Chesapeake (139 page)

George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, visited Patamoke in 1672, but he made no lasting impression, and the saintly Father Ralph Steed had endeavored to establish Catholicism in the most remote corners of the region at about the same time, but his influence had been felt more on the western shore. Ruth Brinton Paxmore, in that same period, had been a powerful force for good, but her personality was so abrasive that she could not be considered symbolic of the region. Woolman Paxmore, as we have seen, was a more gentle type, but he exercised his influence principally in other parts of the eastern seaboard and was not thought much of at home.

No, the man who gave the Eastern Shore its most profound spiritual lift was Jefferson Steed, and what he did was stop planting tomatoes.

In the late 1940s he perceived that those portions of the vast Steed land holdings which had for the past half century been devoted to tomato growing were shortly going to show a loss. The huge tomato canneries scattered along the banks of Eastern Shore rivers were outmoded; much better factories were being installed in New Jersey and the West. Also, the ground had been worn out by constant assaults from the tomato plants, notoriously hungry for minerals, and poor soil meant weak plants susceptible to infestations of insects. Even more important, with labor rushing away from farms and to war plants and new projects like the proposed Bay Bridge, it was no longer economical to raise tomatoes, so on a day fateful in the history of the Eastern Shore, Jefferson Steed told his foremen, ‘No more tomatoes.’ When they protested that the great iron-roofed canneries, looming out of the marshes along the estuaries, could be put to no alternate use, he replied, ‘Let ’em rust to hell. They’ve served their day.’ And a way of life vanished.

‘What will we grow?’ the foremen wanted to know.

‘Corn,’ Steed said.

The men, all practiced farmers, could not believe what they were hearing. They had always grown modest amounts of corn for their dairy
herds, but if they added acreage that had formerly grown tomatoes, new markets would have to be found. ‘Where will we sell the stuff?’ Steed replied, ‘Eastern Shore people love horses. And what’s left over, that’s my headache.’

So at considerable risk of financial disaster, Congressman Steed planted his tomato fields with a hybrid corn developed by agronomists at the University of Maryland, and it grew well. But the remarkable yields he achieved came not from this good seed but from the daring decision he made when planting: ‘From the time the first Englishmen raised corn in Maryland we’ve planted it three feet apart in rows widely separated. Always thought it had to be that way. But if you ask me, it was only so that horses could move between the rows to cultivate. With these new chemicals we don’t have to plant that way.’ And boldly he had seeded his corn so tightly that even a man had difficulty passing between the stalks.

It worked. And in the fall when black field hands swept down the compacted rows, piling the ears in stacks three times as large as predicted, Steed knew he had a good thing.

‘Now all I have to do is find a market,’ he told his manager, and by questioning fellow congressmen he uncovered patrons eager to buy his surplus at the low prices he was able to offer, and soon other farmers along the Eastern Shore were converting from tomatoes to corn; in the late summer the far fields were burdened with stalks eight and ten feet high, laden with heavy ears. Steed’s gamble was one of the shrewdest ever made in Maryland agriculture, and farmers who might have lost their land had they stayed with tomatoes became moderately rich on corn.

But a lucky stroke in rural economics would not qualify a man for sanctification; what Steed did next, in the late 1950s, was to pension off his field hands and purchase a squadron of gigantic automatic corn harvesters, which saved him a great deal of money and allowed him to harvest his fields speedily on Monday and his neighbors’ on Tuesday. The harvester meant that large-scale agriculture was now possible, for gang-plows prepared the fields in spring, huge multiple disks worked it in late April, harrows with enormous teeth kept the land clean, and metal dinosaurs crawled over the fields in autumn, harvesting the corn.

Where did the spiritual significance in such an operation lie? The black field hands had harvested corn slowly but with almost perfect efficiency; the mechanical pickers swept rudely down the rows, leaving in their trail about three percent of the corn missed. It fell as broken ears, or grains knocked off, or stalks left at the end of rows too tightly packed against the hedges for the machine to reach, or one or two rows left standing down the middle, not worth the driver’s turning his huge machine around for.

