Chesapeake (138 page)

Congressman Steed said of her cookery, ‘I’ve attended rallies and political meetings up and down the Eastern Shore, and I calculate I’ve eaten at least two hundred crab cakes a year for forty years. That’s eight thousand cakes, and year by year I’ve graded ’em on a scale of ten. Most public restaurants are serving trash that rates no higher than two-point-zero. A shred of crab meat, a loaf of bread, deep-fried in rancid fat and doused with catsup. What a travesty! Now, my Aunt Betsy made a crab cake that rated eight-point-seven. Gobs of lump, all back fin, delicately sautéed. Never had enough.

‘But for real Eastern Shore crab cake, you’ve got to go to Julia Cater over in Frog’s Neck. You see a poster announcin’ a rally where she’s doin’ the crab cakes, you owe it to yourself to go, just for her masterpieces.
Score? Nine-point-seven, highest ever awarded.’ When someone asked why, if Julia’s cakes were so fine, he rated then only nine-seven, he explained, ‘The perfect crab cake would have just a touch of onion. Julia refuses.’

Once a newspaper in Baltimore had carried a front-page picture of Congressman Steed bending over a stove while Julia Cater demonstrated how to make her specialty. ‘What she does,’ the story said, ‘is use the finest crab meat, just a smidgin of chopped celery, well-beaten eggs to hold the meat together and bread crumbs dried in the sun to give the cake substance. A touch of pepper, a touch of salt and something from a brown paper bag which she refuses to identify, and
voilà!
Crab cakes Eastern Shore, and this reporter never had better.’

On Thursday and Friday the three Cater women worked till their fingers were numb, picking crabs. Other women volunteered to help, but Julia felt that this was her opportunity to serve the Lord with what she did best, and all through the night she and her daughters deftly picked at the crabs and sang. ‘Crab meat so good,’ Helen explained, ‘crab, he don’t want to give it up.’ The work was both tedious and difficult, a constant picking for the elusive lumps of meat that distinguished the best cakes. ‘I seen crab cakes,’ Julia said, ‘they was a disgrace. All dark meat in tiny shreds, I wouldn’t put ’em in a pan, let alone eat ’em.’

By Saturday morning the Cater women had buckets of pale-white crab meat sitting under cheesecloth cover in the cool of the house. During the heat of the day they slept, and at five in the afternoon they began their labors, and as the golden-brown cakes began to come from the fire, round like small tomatoes and lumpy where the good crab meat showed beneath the breading, they were pleased.

At dusk two black men took their positions at the improvised gateway leading to the rally grounds, and as people came down the road from town, these men collected forty cents from grownups, twenty cents from children, and from time to time when some white man who had favored the rallies through the years made an appearance, the older of the two collectors would take him aside, toward a clump of bushes, and there would present him with a bottle of whiskey and invite him to take a swig.

‘We appreciate your comin’,’ the douanier would whisper, and often he would drink with the white man, sharing the same bottle.

One man who never missed a rally was Amos Turlock—‘Best damned cookin’ in the county, and them niggers know how to sing.’ For his modest admission, Amos was offered a gluttonous supply of food: fried chicken, cantaloupe, tomato-and-onion salad, numerous pies, tables of sandwiches and, of course, the crab cakes.

Visitors gorged themselves from five till sunset, then Will Nesbitt and his nine-piece band played loud and bouncy music. During this part of
the rally Nesbitt’s men stuck to music they had been playing at such affairs for a decade, waiting until Father Caveny appeared for their special numbers.

At intervals the choir sang, led by Reverend Douglass, who had a good voice. These men and women offered mainly religious music, running through a ritual of hymns often unfamiliar to the white guests, but sooner or later strong voices like Julia Cater’s would slip into the popular spirituals, and sometimes the whole crowd would join in the singing, and at such moments of fusion any thought of white or black would vanish.

It was about nine o’clock when word sped through the crowd that Father Caveny was coming, and he knew what was expected of him, for he brought with him a small black box, which perplexed the whites in the audience but delighted the blacks. He passed easily through the crowd, a fair-haired young man of twenty-six, dressed in clerical garb, the local lad who had done well in college and even better in the seminary. Patamoke was proud of young Patrick Caveny, but it was also bewildered by his unpredictable behavior.

Nodding to the Steeds and his other white parishioners as if he were on a promenade in his church, he circulated for a while among the blacks, then allowed himself to be edged toward the bandstand. People started to applaud, and Will Nesbitt came down to invite him to join the band. This brought cheers, and after smiling easily to the crowd, and asking for one more bite of crab cake, he unlocked the black box.

Inside lay an unassembled clarinet in four pieces, and slowly, with Irish dramatics, he took them out and carefully fitted them together: bell, body, mouthpiece, reed. After testing the assembly, he asked one of Nesbitt’s men to sound a note, which he sought to match. Satisfied with the condition of his instrument, he nodded to Nesbitt, and the band picked out the seven lovely notes of a song the blacks loved, ‘Bye, Bye, Blackbird,’ and when they sounded, the audience cheered.

Father Caveny did not play during the first part of this admirable song, but when the music reached what was called the bridge, or, as some termed it, the break, the band stopped and on his clarinet he played the lonesome wail of a black man trapped in the north and yearning to return home.

Then the band joined in, and ten minutes later the rally at the A.M.E. became a riot.

