Chesapeake (143 page)

When the project was well under way, Christopher Pflaum, home from college, heard of its magnitude and drove out to the cabin to see what his Uncle Ruthven was up to, and when he stood on the edge of what had once been a marsh, dodging the trucks as they hauled in garbage to fill the area, he was aghast. Looking about for someone in charge, he was frustrated; everything was happening automatically. The pile driver was finishing the last of the palisading as if it had a
brain of its own: haul the weight up, center it, drop it on the head of the wooden piling, and close off another yard of marshland. The dump trucks rumbled in, backed up, raised their beds and automatically strewed the junk into hollows that would soon be filled. Other trucks hauled in earth to cover the garbage, and slowly, inevitably Patamoke Gardens took shape.

There was no one on the site to whom he could protest; the marsh was being erased and building lots were being created, with no one at the controls, no one evaluating the tremendous decisions being reached. He jumped into his car and sped back to town, where he banged his way into the Turlock Agency, demanding of his uncle, ‘What in hell are you doing?’

‘Creating taxable wealth,’ Ruthven said, and with the aid of handsomely lettered maps and diagrams he showed young Chris how this operation was going to provide two hundred choice lots, which would house two hundred families, who for the rest of this century would spend on an average of eight thousand dollars … ‘You add it up, Chris. This is the best thing ever happened to the Choptank. A new settlement. Strictly class.’

Only forty docks would be allowed to jut into the water, but there would be a marina partway up the creek at which everyone else could house a boat comfortably. ‘School? We use the one already in existence … out beyond the cabin.’ He put his arm about his nephew’s shoulder. ‘The beauty part is that all this land back here, it goes up in value too. That piece your father owns. Treble in one year. Your father wants to sell it for a handsome profit, I know a man from Baltimore …’

Numbed, Chris returned to the marsh; only a shred now remained, but he knelt in it and allowed the grass to twist through his fingers. This marsh had nurtured his Turlock ancestors for three centuries, and some of them would have died rather than surrender a blade of it. They had fought and endured and protected, and now in a flash it was gone.

‘Jesus!’ he cried, slapping at the grass, and based on his studies at the university, began to calculate what the building of this resort for outside doctors and dentists was costing in natural terms: Fifty deer lived here most of the year. Five hundred muskrats. Sixty otter. Thirty mink. Two hundred nutria. Two thousand geese, four thousand ducks, and so many birds you couldn’t count them. Sixty turtles, five thousand crabs, a universe of oysters, rockfish and blue and enough perch to sink a skipjack.

He became quite angry, and splashed his feet in the water that oozed up from the dying marsh: And the worst loss is the stuff we can’t see. The water grasses that feed the crabs, the tiny crabs that feed the fish,
and the plankton that feeds us all. Gone! The whole shebang gone.

‘Hey, you! Watch out!’ A truckdriver, hauling in refuse from an abandoned tomato cannery—lengths of twisted steel and rusted corrugations—backed his vehicle close to where Chris had been standing, and mechanically the huge truck bed rose in the air, dropped its rear gate and threw its burden over the strangling grasses.

‘Oh Jesus!’ young Pflaum cried as the truck drove off to make way for another. ‘What a bad bargain we made here.’

Despite Hiram Cater’s enlightening experiences in the Marine Corps, his father might have succeeded in keeping the boy socially passive except for a genetic accident over which there was no control: Hiram was one of those fortunate men who take women seriously. This meant that his life gained an added dimension; unlike the moon, he did not move through the dark night with one hemisphere forever blank, for his association with women brightened it.

In Korea little Nak Lee had begun the dangerous task of educating him; she made him aware that he was as good as any white man, yet afraid of his own capacities. Now two women from his own family, one long in the grave, one in jail, rose to complete his education.

The first step occurred in 1965, when Reverend Jackson, the new minister, was cleaning out the attic of the A.M.E. manse, a pitiful shack, and came upon a document compiled by a black clergyman who had served Patamoke in the 1870s. This young cleric, overwhelmed by subterranean yarns about runaway slaves of previous generations, had listened with jaw agape as old men instructed him, and realized that he was hearing the epic of a race, which if not written down, might be forever lost. His interest began to center on an old black woman named Eden Cater, then in her seventies; her name surfaced in various accounts related by the old men, and in time he went to see her.

She lived in the Cater shack at the end of Frog’s Neck, and she spoke with such fierce comprehension of what slavery meant and of how her Underground Railway had functioned that he knew immediately that it was her story he wanted to record. ‘Miss Eden, you must write down your memories, so’s your grandchildren can understand.’ And when she replied, as he supposed she would, ‘I cain’t write,’ he said, ‘You tell me and I’ll write.’

