Chesapeake (134 page)

The 1918 census had shown seventeen long guns on the Choptank, and diligent pressures from Maryland’s game wardens, primarily Hugo
Pflaum, had reduced the number to four. The Herman Cline, once owned by the slave-breaker on the Little Choptank, had been confiscated, and the Bell, a beauty from Denton. The Cripton family had gone to great lengths to protect their monstrous gun, Cripton, even threatening to murder Pflaum if he persisted in his attempts to impound it, but in the end he had tracked it down to a corncrib.

Amos Turlock ominously remembered the photograph which the
Bugle
had displayed of the capture. There was Hugo Pflaum, a stubby man with broad shoulders and no neck, holding in his right hand Cripton, twelve feet tall, with its barrel reflecting sunlight. His left hand grasped Abel Cripton, hat pulled down over his face to avoid the shame of having lost a gun which had been in his family for over a hundred years.

Turlock had cut the picture from the paper and tacked it to the kitchen wall, where it still hung in tatters; when he was drunk he liked to spit at it, for Hugo Pflaum, with his bull neck, was his enemy, and The Twombly was in peril so long as he operated.

The Twombly, oldest and best of the Choptank arsenal, had taken its name, of course, from old Greef Twombly upriver, whose ancestors had imported it from England in 1827. Its barrel was still as clean as when it left its London foundry; its oak stock had been replaced four times but was still as thick as a man’s thigh. Hugo Pflaum, studying his census of the guns he was supposed to capture, said of The Twombly, ‘It’s been used on this river for a hundred and eleven years. I figure it’s been fired on an average of three times a week, twenty-five weeks a year. That’s over eight thousand shots. Now, if they kill even fifty ducks with each shot, and that’s low, why, it means that this gun has removed about four hundred thousand ducks from circulation, and it’s got to stop.’

Hugo’s estimates were conservative; when a voracious old man like Greef Twombly owned a gun as good as this one, he didn’t restrict its use to three nights a week, and when it passed into the hands of a confirmed waterman like Jake Turlock, he didn’t average a mere fifty birds a shot. A more accurate count would be that this famous old gun had slaughtered nearly two million ducks and geese, and this helped explain why the bird population had declined so severely in recent decades.

‘Hell,’ Amos complained at the store, ‘last year me and Abel Cripton, we sat in our goose blind at the marsh for two straight weeks—and how many geese you suppose flew over? Not twenty.’

He was right. Where the Choptank region had once entertained more than a million geese each year, now fewer than twenty thousand appeared, and these kept to the marshes south of the river. The depopulation was incredible, and many gentlemen who had paid substantial sums for their English and Austrian shotguns rarely found an excuse to use
them for anything but doves. The geese were gone; the ducks were going, and it was Hugo Pflaum’s job to see that reasonable hunting procedures encouraged their return.

This was the meaning of Amos Turlock’s lecture to his family: ‘I don’t give a damn for them fancy foreigners who come in here to steal our ducks with their expensive guns. They miss, they ain’t gonna starve. But if we don’t get our ducks regular, you and me, we ain’t gonna eat.’

The oldest boy, Ben, knew where the gun was hidden, but even before Warden Pflaum began to apply pressure, he had deduced, with shrewd Turlock wisdom, that the day must come when someone would try to take The Twombly away, and he had never spoken of it to anyone. What was more remarkable, he had begun marking Pflaum’s movements. He and the other children knew the warden as Uncle Hugo and often stopped by his farm, where Mrs. Pflaum, their Aunt Becky, could be counted upon to provide them with German cookies. They enjoyed listening to Hugo tell tales of Germany, where his father had lived in the country before running away to sea.

‘In Germany,’ Uncle Hugo explained, ‘they keep the forests as clean as the park before the courthouse. My father said a custodian would be shot if his woods looked like the ones around here. A park, that’s what a German woods is. And when you grow up you should make the woods in back of your place a park.’

Ben said, ‘We like it the way it is. So do the deer.’

‘You must tell your father he can’t shoot those deer any more.’

Ben said nothing, but intuitively he knew that this husky, amiable man with no neck was his family’s enemy, and he watched how and where he went.

