Chesapeake

  The Cavenys had become the backbone of the river towns. They were the policemen, the sheriffs, the minor court attendants, the wholesale merchants just below the Steeds, and the schoolteachers. With Father Patrick Caveny as titular head of the family, they prospered, both spiritually and socially. Real Catholics like the Steeds found this clarinet-playing priest a little hard to take, but he was so energetic and so easily wounded by defections from the faith that they supported him generously. It could be said with some accuracy that the Catholic church was one institution in Patamoke that was prospering, and as it grew, its acceptance among Protestants increased, mainly because of Father Patrick’s common sense.

  But it was the Caters who had made the most significant advances. Indeed, they were now almost a part of the establishment, for Julia Cater held three good jobs and sang in the choir of the A.M.E. Church; Jeb Cater had four jobs; and their daughter Helen had three. True, their second daughter, Luta Mae, was again in jail, in Boston, because of the street demonstration she had led of Harvard, Wellesley and M.I.T. undergraduates, but son Hiram had been made a sergeant in the Marines and was sending money home. The house carried no mortgage. The family had a Ford ten years old, which Jeb kept in good condition, and from time to time Will Nesbitt dropped by to play the banjo and ask how Hiram was doing.

  Only one ominous note disturbed the Choptank as the 1950s drew to a close. Three families had produced children of extraordinary merit, and each of the three young people had felt it necessary to build their lives outside the local area; in the old days they would have made their contributions at home.

  Owen Steed was the last of the Devon line, and he had really never lived on the Choptank after the age of twelve. He had then gone off to Lawrenceville, an excellent school that prepared for Princeton, and after graduation from college had gone west to become an officer in an oil company in Tulsa. Had he returned to Devon he might have led the family enterprises into bold new fields, for he proved to be a good administrator, rising to the presidency of his company in Oklahoma.

  Pusey Paxmore had come home at first, but involvement with the family seaplane diverted him to Washington, and once he experienced the enticements of that city, he either could not or would not leave it. He had now held four different jobs of some distinction, and at each swearing-in the Bugle had run photographs showing him with either President Eisenhower or Vice-President Nixon. He always looked the same: the Harvard Law School graduate in the vested three-button dark suit. Had he stayed at home he might have taken the place of Woolman Paxmore as spiritual leader of the Quakers, for he had a strong theological predisposition, but now his life was cast in another mold and any possibility of preacherhood within the Quaker religion was lost. President Eisenhower once called him “The conscience of the White House,” and he certainly looked the part, the cautious lawyer who hewed to the straight line which Paxmores had always followed when they laid down their keels.

  Luta Mae Cater had also fled Patamoke to find her destiny, but her departure was. somewhat more frenetic than that of her older male neighbors. One summer’s day she had marched into the Blue and Gold Ice Cream Parlor, ordered her loganberry cone, and sat boldly down at one of the iron tables to consume it.

  “You can’t eat there, miss,” the proprietor said.

  “And why not?” she demanded belligerently.

  “Because we don’t serve colored in here.”

  “You just sold me this cone.”

  “That’s for buyin’, not for eatin’.”

  “Starting today, it’s for eating, too.”

  “Miss, I will give you fifteen seconds to leave that table.”

  Insolently, a large dark girl with rumpled hair who sought a fight, she remained at the table, slowly nibbling away at the cone. The owner kept an eye on his watch, and when the fifteen seconds was up, grabbed a whistle that he had bought for just such a day and blew it madly. It made a hellish sound, and within two minutes a pair of white officers, who had also been briefed on how to handle such criminal acts, came quietly into the ice cream parlor and said respectfully, “Miss, you can’t eat in here.”

  “Why not?” she snarled, as if daring them to strike her.

  “Custom,” one of the officers said.

  “Not no more,” Luta Mae said in her street language. “We ain’t gonna give this honky our money and eat outside.”

  “Miss,” the officer said with quiet persuasion, “we don’t want trouble, do we?”

  “I sure as hell do,” Luta Mae said, and this was used against her at the trial, where it was proved that she had resisted arrest, used harsh language against the proprietor and tried to bite the hand of the second officer who tugged at her arms.

  “Aren’t you ashamed?” the judge asked, “to bring dishonor upon your fine father and mother, who this town respects as if they were white?”

  Remorse was not what Luta Mae proposed to show that day, and when she abused the judge he dropped his attempts to conciliate her and gave her thirty days in jail. The charge was interesting: “She did willfully disturb the peace.” The judge pointed out that over the centuries certain accepted rules had been fashioned for the happy relations between whites and blacks; these were understood, and when they were observed, the two races existed side by side in harmony.

  “Ain’t gonna be no more harmony,” she said as the two sheriffs dragged her away.

