The ecology of Charleston is distinctive to the American Lowcountry: Spanish moss  hangs from live oak branches on ancient, gigantic trees. The humidity spreads over the wetlands. The Atlantic overflows into the streets at high tide. The coastal marshes soak the water like a mop in a bucket of silt.

I did not attend The Notebook Tour of Charleston, and was sorry to miss its trip to Cypress Gardens, a preserve featuring a blackwater bald cypress and tupelo swamp. Here, hundreds of trees grow across the water on islands the width of one trunk. Because the water is so still, it creates an illusion of trees growing infinitely tall, into the sky and an empty floor, and your boat hovers somewhere in the space between.

Charleston’s attributions of water are particular. Being a port city, most of its stories begin and end with water.

“There’s an old saying that ‘a lot of African bones at the bottom of the ocean,’” said Al Miller, a local guide. Miller was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, the Ebenezer A.M.E. Church, and the Choraliers Music Club. I took his Sites and Insights Tour, Inc. bus tour instead of the Notebook one. It expounded upon the history of the Gullah Geechee people, a unique community which retained elements of African language and culture despite their displacement to the region, adapting and creolising their traditional culture with their New World setting.

Miller took us from downtown Charleston to James and Johns Islands, his tall, houndstooth-clad legs cradling the steering wheel as he drove. As a member of the Choraliers Music Club, Miller had performed the role of Sportin’ Life (“a happy-go-lucky fella, a pimp”, he said) in Charleston’s first production of Porgy and Bess, despite its premiere in 1935. Its composer Gershwin did not want it performed before a segregated audience, and Charleston resisted this provision until 1970, so that the opera toured the world for 35 years before finally reaching its hometown.

The Notebook (2004) was directed by Nick Cassavetes, the son of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes. His credits include writing the dialogue for Justin Timberlake’s 2007 music video “What Goes Around… Comes Around” and cameo appearances in The Hangover: Part II and season 7 of Entourage.

Miller parked by the grave of Samuel Smalls, the man who inspired the character of Porgy, in the churchyard at James Island Presbyterian Church. Born in 1889, Smalls was a disabled street vendor who navigated Charleston in a goat-drawn cart. His tombstone was covered in pebbles – a gift from visitors. On the ride over, Miller sang “Summertime”, the aria from Porgy and Bess.

“Summertime, and the livin’ is easyFish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high”

The intercom’s speaker transformed his voice into a thin, metallic cry, but did not lose its emotion, and I could imagine Miller on stage half a century ago. He performed the song in its entirety as he drove, passing swamplands and the weathered clapboard bungalows of predominantly Black neighbourhoods.

“Summertime” is the opening number of Porgy and Bess, and its lyrics describe a false prosperity that accentuates the poverty of the South Carolinian Black community in the 1920s, around whom the opera revolves. The song itself has been analysed as being structurally and tonally similar to “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” a traditional spiritual from the late-19th century. Both songs evoke love, disillusionment, hope. If the feeling they convey could be described more precisely than this, perhaps they would not be so haunting. In the Georgia Review, the writer Anne Goldman suggested that “Summertime” has been featured more often in American TV and cinema than “The Star-Spangled Banner”. I wondered if there was something inherently American about its meld of longing and loss.

Miller parked at the corner of Maybank Highway and Folly Road, and our tour ended shortly after. “This is a sacred burial site of our African ancestors, so don’t let the green grass fool you. There are unmarked graves all over the place. Why were they buried near the water? Because these people believe that once they died, their souls will return to Africa by water. Just like they came alive by water.”

A hand-painted sign near the bushes called the area a sacred ground. I searched the site online later that night. Its public Facebook page had published hundreds of images of ceremonies from recent years – an avalanche of photos, some entirely motion-blurred. The page owners wrote that proliferating these images was a way of “controlling a narrative”, wishing that “the internet would not be filled with only pictures of the murderer of the Emanuel 9 posed at this location.” This is a reference to the nine Black parishioners massacred during a shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on 17 June 2015 by a white supremacist.

The page shared images of food offerings on the ground – palm oil, candy, liquor – and pieces of cloth. There was a photograph of a tall figure dressed in a Yoruba Egúngún masquerade costume. These garments are traditionally layered in fabrics like velvet and indigo-dyed canvas, and covered in metallic embroidery, glass beads and cowrie shells. With the face covered, the disguised figure is then animated by collective ancestral spirits, mediating two realms.

