Chesapeake (135 page)

So on two nights during the show-boat stay, the blacks of Patamoke could watch their own man perform. Nesbitt had no lines to speak, no role in the broad comedy, but he was part of the show, and when he was invited to step forward and do the coon shuffle, ridiculing the feckless behavior of black workmen, it was a moment of joy. Black athletes could not perform with whites, nor black singers in a white choir, nor black spellers against children their age from white schools, but on the show boat Will Nesbitt could do the shuffle, and that was something.

Why, then, was Jeb Cater infuriated by the show boat? Because it contained only a few seats for blacks, and those far from the stage and smelly. They could not be reserved; to be assured of one meant that some member of the family must stand in line for hours, and even then, white men from the big houses were free to barge in ahead to purchase seats for their black help.

If there was one function throughout the year to which the blacks of Patamoke should have been invited on equal terms, it was the show boat, especially to its nights of
Old Time Minstrels,
but it was precisely these that were handled most callously. Even so, in the summer of 1939, Jeb Cater was prepared once again to go through the misery of trying to land two tickets for the minstrelsy.

Early Monday morning of the third week in July whistles started blowing on the Choptank, and a puffing little tug appeared in the channel, hauling behind it a monstrous old barge on which a theater had been erected. The whole appearance of the two boats evoked nostalgia and romance: the little tug straining against the cables; the captain tooting his whistle; the lovely dip of the line as it fell beneath the water; the blunt nose of the scow; the small, vigorous band on deck, hammering out strong tunes; the waving of the cast as they recognized old friends; and the bright colors of the theater itself, red and gold in the sunrise.

With what care the tug brought its heavy burden into the harbor, stopping its forward motion lest it crash into the wharf, then nudging it cautiously into position. Lines fore and aft! Lines binding it to the posts! Lines bringing it close so that gangways could be lowered! And then the gangplanks, one amidships for white patrons, another aft for blacks.

The management, on its nineteenth visit to Patamoke, was clever enough not to offer the minstrelsy during the first days. These were reserved for the new comedy
Skidding,
the old favorite
Stella Dallas
and the risqué farce
Up in Mabel’s Room.

On the first night of
Old Time Minstrels
Jeb got in line too late to find
a seat, but on the second he sent Luta Mae to stand for him while he went crabbing, and it was his intention to hurry home, sell his catch, wait for Julia to finish work at the cannery and then take her to the show, but she surprised him by announcing firmly, ‘Don’t want to see no more pretendin’. You wants to go, you takes Helen.’ To his surprise, she also refused—‘Too many peoples.’

So at dusk he went to the wharf and found Luta Mae fairly close to the ticket window, not the big one where the real seats were being sold, but the little one in the rear for blacks. Standing beside her, he moved along with his black neighbors, put forty cents on the lip of the window and got his two tickets, twenty-five cents for himself, fifteen cents for Luta Mae. Gingerly they climbed the steep stairs, entered the little balcony, said hello to their friends, then awaited the lowering of the lights.

It was magical! Worth all the waiting and the conniving and the humiliation. ‘Ain’t this somethin’, Luta Mae?’

‘Look at them uniforms!’

The band consisted of four members who played a staggering variety of instruments and played them well. When they reached the finale to the
William Tell Overture
they were so versatile they sounded like a company of forty, and then the curtains parted, and there was the familiar half-moon of black-faced performers, with a most handsome white gentleman in the center asking his unctuous questions:

A minstrel show consisted of two halves: the first featured the circle, with the interlocutor exchanging jokes with his two end men, Mr. Bones and Mr. Sambo. It was in this part that various actors did their specialties, and shortly before intermission the time came for Will Nesbitt to appear. ‘Now you watch this, Luta Mae. This the good part.’

Nesbitt was a tall, thin black man with practically no hips, and when he came jigging on stage, rattling out a rhythm with his bones, the black gallery roared. Luta Mae was entranced by the clicking and the lovely
intricacy of his steps as Nesbitt performed in near-darkness, with a beam of light chasing him about the stage. ‘It’s wonderful!’ she cried, clasping her father’s arm.

