Chesapeake (137 page)

The waning of the Depression brought Julia Cater a perplexing dilemma: because she was recognized as a reliable housekeeper, white families invited her to work for them, and had she done so, she might have earned somewhat more than she did in the various canneries. The Steeds could have used her in their town house and the Paxmores who managed the boatyard asked her several times to work at their home. Even the Cavenys who had the line of trucks wanted her, but always she refused.

Two good reasons kept her at her burdensome tasks: she found solid joy in working with other black women and singing with them through the long, hot hours at the steam tables; and she was the best hand along the Choptank at bobbing crabs.

Watermen like her husband brought their crabbing boats to the wharf by noon, and when the live animals were hauled ashore in baskets, Julia’s manager would be on hand to buy several barrels of the biggest crabs for the special process he had invented. It was always with a sense of pride that he delivered the big crabs to Julia’s table—‘We got some beauties again!’ And he would have his men throw the live and kicking animals into the vats of boiling water.

When Julia lifted them out with her net they were a beautiful red, and it was on these fine specimens that she went to work. Deftly she pulled away the bony carapace, the swimmers and the apron. After scooping out the entrails, she placed the crab with its delicate meat in a kettle of boiling crabapple vinegar, and after the crabs were well infused with this tangy flavor, she took from a carefully guarded closet a small folded packet of spices, which she had concocted from powders bought by the manager at McCormick’s in Baltimore. Only Julia knew the proportions for this mixture; other houses tried to capture the lucrative business of bobbing crabs, but theirs never matched the ones Julia made.

After the mysterious packet was emptied into the boiling vinegar, the crabs remained in the brew only a short time, so that a fresh, tantalizing flavor would be imparted rather than a drenching superabundance. Then
the crabs were lifted out and set on racks to drain, after which Julia took each one individually, inspected it, adding lumpy claws to replace any that may have been lost in fighting and wrapping the whole in parchment.

The end product was a bobbed crab, much sought after in Baltimore and New York saloons. The customer paid seventy-five cents for this tidbit, which he could eat either cold as it came from its parchment or grilled with a little butter and pepper. Either way, the spicy, delicious meat was one of the finest delicacies of the Eastern Shore, and Julia Cater, better than any other worker in the canneries, knew how to make it.

She was a culinary expert, one of the best in America, and for her efforts was paid eighty cents a day for a ten-hour day.

With this money, plus the funds her husband added, she kept her family together. The girls were growing older now, and thank God they were responsible. Helen, approaching eleven, was already talking about finding her own job in a cannery, and nine-year-old Luta Mae, although rather forward in protesting injustices, nevertheless, was willing to run errands for white folks and pocket the pennies they offered. What reassured Julia was the girls’ sense of duty; their father was usually absent on some skipjack and their mother was gone the greater part of each day, so that if the sisters had any tendency toward delinquency, they would have had easy opportunity to go wrong. Instead, they minded the home, tended their brother, progressed in school and sang in church.

The singing was important. ‘If’n a colored girl cain’t sing,’ Julia often said, ‘she dries up her soul.’

At the crab cannery, and while working on tomatoes, Julia sang. In the kitchen with her daughters she sang. And in church on Sundays and Wednesdays she poured out the love she felt for God and His miraculous world. Her voice was strong, like her body, and often when she sang she allowed her head to fall backward, as if she desired her song to go straight upward. Closing her eyes, she would clench her hands before her and sing her praises.

Had her wages been doubled at the Steeds’, she would not have wanted to work in silence, one lone black woman moving through hushed rooms. The way to clean a room was to move at it slowly with your two daughters, each with a cloth, each with her own contribution to the singing. The only decent way to bob a crab was in the presence of a score of women, their voices rising in song, their bodies swaying to the music, breathing with it, passing the long hours of toil to its rhythms and reassurances.

And it was not all work music, by any means. Sometimes toward the end of a season, when Julia realized that her man would be coming home one of these days and that Hiram with the scar at his ear all mended
would run forth to greet his father, Julia would burst into song whether there was anyone to join her or not.

