Chesapeake (133 page)

Regardless of what he did, he came home exhausted, for he worked hours that no white man would have tolerated, and always at the most demanding tasks. If the skipjack loaded timber, it was Jeb who carried it aboard at the river ports and unloaded it in Baltimore. His hands were calloused, his back slightly bent, but on and on he worked, a machine that was employed at slight cost and would be discarded at the first sign of slowing down.

Despite his unstinting labor, he would still have been unable to support his family had not Julia worked as hard as he. She never complained, for she was gratified at having captured Jeb, and this was understandable, because not only did the black community respect him as a leader, but he was also the best husband in Frog’s Neck. At home he had a placid disposition, and in public a willingness to share his meager funds with any family facing trouble, and Reverend Douglass
said of him, ‘I preach charity according to the Bible, but it’s Jeb who demonstrates what the word means.’ He was a good father, too, spending much time with his daughters, and if young Luta Mae was proving fractious, it was not because her parents ignored her; they loved her deeply and did their best to quieten her rages when she felt herself abused by white folks.

‘Luta Mae,’ her father told her repeatedly, ‘you ain’t got to fight the white folks. You got to side-step ’em.’ It was Jeb’s belief that if a black person minded his ways, he would run into very little trouble with whites.

‘Turlocks hate us colored,’ he warned his daughters, ‘so the smart thing, stay shed of ’em. Cavenys too. Just you stay clear, like me, an’ you find no trouble.’

Repeatedly he assured his family that the bad old days when Turlocks and Cavenys could rage through the countryside were gone: ‘Ain’t been a lynchin’ along the Choptank in twenty years, and they ain’t gonna be if’n you side-step ’em.’ The Turlocks and Cavenys recognized Jeb’s qualities by observing many times, ‘He’s a good nigger. Knows his place.’

Jeb realized that the heaviest burden in the family fell on Julia. She held three jobs. In winter she shucked oysters at the Steed sheds, working the midnight shift so that gallon cans of fresh seafood could be shipped out at dawn. In summer she was invaluable at the crab-picking company, and in autumn she worked double shifts at the Steed tomato cannery, peeling by hand the extra-fancy size for cold-packs.

In addition to this, she did sewing for several white families and stood as one of the great pillars of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. She was Reverend Douglass’ principal support and also one of the lead sopranos in his choir. She was positively convinced that God took a personal interest in her church and her family, and although she was well aware from stories handed down from the time of Cudjo and Eden that Christianity had often been used as a prison for blacks, she also knew that God had not only arranged for Emancipation by sending Abraham Lincoln to earth, but had also given blacks their A.M.E. Church as proof of His concern.

From Monday morning at midnight till Saturday afternoon at six Julia Cater worked as few people in the world were required to work, but as Sunday approached, and the wooden church waited for her to decorate it with whatever flowers the season provided, she knew that God Himself waited to participate in her thanksgiving that another week had passed without major disasters.

Lesser disasters were with her constantly: ‘Ain’t no more crabs comin’ in, Jeb. Nex’ week the las’.’

‘Maybe Mrs. Goldsborough, she want some sewin’ done.’

‘Tomato peelin’ start late this year. Meanwhiles we got to eat.’

From anxiety to anxiety the Cater family moved from year to year,
but in late 1938, with Julia unable to work at the cannery until her child was born, and with Jeb earning almost nothing on the skipjack, a major crisis developed, and at last, desperate, the husband and wife decided to seek advice from Reverend Douglass.

‘We ain’t got a penny, and no food in the house,’ Julia told the minister. Jeb sat, silent, looking down at his work-worn hands.

Reverend Douglass leaned back in his chair, saddened as always by the story heard so often in Frog’s Neck. But this time he felt overcome by it, for these were the Caters, who had labored so faithfully to keep their family together, who despite their pitiful, hard-earned income had always contributed to his salary, had even whitewashed their shack to preserve an appearance of decency and dignity.

He could see them now, entering his church, Jeb a few steps in front in a clean suit, then Julia, prepared to sing her praises to God, and the two girls, pretty and spruced up for the Sabbath. They were the backbone of his congregation—and now they were starving.

