Middleton and Cubby Wilder and Inez Brown-Crouch, it looked like an invasion, and an insult. Despite repeated pleas to their county and public service district--despite years of local organizing--they still had their dark unpaved roads, their seeping septic systems, their unprotected water supplies. Now, though, they dwelt just minutes from an alternative.

Ron Middleton, talking about all this one morning as he paced about the Honey Hill community hall, looked as if he might--but for deeply ingrained manners--punch a wall. Here he was, twice wounded in Vietnam, a U.S. citizen who’d fought for his country, 51 years old, fighting still. We don’t need basics, he fumed, we don’t need what white folks take for granted, because we’re not important. We’re stupid country folk. They want us blacks under their thumb.

“Why not get down to it?” Middleton finally suggested, with as much embarrassed regret as anger. “If you want to be honest, we were being ignored.”

Inez Brown-Crouch, who has “gone away” for 16 years, who has lived everywhere and tasted big city life--she wants it known she can talk Yiddish just as well as Gullah--agreed but at moments viewed the matter less personally: “There’s no tax base here where we live. It’s economics. Your property’s worth just $25,000--who’s going to put in a sewer system?”

On Island, Charleston Saw Growing Room

It is easy to understand Charleston’s hunger for James Island land. Until 1960, the city existed entirely on a confined peninsula, where 40% of the land mass comprised a tax-free historical district. Aristocratic and sophisticated, densely adorned with 300-year-old homes, vintage churches and winding cobblestone roads, Charleston drew admiring tourists but limited tax revenue. By the time Joseph P. Riley Jr. took over as mayor in 1975, he was convinced that Charleston would die if it didn’t grow.

His attention almost instantly turned to James Island. There it sat, just across a ribbon of water. It wasn’t really an island, it seemed to him. Only technically. It really was a natural part of the greater metropolitan area. A suburban bedroom community, full of open space, promising a bountiful tax base.

Charleston has never tried to obscure its tactics. To be annexed, land had to be contiguous to the city. So Charleston began annexing rivers and creeks, ponds and marshes, whatever waterways it needed to reach targeted James Island land. Charleston crossed the Wappoo Cut to claim The Charleston Country Club, then the Country Club Estates housing development; Charleston “came down river” to reach the Dill plantation (after Mayor Riley wooed 90-year-old Ms. Dill with flowers and visits); Charleston carved 10-foot-wide paths through marshes to reach the Harborwood development.

Certain outraged citizens on James Island now hold up the resulting maps, laced with narrow winding strips of city-owned land, to show just how devious Charleston has been. Yet Charleston’s city attorney, Bill Regan, holds up the very same maps to show just how clever Charleston has been. The city’s plan, after all, wasn’t merely to acquire land; it was to prevent the residents from forming a town.

“Early on with James Island,” Regan happily explains, “the idea was to break the island up into noncontiguous portions, to divide the island so it can’t incorporate as a town.”

Divide it Charleston did. Over 20 years, the city claimed half of James Island, a third of the population. The results weren’t all ruinous--a YMCA, two parks, a fire station--but downtown Charleston didn’t exactly replicate its charm on the island. Charleston built a sewage treatment plant--”their outhouse,” Mary Clark calls it; “I’m from Kentucky hills, and I know what an outhouse smells like.” Charleston lured developers with rezoning and variances. Charleston approved shopping centers, strip malls, multiple-unit complexes.

Riley offers no apologies. James Island was being developed well before he arrived, he rightly points out; James Island’s need for sewers and utilities results from a public service district’s failures, not his; James Island has gained all sorts of programs from the city; James Island’s fate reflects its unavoidable proximity to a growing metropolis.

A dean among urban mayors in America, in office 22 years now, past president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Riley calls his foray onto James Island “a key component to my stewardship. The question for me is, 50 years down the road, am I taking actions to assure the financial security of Charleston in the 21st century?”

The hospital gets bigger, but it doesn’t pay taxes, Riley points out. The cultural institutions get bigger, they don’t pay taxes. The university gets bigger, it doesn’t pay taxes. Charleston has to repair historical-district buildings even though it doesn’t own them. Charleston has to pay for policemen, firemen, waterfront parks, museums, a new multimillion-dollar aquarium.

