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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 6 6 sea and passed down through the generations, they provided daily transportation for mistress, master, and children, and they held the lives of all in their hands. They competed in local regattas and propelled Elliott on many harrowing adventures over the years. Elliott may have doubted the weather, his priming and powder, but never these men. We know this because William Elliott was a writer. Poems, a play, articles about agriculture and politics published in Yankee newspapers, but mostly from his collection, Carolina Sports by Land and Water, including incidents of Devil Fishing, etc., published in Charleston in 1846 and continuously in print thereafter. I grew up loving Carolina Sports, and a century and a quarter after its initial publication, almost to the day, I got my first paying gig, "Things that Vanish," a tale of an island deer hunt like Elliott's. In hindsight, it was hardly that good, but it first saw light of day in a magazine and sometime later was anthologized. It got me a discount on my last semester at Carolina and lastly, won me a full ride to the Iowa Writer's Workshop, hailed in those days as the nation's best. I had never even pulled the trigger and it became the most profitable deer I never shot. My grandmother was a lifelong journalist, the first female to be allowed to write beyond the society pages in South Carolina. She had two books published posthumously, and I am damned happy I did not have to wait that long. She was mighty proud of me but wouldn't let on. She sat me on her porch in the jasmine shade and poured me sweet tea though I was old enough then for a proper drink. "Now Rogie," she said, waggling her finger like grandmothers do, "you know printer's ink is bad as liquor or dope. Once you get a hankering for it, you'll be hooked for life. And it can skip a generation, too. Is your momma a writer?" She knew the answer and just asked the question to make a point. "No ma'am," I said. "You know I tried to retire twice already." "Yes ma'am." She had been writing almost a half-century by then, with a weekly column in the Charleston paper. And when she started fresh out of college in 1919, she worked for William Elliott's grandson, Ambrose. W illiam Elliott wrote for addictive pleasure rather than money. He was educated at Harvard, tried his hand at politics but resigned his seat in the legislature when it became apparent his constituents expected him to vote for secession. He came back home, looked after his plantations, hunted, fished, and