Reverend Douglass mulled over the possible ways he could help the Caters. He knew that in the Steed stores or at the Paxmore Boatyard there were no jobs for additional blacks; each establishment had its quota who swept and lugged and cleaned and muscled things about, but those jobs were treasured from one generation to the next, even though the pay was minimal. Sometimes in cases of extreme indigence the black community coalesced like corpuscles about the wound and somehow the patient was saved. But in these harsh days the families had scarcely enough for their own, and the reverend knew it would be useless to ask for help from them. The only thing left was the traditional Patamoke recourse: the Caters could go to either the Steeds or the Paxmores and plead for help.

But when he suggested it to the Caters, Julia said, ‘We’s proud,’ and then, unable to bear the thought of begging, she went on, ‘Maybe they get me some sewing, and Jeb could fix barns. Or the girls could help at the cannery.’ And still Jeb said nothing.

Finally Reverend Douglass said, ‘I’ll go to the Steeds and ask for help.’

‘Better the Paxmores,’ Julia said, and it required rigid self-discipline to prevent tears.

Reverend Douglass left the Neck and drove out to Peace Cliff to talk with Woolman Paxmore, just home from Berlin, where he had helped save twenty-five thousand Jews, and the kindly Quaker said, ‘John, I simply have no money left.’

‘Mr. Paxmore, this worthy family is in deep trouble.’

‘John, I’m powerless.’

‘But the woman’s about to have another baby. We can’t let her go hungry.’ Reverend Douglass, realizing that no white family could comprehend the perpetual crisis in which blacks lived, cried with heartbreaking force, ‘These good people are starving!’

Woolman Paxmore pressed his hands against his eyes, and because he
was a minister, snatches of biblical phrases tumbled through his head. He thought of Jesus aiding the poor and admonishing his followers to care for the downtrodden, and it grieved him that whereas he had been able to help the Jews in Berlin, he could not do the same for the blacks here in Patamoke. Painfully he dropped his hands and looked at Reverend Douglass, whom he accepted as a messenger from God. ‘Obviously, we must do something,’ he said quietly. ‘But what?’

And then he remembered a canning jar in which his wife stored small coins against some day of great need, and he left the room to find that jar, but as he rummaged about, his wife heard him and asked, ‘What is it, Woolman?’ and he said, ‘The Caters. Those good, dear people.’ And she said nothing as he took her coins.

The meeting at which the two ministers rescued the Caters occurred on Friday. Next day the
Patamoke Bugle
carried the latest in its series of hilarious make-believe anecdotes from the black community:

Amos Turlock was in a bitter mood. Rocking back and forth in his shack north of the marsh, he brooded upon the sad condition into which his life had fallen. He was only twenty-nine, a tall, lanky waterman who shaved only on Sundays; one of his incisors had recently broken and other front teeth threatened to follow. Sucking on the empty space, he gazed dispassionately at his weatherbeaten wife as she plodded about the kitchen, preparing his greasy breakfast. ‘I jes’ cain’t believe it,’ he said more to himself than to her. ‘Goddamnit, he’s my own brother-in-law and he hadn’t oughta behave thisaway.’

‘Ain’t he more your cousin?’ his wife snarled. ‘Din’ his pappy marry your aunt?’

‘Point I’m tryin’ to make, if a body would listen, Hugo Pflaum ain’t got no right atall.’

He rocked on, contemplating the inequities of life, and he had many to protest. For one brief spell at the turn of the century his branch of the Turlocks had been smiled upon—‘We had the brick house in town. Gran’daddy Jake had his own skipjack.’

‘Yesterday you claimed Sam Turlock was your gran’daddy.’

‘He was, goddamnit, on my mother’s side …’ He stopped in disgust. It was impossible to conduct a serious conversation with this woman, one of the Turlocks from upriver, but after a dull silence he resumed his litany. ‘Yep, we had our own skipjack, and you know what, Cass, I think that son-of-a-bitch Caveny stoled it from us. Yes, sir, you ask me, he flashed some papers in court, but I think he forged ’em, and the judge let it slip by.’