“That’s what a central city does,” Riley argues. “It provides amenities that enrich the whole metropolitan area. When bedroom communities don’t join the central city, it all breaks down. So we have to fight. It’s going to be controversial, but you have to do it. If James Islanders go to art galleries, go to the hospital, go to the university, but don’t join the city, then the city can’t have those resources. You have to share the burden; you have to pay your share.”

There exist all sorts of reasons why Riley’s arguments--however reasonable--didn’t manage to sway everyone on James Island. Not all have to do with resentment in the poor black neighborhoods. Some on the island simply have no interest in Charleston traffic and parking tickets and cobblestone roads, especially after May, when the tourists multiply. Some flat-out don’t like Riley’s progressive politics, finding it difficult to mouth his name without attaching the word “scoundrel.” Some just don’t fancy being part of a big sophisticated city. Some don’t appreciate Charleston letting developers roam unchecked on their island.

Yet it is possible to view the James Island uprising in less complicated terms, or at least to distill the rebellion’s various strands into a single theme. What this rift amounts to is a clash between distinctly different cultures. “Riley has a great vision,” is the way the island’s lawyer, Gregg Meyers, put it. “But these people opposing him on James Island want to go clamming, not to an aquarium.”

Fresh Eyes Could See What Islanders Didn’t

That it took an outsider to ignite James Island’s rebellion doesn’t surprise those familiar with its plantation past. That she came from New England and Washington, D.C., and Southern California helped rather than hurt Joan Sooy. She knew about scrappy town hall meetings; she knew about uncontained development. She knew also about enduring.

At age 8, her divorced and strapped mother put Sooy in a Catholic boarding school, where she stayed until high school. Months passed between her mother’s visits. She read voraciously; she cried often. On Sundays, when others were visited by parents, she spun around alone on a playground merry-go-round, singing “You are my sunshine” over and over.

There followed years supporting a husband through graduate school, elementary school teaching in Redondo Beach, a move to Washington, then, after 25 years of marriage, divorce in 1977. Sooy, seeking “escape from the maddening world” and a place to raise her two children, flew down to South Carolina, looked around James Island, savored the wooded lakes and settled in.

It didn’t take her long to decide that her new home needed a land-use plan. From cooking a husband fancy meals and making her family’s clothes, Sooy turned with relish to political agitating. First she concerned herself with forming a new PTA branch. Then her son got thrown out of a local cemetery for tossing a football around, so she joined the local parks and recreation committee. Next came seats on the school board and the public service district. Not enough, she saw.

“I was only one person, a Yankee, a divorced woman in the South. I needed a base. Let’s get them organized, I decided.”

Up went those handwritten posters, urging citizens to meet her at the high school. Soon Sooy was working the circuit. Inez Brown-Crouch, not accustomed to a white Yankee in a room of Carolina blacks, beamed when Sooy showed up at her Honey Hill community meeting. “We hit it off,” Brown-Crouch recalled. “She liked how I told white folks what to do, and I saw that Joan had a passion for getting things done.”

There’d been an all-black James Island Improvement Assn. in the early ‘60s, but it had withered away. Now a core of activists began to see another way: “Black and white together,” Brown-Crouch exclaimed. “The ‘you and me’ drink I call it--Black & White. Never done before. But this wasn’t a color thing. If you’re a jackass, you’re a jackass. It’s common goals. Tossed salad approach. Respect differences, draw on each other’s abilities.”

One of their first fights concerned an “oh-my-God” ugly billboard someone had erected at the bridge coming on to the island. Let’s protest, let’s call the media, Sooy suggested. When the TV cameras arrived, Sooy stepped forward. Anything that gets advertised on that billboard, she declared, we’re gonna boycott. That same day, in a rainstorm, someone from the billboard company came and took down the whole oh-my-God thing.

Soon enough, Sooy began hearing people say “We should’ve incorporated when we could have.” She poked around, learned there’d been a failed attempt back in 1974. She poked some more, came up with a mighty interesting 1982 state attorney general’s opinion. It suggested that even though Charleston had annexed waterways running through James Island, this didn’t affect its contiguity “for the purposes of incorporation.”

Sooy first held that document in her hand in early 1990. The AG’s opinion, she saw, had been signed by a deputy who’d since ascended to a respected federal judgeship. Thus encouraged, Sooy started marking every Charleston annexation on a James Island map. Waving that about drew the needed 1,500 signatures on a petition directed to South Carolina’s secretary of state. By the summer of 1992, Sooy had state authorization to hold a referendum on whether to incorporate.

