Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  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:

  The three whites from Patamoke on whom we could rely were Quakers, but each operated in a different way. Comly Starbuck frightened me, for he would venture anything. His sister, Rachel Starbuck Paxmore, had a warmth that touched every human being with whom she worked and a quiet courage which sometimes startled me. Bartley Paxmore, her husband, was like an oak tree, so reliable that we built our lives around him.

  But the white man I remember in my prayers and hope to see again in heaven was a modest farmer who lived near Bohemia. His name was Adam Ford, and since he was not a Quaker, he was under no compulsion to help us. He had no funds, no horses to spare and little surplus food. He offered only himself, but he offered all, for he was a widower and his children were gone. No matter when we crept up to his farm, or in what condition, he was ready to help, regardless of risk. I have watched him by candlelight as he washed the wounds of our children or carried water for old men. Twice the authorities in Wilmington threw him into jail for helping runaway slaves and once the sheriff took away what few belongings he had as a fine for aiding us, but he persevered. May God look kindly upon the soul of Adam Ford.

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

  But on six of the fourteen escapes no white men or white women helped. It was black freedmen like Cudjo Cater who took the risk. It was strong-minded slaves like Nundo who bore the heaviest burden. Even when we did travel with the noble Quakers we followed two different roads. If they were caught, they were fined or placed in jail for a few months. If we were caught, we were hauled back to slavery, or hanged.

  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.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think I’d better go north ... for a few days.”

  “To Scanderville?” This was a daring question to which the minister did not expect a reply, but he did want to discuss the matter with Hiram if that was indeed his destination. The ex-marine said nothing, turned on his heel in military fashion and strode off.

  But Reverend Jackson would not permit him to leave in this fashion. Running after him, he overtook him at the edge of the campus and said forcefully, “Hiram, you’re in an emotional state. The things Eden Cater reported. Don’t rush off to Scanderville to find a lot of stupid conclusions.”

  “Who’s stupid?” Hiram demanded.

  “Your sister Luta Mae. She is on the wrong—”

  “Don’t you say nothin’ about Luta Mae.” The polished speech he had acquired in the Marine Corps vanished and he reverted to the double negatives of his childhood.

  “Luta Mae is engaged in a private war that will end only in disaster. Don’t become involved.”

  “Luta Mae, she the same as Eden.”

  “For the love of God, no! Don’t be deceived by glib similarities.”

  But Hiram stormed off, went to the edge of Baltimore and started hitchhiking north into Pennsylvania, and as one white traveler after another passed him by, the angrier he became. Finally a black salesman carried him as far as Harrisburg, where a white trucker, a brusque, heavy man in his fifties, invited him into his cab for the run to Scanderville.

  “You got a friend in the prison there?” the trucker asked.

  “My sister.”

  “What she do?”

  “Civil disobedience. Federal case.”

  “Placards and stuff like that?”

  “Yep.”

  “I don’t blame her. If I was black ... How long she in for?”

  “Two years. That is, two-to-six. She told the judge to go to hell. In open court.”

  “She one of those with the big hairdos?”

  “She goes the whole route.”

  When they pulled up at a diner in Sunbury, the trucker said, “Have supper on me,” and as they ate he said, “You know, son, people like your sister ... them god-awful hairdos ... those loud-mouths ... They make enemies they don’t need to make.”

  “Why did you pick me up?” Hiram asked. “And offer to buy me supper? You got a guilty feeling, maybe?”

  “I got a son in Vietnam. I got great respect for soldiers and I could see you’d been in service ... the way you stood.”

  “I was in the Marines.”

  “I ain’t surprised. And you came out willing to fight the world?”
>
  “More or less.”

  “Son, don’t fight with me. Tell your sister to lay off, too. It ain’t necessary, and it won’t win you a goddamned thing. Play it cool and you’ll get everything you want.”

  The driver went out of his way to drop Hiram at the prison, then flashed the thumbs-up sign and cried, “I’m on your side, buddy.” And for a moment, as Hiram watched the truck move down the highway, its red and green lights flashing in the darkness like beacons hailing a different day, he entertained a brief hope that the rough-and-ready accommodation proposed by the trucker might be possible, and he spent the night fashioning procedures which might lead to a juster America.

