by Earl Swift
His preamble complete, Duane gets around to the real subject of his message: “When we make up our own rules and regulations outside of what’s in the Bible,” he says, “then we put ourselves in what’s called a yoke of bondage. I have done that in my own life so many times.”
He cites, as an example, his relationship with a combination gas station and wine shop on U.S. Route 13, the main highway running up the Eastern Shore. “I’ve thought many a time, ‘I would not get gas to a place called the Wine Rack. I will not do it. Lord knows how many people have gotten drunk from wine they’ve bought there. I will not buy gas to the Wine Rack.’ It was something I started in my own mind, that I couldn’t gas my car up there—and then everybody who gassed their car up there became a heathen because they did that.
“I was coming back down to Crisfield one day. The gas light started flickering.” A knowing chuckle rises from the congregation. “I had to gas up. I said, ‘Now, I can take a good chance and wait till I get down to Princess Anne, or I can pull over here and gas my car up.’ What did I do?” He pauses for two beats. “I did the commonsense thing. I pulled my car over and I gassed my car up at the Wine Rack.”
“I’m not going to be judged on what kind of gas I put in my vehicle,” he says. “But you see, I had put myself under a yoke of bondage. And to redeem myself to the congregation I have to say I haven’t gotten gas at the Wine Rack since the day the light went off in my car.”
THE YOKE OF BONDAGE: Tangier knows a thing or two about that. After Charles P. Swain’s death, and through much of the twentieth century, the island’s Methodists held fast to practices that struck visitors as quaint, even backward. For starters, the Sabbath was observed to a degree long abandoned on the Virginia mainland. Many an island family did no cooking on Sundays, as it might be considered work; devout Tangiermen instead prepared their Sunday meals on Saturday and strove to preserve them until time came to eat.
Some islanders wouldn’t wash their hair or wash dishes, either, out of fear that it constituted work. They avoided any activity involving the use of machines, which they defined to include such simple devices as scissors. A believer did not mow his lawn, ride a bike, or work on his boat on a Sunday, and he didn’t snip coupons from the newspaper, either.
The faithful might forgo eating dessert with a Sunday meal as an unnecessary pleasure and thus displeasing to God. The Sabbath was thought to nix child’s play, too. “I remember when I was a little boy,” Duane says later in his sermon, “I used to like to carry around with me a bushel basket lid, and everywhere I’d go I’d pretend I was steering a boat.”
“Well, one Sunday morning I went to Sunday school. I had went out the yard, steering my boat. I left [the lid] at the edge of the yard, and when I come back from Sunday school I came back through the yard and picked it up, and Pop-Pop Wes was out on the porch, waiting for me. He always called me Wayne. He said, ‘Wayne, come here a minute.’ I said, ‘What, Pop-Pop?’ He started singing this little chorus to me. These were the words:
You must not play on Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.
You must not play on Sunday because it is a sin.
You can play on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday, Saturday, until Sunday comes again.
“He said, ‘You ought not to be toting that lid through the yard on a Sunday.’ And I never did anymore,” Duane tells us. “And let me say this: to the point that I did nothing anymore on a Sunday at all, because I felt like I was hurting God by doing that.”
Enforcing the Sabbath wasn’t just the province of Swain’s minister but the town government, for in most respects Tangier behaved as a full-on theocracy. No municipal decision was made without the church’s assent. No new idea could take root without its backing. And the town’s ordinance book included a blue law that went far beyond those elsewhere: It outlawed “loafing on store porches and streets” on Sundays and decreed that all residents be “in church during the hours of service, or in their homes.”
The island has never been populated solely with the faithful; from the start it was home to scalawags and backsliders, to drinkers and brawlers. But even the resolutely unchurched respected the place and power of Swain Memorial in Tangier life, and recognized the conformity that peaceable coexistence with the Methodist majority required. Alcohol was surely present, but it was imported discreetly and consumed on the sly. A drunk islander would wade the marsh before he’d be seen weaving down the Main Ridge. Even the saltiest Tangierman strove to keep his language clean around his neighbors. And with rare exceptions, all observed the blue law.