One night in October 1938 Ben whispered to his father, ‘Hugo’s up to Denton, lookin’ for the gun that’s supposed to be there.’

‘Good,’ Amos said, and when night fell he and Ben hurried along a footpath that led into the heart of the marsh, then ducked off to one side, doubled back, moved along a path that was barely discernible and came finally upon a wooden structure not two feet high and absolutely invisible from any distance. It rested on poles, to keep salt water away, and had a lid, which Amos lifted quietly. Inside, in a nest of greased burlap, lay The Twombly, its barrel wiped clean, its heavy stock solid and new. Almost reverently Amos hefted it, carried it in his arms and headed for the waiting skiffs, but as he climbed easily into his, placing the gun in position, he heard a noise, grew tense, then laughed.

‘Come on, Rusty,’ he said, and his red Chesapeake leaped into the boy’s skiff and they were off.

On January 1, 1939, Julia Cater gave birth to a boy, who was taken to the A.M.E. Church in Frog’s Neck and christened Hiram, a biblical
name meaning ‘most noble,’ and on the way home from church Jeb Cater was stopped by the captain of a successful skipjack. ‘Jeb, we goin’ out and we stayin’ out. You want to cook?’

It had happened just as he predicted: ‘Things is gonna be tough for the rest of this year, Julia, but come 1939 they gonna fall in place.’

He was not happy about leaving home for a protracted absence right after the birth of his son, and his apprehensions were doubled when Julia took a job shucking oysters—‘Don’t you think you oughta stay with the boy?’ His wife ridiculed this—‘We got a chance to earn some money, we takin’ it.’ She would work the midnight shift, hurry home and supervise the girls as they dressed for school, then tend the baby and have him ready for Helen to watch over while she slept.

The girls, of course, attended the black school held in a crumbling building at the far end of the Neck. It contained twenty-two desks for forty-seven students, so the teacher had to exercise some ingenuity in keeping her pupils juggled between sitting and standing classroom periods. She taught seven grades, and when a black child left her care that child usually had all the education it would get. There was one broken blackboard, but months would pass with no chalk. There was no ink, but ingenious boys collected berries from which a pale stain was extracted. Pencils were precious and some students would spend whole weeks without one, but what most irritated little Luta Mae was the fact that she was now in Grade Three without ever having had a book. The school had books, outmoded editions handed down from white schools in the neighborhood, but they were so few that only certain students could obtain one, and so far the luck of the draw had worked against her.

‘Harry he gets one and Norma Ellen she gets one,’ she complained to her mother, ‘but I never gets one.’

‘Maybe next year, in Grade Four, you’ll be lucky,’ Julia said. She refused to believe that the teacher was discriminating against her daughter, and when Luta Mae said harsh things, Julia reprimanded her, ‘You wait till your daddy gets home in March …’

At the end of the oyster season Jeb Cater came home, tired from his hard work but well nourished because he had been the cook. His broad face beamed with pleasure as he gave Julia his wages, but any thought of disciplining Luta Mae vanished when he saw his son. ‘That boy growin’ like a weed! He gonna be the best.’

For hours at a time he played with Hiram, not throwing him in the air as some fathers did, for the boy was too precious for such rough treatment, but talking to him as if he understood. ‘Hiram, you gonna go to school. You gonna learn to go out into the world. Come time you gonna enlist in the army. Who knows, you might be a general in France.’

There were no aspirations too lofty for this child, and Jeb’s heart expanded with hope when he saw how well formed the child’s body was,
how bright his eyes, but after his exultation he found that a son altered his life in disturbing ways.

During the years when he had only daughters he could ignore the handicaps under which all blacks existed, but with a son he was constantly reminded of the discriminations, for whereas he had been required from birth to adjust to them and had grown inured to injustice, it galled him to realize that his son was doomed to an endless repetition of such unfairness. These were the specifics he began to list, not commenting upon them even to his wife, but marking them in his mind:

… It was customary, in Patamoke, for a black to step aside on the town pavements when a superior white person passed, even going into the gutter if necessary.

… It was traditional for a workman like Jeb to touch his cap when a white man approached and to lift it completely off the head for a white woman. The white thus deferred to could pass on without acknowledging in any way the black man’s courtesy.