They ran the campaign through the residential association. They put volunteers in parking lots, at schools, on door-to-door routes. Sooy spoke to clubs and churches. Desperate for money, Inez Brown-Crouch proposed they raffle off $100, rightly gambling they’d sell more than 100 dollar tickets. The $200 profit paid a few Kinko’s bills. So did the oyster roasts and auctions of local artists’ prints.

It wasn’t an overwhelming victory and the turnout was low, but on Dec. 1, 1992, they won by 77 votes. “We only needed to win by one,” Sooy pointed out later. They celebrated with a pizza party. Two weeks later, Charleston filed suit, seeking to block the town of James Island’s creation.

James Island can’t be a town, Charleston’s attorneys argued. James Island isn’t a contiguous piece of land.

A Brand New Town With Money of Own

For a good while, it appeared that Charleston had it all wrong, for James Island did become a town. In January 1993, the secretary of state issued a charter, and a month later the state Supreme Court--overturning a lower court’s temporary injunction--let James Island hold an election to select its officers. By March 1993, with Sooy elected mayor--drawing more votes than her four male opponents combined--James Island was underway.

The most tangible benefit of being a town soon became apparent: James Island began receiving its share of an extra-penny “local option sales tax”--some $350,000 a year that, much to Joe Riley’s chagrin, otherwise would have gone to Charleston. Add to that various state-shared revenues and franchise fees, throw in an assortment of state and federal grants, and James Island suddenly had money to spend.

James Island also had reason to spend that money, even beyond the immediate needs of its citizens. With Charleston’s lawsuit winding its way through the judicial system, the town’s lawyers advised island leaders that it wouldn’t hurt--as a “fallback” legal strategy--to establish a de facto existence. The more “encumbered” they got, the more contracts they signed, the more property they bought, the more services and programs they delivered, the harder it would be for any court to void James Island.

James Islanders rolled up their sleeves and went to work. They staged a Christmas parade; they expanded a newly franchised Little League program. They signed franchise agreements with Southern Bell, South Carolina Electric and Gas, Comcast Cable. They paid $400,000 for 35 acres, laying plans to build three ball fields and a recreational center.

Soon James Island had a planning commission, a board of zoning appeals, a recreational committee, a housing and redevelopment committee, a public safety committee. Then it had a town hall, replacing free quarters in a corner of someone’s auto paint shop. Eventually it had a $1.7-million budget and more than $3 million in assets.

The list of James Island projects kept growing, many aimed at the poorer black neighborhoods: the Battery Island water project; the Grimball Road sewer project; the Harborview bike lanes; the Folly Road master tree plan; the Sol Legare landscape improvements; the Honey Hill home rehabilitations; the historic preservation ordinance; the beautification ordinance; the sign ordinance; the restricted office zoning district.

Most striking of all was the human-scale accessibility a town such as James Island offered. Instead of mainland bureaucrats, islanders were going to a local office for one-stop permitting, licensing and inspecting. They were also going to their mayor with anything on their minds. Stop signs, speeding cars, blocked drainage ditches--Joan Sooy heard about them each time she went grocery shopping. So did James Island council members; blacks and whites together filled the town meetings.

Some cared most about basic services, some about local zoning. A handful called themselves “liberal Democrats,” most proudly did not. Almost everyone remembered Foley Road without fast-food stands; a few described dirt streets traveled mainly by horses. Before this rich stew sat James Island’s Yankee woman mayor, riling and confounding half the menfolk. Watching from a front-row seat, sporting her self-styled African look--head wraps, long dresses, sandals--Inez Brown-Crouch couldn’t help but chortle. Also scold freely: Don’t ask me if you don’t want to hear me, she warned everyone. I think I could make a really good plantation owner.

“It gave us an opportunity to make a difference,” Brown-Crouch recalled. “Also to be heard, to voice what’s been inside ourselves all these years. I spoke out because Mom and Dad never could. They held it in always. I spoke for them. And when I said something, people listened. I’d get lots of handshakes after meetings, everyone so gracious, even though I’d just told them to go to hell. That amazed me. For once, we all walked the same roads, we all had one goal. No one was inferior; color didn’t matter. We were valued. We weren’t seen as black people. We were seen as community organizers. That was the catalyst--blacks and whites united. That’s what did it.”