‘He the real thing,’ Jeb whispered.

But when the second half started—a playlet with the cast in white face—Luta Mae could not make the adjustment. ‘Where all the colored, Daddy?’

‘Them was the colored,’ Jeb explained. ‘Why they white?’

‘They’re actors,’ Jeb whispered, but before he could give a better answer the highlight of the show approached. It consisted of a lone white dancer, very capable, who came on stage in white tails and top hat to sing
Me and My Shadow,
and as he danced, Will Nesbitt, all in black, appeared behind him, imitating every step like a real shadow, and for some minutes the two artists dueled in the shimmering light to the words and music of one of America’s most effective songs, with the white dancer executing difficult steps and the black equaling them.

Now stagehands moved a short flight of stairs into position, and as he danced nimbly up them, the white man sang that effective passage about his loneliness as he climbed the stairs at midnight, to find only an empty room.

Up after him came his black shadow, and on the relatively small top stair the two men engaged in a competition, until at the end Will Nesbitt let go in a furious improvisation, which the white man watched in admiration, finally wiping his brow and asking the audience, ‘Ain’t he somethin’?’ The balcony exploded with cheers, in which the white audience joined, for Will Nesbitt with his flying feet was something to see.

The concluding number was a resumption of the circle, with some of the actors in black face, some in white, and Will Nesbitt the only real black, off to one end rattling his bones and doing a reprise of his shuffle.

‘Are the men in the circle real colored?’ Luta Mae asked.

‘No.’

‘But the man who beat the other man in the dance, he is?’

‘He sure is.’

The girl pondered this, then asked, ‘If the real colored is the best, why they use make-believe for the others?’ Jeb had no explanation.

On the Eastern Shore, aviation played an emotional role, not an economic one. When Charles Lindbergh soloed across the Atlantic back in May 1927, the area had gone wild with enthusiasm, for it seemed as if the Chesapeake had leapfrogged from the age of the sailboat into the age of air, leaving the railroad and the automobile to other parts of the
United States. Roads were still bad, someone having invented a one-lane disaster paved with oyster shells that crumbled under the weight of a car. But the airplane!

Jefferson Steed revised his Great-Grandfather Paul’s enthusiastic belief that the Eastern Shore would be saved by the railroad. ‘I can foresee,’ Jefferson sonorously proclaimed at the Fourth of July celebration, ‘the day when our peninsula is united by swift-flying airplanes that link us to all parts of this great nation.’ He lost a bundle sponsoring a commuter airline that failed five weeks after it started.

The air age would have its greatest impact on two persons: Isaac Paxmore, the boatbuilder, and John Turlock from the cabin in back of the marshes.

In 1938 Paxmore, watching a barnstorming plane fly up the bay, said to his sons and nephews, ‘If we’ve built boats all these years, we can certainly build a flying boat.’ He was sixty years old when he uttered these words, but the principle of flight so enchanted him that he began forthwith to draw the plans for an airplane made of highly finished light wood, powered by the best engine he could buy from experts in the field and pulled through the air by a laminated propeller which he would personally construct.

His cautious sons considered him irrational, but his nephew Pusey, son of the preacher Woolman Paxmore and a well-disciplined young man who had excelled at Harvard Law, saw possibilities in the flying boat and encouraged his uncle. ‘I think we ought to try. There’s bound to be a big market in the Navy for airplanes that can land on water, and I had a classmate at Harvard whose father makes airplane engines. Place called Scanderville.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Pennsylvania.’

‘Is that where the prison is?’

‘The same. His factory’s a branch of Lycoming, and they build a good engine.’

So in 1939 young Pusey Paxmore donned his best blue suit and reported to the factory in Scanderville, where he purchased two Lycomings, which he brought home by truck. A handsome seaplane waited to receive them, its pontoons ruggedly attached, its surfaces sanded to a glossy finish by workmen long accustomed to building fine boats.

‘This is the start of a whole new adventure,’ Isaac said. ‘This broad river was made for seaplanes.’