Steed and his managers were not slothful; they realized they were
losing corn, but when they calculated what they would have to spend to garner the stray bits, they found that it was cheaper to leave it. ‘Let’s admit that the loss in harvesting by machine is three percent. But even when you add to that the depreciation and the gasoline, the machine harvester is a bargain. So we’ll forget the fallen grains.’

It was one of the happiest decisions a Steed ever made regarding his land, for when the bright yellow grains lay on the ground in autumn, reflecting back the paling rays of the sun, geese flying overhead began to see them. At first a few stopped on their way to customary wintering grounds in North Carolina, and a thrill shot up and down the spine of the Eastern Shore—‘Geese comin’ back! Henry seen at least forty at the far end of his field.’

Housewives going to market would suddenly stop to stare at something their grandmothers had spoken of but which they had never seen. ‘I was turnin’ the corner off Glebe Road, and there in the field stood—well, it must of been a hundred fat geese feedin’ on the Childress farm.’

One autumn at least forty thousand geese came to fields along the Choptank, and legends of the time when nearly a million came were revived, and fifty Turlocks began to grease their guns.

By 1960 two hundred thousand geese were spending their winters along the endless streams feeding into the Choptank, and in the years ahead the population would reach the levels Captain John Smith had observed in 1608. Rafts would form east of Patamoke, ten thousand geese drowsing on the water, and something would alert those at the edge, and they would rise, and all would follow, and then the scouts would satisfy themselves that the danger was not real, and they would settle once again upon the river, and all the rest would follow; it was like a magic carpet somewhere east of Baghdad, rising and drifting and falling back.

At the store, huntsmen summed up the consequences: ‘Elmer’s carvin’ decoys again. They’s five Turlocks advertisin’ their services as guides. That black man at the garage is offerin’ to pick feathers off’n a goose for twenty-five cents, and Martin Caveny rented his waterfront to a dude from Pittsburgh for nine hundred dollars.’

But always when the hunters explored this fascinating subject of how the return had vitalized the Eastern Shore—‘Ever’ damned motel room rented for the season’—the moment would come when they would fall silent from the wonder of it all, then some old man would shake his head and say, ‘Beats all, the geese came back.’ And again no one spoke, for the old man had summarized the best thing that had happened to the Shore in a hundred years.

When Hiram Cater was seven years old his serious education began, not in spelling or arithmetic but in the brutal tactics of survival in a white
world. His mother, who could remember lynchings along the Choptank when black men who may or may not have been guilty of something were summarily hanged, was his principal instructor: ‘Your job to stay alive. Keep away from notice. Doan’ do nothin’ to attract attention, If a Turlock or a Caveny come your way, you step aside. Doan’ never challenge a white man.’

At the slightest indication that young Hiram was developing a temper, she warned him, ‘All right you hit Oscar. He black. But doan’ never hit a white child, because his papa gonna make big trouble.’

And she was especially careful to admonish her son about speaking to white girls: ‘They doan’ exist. They ain’t there. You doan’ go to school with them, you doan’ go to church with them, and in town you keeps strictly away.’ As she watched her son, she was gratified that the two halves of Patamoke were separated; with luck, he need never come into contact with a white girl.

Her doctrine was: ‘It doan’ exist.’ Anything that irritated or denigrated was to be cast out of mind, and no insolence from whites was sufficient cause to retreat from this basic strategy. If Hiram had no books in school, forget it. If when he did get his hands on a book, it was in tatters from long use in white schools, ignore it. If the school had no glass in its windows, keep your mouth shut, because nothing can be done about that. The most automatic human responses were to be muzzled, kept down in one’s stomach. The one response to humiliation was a grin, a step aside, a descent into the gutter so that the white woman could pass, a repression.

‘That’s how it gonna be all your life,’ Julia Cater told her son, and she was preaching old black wisdom, for through the generations that was how black women enabled their sons to survive so that they could grow into black men.

Hiram’s natural protests, uttered from the day this indoctrination began, received scant support from his father. ‘You do like your mama say, you stay alive.’ On the skipjacks, Jeb had mastered the trick of getting along with white crewmen. ‘I does the job better, and when trouble starts I keeps my eyes down.’ As a consequence, he was known favorably as a good nigger, and after a while he found little resentment in playing this role. ‘Man got to stay alive. Man got to have a job. You listen to your mama, Hiram, you gonna be a smart man some day, maybe have your own skipjack.’