Not everyone felt happy, though. If it’s true that James Island--as town council member John Mizzell put it--”was a place where a person could go to a council meeting, rise and complain, and be looking at faces of people he knew,” it’s also true that more than a few citizens did precisely that. In its brief existence James Island proved a lustrous model for small-town bickering as well as small-town advantages.

Some credit “personality clashes,” but differences in philosophy also played a role. A good number--being no more interested in a big James Island government than a big Charleston government--didn’t particularly appreciate Joan Sooy’s activist cascade of programs, ordinances and commissions. Most had expected James Island to take control of its own zoning and planning, but not everyone thought it would expand so quickly and boisterously.

Empire building, some called Sooy’s efforts. “It seemed we were taking on too much,” observed council member Jack Bryant. “It was chaos down at City Hall.”

Sooy still had plenty of allies--”Joan moves fast,” offered Mizzell, “while others nit-pick, mull, cry, tear hair over each dollar”--and she did get reelected in March 1995. Yet it’s fair to say that council meetings in time grew to be raucous affairs. Certain council members began criticizing Sooy openly, while she more than once ruled them out of order. An agitated citizen railed at the town’s beautification ordinance, wondering whether he needed a permit to paint his house a particular color. One night, Sooy and the town council received what the local island paper called “verbal lashing from angry citizens.” Another night, the town’s attorney, Bill Dreyfoos, finding himself being asked whether his $100-an-hour presence was needed at every meeting, frankly advised “it’s a value judgment. . . . In my experience I make more when I don’t go to all the meetings.”

It was just about then that Charleston’s lawsuit finally reached a courtroom, after two years of preliminary skirmishing. In July 1995, in the Charleston County Court of Common Pleas, before the Honorable Judge John C. Hayes III, James Island’s fight for life began in earnest.

Islanders Overlooked Rival’s Win Record

Fairly sensible reasons exist for why James Island’s founders always expected to prevail in court. They’d started out, after all, with a favorable state attorney general’s opinion. They’d received a charter from the South Carolina secretary of state. They’d been allowed, by order of the state Supreme Court, to elect officers.

In all their calculations, however, they had not entirely considered the meaning of Charleston’s perpetual success in the annexation game. For 20 years, Charleston has won every legal battle it has fought, and there have been dozens of them, 60 on contiguity issues alone. “We have litigated virtually every annexation,” Charleston City Atty. Bill Regan gleefully advised recently. “James Island put my daughter through college.”

One by one, James Island’s various program directors traipsed to the witness stand in Judge Hayes’ courtroom to explain just how big a difference they’d made on island life. Then came Joan Sooy, talking about “a town that is a home.” A filmed tour of the town followed, backed by maps and all manner of exhibits.

In the end, it hardly mattered. Judge Hayes waited until late September to declare James Island a “nullity” due to “lack of contiguity.” Yet he didn’t immediately bury the town: He “enjoined” James Island “from exercising the powers and duties of an incorporated municipality” then suspended that edict during the appellate process so long as James Island didn’t “take action outside the normal course and scope of that required for its safe and efficient operation.”

Hayes could not have offered James Island a more wide-open opportunity. “That court order was the squirreliest thing ever issued,” council member Jack Bryant would later observe. “I don’t want to be in contempt of court, but when someone puts out an order like that, they ought to put someone in charge of interpreting it.”

Actually, James Island’s leaders did a fine job of interpreting on their own. The “normal course and scope of that required for safe and efficient operation” sounded to them precisely like what they’d been doing all along. So they continued on with the doing.

They rezoned, they issued permits, they signed contracts. They collected another $262,000 in local option sales tax revenue from the state. They signed up 100 more children to participate in the town’s Little League program. They pushed on with the Battery Island water project construction. They sent a Grimball Road sewer project out for bid. They approved the appointment of a town clerk. Most consequential of all, they made plans to return some $670,000 in local option sales tax revenue to James Island citizens.

That being $670,000 the city of Charleston had a good chance of gaining if and when James Island finally ceased operation, Regan felt compelled to alert Judge Hayes. He feared the town was continuing to “encumber itself,” he advised at an October 1995 hearing. The town has been doing heavy duty since Hayes’ initial order. We just think they need a tight rein.

Hayes agreed: He ordered James Island not to distribute that $670,000 in local option tax revenue. He also ordered that the assets of James Island “remain intact” as they existed on the date of his initial order.

