Chesapeake by James A. Michener
On February 22, 1941, Amos Turlock’s photograph appeared on the front page of the Patamoke Bugle, but not in the form that Hugo Pflaum had planned. He wanted grizzly Amos standing on one side, The Twombly in the middle, and himself on the other side, the clever game warden who had confiscated the last and most famous of the long guns.
No, it was quite a different kind of portrait. Unshaven Amos stood with an ordinary shotgun in one hand and a dead goose in another; the caption read:
Local Hunter Bags Goose
in Family Marsh
The story went on to tell of how Amos had prowled the marshes for five months, hoping to get one good shot at his elusive target, and several hunters were quoted in praise of his determination:
“If any Patamoke man was destined to get a goose this year,” said Francis X. Caveny, himself a gunner of note, “it would have to be Amos Turlock, for he knows more about the habits of this bird than any other local resident.”
There was additional material recalling the years when quite a few geese used to visit the Choptank, and Amos was congratulated editorially for reminding Patamokeans of those good old days:
To Amos Turlock and to men like him, we say Bravo! And even though we might be fatuous, we would like to voice the hope that one day the multitudes of geese that once inhabited our region will return. Certainly we applaud the efforts of good sportsmen like Amos Turlock who strive so diligently to help us keep the ducks we still have. Hang your goose high, Amos, and eat it in good health!
No black in Patamoke could exist through a period as short as six days without being reminded of the distorted society in which he lived. This was brought home to the Caters on the afternoon of the day when they heard the exciting news that Amos Turlock had actually shot a goose.
What happened on this particular afternoon was that Julia was fortunate enough to get an appointment with the traveling black dentist who had come down from Baltimore. For some time she had been having serious trouble with her teeth, and since dental care was totally beyond the reach of local black families—white dentists would not treat them and there were no black practitioners—she had watched her teeth deteriorate when she knew that with proper attention they might be saved.
“Bad case here,” the overscheduled visitor said. “Only thing I can see, have them all out.”
“But, Doctor—”
“They could have been saved. Maybe they still could be if I could see you once a week for six months. Impossible. Better have them all out.”
“But—”
“Lady, we have no time to argue. I can pull them for you, take an impression, and mail you a set of real fine teeth from Baltimore. Forty dollars and you have no more trouble.”
“But—”
“Lady, make up your mind. I don’t get back this way again this year.”
“Could I come back?”
“Look, if you don’t have the forty dollars now, I’ll take a deposit and trust you for the rest. Reverend Douglass told me—”
“It’s not money!” she interrupted sternly, and then all the fight went out of her. The years of trying to hold her family together, of trying not to get too fat the way some black women did, the anxiety over her teeth and the recent behavior of Luta Mae and the education of her son. It was too much, too much. The remorseless, never-ending struggle was too much.
Resigned, she lay back in the chair, but when the first whiffs of gas reached her nostrils she instinctively fought against them. “I ain’t gonna faint!”
“Now, now,” the dentist said, softly stroking her hand.
Really, it was much less painful than she had anticipated, and the dentist laughed when he helped her from the chair. “If the teeth don’t fit, I’ll tell you what. I’ll wear them myself.”
But when she reached the street, and felt the vast emptiness in her mouth, she could not hold back the tears. “Dear Jesus, I won’t never be able to sing no more.”
If anyone had sought to compose an honest history of Patamoke, he or she would probably have felt obliged to include a passage on the spiritual experience of the region, and a curious problem would have presented itself, because it would have been difficult to identify any of the presumed leaders as the man or woman who had done most to inspirit the area.
For example, a traditionalist might want to nominate William Penn, the stately Quaker from Philadelphia; he came to Patamoke in the late 1600s, bowing pompously to the locals and offering evidence of his spirituality, but it would be difficult to enshrine him, for to the average Marylander, Penn was a conniving, thieving, lying rascal who had done his darnedest to steal the northern part of the colony into Pennsylvania, and succeeded. Paul Steed, in writing of that period, said:
The worst enemy Maryland ever had was William Penn, that sanctimonious Quaker and self-styled religious pontificater. Had my forebears not been on their guard, Penn would have stolen the fairest portion of our colony, all the way down to Devon Island. He came to Patamoke once, ostensibly to pray with his local religionists but obviously to spy out what parts to steal next. A more devious man never appeared on the Choptank.