The effect on Hiram of this constant repression of natural instincts was minimal, for he found within the black community adequate outlets for his boisterous spirits. If he wanted to fight, Oscar was at hand, slightly larger, slightly better with his fists. If he wanted to play rough games, many boys his size frequented the school grounds and at times their contests became almost violent. By no means did his mother’s preaching
make him into a subdued child, nor one afraid of social conflict. Instead this walling him off from the white community forced him to become an even stronger personality within the black.

Like his father, he had a rugged medium build. His skin was darker than that of many with whom he played, bespeaking an unmixed ancestry reaching back to Africa, but of that continent and Cudjo Cater’s adventures there, he knew nothing. He was a child of the Choptank, without heritage, or language, or knowledge of social custom, and it was likely that this condition would maintain for the rest of his life, as it had for his father.

One preachment of his mother exerted a profound influence: ‘You brush your teeth, you ain’t gonna lose ’em the way I done los’ mine.’ Cleaning his teeth twice a day became a solemn ritual which he observed through choice and not because his mother forced him. As a result, he noticed that his teeth were whiter than those of his playmates and much brighter than those of white children, who were allowed unlimited quantities of candy.

He was allowed almost nothing. His sister Luta Mae saved their pennies and on festive days would lead him to the Blue and Gold Ice Cream Parlor, where they would agonize over which of nine flavors to choose for their cones; he thought of these days as the best in his life and felt none of his sister’s resentment that when the cones were bought they could not be eaten at the lacy iron tables. He wanted to be out on the street, where the cool touch of the cream on his lips contrasted with the hot breeze from the river.

When Luta Mae was twelve, a big bright girl with energies and imaginings far surpassing those of her older sister, she told Hiram extraordinary stories—of how she flew one day with Charles Lindbergh all through the sky, and of how she had once owned a Chevrolet and driven it over the oyster-shell roads, and of how she had met this older boy Charley and of their going through the countryside and doing everything they damned well pleased. One’s mind was dusted out when one talked long with Luta Mae, for her enthusiasms flourished and carried her to perimeters far beyond the Choptank.

When she was thirteen she confided to Hiram that she would refuse to end her education when the black school terminated at the end of the seventh grade. ‘I am going to Salisbury. I am going to the black high school and get all A’s. And then I am going to college.’ She had fallen under the spell of a Miss Canby, who taught in the Patamoke black school, and from her had learned to speak white man’s English, with no contractions or gutter slang. She affected ladylike pronunciations, too:
skoo-well
for
school
and
Feb-ru-ar-y,
with all letters vocalized in a manner few college professors could equal. She was reading Langston Hughes and the life of Frederick Douglass, who had grown up nearby.

And always she seemed to be dragging Hiram along behind her, as if it was his education that mattered; but when their mother heard of this, she became agitated.

‘Doan’ you listen to Luta Mae,’ Julia warned. ‘She got special problems.’

And then, suddenly, the Eastern Shore was gripped by an excitement that preempted even Julia’s cautionary preachments. World War II had come and gone, scarcely touching the Shore; no munitions plants sprouted, nor any big military installations. Life hardly changed in spite of the convolutions at Berlin and Hiroshima; the only excitement came when a U-boat crept close to the Virginia Capes and sank some freighters. It was believed that the real mission of the submarine was the bombardment of Patamoke and the destruction of the Paxmore Boatyard, and when cynics said, ‘Not likely they’d bother,’ older men reminded them, ‘That’s what they said before the British bombed us in the War of 1812.’

The war had passed without invasion of the Choptank, and things were back in their somnolent grooves when the Maryland legislature, composed principally of men from the western shore, passed a bill authorizing the construction of a mighty bridge right across Chesapeake Bay. Imaginations were inflamed by the possibilities: ‘Is it feasible for man to construct a bridge five miles long across a major arm of the Atlantic Ocean? It is and we shall do it.’