Joan Sooy responded by fuming publicly in an affidavit against this “severe violation of our legal rights.” The court’s order was “quite burdensome” because “we are not sure what would be considered contempt of court.” We have been limited, “but we do not know exactly how.” What about all the projects we’re already pursuing? What about the rehabilitation of substandard houses? What about all the sections of town without water, sewers or paved roads? What of contaminated wells, crumbling septic tanks, clogged drainage ditches? Will we be challenged each time we try to improve conditions? Will we be questioned on each action the town council takes?

They would not, as it happened. Judge Hayes had left the door open again. The town’s assets were frozen, he’d instructed in his written order, “with the exception of expenditures in the normal course and scope of its day-to-day operations.”

Cities’ Battle Reaches State Supreme Court

By the time the appeals to Judge Hayes’ orders came before the state Supreme Court in the fall of 1996, James Island--among a number of other projects--was moving seriously toward the creation of its own police department. To further that notion, the town had already appointed a “community safety officer.” The town had also secured pledges for $219,000 in federal “cop” grants that would oblige James Island to supplement and extend police funding for years to come. The future beckoned: Joan Sooy had started talking about running for a third term.

Charleston felt the need to speak out. “What’s at stake is the future of the island,” Mayor Riley declared publicly. “What’s at stake is the degree of livability of James Island. What’s at stake is having one government, one recreation system, one park system, one sense of community.”

Countered Mayor Sooy: “I’m glad the mayor sees it my way. Unfortunately, he doesn’t see the right government in charge. . . . James Island protected Charleston during the Civil War. It’s unfortunate Charleston didn’t protect it.”

Neither, in the end, did the state Supreme Court. On Nov. 18, it upheld Judge Hayes’ orders entirely, ruling James Island’s incorporation “invalid due to a lack of contiguity.” The waters and marshlands snaking through James Island didn’t by themselves destroy the town’s contiguity, the justices explained. It was Charleston’s previous annexation of those wetlands that created the obstacle--just as Charleston had intended.

Stunned islanders labored to absorb the implications. Business owners who’d been granted building permits asked where they now stood. So did homeowners who’d won zoning changes. “Overnight, they pull the rug from under us,” complained Margaret Edwards, a visibly upset, lifelong James Island resident. “Oh Lord, have mercy.”

What followed next, even Charleston’s City Atty. Bill Regan had to allow, “really made things interesting.”

On the afternoon of Dec. 18, apparently without giving the required public notice to the press, the James Island Town Council gathered in Joan Sooy’s 9-by-12-foot office for what may or may not have been a legal meeting. Because of technical last-minute motions, the state Supreme Court’s ruling had not yet become final, and wouldn’t for another five days. The town, in other words, still existed.

Before the five-member Town Council stood several attorneys from one of Charleston’s most respected law firms. Days after the state Supreme Court decision, Sooy had handed these lawyers a $30,000 retainer, payment for researching possible federal appeals based on voter rights issues. Black voters, especially. Black voters who’d voted three times for a town and its officers.

The lawyers now offered their conclusion: Yes, there was a basis for a case. Civil rights, contract rights, freedom to associate, freedom of speech, all sorts of bases. For $250,000, they offered, we will fight James Island’s battle. For an upfront $250,000. Prepayment in full.

“We knew the client might disappear,” one of those lawyers, Gregg Meyers, later explained. “We knew they might not be able to sign a check in the future. So yes, we proposed prepayment for the whole case.”

Council members considered, and listened to their town attorney. The $250,000 wouldn’t need to come from the frozen assets; they had that much already budgeted in a contingency fund, and Judge Hayes hadn’t frozen their budget. What better way than this to maintain the town’s operation? For that matter, what other way?

Two council members voted no; Joan Sooy and two others voted yes. The next day, Gregg Meyers’ law firm filed a lawsuit in federal district court. Soon after, it filed a second petition directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Charleston’s city attorney, thinking he’d buried this town two or three times by now, instead found himself once again being inundated by legal documents. On the second day of 1997, Bill Regan picked up his phone and punched in the number for the island’s Town Hall. Someone answered.

“You still in business?” Regan inquired. Yep, came the answer. “Will you all be open all week?” Yep, came the answer once more. That same day, Regan filed an affidavit in Judge Hayes’ court, advising what James Island was up to.