In the spring of 1940 the Steeds belatedly came to grips with the problem of their vanishing island. Jefferson Steed, the congressman who now occupied Rosalind’s Revenge, awakened to the fact that not only were the western fields in critical danger, but the mansion itself ran some risk of being undermined and toppled. Frantic steps were taken to shore up the western banks, where erosion was rampant, but no sooner had bulkheads been installed at great cost than diverted currents began eating away at the northern shoreline, and the southern, too.

The spectacular storms that occasionally swept the Chesapeake usually generated in the Atlantic, south of the bay, and when they roared inland they deposited a lot of water; there was always some flooding but never any real damage to the shoreline. It was the less conspicuous storms that did the damage, the persistent ones that came without fanfare from the northwest, blowing for days and even weeks at a time, creating substantial waves to nibble away at the northwestern tips of the islands and peninsulas.

The Eastern Shore consisted of a vast, flat alluvial deposit sent down by glaciers as they melted at the ends of the various ice ages. The highest point in the Patamoke area was Peace Cliff, and within a radius of twenty miles from the town a searcher would find not a single rock, and barely a pebble. Everything was sandy clay. Of course, into it had been mixed vegetable matter, oyster shells and fine gravel brought down by the Susquehanna, but in effect, Devon Island, as representative of the whole, was cruelly vulnerable to the pounding waves.

They did their damage not by breaking upon the face of the shore, thundering it to shreds; they broke some distance out, then rolled in at surface level, gradually undercutting the bank at water line. At times the cut would extend two or even three feet under what appeared to be a solid extension of land with tall trees upon it, but it was doomed, for its base had been hollowed out.

Then, when some storm of unusual force swept in, the huge block of sandy soil, plus its burden of trees and grassy banks, would shudder, tremble for a moment, and slowly collapse into the bay. At Devon Island this remorseless erosion had been continuing in its silent, steady way since long before the day Captain John Smith first mapped the place in 1608. Much of the island had already disappeared, and heroic steps were required if the remainder was to be saved.

‘What we’ll do,’ Jefferson Steed said, ‘is throw bulkheading of a sturdier type about the entire northwest sector.’ His foreman pointed out that this would be exceedingly costly, but Steed said, ‘We’ve been selling
off the mainland plantations at a good profit, and anyway, if we don’t pin the shoreline down, we’re going to lose the mansion.’

So an engineer was called in, and he spent more than a hundred thousand dollars to protect the island; but his wooden wall had scarcely been completed when a stubborn four-day nor’wester hammered at it. ‘Thank God, it’s standing,’ Steed said as he and the engineer surveyed their work, and he was correct; the pilings had been so deeply driven and so clevery tied together with planking that the new bulkheads resisted the storm.

‘But look over here,’ the engineer said with dismay.

And what Jefferson Steed saw took all the assurance out of him. For the storm, powerless to knock down the bulkheading, had simply cut around behind it, forming a deep channel between the wooden wall and the island, and the current thus created was so swift that it eroded the sandy soil almost as effectively as the waves had done, but from a different direction. At many places it was impossible to step from the remaining soil onto the bulkhead, so wide had the channel become.

‘What in hell can we do?’ Steed asked.

‘We could try to enclose the entire island in one unbroken wall,’ the engineer replied. ‘At what cost?’

After some silent calculation the man said, ‘Two million dollars.’

‘Good God!’ And for the first time Steed faced the possibility that his family might actually lose this island. ‘The whole damned thing could go … the Revenge … everything.’

Numbly he walked to the northern shore and pointed to a new type of erosion beginning there. ‘Looks as if new currents were butting at us, all the time.’

‘They are,’ the engineer said.

This fatalistic remark angered Steed, and he demanded, ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’

‘Nothing,’ the engineer said.

‘You mean … all we did last year was fruitless? This year, too?’

‘Seems so. But I assure you, Mr. Steed, it could not have been anticipated.’

‘That’s what we hire engineers for. Damn it, we’ve wasted a fortune. What’s going to happen?’