Animosity toward Penn’s memory was kept alive by two unfortunate incidents: in 1765, when Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed the line allocating land between Maryland and Pennsylvania, they started from a point not far from the Choptank, and it was soon rumored that Pennsylvanians had suborned them to draw a line favorable to Penn’s people; and in 1931, when a professor at Penn State College wrote a book explaining that the Chesapeake Bay should never have been so named since it was merely the extended mouth of the Susquehanna River, the Patamoke Bugle thundered: “First they steal our land and now they want to steal our bay. We say, ‘To hell with Pennsylvania and its thieving ways.’ ”
A more acceptable case could be made for Francis Asbury, that inspired English clergyman of limited education but unlimited devotion to the precepts of John Wesley who came to Maryland in the 1770s. A man of indefatigable will, he traveled each year more than five thousand miles, laboring to establish in the nation about to be born the new religion of Methodism. His harsh style was particularly effective on the Eastern Shore, which he traipsed from end to end, shouting hellfire and providing the simple citizens with a brand of religion much more appealing than the stately proprieties of Episcopalianism, a rich man’s faith, or Catholicism, which had become severely formalized. Asbury stopped at Patamoke three times, creating a frenzy among the watermen with his revelations of heaven and hell, and it was principally because of his enthusiasm that the Choptank became in effect a Methodist river. Of one visit he wrote in his diary:
I arrived at Patamoke, a fair town on a fair river, on fire to save the souls of these rude men who fished the bay as the followers of Jesus fished the Galilee, but the first man I fell in with was one Turlock, who annoyed the patrons of our tavern by his noisy eating, his loud drinking, his smoking and his riotous behavior. He appeared as forgetful of eternity as if he had been at the most secure distance from its brink. The reprobate had the effrontery to tell me in a loud voice that his father had lived to be 109 and had never used spectacles.
Having been greeted by a man so steeped in sin, I was eager to get about the business of saving this place, but I found that Satan had arrived before me, diverting the good people of Patamoke with a play, which they attended noisily and with apparent delight. I was sore distressed.
George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, visited Patamoke in 1672, but he made no lasting impression, and the saintly Father Ralph Steed had endeavored to establish Catholicism in the most remote corners of the region at about the same time, but his influence had been felt more on the western shore. Ruth Brinton Paxmore, in that same period, had been a powerful force for good, but her personality was so abrasive that she could not be considered symbolic of the region. Woolman Paxmore, as we have seen, was a more gentle type, but he exercised his influence principally in other parts of the eastern seaboard and was not thought much of at home.
In the late 1940s he perceived that those portions of the vast Steed land holdings which had for the past century been devoted to tomato growing were shortly going to show a loss. The huge tomato canneries scattered along the banks of Eastern Shore rivers were outmoded; much better factories were being installed in New Jersey and the West. Also, the ground had been worn out by constant assaults from the tomato plants, notoriously hungry for minerals, and poor soil meant weak plants susceptible to infestations of insects. Even more important, with labor rushing away from farms and to war plants and new projects like the proposed Bay Bridge, it was no longer economical to raise tomatoes, so on a day fateful in the history of the Eastern Shore, Jefferson Steed told his foremen, “No more tomatoes.” When they protested that the great iron-roofed canneries, looming out of the marshes along the estuaries, could be put to no alternate use, he replied, “Let ’em rust to hell. They’ve served their day.” And a way of life vanished.
“What will we grow?” the foremen wanted to know.
“Corn,” Steed said.
The men, all practiced farmers, could not believe what they were hearing. They had always grown modest amounts of corn for their dairy herds, but if they added acreage that had formerly grown tomatoes, new markets would have to be found. “Where will we sell the stuff?” Steed replied, “Eastern Shore people love horses. And what’s left over, that’s my headache.”
So at considerable risk of financial disaster, Congressman Steed planted his tomato fields with a hybrid corn developed by agronomists at the University of Maryland, and it grew well. But the remarkable yields he achieved came not from this good seed but from the daring decision he made when planting: “From the time the first Englishmen raised corn in Maryland we’ve planted it three feet apart in rows widely separated. Always thought it had to be that way. But if you ask me, it was only so that horses could move between the rows to cultivate. With these new chemicals we don’t have to plant that way.” And boldly he had seeded his corn so tightly that even a man had difficulty passing between the stalks.
It worked. And in the fall when black field hands swept down the compacted rows, piling the ears in stacks three times as large as predicted, Steed knew he had a good thing.
“Now all I have to do is find a market,” he told his manager, and by questioning fellow congressmen he uncovered patrons eager to buy his surplus at the low prices he was able to offer, and soon other farmers along the Eastern Shore were converting from tomatoes to corn; in the late summer the far fields were burdened with stalks eight and ten feet high, laden with heavy ears. Steed’s gamble was one of the shrewdest ever made in Maryland agriculture, and farmers who might have lost their land had they stayed with tomatoes became moderately rich on corn.
But a lucky stroke in rural economics would not qualify a man for sanctification; what Steed did next, in the late 1950s, was to pension off his field hands and purchase a squadron of gigantic automatic corn harvesters, which saved him a great deal of money and allowed him to harvest his fields speedily on Monday and his neighbors’ on Tuesday. The harvester meant that large-scale agriculture was now possible, for gang-plows prepared the fields in spring, huge multiple disks worked it in late April, harrows with enormous teeth kept the land clean, and metal dinosaurs crawled over the fields in autumn, harvesting the corn.
Where did the spiritual significance in such an operation lie? The black field hands had harvested corn slowly but with almost perfect efficiency; the mechanical pickers swept rudely down the rows, leaving in their trail about three percent of the corn missed. It fell as broken ears, or grains knocked off, or stalks left at the end of rows too tightly packed against the hedges for the machine to reach, or one or two rows left standing down the middle, not worth the driver’s turning his huge machine around for.