The Steeds and other proper Catholics were embarrassed by the gyrations of their priest, and the congressman’s aunt said, ‘If you ask me, he’s getting much too close to the niggers in all respects,’ and one of her generation said, ‘Shameful, for a man of the cloth to be playing a clarinet the way he did in high school.’

But when the rally was over, and Reverend Douglass had counted the dimes and quarters on which his church must exist for the coming season, and when the pots were cleared and the ropes taken down, it was Jeb Cater who summed up the evening: ‘Quakers like Woolman Paxmore, the finest man in town, they loves black people in big doses—like all the blacks in Alabama or Georgia—but Father Caveny, he loves us one by one … just as we are … here in Frog’s Neck.’

On February 22, 1941, Amos Turlock’s photograph appeared on the front page of the
Patamoke Bugle,
but not in the form that Hugo Pflaum had planned. He wanted grizzly Amos standing on one side, The Twombly in the middle, and himself on the other side, the clever game warden who had confiscated the last and most famous of the long guns.

No, it was quite a different kind of portrait. Unshaven Amos stood with an ordinary shotgun in one hand and a dead goose in another; the caption read:

Local Hunter Bags Goose
in Family Marsh

The story went on to tell of how Amos had prowled the marshes for five months, hoping to get one good shot at his elusive target, and several hunters were quoted in praise of his determination:

There was additional material recalling the years when quite a few geese used to visit the Choptank, and Amos was congratulated editorially for reminding Patamokeans of those good old days:

No black in Patamoke could exist through a period as short as six days without being reminded of the distorted society in which he lived. This was brought home to the Caters on the afternoon of the day when they
heard the exciting news that Amos Turlock had actually shot a goose.

What happened on this particular afternoon was that Julia was fortunate enough to get an appointment with the traveling black dentist who had come down from Baltimore. For some time she had been having serious trouble with her teeth, and since dental care was totally beyond the reach of local black families—white dentists would not treat them and there were no black practitioners—she had watched her teeth deteriorate when she knew that with proper attention they might be saved.

‘Bad case here,’ the overscheduled visitor said. ‘Only thing I can see, have them all out.’

‘But, Doctor—’

‘They could have been saved. Maybe they still could be if I could see you once a week for six months. Impossible. Better have them all out.’

‘But—’

‘Lady, we have no time to argue. I can pull them for you, take an impression, and mail you a set of real fine teeth from Baltimore. Forty dollars and you have no more trouble.’

‘But—’

‘Lady, make up your mind. I don’t get back this way again this year.’

‘Could I come back?’

‘Look, if you don’t have the forty dollars now, I’ll take a deposit and trust you for the rest. Reverend Douglass told me—’

‘It’s not money!’ she interrupted sternly, and then all the fight went out of her. The years of trying to hold her family together, of trying not to get too fat the way some black women did, the anxiety over her teeth and the recent behavior of Luta Mae and the education of her son. It was too much, too much. The remorseless, never-ending struggle was too much.

Resigned, she lay back in the chair, but when the first whiffs of gas reached her nostrils she instinctively fought against them. ‘I ain’t gonna faint!’

‘Now, now,’ the dentist said, softly stroking her hand.

Really, it was much less painful than she had anticipated, and the dentist laughed when he helped her from the chair. ‘If the teeth don’t fit, I’ll tell you what. I’ll wear them myself.’

But when she reached the street, and felt the vast emptiness in her mouth, she could not hold back the tears. ‘Dear Jesus, I won’t never be able to sing no more.’

If anyone had sought to compose an honest history of Patamoke, he or she would probably have felt obliged to include a passage on the spiritual experience of the region, and a curious problem would have presented itself, because it would have been difficult to identify any of the presumed leaders as the man or woman who had done most to inspirit the area.

For example, a traditionalist might want to nominate William Penn, the stately Quaker from Philadelphia; he came to Patamoke in the late 1600s, bowing pompously to the locals and offering evidence of his spirituality, but it would be difficult to enshrine him, for to the average Marylander, Penn was a conniving, thieving, lying rascal who had done his darnedest to steal the northern part of the colony into Pennsylvania, and succeeded. Paul Steed, in writing of that period, said:

Animosity toward Penn’s memory was kept alive by two unfortunate incidents: in 1765, when Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed the line allocating land between Maryland and Pennsylvania, they started from a point not far from the Choptank, and it was soon rumored that Pennsylvanians had suborned them to draw a line favorable to Penn’s people; and in 1931, when a professor at Penn State College wrote a book explaining that the Chesapeake Bay should never have been so named since it was merely the extended mouth of the Susquehanna River, the
Patamoke Bugle
thundered: ‘First they steal our land and now they want to steal our bay. We say, “To hell with Pennsylvania and its thieving ways.”’

A more acceptable case could be made for Francis Asbury, that inspired English clergyman of limited education but unlimited devotion to the precepts of John Wesley who came to Maryland in the 1770s. A man of indefatigable will, he traveled each year more than five thousand miles, laboring to establish in the nation about to be born the new religion of Methodism. His harsh style was particularly effective on the Eastern Shore, which he traipsed from end to end, shouting hellfire and providing the simple citizens with a brand of religion much more appealing than the stately proprieties of Episcopalianism, a rich man’s faith, or Catholicism, which had become severely formalized. Asbury stopped at Patamoke three times, creating a frenzy among the watermen with his revelations of heaven and hell, and it was principally because of his enthusiasm that the Choptank became in effect a Methodist river. Of one visit he wrote in his diary: