Carolina, and that that someone could only be me. I never actually pulled the race card per se, but I’d never cut it in two with a pair of scissors in front of unsuspecting diners either. We got into logistics after I got the official go-ahead—like where I was going to stay, how I was going to get around Columbia, and who the hell I was going to talk to. They wanted “reax” from regular folks, who couldn’t be hard to find.

During the Friday plane ride, my idle thoughts got some exercise jumping ahead to Monday morning in the office, when the story would be front page, be on Drudge, and then get bandied between boxes of blowhard foursquare on cable. I do this a lot—sneak into advanced screenings of my life. But the trailers for Helena Does South Carolina were totally misleading. Instead of an intellectual thriller, this thing would turn out to be a romantic tragedy.

It started with an old man loitering in a “garage.”

The plan was simple—grab a handful of the pulsating masses of black people brimming on southern streets and get them to say something profound. Also, I can’t drive—as in don’t know how. Frommer’s was moderately helpful in finding me a “car service” to get me to my hotel. At the airport, a balding white guy in a leather bomber jacket was flashing a sign that read “Andrews.” We were surprised to see each other. He sounded black on the phone, and I could tell he assumed I wasn’t.

“Whatchu heah foh,” he asked, lifting my carry-on into the back of his “cab”—a black Lincoln-like town car with a laptop where the meter should have been. Littered with yellowing newspapers and what I assumed were conspiracy theorist manifestos, the entire front seat looked as if it belonged to either someone just too busy to make it to the recycling center or a deranged psycho killer.

I got in anyway.

“I’m a journalist, and I’m doing a story on Senator Barack Obama.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Actually, you might be able to help me. Is there a particular neighborhood or any place down here where African Americans hang out?”

“Oh. Well, you don’t wanna be going to any of those places. It ain’t rally safe—drugs and…” The rest of that sentence would only be important to know at my murder trial. I’m not going to say “Mr. Cabdriver, sir” was a racist, but he was racist-ish. After a mind-boggling minutes-long tirade about all the places I shouldn’t go because “the blacks”—who he personally had nothing against—in Columbia were not only dangerous but also totally in the dark about politics, he dropped me off at the one place he knew there’d be “someone smert enough tuh talk tuh ya,” Dr. Ray’s Used Cars and Ground Transportation. He promised I’d be safe.

“They’ll take care of you,” he said, now unloading the trunk, perhaps unaware of the alarming similarity his guarantee had to a gangster’s. Perhaps. “It’s back in there.” He pointed to a darkened wormhole–slash–front door near where his “Lincoln” was parked. You’ve got to be shitting me.

But before I had the chance to plead, “Wait, what? In there?!” the handle to my suitcase was in my hand, and I was left alone, listening to the popping sounds tires make when they run over busted-up gravel mixed with dirt. Across the driveway, overalled men worked under the huge shadows of beached Beemers. It started to rain, and I walked inside.

See, this is what Gina calls “some ole white people stuff.” The type of commonsense-defying idiocy—sticking your head in a “trained” lion’s mouth, walking alone from the train at 2:00 a.m.—that we of the overcritical-black-female variety routinely categorize as “white girl shit.” Which is to say any action that is in no way demonstrative of how we ourselves personally would behave in a situation of similar life-threatening level. Much is made of the high mortality rate of horror-movie black people. But think of it as a question of plot, not prejudice. Boomsheekah gets the ax in the first five minutes of Slasher Movie Magic IV, not because she lacks the mental acumen to stay alive, but because the whole thing would have been over in the five minutes it takes to run out the front door (not up the damn stairs) and call the police (not your idiot friend who lives twenty minutes away).

Back at the garage, nobody came out to offer me a mint julep, so after standing perfectly still with my eyeballs looping roller-coaster-like in their