Steed and his managers were not slothful; they realized they were losing corn, but when they calculated what they would have to spend to garner the stray bits, they found it was cheaper to leave it. “Let’s admit that the loss in harvesting by machine is three percent. But even when you add to that the depreciation and the gasoline, the machine harvester is a bargain. So we’ll forget the fallen grains.”
It was one of the happiest decisions a Steed ever made regarding his land, for when the bright yellow grains lay on the ground in autumn, reflecting back the paling rays of the sun, geese flying overhead began to see them. At first a few stopped on their way to customary wintering grounds in North Carolina, and a thrill shot up and down the spine of the Eastern Shore—“Geese comin’ back! Henry seen at least forty at the far end of his field.”
Housewives going to market would suddenly stop to stare at something their grandmothers had spoken of but which they had never seen. “I was turnin’ the corner off Glebe Road, and there in the field stood—well, it must of been a hundred fat geese feedin’ on the Childress farm.”
One autumn at least forty thousand geese came to fields along the Choptank, and legends of the time when nearly a million came were revived, and fifty Turlocks began to grease their guns.
By 1960 two hundred thousand geese were spending their winters along the endless streams feeding into the Choptank, and in the years ahead the population would reach the levels Captain John Smith had observed in 1608. Rafts would form east of Patamoke, ten thousand geese drowsing on the water, and something would alert those at the edge, and they would rise, and all would follow, and then the scouts would satisfy themselves that the danger was not real, and they would settle once again upon the river, and all the rest would follow; it was like a magic carpet somewhere east of Baghdad, rising and drifting and falling back.
At the store, huntsmen summed up the consequences: “Elmer’s carvin’ decoys again. They’s five Turlocks advertisin’ their services as guides. That black man at the garage is offerin’ to pick feathers off’n a goose for twenty-five cents, and Martin Caveny rented his waterfront to a dude from Pittsburgh for nine hundred dollars.”
But always when the hunters explored this fascinating subject of how the return had vitalized the Eastern Shore—“Ever’ damned motel room rented for the season”—the moment would come when they would fall silent from the wonder of it all, then some old man would shake his head and say, “Beats all, the geese came back.” And again no one spoke, for the old man had summarized the best thing that had happened to the Shore in a hundred years.
When Hiram Cater was seven years old his serious education began, not in spelling or arithmetic but in the brutal tactics of survival in a white world. His mother, who could remember lynchings along the Choptank when black men who may or may not have been guilty of something were summarily hanged, was his principal instructor: “Your job to stay alive. Keep away from notice. Doan’ do nothin’ to attract attention. If a Turlock or a Caveny come your way, you step aside. Doan’ never challenge a white man.”
At the slightest indication that young Hiram was developing a temper, she warned him, “All right you hit Oscar. He black. But doan’ never hit a white child, because his papa gonna make big trouble.”
And she was especially careful to admonish her son about speaking to white girls: “They doan’ exist. They ain’t there. You doan’ go to school with them, you doan’ go to church with them, and in town you keeps strictly away.” As she watched her son, she was gratified that the two halves of Patamoke were separated; with luck, he need never come into contact with a white girl.
Her doctrine was: “It doan’ exist.” Anything that irritated or denigrated was to be cast out of mind, and no insolence from whites was sufficient cause to retreat from this basic strategy. If Hiram had no books in school, forget it. If when he did get his hands on a book, it was in tatters from long use in white schools, ignore it. If the school had no glass in its windows, keep your mouth shut, because nothing can be done about that. The most automatic human responses we
“That’s how it gonna be all your life,” Julia Cater told her son, and she was preaching old black wisdom, for through the generations that was how black women enabled their sons to survive so that they could grow into black men.
Hiram’s natural protests, uttered from the day this indoctrination began, received scant support from his father. “You do like your mama say, you stay alive.” On the skipjacks, Jeb had mastered the trick of getting along with white crewmen. “I does the job better, and when trouble starts I keeps my eyes down.” As a consequence, he was known favorably as a good nigger, and after a while he found little resentment in playing this role. “Man got to stay alive. Man got to have a job. You listen to your mama, Hiram, you gonna be a smart man some day, maybe have your own skipjack.”
The effect on Hiram of this constant repression of natural instincts was minimal, for he found within the black community adequate outlets for his boisterous spirits. If he wanted to fight, Oscar was at hand, slightly larger, slightly better with his fists. If he wanted to play rough games, many boys his size frequented the school grounds and at times their contests became almost violent. By no means did his mother’s preaching make him into a subdued child, nor one afraid of social conflict. Instead this walling him off from the white community forced him to become an even stronger personality within the black.
Like his father, he had a rugged medium build. His skin was darker than that of many with whom he played, bespeaking an unmixed ancestry reaching back to Africa, but of that continent and Cudjo Cater’s adventures there, he knew nothing. He was a child of the Choptank, without heritage, or language, or knowledge of social custom, and it was likely that this condition would maintain for the rest of his life, as it had for his father.