When the time came to test-fly the contraption, and the tanks had been filled with gasoline, an aviator from Washington crossed the bay in his own powerboat, studied the seaplane and pronounced it at least as good as any being made elsewhere. ‘It seems to have the proper lines. Now we’ll see.’

He asked if Isaac wanted to accompany him, but the old Quaker said, ‘Pusey wishes to go. He supervised buying the engines.’

‘He got good ones. Hop in.’

So Pusey Paxmore, a conservative Quaker dressed in a three-button suit, jumped into the second seat and held his breath as his uncle’s invention gathered speed on the Choptank, threw a monstrous wake, then raised onto the step, rode on it for a few moments, finally breaking free of the water and sailing into the air.

The lasting impact of this flight did not, however, concern either Isaac Paxmore or his nephew Pusey. The trial run was without incident, the test pilot pronouncing the craft airworthy; he predicted great things for the Paxmore seaplane and expected to see it adopted by both the commercial and military fleet. Neither of these prognostications came to pass because the Paxmores lacked both the funds and the determination to proceed in aviation; their prototype remained a dazzling toy, much enjoyed along the river until its engines rusted away during World War II.

But on his third trial run, the pilot from Washington invited any local who might want to try aviation to accompany him, and to everyone’s surprise Amos Turlock’s younger brother, John, stepped forward. He was then an aimless young man of twenty-seven who had tried his hand at various employments and failed in all. He liked hunting and oystering and that was about it.

But he was adventurous and he wanted to see what flying was like, so when volunteers were called for he stepped vigorously forward and was selected. Fastening the belt so that he would not fall out, he grinned somewhat stupidly at the hangers-on who chided him, waved to a girl he had been courting, and kept his head cocked so as not to miss anything.

The next half-hour was a religious experience, so profound that it altered his life—‘With me everythin’ dates from 1939. Before, nothin’ happened except the time I trapped a skunk. After, my eyes were opened.’

What happened was that he saw for the first time the Eastern Shore of Maryland; indeed, he may have been the first human being ever to have seen it properly. ‘What I mean, I was up there in the sky, lookin’ down on land I thought I knew, but it was all so different I couldn’t believe my eyes. I just gawked and gawked, and then I had this clear vision, like I was in a dream, and I shouted out loud for all the heavens to hear, “Jesus Christ! We got a paradise and we don’t know it.”’

What he saw below him was that enchanting mixture of broad estuaries, nestling coves and long fingerlike peninsulas providing a shoreline hundreds of miles in length, a magical blend of land and water equaled nowhere else in the United States. ‘Lissen, you know-it-alls,’ he told the men at the store, ‘you could drive these roads a lifetime and never know
what the real Eastern Shore is like. You could sail it till the canvas rots without appreciatin’ what you have. Only when you’re up there in the sky, like I was, can you see how the parts lock together.’ Once when he spoke thus, he leaped from his bench, threw his hat in the air and cried, ‘Me and the wild geese! We’re the only ones that know.’

But John Turlock had more than mere enthusiasm; he had seen not only the beauty of the shore, but also its possibilities, and one evening after he had extolled its splendor to the skeptics at the store, he sat in the cabin with his brother Amos and began scribbling on a piece of paper. After a while he shoved his work across the table. ‘How you like that, Amos?’

J. Ruthven Turlock
Your Real Estate Counselor
Patamoke, Maryland
Paradise for Sale

‘Your name ain’t Ruthven,’ Amos growled.

‘Sounds better. People will notice.’

‘What people?’

‘Rich people.’

‘What’ll you do with rich people, John?’

‘Name’s Ruthven. What I got in mind is those rivers I saw from the air. Peachblossom, Tred Avon, Miles, Wye. Amos, there’s enough empty land borderin’ those rivers to keep a real estate man with imagination busy for the rest of his life.’

‘It’s there, but who’s gonna buy it?’

‘Millionaires. They’re gonna grow tired of cities. They’ll want places like those for their kids and their yachts.’