He rocked in silence, shaking his head over paradises lost: the brick house had been sheriffed out at a forced sale; the skipjack was now operated by Cavenys alone; his children could barely read; and were it not for the marsh and the game it provided, the family would barely be able to exist, even with public charity. And now the final indignity! His own cousin, Hugo Pflaum, had announced in the
Patamoke Bugle
that he intended to confiscate every long gun on the Choptank, and at the store had specifically boasted, ‘If I don’t do nothin’ else, I’m gonna get my hands on The Twombly.’

‘Goddamnit!’ Amos cried, rising from his chair. ‘We been warned. Cass, get the children in here. I want to talk with ever’body, serious.’

Whenever he stood up and spoke in that tone, she knew he meant it, so she stopped frying the eggs and shouted from the door, ‘Kipper, Betsy, Ben, fetch Nellie and come in here.’ Four separate protests greeted this cry, and she yelled, ‘I meant what I said. Your pop wants to talk to you.’

Four bedraggled children came in from the muddy yard, and if old Captain Jake could have seen them—he the master of his own skipjack and dominant waterman of the Choptank—he would have been appalled at how swiftly his family had descended, and he would have been perplexed as to the reasons. For one thing, he had married his full cousin, so that each inherent weakness in the Turlock strain had been magnified. And he had scoffed when Miss Paxmore warned him that his children were not learning to read. Furthermore, while Tim Caveny had hoarded every penny, like the penurious Papist he was, Jake had squandered his on family ventures of no merit. He had not lived to watch the sad transfer of the skipjack to sly Timothy, but in his last days he had often suspected that this might happen.

Why did a family rise and fall and sometimes rise again? Luck played an enormous part. For example, if Jake Turlock had lived as long as Tim
Caveny, he might have held his sprawling family together, and saved both the brick house and the boat, but he had drowned one bitter night when a super blast from the long gun caused him to lose his balance and capsize his skiff.

But a family rises or falls primarily because of the way it marshals its genetic inheritance and puts it to constructive use. No family along the Choptank had a more vigorous life force than the Turlocks; they were not handsome like the Steeds, nor clever like the Cavenys, nor powerfully built like the two generations of Pflaums, nor intellectually solid like the Paxmores, but they possessed a wonderful capacity for survival. They were lean, spare, simple and clean of mind, with strong eyes and teeth, had they cared for them. And all members of the family possessed an animal cunning that protected them. With their genetic gifts they should have owned the river, and Turlocks like Captain Matt of the slave trade and Captain Jake of the oyster dredging had done so.

Amos could have owned it, too, for he had inherited every innate capacity his forebears had possessed, but fatal inbreeding had encouraged family weaknesses to multiply, while its virtues receded. He had wanted to repurchase the house in town when the price was reasonable, but he never got around to it, and now they wanted eleven hundred dollars. He had intended to buy back his family’s share in the skipjack, and he could have done so, for Caveny offered it, but now a skipjack was selling for six thousand and there was no possibility of repurchase. He had also talked of sending his children seriously to school, but at their first protests had allowed them to swarm in the marsh.

Now they stood before him, four marsh rats as disorganized and hopeless as he. ‘Serious business, and I want you to listen. None of you, and this includes you too, Cass, is ever to mention The Twombly. You don’t know nothin’ about it. You don’t know where I keep it. You don’t even know whether I still have it or not. And goddamnit, you are never to let anyone know that I use it.’ He stared balefully at each of his children, then at his wife. ‘Because if you blab, even once, Hugo Pflaum is gonna come here and take The Twombly away, and that means you and me ain’t gonna eat no more duck.’

In 1918 the government of Maryland had outlawed possession of long guns, for it could be proved that these lethal weapons were slaughtering ducks at a rate which prevented replacement. A census had been conducted, and the location of every gun specified; they were known by name—Cheseldine, Reverdy, Old Blaster, Morgan—usually referring to the family which first owned them, for no matter how many hands a gun passed through, it was always referred respectfully back to its original owner.