  Jeb and Julia had been profoundly disturbed by this incident. As members of the black establishment, respected even more by whites than by fellow blacks, they deplored their daughter’s behavior. They knew what a rash thing she had done, the terrible risk she had taken that her actions might stir the sleeping Turlocks and Cavenys. Her deportment before the judge merited a jail sentence, and they felt no resentment against the court.

  But they were terribly against the judge’s stated doctrine that ancient rules devised to keep blacks in a subservient position had somehow acquired moral sanction, forever preventing their amendment. They knew that Luta Mae was right, that it was no longer acceptable to give a white merchant money and accept fifth-class treatment in return. They knew that the old rules of Patamoke were about to be broken. But they did not want to get involved.

  “Bes’ thing can happen,” Jeb told Julia when they reached their cabin, “Luta Mae serve her term and get out of here.”

  “I think so too,” Julia said. “Change gonna come, but doan’ let it be on her shoulders.”

  “Hiram, if’n he was here, he would of calmed her. Ain’t nothin’ I can do with that girl. She headstrong.”

  “She’s right,” Julia said stubbornly. “But change ain’t gonna happen as fast as she want. Like you say, Jeb. Bes’ she get out of here.”

  Luta Mae felt the same way, and when the judge released her ten days early, she kissed her mother goodbye and headed north.

  When this disturbing element left town, Patamoke settled down to one of the finest years it had known since the peaceful 1890s. People had jobs. The oyster catch was far above average and crabs were plentiful, even the valuable soft shells. In October the geese returned in such numbers that any farmer who had waterfront to rent made a small fortune, and Christmas along the Choptank was like the gentlest week in September. In this way the somnolent 1950s drew to a close.

  There was one man in Patamoke who rejoiced when the new bridge spanning the Chesapeake was opened. J. Ruthven Turlock had long realized that hordes of people from Baltimore and Washington, not to mention Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, would flood into the Eastern Shore on sightseeing expeditions—“And we will have the opportunity of catching our share of them as clients.” He enlarged his offices and ordered seven more signs for the highway.

  But his genius manifested itself in a gesture which astounded the people of Patamoke. He conceived this plan one morning when visiting the Turlock cabin to pick up two geese his brother Amos had shot the night before; for such gifts Ruthven took care of Amos’ paper work and whatever legal matters might arise. He was abou
t to depart with the plucked geese hidden behind the spare tire in his trunk, when he chanced to see in a very favorable light the three hundred and ninety-eight acres of the Turlock marsh, and it occurred to him that he could convert this useless land to a constructive purpose that would make Amos and the family rich.

  “What we could do,” he explained as he stood with the Turlocks at the door of their cabin, “is palisade that whole front edge, throw some earth along the flanks and then announce that we’re running a sanitary fill.”

  “What would that accomplish?” Amos asked.

  “Why, dump trucks from miles around would wheel in here, fill in the land behind the palisades, and before you could say Bob’s-your-uncle, we have us four hundred acres of choice waterfront land. We call it Patamoke Gardens and we sell it to rich dudes from Chicago and Cleveland for so much money you’d never believe it.”

  “Could we do that?” Amos asked.

  “We sure could.”

  “But won’t it cost money to palisade?”

  “I know ways of getting money,” Ruthven said, so a deal was arranged whereby he would fill in the marsh, subdivide it into two hundred lots and create the attractive new town of Patamoke Gardens. The beauty of his plan was that it was totally practical. He knew where to borrow the money at four percent; he knew builders eager to participate in such a gamble; and he knew scores of well-to-do doctors and dentists who were interested in either waterfront homes or real estate investments. Before the town planners of Patamoke could say Bob’s-your-uncle, the plan was unleashed, the marsh was palisaded, and the waving grass in which deer and ducks and red-winged blackbirds had luxuriated was buried in waste so that new homesites could be formed.

  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 hear
d 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:

  We were now within six miles of Pennsylvania, and the freedom for which these fifteen had longed while working in the swamps of South Carolina was at hand and they began to grow careless, believing themselves to be shed of slavery. But I warned them that the greatest danger always arose in the last dash for the border, because there the enemy would concentrate his greatest power. To reach our goal we must use guile and not force, and I coached them how to do this.

  But as we were picking our way toward that land where others would be waiting to help us, two slave-catchers left the road and came through the fields, suspecting that we might have taken that route, and when it seemed that they must discover us, three strong men behind me vowed, “If they find us, we got to kill them,” and I knew that no persuasion of mine would stay them. So I had our people lie flat in the grass, and the slave-catchers passed us by, and after a proper wait I gave the signal and we all ran for the border, but I could not restrain them from shouting as they ran.

  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.