Two notebooks were filled with Eden’s reconstructions of her expeditions into Pennsylvania, and on facing pages, wherever possible, the minister had written: ‘This part of Eden’s story was confirmed by John Goldsborough, now living in New Bedford, Massachusetts.’ More than two thirds of her claimed exploits were thus substantiated, occasionally by white witnesses. Of course, when the escapes had been participated
in by Bartley and Rachel Paxmore, those Quakers were available for detailed confirmation.

What evolved was a concise account, written in seminary English, of the dangers encountered by slaves who sought freedom and of the courage exhibited both by those who fled and those who helped them. When the narrative was completed, over a period of several months, the black minister gave it a title,
Fourteen Journeys North,
and noted Eden Cater as author. And it was this manuscript which Reverend Jackson handed to Eden’s great-great-grandson one morning in July 1965.

Hiram carried the notebooks to a bench at the tip of the Neck, where he started to leaf through them casually, much less interested in the narrative than Reverend Jackson had supposed he might be. Hiram had often heard of Eden Cater, but all he actually knew about her was that she had intended buying her husband’s freedom but had ended up providing money to buy a skipjack. She was remote, a slave ancestor whose history had been lost.

Therefore, the young marine could find no bond of association tying this shadowy woman to himself or to his problems. The situation today was so different that Eden could not possibly comprehend it, even if she were living through it, and for her to have any relevance was improbable. But toward the front of the second notebook he chanced upon two paragraphs that recalled his own boot training:

Hiram kept a forefinger in the old booklet to mind his place, and as he stared out across the Choptank it became not merely the brown river he had always known but a dividing line between the Deep South, where
slavery had flourished, and the modified slaveholding area from which escape had been possible, and the role played by Eden and her husband became clear: They were a lighthouse in the night. That lousy little cabin. If slaves could reach there, they were on their way.

He returned to the book, and in spite of the fact that this was a hot morning, with a strong sun blazing out of a cloudless sky, he kept reading, dipping into the manuscript at casual places, and generated a rage that would never be quenched. These were flesh-and-blood slaves risking their lives for freedom, and at one point he slammed the frail pages shut: Don’t never tell me again that blacks submitted like tamed animals. These bastards fought every inch of the way.

Because of his desire to comprehend the relationship between whites and blacks, he was most interested in her assessments of the white men and women with whom she worked:

And just as Hiram was beginning to tire of this praise of white participants, Eden added the paragraph he sought:

When Hiram finished reading this narrative he found himself with an understanding of the Choptank that would never dim: his ancestors had been slaves along this river and had endured tragedies he had not imagined. Eden Cater, especially, had combated the system, placing her life in jeopardy fourteen times, and in his veins ran her daring blood.

When he returned the booklets to Reverend Jackson he said, ‘This ought to be in print. For everyone to read.’

‘That’s why I gave you the books. To get your opinion.’

‘What could we do?’

‘There’s a history professor at Johns Hopkins. Says he thinks he could get a subvention …’

‘What’s that?’

‘One of the big foundations would give him money … Hiram, many people in this country are eager to see the true stories of slavery unfold.’

‘This should be one of the first.’

‘I’m glad you feel so. Reinforces what I thought.’

So Hiram and Reverend Jackson drove to Baltimore to meet with the professor, a white man who said enthusiastically, ‘I’ve approached the people in New York and I’m sure we can get the funds. What I have in mind is to publish Eden Cater’s account, with full historical notes, tying her time and experience in with that of Frederick Douglass, who lived in the same area at about the same time.’

Hiram drew back. The black experience of his ancestors would be used to further the career of a white professor who looked at Eden’s record not as a life-and-blood account of slavery but merely as a means of publishing a book. He was about to ask for return of the booklets when the professor said, ‘I’m particularly desirous that the book be edited by some black scholar. After all, Mr. Cater, it is a black odyssey and I think we have in our department just the man you would want.’

A Professor Simmons was sent for, and as soon as Hiram saw his exaggerated Afro hairdo, he was satisfied. He was further assured when he learned that the young man was an activist, with a strong undergraduate degree from Howard University and a doctorate from Yale. Since he had grown up in one of the heavily black counties on Maryland’s western shore, he could imagine the slave structure in which Eden and Cudjo Cater had lived.

The three blacks and the white senior professor had an exciting lunch, at the end of which the white professor called New York to advise the foundation secretary that all matters were settled: ‘Professor Simmons will do the editing along the lines we suggested, and I’m pleased to assure you that Eden Cater’s principal male descendant will cooperate.’ A long
pause followed, after which the professor slammed down the receiver and cried, ‘We’ve got the money!’

Eden Cater’s story would be told,
Fourteen Journeys North;
the long silence about black life on the Choptank would be broken; and henceforth it would be impossible for anyone to write a history of the river without taking into account the contribution of blacks.

But Eden Cater’s triumph was fragmentary, so far as her descendant Hiram was concerned, for as he left the luncheon he felt himself torn away from the celebration, and he excused himself. ‘Reverend Jackson, I won’t be going back to Patamoke with you.’