Chesapeake (132 page)

Woolman Paxmore wanted to respond to such a ridiculous instruction, but the merchant from Pittsburgh nudged him, so he said nothing. But when the interpreter wasn’t looking, he shrugged his shoulders so that the schoolmaster could see. That man raised his eyebrows and smiled.

They landed at an airfield near a lake and were ushered immediately into a Rolls-Royce, which started a steep climb up a road of exquisite beauty. ‘We are going to the Eagle’s Aerie,’ the interpreter said with the proper amount of awe, and after a long ascent through forested trails the car broke through to a view of staggering grandeur.

‘My goodness!’ Paxmore said. ‘Anyone would like to live up here.’ The mountains, the vast expanse of forest, the limitless plains of Germany below, how different they were from the small, flat fields of the Eastern Shore! ‘This doesn’t look much like the Choptank,’ he said to no one.

‘This way,’ the interpreter said, leading them into a salon even bigger than Göring’s. They had not yet adjusted to it when they were surprised by General Göring himself, who entered from a far door wearing a Bavarian knee-length hunting costume and heavily ribbed lederhosen.
Taking huge strides, he came to greet the three Quakers, saying in English, ‘Gentlemen! So soon we meet again!’ He actually embraced Paxmore, slapping him vigorously on the back. In German he said, ‘Der Führer was captivated by your idea, gentlemen. He wants your specific comments.’

And before the Quakers could respond to this, Herr Hitler appeared, a smallish man with very black hair, wearing a simple brown uniform lacking in either medals or pretension. When the two German leaders stood side by side, they seemed like typical huntsmen, their intelligent faces beaming with excitement.

And now Hitler spoke, in a rather high, thin voice, and the interpreter took over. ‘Is what General Göring tells me still true? You can collect one million dollars to pay for the Jews’ education?’

‘Yes,’ Paxmore said firmly. At that moment he had not the slightest idea as to where he could collect a million dollars, but his life had been spent in making commitments which were to be discharged later, and in doing so, had found that for a worthy cause God somehow found ways to fulfill the most demanding pledge. ‘We will get the money.’

‘Then I think we can let you have your Jews,’ Hitler said. ‘We’ve calculated the cost of their education. In your dollars … What was it, Hermann?’

‘Five thousand dollars a Jew,’ Göring said.

Paxmore was not good at arithmetic and he stumbled for an answer as to how many Jews one million dollars would rescue. ‘Two hundred,’ said the schoolmaster.

‘Outrageous!’ Paxmore protested. ‘Herr Hitler—’

‘Silence!’ the interpreter shouted.

Paxmore ignored him and moved close to the dictator. ‘It ought to be fifty thousand, at least. Compassion would dictate at least that many.’

The interpreter refused to translate this audacious demand, but Hitler saw the effect his proposal had made on the Quakers; indeed, in naming it he had suspected that it would be unacceptable. Now he calmed the interpreter and instructed him to ask, ‘What number did you have in mind?’

‘Fifty thousand,’ Paxmore said firmly.

‘I doubt if we have that many who would want to leave,’ Hitler said.

‘Thee would gain great credit, Herr Hitler,’ Paxmore said in his voice of quiet reasoning, ‘if thee made a gesture of such dimension.’

And the fact that this unkempt, gangling man would use persuasion and an appeal to self-esteem impressed the dictator. On the spur of the moment he snapped, ‘Forty thousand,’ and with that, he marched from the room.

‘You’ve struck a great bargain.’ Göring beamed. ‘As you have seen for yourself, Der Führer is a man of deep compassion. Tell the world this.
Report it to the world.’ With a salute, which seemed totally out of place, he waddled off after his leader.

In this way Woolman Paxmore and his two tall friends bought the lives of forty thousand Jews. They gathered the million dollars from diverse sources, solely on the strength of their reputations and the assurance that they would do what they said they would do.

And for the rest of his life Paxmore would meet men and women with heavy accents who would seek him out to tell him, ‘You saved my life. My group was the last to escape from Germany. The rest are all dead, in the ovens.’ And they would try to kiss his hands, but he would pull away.

The affair of the German Jews gave Woolman Paxmore no sense whatever of accomplishment, and he better than anyone else knew that in this affair his hands were not for kissing, for when he and his two friends had collected the money and arranged for the rescue of the forty thousand, he could find no country that would admit them, and he spent nearly half a year traveling from capital to capital begging the various governments to accept these people saved from extinction. In the end he failed, both with his own government and all others, so that of the forty thousand who were entitled to escape, having been paid for, only twenty-five thousand did reach safety, because the others were acceptable nowhere.

IN 1938 A STRIKING BOOK WAS PUBLISHED IN PATAMOKE
. Its merit did not lie in its literary style, which stressed cuteness and a blizzard of exclamation points. Nor was it memorable for any philosophical revelations, because it consisted of unrelated little episodes chosen at random and arranged without regard to chronology.

It was called
A True History of Patamoke
and had been composed, or perhaps assembled, by Judge Hathaway Steed’s older son Lawton. Since the development of the town was seen through the romantic experiences of the tobacco-raising families, there was much material on haunted rooms, beautiful young wives and Cavaliers. To read the book gave the impression that one could understand the history of the Choptank only if one visited seventeenth-century plantations.

What made the book outstanding was an amazing accomplishment: it recorded three hundred years of history without once mentioning the blacks who had shared that history and played a major role in it. There were whole chapters about pretty Steed women, and the reforms essayed by dissident Paxmores; there were even condescending paragraphs about the Turlocks, especially those of a piratical turn, but about the slaves who enabled the system to function, there was absolutely nothing.

