In 1974, Franklin Ashley, a polymath and Southern renaissance man, edited a collection of essays entitled Faces of South Carolina: Essays on South Carolina in Transition. In it, he published an essay by a little-known Southern novelist and former basketball coach by the name of Pat Conroy. That essay, “Horses Don’t Eat Moon Pies,” is a candid look at Aiken, South Carolina as it was in the early 1970s—and in some respects as it remains today. Beautiful, clannish, stringently hierarchical, horse-obsessed, old and new South at the same time.
Faces of South Carolina has been out of print for years and is terribly difficult to track down. There is one copy housed at the Thomas Cooper library on the University of South Carolina campus. I know this because several years ago, I asked one of our stalwart research librarians to track it down for me and see if I could get a photocopy of Conroy’s contribution to the volume. Recently, for reasons I will get into below, I decided to go ahead and purchase one of the few remaining copies from an online seller. When I flipped to Conroy’s essay, I saw that he had signed it.
In the early 1970s, Ashley, who passed away in 2018, was an English professor at the University of South Carolina Aiken. He would later teach at the University of South Carolina Columbia (the main campus) and was instrumental in bringing Barack Obama to Columbia in early 2007 for a private fundraiser—months before anybody but the wonkiest Democrat had any idea who he was. Ashley was a lifelong Democrat and staunch progressive. Only someone with those values could put together a forward-thinking collection like Faces of South Carolina. I have always been a huge fan of Conroy’s essay, but I never had a chance to read the entire collection of essays. To my surprise, there are actually two other essays on Aiken, but they tend to get overshadowed by “Horses.” The collection was a partnership between the University of South Carolina and the South Carolina Committee for the Humanities. As Ashley writes in his Preface to the volume, “This collection of essays was prepared with the serious intent of going beyond stereotype… Beginning in late May of 1973, seven towns in South Carolina became sites for a new perspective. Aiken, Allendale, Beaufort, Columbia, Conway, Lancaster, and Spartanburg provided ample material for a dialogue with South Carolinians.” Each of these seven cities at the time also contained a campus of the University of South Carolina, which made them ideal locations for this kind of humanities research and civic outreach.
A few months ago, I received an email advertising a call for papers in something called Carolina Currents, a project of Francis Marion University and published by the University of South Carolina Press. The collection intends to publish peer-reviewed academic essays from across a variety of disciplines on topics and issues related to South Carolina culture, history, folkways, and people. This gave me the idea to write something up that would be an homage to Conroy’s essay (and my hometown) and the Faces of South Carolina volume itself and the spirit of humanistic inquiry it embodies.
Of course, I am still in the early stages of researching and writing and figuring out the shape of this essay, but as part of the project, I thought it would be fun to read “Horses Don’t Eat Moon Pies” in several parts (it’s a 5,000+ word essay, after all) and share it with all of you. This is Part 1 of (probably) 4 parts total.
I sincerely hope you enjoy! Please feel free to drop me a note of encouragement below if the spirit moves you. As always, thank you for reading. Consider becoming a free or paid subscriber so you never miss a beat.
"Horses Don't Eat Moon Pies" by Pat Conroy (Part 1)