  But in the morning, in the waiting room of the jail, he was electrified when he saw Luta Mae come slouching toward him, her sturdy body covered by prison garb, her insolence intended to infuriate her guards, and he surrendered any thought of conciliation. It was social warfare, and Luta Mae was in the vanguard.

  She was implacable. From behind the wire mesh that separated them she growled, “Hiram, it got to be all burned down.”

  “You mean the old ways?”

  “I mean everything. It all got to change.” She now preferred to use black speech, and she exaggerated its illiteracies.

  He started to tell her about Eden Cater’s book on slaves escaping north, but she interrupted. “Why you tellin’ me ’bout her?”

  And he explained that he saw his sister as the inheritor of the fearless old slave woman. Luta Mae, with her flaming hairdo and her uncompromising manner was the Eden Cater of this generation, and as he watched the guard, lead her back to her cell, her challenge echoed in his mind: “It got to be all burned down.”

  It was in the spring of 1965 that J. Ruthven Turlock had his final inspiration about the development at Patamoke Gardens. “I was driving home from selling a lot to a doctor from Binghamton when it occurred to me that most of our buyers were elderly people ... coming here to retire ... comfort-filled final years. It was then I hit on the perfect name. Sunset Acres.”

  Of course, when Ruthven implemented his design, the old Turlock cabin occupied by his brother Amos had to go—“It’s an eyesore. You’ve made a bundle off the marsh, Amos, you can afford something decent.”

  So this ancient center of incest, illiteracy, prejudice, law-breaking, coon hunting and good living was burned off so that in its place could be wheeled a spanking new mobile home built in Sheboygan. Ruthven paid for the white picket fence that quarantined it from the more pretentious homes of Sunset Acres, but it was Amos who purchased the cement statuary that adorned the small lawn: Santa Claus with eight reindeer nicely disposed across the grass, a purple flamingo, a polar bear on his hind legs and a brown doe with two adorable gray fawns. When Chris Pflaum saw his uncle’s concrete menagerie he had to compare it with the real birds and animals that once graced the site.

  Chris was having his problems with the former marsh. At the community college he attended, his instructor in American Lit 107 was a bright young man from Brandeis University with a commitment to the best in American writing, and the concise manner in which he disposed of old myths that cluttered his pupils’ minds impressed young Chris:

  “There is no reason why any sane person should read Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. It is one of the worst books ever written by an American, shoddy, meretricious and without any redeeming social value.”

  When Chris read the book, some years back, he had suspected that Miss Mitchell’s depiction of blacks had been criminally unfair and her portrayal of whites sentimental and highly prejudiced; he was pleased to find his instructor confirming his youthful doubts. But in his next lecture the young man from Brandeis tore into all American poetry prior to Lowell—Robert Lowell, he explained—and his special scorn was reserved for Sidney Lanier:

  “A sentimental, soggy, drum-beat rimester, representing all that was wrong with southern thinking of his time, he has become the litmus paper of American literature. If you like Lanier, you cannot like poetry.”

  This time Chris was disposed to argue. “I thought The Marshes of Glynn was rather good ... the part about the bigness and the sky.”

  The young scholar looked compassionately at Pflaum and said, “I’m delighted to know that you studied Lanier. Not many bother, these days. How old were you at the time? Yes, about thirteen? Well, Pflaum, ‘Little Miss Muffit’ is ideally suited to the four-year-old and Felicia Hemans is just right for the nine-year-old. Sidney Lanier is the poet par excellence for the thirteen-year-old mentality, but now we’re all growing up, aren’t we?”

  He then proceeded to demonstrate everything that was wrong with this long, painfully obvious old poem: its forced rhymes, its rhythms broken to order, the preposterous variations in line length and, above all, its religious sentimentality.

  “Aren’t some of the images good?” Chris asked.

  “Yes, but they’re terribly belabored. Take the marsh-hen building her nest in the greatness of God. Line after line, repetition after repetition. A real poet would have disposed of that goddamn bird in four well-chosen words.”