Grief rarely feels so luminous, but the IAAM wrote of the local Black community that in “recognizing that few earthly rewards came from their struggles, pain, and difficult labour, their belief systems were otherworldly, joyful, and affirming.” The South Carolinian artist Jonathan Green is celebrated for his paintings evoking the joy, ingenuity and freedoms of the Gullah people. I received a call on my last day in Charleston. Jonathan Green had agreed to meet me, and I should come to the Thoroughbred Club at The Charleston Place hotel, and we would have drinks in the Jonathan Green Room.

In person, Green was a figurative embodiment of his paintings, which I had seen at the IAAM, and the Gibbes Museum of Art in Downtown earlier in the week. His paintings’ colours were particular, staining the backs of your eyelids as light does. The Thoroughbred Club resembled a leather jewellery box. As I entered, Green called my name with a recognition that had me questioning our unfamiliarity. No, we did not know each other. Green, it transpired, merely had a quality that made him entirely spiritually available to those around him.

His family had worked at the Twickenham and Tomotely plantations in Beaufort county five or six generations ago. He had been “born with a veil” – an en caul birth, which is an omen in West African folklore that has prevailed in the American Deep South, prophesying that the child will continue wandering the line between life and death through the course of their existence. We talked about mothers, love lives and diaspora while drinking unsweetened cosmopolitans.

“I don’t know any city, historically speaking, that has ever been built without enslavement. So, I think that’s a good place to start to level the playing field, if you will, about this great city of Charleston,” he said when I talked about my trip. “Because for me, in terms of my knowledge base, who I am and where I came from, this is one of the most incredible cities in the world. Everywhere I look, there are signs of my ancestors, what they did, enslaved and freed.”

Green’s reflections were readied and crystallised. From a certain light, he was among the people who wanted to untangle love and grief in Charleston, only his notion of love outweighed romance. It was rooted in belonging, and a kind of freedom that cannot be taken.

“Listen, I’m almost 70 years old. I’ve been listening to this stuff all my life. And I’ve come up with an attitude that I wasn’t there, you weren’t there, but look at what we did. Now, let’s celebrate and embrace that.”

Green invited me to his home to see his studio. The sun was bright, bleaching the pastel colours of the city. Its Neoclassical columns looked taller without shadows, and their wrought ironwork was more graphic. The palm trees made a shuffling sound in the wind. “Africa is everywhere in this city, and you can see it in the architecture. You can see it when you go up into the ceilings of the older buildings, where you have African markings all over them. The way the houses are built, so you get the breeze. The elevation, so you get the air. These are all African conceptual designs.” The route to his apartment was poky and winding. It hid above the city and was decorated with orchids.

Here, hundreds of trees grow across the water on islands the width of one trunk. Because the water is so still, it creates an illusion of trees growing infinitely tall, into the sky and an empty floor

His partner, Richard Weedman, whom Green had been with for 46 years, was sleeping next door, and classical music was playing from the room. Green showed me his art collection, and an archive of his own work and achievements, documented painstakingly by Weedman in hundreds of folders tessellating a wall. If I had gone looking for love in Charleston, I had found a version of it here.

“We adore each other, and that makes for a big difference,” he said. “Because when you adore someone, you accept the person totally. You’re not into changes. And that’s the lifestyle I’ve had. I’ve been accepted and adored all of my life.”

He suddenly took a brooch off of his jacket, and gave it to me to keep. It was circular and woven from beige and brown straw.

“I always say to young people, never fall in love. It’s the worst thing you can do. Wait to be adored. And you’ll know that.”

Green called several friends to meet with me, including Walter Fiederowicz, the Chair of Charleston’s Literary Festival, and the artist Fletcher Williams. I would spend the remainder of my time in Charleston reaching for it through books and art, then bars, and then walking alone once again, stopping one last time at the Waterfront Park Pier.

Green’s vision of Charleston remained with me through the night, turning the city translucent and illuminated by spirit and memory. There was also his distinction between love and adoration, learned from his family. The latter, it seemed, had the specificity of elevating and revering its object; also, of worship. This gaze, I could only imagine, had sustained a tyrannised people for centuries.

The sky was deep blue and its line was indistinct above the ocean, cut only at one side by a cluster of buildings. Their lights were flashing, almost as if the glistening of the ocean extended to them. A couple was seated on a bench overlooking the view, and a man eventually came and stood nearby along the railing. Otherwise it was empty. Empty, and perfectly quiet, except for the waves, and the man’s music, which sounded like punk, whistling out of one earphone. Then he turned to me and asked, “Excuse me, do you know what’s on the other side of the water?” .