… There were no black doctors in the region, no dentists. A black could get minimum medical care from white doctors, especially in the case of communicable diseases which might spread to the white community, but the system was a bad one, lacking confidence on both sides.

… Few blacks ever assembled in a building that was painted. The church, the school, the corner store, the homes were gray and rotting.

… Streets on which whites lived were paved; those for blacks were dusty and rutted.

… All things pertaining to blacks were diminished. The school had only seven grades instead of twelve. The school year consisted of only one hundred and ten days instead of one hundred and sixty-six. Five blocks of black homes had one streetlight instead of ten. And the playground for children in the Neck was a small back lot instead of a ten-acre field with a full-scale baseball diamond.

… Almost every really desirable aspect of Patamoke life was proscribed to blacks. They were not welcomed in the library, nor in the big stone churches, nor in the motion-picture theater (except in a high and dirty balcony), nor in the courthouse, nor in the new school, nor in the recreation areas, nor in the public meetings, nor in the better law offices. If they were seen at night walking along the better streets, they were questioned, and at the ball park they had to sit in the unshaded bleachers, in a section severely roped off.

… What infuriated the two Cater girls was that when they had saved their pennies and marched proudly to the Gold and Blue Ice Cream Parlor, the man behind the counter took their money, treated them courteously and gave them at least as generous a scoop as he gave white children. But once the cone was in their hands, they had to leave the parlor, walking past the lovely iron tables where white children sat, and
if they so much as nibbled at the dripping ice cream while they were inside the store, the owner would chide them gently, ‘No, no. You mustn’t eat the cone in here. Only outside.’ So the girls would carry their cones grimly to the door, quit the premises and eat on the street. Luta Mae, eight years old, resented this expulsion. It wasn’t the fact that she had to eat outside that embittered her—‘It’s them tables, Mom. All white and lacy-like with the clean glass tops and the kids sittin’ there.’ For some years her dream of paradise was a cloudy space filled with endless iron tables, all painted white, at which angels sat in easy relaxation, not eating ice cream necessarily, ‘Just sittin’ there at the clean tables.’

… Jeb’s major irritation was one he could explain to no one, but it was so real it gnawed at him when other far more important deprivations went unchallenged. Each summer a crescendo of excitement was orchestrated by a smallish white man who arrived in town from Baltimore, Mr. Evans. He went first to the
Bugle,
whereupon florid stories began to appear on the front page: ‘Show Boat to Offer Six Sure Hits.’ Then he employed two black boys to help him poster the town: ‘Show Boat. Two Weeks. Solid Hits.’ Finally he made a deal with Steed’s whereby he could plaster one side of their store with really large full-color announcements of the stars and the plays they would be presenting:
Stella Dallas, Romeo and Juliet, Up in Mabel’s Room, Red Stockings
and
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Seats were scaled from a dollar down to fifteen cents for children at matinées.

Excitement rose in the week prior to the arrival of the boat, for then the
Bugle
told of the fabulous successes the various actors had enjoyed in Europe and New York, and at Steed’s a desk was set up inside the door where seats for specific performances could be reserved. It was then that the blacks in Frog’s Neck began to lay their plans; they could not reserve seats, of course, for they were restricted to a hot and narrow balcony, but they could express their preferences: ‘Gentlemen from Baltimore say us colored gonna like this here
Skidding.
Very funny little boy, make you laugh.’

The two favorites among the residents of the Neck were
Stella Dallas
and
Old Time Minstrels,
and each year Jeb Cater bought tickets for the latter. ‘I likes that there play about the girl, she break a man’s heart, but I prefers the minstrels.’ He did not try to explain why he liked the night of minstrelsy, but it had nothing to do with the fact that blacks were portrayed, nor that the humor was broad and easily understood. What pleased him was that the white manager, realizing that his all-white cast lacked certain proficiencies, always hired Will Nesbitt, a local black, to play the bones and do the shuffle.

The bones were four time-hardened cow-ribs, about seven inches long, one pair for the right hand, another for the left. When properly wedged between the thumb and fingers they could be rattled like castanets,
and a good performer could beat out amazing rhythms with this musical instrument. Will Nesbitt could beat a real tattoo, and it was this bold and basic rhythm that established the quality of a good minstrel show.