  Chris would not let go. “But wasn’t Lanier way ahead of his time in dealing with an ecological problem?”

  Now the young man from Brandeis could show some excitement. “Indeed he was, Pflaum, and that’s the only merit of this old war-horse. If Lanier had said simply, ‘Marshes are worth preserving,’ he’d have said it all.”

  But it wouldn’t have had the ring, Chris thought, and I’d never have remembered it the way I remember the real lines.

  When he returned home he went to the public library and found that during the past four months thirty-one residents of a town that didn’t read much had checked out Gone With the Wind and when he asked about it, the librarian said, “We have to keep three copies. Local women like to make believe their ancestors lived on plantations.” And when he went out to Sunset Acres and stood where the Turlock marsh had once stretched, he could hear the rhythms of Lanier’s poem, those words which had given his life its direction.

  As he stood there, pondering these contradictions, he watched a pair of cardinals coming back to what had once been their home. They flew erratically, here and there, looking for vanished succulence, and Chris thought: Taking them both into consideration, they must be the handsomest pair of birds in any country. Sometimes I think the male is the most beautiful, that flaming scarlet. But at other times it’s the female. Those muted colors, so perfect in combination. I wish I could put in words what I feel about those birds.

  And then a tardy wedge of geese flew north, and as he watched their flight his world fell into place: I want to go to Canada ... to see where the geese breed. If you live on the Choptank, you know only half the bird ... October to March. Who wants to know half of anything? To the disappearing birds he cried aloud, “I’m going to see the other half in Canada.”

  The idea of this trip had been germinating for some time, in fact, ever since his English instructor had said in class, “You may not know it, but your region has produced one masterpiece of American writing. Thomas Applegarth’s To the Ice Age. I suggest you read it if you want to comprehend where you live.” The little book had been a revelation, and from it Chris deduced that every burgeoning mind ought to make some pilgrimage. His would be to the nesting place of the geese.

  But his eyes kept coming back to the vanished marsh and his mind to the vanished poem, and he thought: So he takes away Lanier and gives me Applegarth. Fair trade, perhaps.

  After Hiram Cater left his sister in Scanderville Prison he spent two years drifting through the major cities of the North, seeking viable solutions to the problem of blacks in American life, and in sharp discussions with young men and women from Harvard and the University of Chicago he could offer specific illustrations which summarized black experience much better than their philosophizing:

  “My mom and pop have worked fourteen hours a day, six days a week for more than fifty years. Everybody says, ‘Best people in the commu
nity, white or black.’ And what’s their reward? A two-room shack built in the 1840s which became a three-room shack in the 1940s. From birth to death they’ve been shortchanged.”

  In certain parts of the North conditions were slightly more promising, but in general, throughout the nation he found the cruel inequities of Frog’s Neck endlessly repeated, and he spent most of his hours trying to construct some sensible explanation of why the United States seemed so determined to ignore and waste the human potential of so large a portion of its population. His experience in the Marines convinced him that he was positively as capable as any white man of comparable background, yet society was determined to prevent him from demonstrating his skills.

  He listened attentively to the endless debates regarding basic policy—“Shall we become spineless subservients like Booker T. Washington or leaders of the street rebellion?”—and he did not know where he stood. He could not erase his memory of the truckdriver who had argued that gradualism was the sensible path, nor could he forget Luta Mae’s strident call to battle. The debates were fruitless, but he did make up his mind on one major aspect of black life, and for a public discussion on Boston television he prepared these notes:

  Moynihan and others argue that black family life is destructive because so many children are reared with no father in the home. When I first heard this argument I thought it stupid, because I grew up in a family that had a father, and a very good one. But of the fourteen men who I meet with, eleven had no father at home. Bad consequences, etc.

  However, when you look at the great nations of the world, the majors divide into two groups. In Germany, Japan, England and the United States the father is boss. Who ever heard on television of a “kindly German mother.” To hell with Mom, Pop’s boss and everyone knows it. These four societies are therefore harsh, militaristic, violent, cruel.