To take only one example. The Caters had made themselves a powerful force in Patamoke history: Cudjo’s rise exemplified an era; Eden had led fourteen escape missions into Pennsylvania; Captain Jimbo sailed his skipjack through two generations of watermen, becoming known as the premier skipper in the fleet—but the family was not even mentioned. It would not be correct, however, to claim that the name Cater was ignored in the history; appeared this paragraph:

Ignoring the Caters might have been justified on the ground that no one black family dominated, but Steed also ignored the black Methodist ministers who had served this community so constructively, often stabilizing it through turbulent decades when they were lucky to receive one hundred dollars a year in salary. He overlooked, too, the small businessmen, the workers who staffed the oyster canneries, the blacks who served as foremen in the tomato plants, and the men who loaned money, serving as crisis banks to keep the community functioning.

Of the black schools that tried to educate the children of former slaves, there was not a word, nor any record of the baseball teams that could usually defeat the white. There was no account of the late-summer rallies, when the nights were filled with music, nor of the powerful black evangelists who could make hellfire sizzle at the edge of the pine grove.

In obedience to the national custom, the black experience was erased, not because it was unimportant, but because in the mind of a man like Lawton Steed it had never existed, and visitors from other parts of the nation who read this book pleasantly after their crab-cake dinners at Patamoke House could be excused if they left with the impression that the Choptank had been explored, settled and developed by far-seeing white men who did all the work, after which a gang of blacks mysteriously appeared out of nowhere, with no history, no traditions, no significance and no rights. In 1938, when the
True History
was published, Patamoke contained 6,842 citizens, of whom 1,984 were black. Twenty-nine percent of the population, in the thinking of civic leaders, did not exist.

The
Patamoke Bugle
reflected this tradition; months would pass without a single mention of the black community, and if notice was taken, it was invariably an amusing account of some disaster at the African Methodist Episcopal Church or a hilarious report of a gambling riot. It was forbidden ever to use the honorifics Mr., Mrs. or Miss when referring to a black, and except for reporting court cases, their social life was ignored.

The blacks lived behind the boatyard east of town, severely restricted to that area in which occasional freed slaves had taken residence since 1700. In the intervening years Frog’s Neck had altered little: houses were
still small, often without windows; some were painted when employers gave leftover pails of paint to men and women who had served faithfully; and there was a truncated baseball diamond on which black players perfected their skills. But it was a world apart, with its own church, school and customs. It had no doctor, no dentist, but it did have a black policeman who exhibited incredible tact in maintaining a semblance of order.

If the
True History
contained nothing about blacks, its attitude toward them was intimated in two paragraphs, which gained favorable comment from the locals:

In 1938 Patamoke was a closed little world, with its own customs, shibboleths and strengths, but in it blacks could achieve a life that was marginally satisfactory if they devised strategies of survival. To do so was difficult, for they were required to suppress ordinary human emotions in order to escape notice in a white environment. On no one did the problems of survival fall with heavier force than on Jeb Cater, a thin, medium-sized man of forty-two who occupied a two-room shack in the Neck.

This year Jeb had special problems. Not only was his employment more precarious than usual, but his wife was pregnant, so that the money she would normally have earned was missing. During the final months of the year Jeb worked fourteen and eighteen hours a day at any available jobs, and even then could scarcely keep his family of four alive—‘What we gonna do, our son arrives, on’y God knows.’

He already had two daughters, Helen, aged nine and almost old enough to work steadily, and Luta Mae, aged seven, who was so troublesome that it seemed she might never hold a steady job, and it was his conceit, nurtured during the long hours of his toil, that his next child must be a son. His wife Julia chided him on this: ‘You takes what you gets an’ you likes it.’

Julia had grown up in Frog’s Neck and had known Jeb all her life; they were the same age and had started courting at fifteen. She had been a large girl, with a strong mind, and once she settled on Jeb as her probable mate, she did everything to prevent his escape. He had wanted to try his luck at some job in Baltimore, but she had prevailed upon him to stay at home. During the last days of World War I he had talked of running away to the army, but she had stopped this abruptly by threatening to elope with his older brother.

She ran her only real risk when this brother left town, found a job somewhere and returned with good money, inviting Jeb to join him. ‘Your brother ain’t gonna amount to nothin’, money or no money,’ she had argued, trying to hold her man, and when Jeb reminded her that only a year ago she had threatened to marry the brother she was now condemning, she sniffed, ‘Me marry that no-good. Jeb, you fool easy.’

This was a good description of her husband: he fooled easy. He believed that tomorrow would be better, that he would find a permanent job with a decent wage, that the girls would study in school, and that his next child would be a boy. He also believed in the ultimate goodness of the United States and had been ready to fight the Kaiser to defend it. He had inherited from his predecessor Cudjo Cater that solid will power that enables men and nations to survive, and from Eden Cater the personal courage to keep trying. He was, in many respects, the finest black man in Patamoke, but in spite of this, he could never find steady work.

In winter months he labored aboard a white man’s skipjack dredging oysters. In the summer he ran a trotline, trying to catch crabs. He was a master of neither profession and earned little, but it was in the two in-between seasons that his family felt the pinch of real poverty. In spring he helped the skipjack captain haul timber to Baltimore, and in autumn he lugged his tools into the surrounding woods to split firewood. For a cord of pine he earned twenty-five cents, for a cord of oak, fifty.