The judge, by most accounts a temperate man who once considered the Lutheran ministry, grew visibly agitated as he sat at a Jan. 6 hearing listening to Regan catalog James Island’s transgressions. The news that the town had prepaid the mayor and council members’ salaries and expenses through the end of their terms in February--more than $8,000 total--did not appear to sit well with Hayes. By the time they got to the matter of $280,000 spent for high-priced downtown lawyers, Hayes was glaring. When Charleston Assistant City Atty. Frances Cantwell urged that James Island leaders be held in contempt--”They will stop at nothing. . . . It’s nothing but mischief”--Hayes sounded inclined to do just that.

Town officials can be held personally liable if they spent money against his orders, he declared. There indeed would be contempt hearings in the near future. Someday, in some courtroom, these people were going to have to account for why his orders weren’t obeyed. “If I were in their position,” the judge told all those before him, “I’d be real, real concerned.”

This time, Hayes allowed no toeholds: He appointed a receiver and ordered Charleston County to seize James Island’s assets. Within hours, county workers were changing the locks at the island’s town hall. Ron Middleton seethed about “Gestapo-like tactics,” and Mary Clark suggested Charleston “hang its head in shame.” But it appeared the rebellion had finally expired.

“I love this state, I’m born and raised Dixie,” council member John Mizzell observed when it was all over. “But sometimes, sometimes, the good ol’ boy system doesn’t work. It’s my own dog that bit me.”

Uprising Continues in Federal Courts

In recent days, various Charleston County municipalities have started lining up for their share of James Island’s remaining $2.5 million in assets; the city of Charleston expects to get $543,000. Yet those picking over the grave may be premature. James Island’s lawyers, funded by a dying town’s last-minute legacy, are still arguing before the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Not even looming contempt proceedings against Joan Sooy and the Town Council have entirely quelled James Island’s voice. Faced with the prospect of being ordered personally to reimburse $280,000--if not report to jail--Sooy fusses more about her legal bills than her courtroom fate. Let’s make it a criminal trial, she suggests, let’s have a jury. “We did nothing wrong. Everything we did was to benefit James Island.”

Thus the uprising continues, in its way.

Every Monday morning, a group named Citizens to Preserve the Town of James Island--among them Ron Middleton, Cubby Wilder, Inez Brown-Crouch and Mary Clark--pickets outside Charleston’s city hall. On weekends, Mary Clark--whose husband’s grandfather signed the state’s 1860 Ordinance of Secession--presides at a table outside the James Island Wal-Mart, collecting signatures from those wishing to see their town resuscitated. In early May, dozens of islanders twice rode buses to the state Capitol to lobby for a bill aimed at altering the rules for forming new towns.

Charleston’s leaders roll their eyes at these efforts. “The town really had almost no effect on the people who lived on James Island,” observes Regan. “The town didn’t provide any vital services. By and large, it really was a paper town.” Yet some of those who forged that town talk differently about its demise.

“It bothers me so bad,” Ron Middleton advised state legislators during one visit. “I defended the United States in Vietnam but now can’t defend my own home. When the town closed, it felt like the morning after losing a battle in Vietnam.”

“It’s absolutely devastating,” offered Inez Brown-Crouch. “I think of my parents, how they suffered and died, never seeing this. To take it away, it’s like losing my dad, that’s how personal.”

Added Cubby Wilder: “For awhile, for once, we had the inside track.”

One recent morning, Joan Sooy drove across James Island. She drove past a section of the Dill plantation property that is now a shopping center. She drove past the island’s first town hall, the corner of an auto paint garage. She drove past a housing development fronted by a stand of live oaks they’d managed to save. She drove past the now-overgrown 35 acres where they’d imagined three ball fields and a recreation center. She drove past Ft. Johnson, muttering about “people who want to fill those cannon up again and aim back toward Charleston.” Then she braked to a stop. Before her rose a monstrous construction project--a huge ditch, mountains of dirt, bulldozers and backhoes.

Sooy frowned. “What’s this?” she asked. “This wasn’t here last time I came this way.” As she mulled that fact, her frown slowly brightened with anticipation. Here was a job for James Island’s mayor. “I’ll be making some calls tonight,” Joan Sooy declared.

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Island Struggle

The town of James Island has lost its right to exist, but the battle is continuing in the courts.