Carefully the engineer studied the northern bank, shaking his head dolefully when he realized the awful rate at which it was slipping back into the bay. With Steed he got into a small powerboat to circumnavigate the island, and it was apparent that even the small wake thrown by this boat imperiled the shoreline, for its waves cut at the vital line where the impacted sand met water.

‘You can imagine the damage done by the wake of a big vessel,’ he told
Steed. Each foot of shoreline was under attack; each year the island would grow smaller as its borrowed sand slipped back into the bay. ‘What’s it all mean?’ Steed asked.

‘It means that Devon was doomed from the day it was created. The entire Eastern Shore was, if we accept the evidence.’

They were now at the southeastern corner of the island, the spot from which the roof line of Rosalind’s Revenge was most compelling; just enough of the house itself was visible to give the structure substance, but the feature that caught the eye was the widow’s walk, that rectangular superstructure with the low balustrade. That this should go down with the crumbling island was unacceptable, and Steed shook his head.

Twice he tried to speak, but his throat filled and words fell back. Afraid that tears might come to his eyes, he reached for his handkerchief and mumbled, ‘Excuse me, please,’ and the engineer had the decency to look away.

The separation of races which had always marked the Eastern Shore continued unabated into the 1940s and long thereafter, and the loss to the community of what might have been accomplished by joint effort was staggering. Choirs would have been sweeter, taxes could have been kept lower if black incomes had been allowed to rise, baseball teams would have been more capable if black players had been accepted, and in almost every enterprise the results could have been more productive if black energies had been enlisted.

But tradition demanded that the two communities exist side by side in a kind of armed truce, with all the arms in possession of the whites. Enforcers of the policy fell into two groups: at the apex of society the Steeds and their fellow planters—‘We took the name
planter
in the good old days when our slaves raised tobacco, now we grow mainly tomatoes, but we hold on to the name’—believed that blacks were suited only for labor and that society prospered when they were held to it; at the base of the pyramid the Turlocks and Cavenys defined and enforced the working rules.

‘Niggers is meant for Frog’s Neck,’ Amos Turlock said many times. ‘Let ’em come out in the mornin’ to work in the canneries, but let ’em by God get back home, come nightfall.’

The Turlocks were not altogether idiotic in their enforcement. ‘Best thing this town ever did was hire that nigger cop. One of the finest men in this town. He sees to it that when the niggers cut somebody up, it’s their own kind.’ They also felt that the blacks should have a school. ‘Not a real school. Ain’t no black in this world fit for college, but they got a right to an education. Six, seven grades. They got to learn how to read.’

So the races lived in their separate vacuums except for those rare and hallowed nights when someone organized a rally. This event usually occurred in summer. Hand-lettered signs would appear in the window at Steed’s, and on posts along the waterfront:

In the black community no signs were necessary, for everyone knew that upon the success of this rally depended the amount of good work their church could do in the coming season. It was to the white community that the signs were addressed, especially the Turlocks and Cavenys, for if they paid their admissions in sizable numbers, the affair was bound to be a success; the Steeds and Paxmores would contribute whether they came or not, but it was more fun if the Neck was filled with Turlocks, for as Jeb Cater said, ‘They knows how to enjoy theirselves.’

On Saturday, July 20, 1940, the big rally of the summer was to be held; on Thursday and Friday all families related to the A.M.E. Church attended their customary tasks. Jeb Cater was responsible for roping off a substantial portion of the Neck, which could be entered only upon payment of an admission. The Will Nesbitt Band practiced unaccustomed numbers because a rumor had circulated that Father Caveny, fresh from his ordination, might attend. Other men gathered chairs, swept the grounds and strung lights.

The women of the black community, after long hours in the canneries, were busy cutting chickens for frying, and chopping okra to be boiled with tomatoes and onions, and baking the goodies which white children liked so much. To Julia Cater’s small home black watermen brought baskets of crabs and celery and onions and bags of flour, for by tradition she was in charge of making the reigning treat of any rally—the crab cakes.