Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

... 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 prefer 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.

  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, not 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 ti
cket 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:

  “Mr. Bones, do I understand that you took after your good friend, Rastus Johnson, with a razor?”

  “Dat’s a fact, Mr. Interlocutor.”

  “And what, if I may be so bold as to ask, was the reason?”

  “He done sneak into mah house and steal mah wife’s nightgown.”

  “Come now, Mr. Bones, you don’t chase a man with a razor merely because he stole your wife’s nightgown.”

  “Yeah, but she was in it.”

  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 mig
ht 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?”