Such an exception sparked one of the most notorious episodes in island history. On a Sunday in April 1920, seventeen-year-old Roland Parks—grandfather of Annette Charnock, whom I sat with at the wedding—went to his family’s closed grocery store on the Main Ridge to fetch ice cream for his ailing mother. The town sergeant, C. C. “Bud” Connorton, saw him at the store and, citing the blue law, tried to arrest him. When Parks insisted on completing his errand, Connorton followed him home and shot him on his front porch.
The boy survived the wound, and Connorton was sentenced to a year in prison. He served a fraction of the stretch before receiving a gubernatorial pardon, and he returned to Tangier and his job as the island’s cop. Five years later, as he sat beside an open window in an island café, Connorton was shot and killed by an unidentified gunman.
A great many islanders were said to know who was responsible, but none talked. The tight-lipped included God-fearing Swain regulars.
On Tangier, piety and lawlessness can keep close company.
WHICH BRINGS US TO A SAGA that cut Tangier to the bone and continues to reverberate among its people today. At its center was James C. Richardson, who arrived on Tangier in November 1943 as the new pastor of Swain Memorial. He was a native of Hampton, Virginia, at the bay’s south end, and had started preaching in neighboring Newport News at seventeen years old. When he moved into Swain’s parsonage with his wife, Elva Curl Wilson, and their fifteen-month-old daughter, Grace, the dynamic, blond-haired preacher was a rising star in the Methodist Church’s Virginia Conference. He wasn’t yet thirty.
Richardson quickly won the hearts and minds of his new congregation, which was storied throughout the conference as an especially active, Bible-smart, and conservative bunch. Then, in 1945, he welcomed into his ministry an island native named Stella Thomas, who was returning to Tangier after years of overseas missionary work. She brought some newfangled ideas with her—ideas that today’s evangelicals might not find radical, but which came as a surprise to Swain’s old-fashioned and biblically literalist worshipers.
I won’t detail the ideas here, because they really don’t matter to the story. Suffice to say that they excited Richardson, along with some in the congregation, but struck many more as deviations from Scripture. And it probably didn’t help that the majority sensed a bit of the holier-than-thou in Richardson’s close supporters, an attitude that the Methodism that had so long piloted the island was not good or strong enough to suit them.
The situation came to a head when, in the summer of 1946, Richardson began leading daily morning services in addition to the regular Sunday worship, to accommodate his flock-within-a-flock. Church trustees petitioned the Virginia Conference to have the pastor removed. Richardson asked for another year on the island. The conference’s bishop turned him down.
So it came to pass that after pondering his situation, Richardson decided to quit the Methodist ministry and start a second church on Tangier. He rented a house on the West Ridge and moved his family—which now included a second daughter—out of the parsonage. “My earliest memory over here is the day we were leaving the church and moving into the house on West Ridge,” his older daughter, Grace Kimpel, told me when she visited the island in the summer of 2016. “My grandmother was pushing my sister in the baby carriage—she was four months old or so. She was pushing the baby carriage with one hand and carrying an upright floor lamp with the other.
“It felt like we were going on an adventure, but I had a sense that it was important.”
Richardson didn’t leave alone. Fifty-five of Swain’s women and four of its men followed him—only a modest share of the Methodist membership, but an exodus that split families, separated husbands from wives, and sowed hurt and distrust in scores of Tangier homes. Those who left found themselves banished from their social circles and branded as deluded and disloyal by those who stayed put.
Stella Thomas’s sister rented Richardson an empty one-room store she owned in Meat Soup. In November 1946, what was then called the House of Prayer, and would later become the New Testament Church, held its first service there. The next morning, Richardson discovered that someone had sunk his boat in Tangier’s harbor.
So the lawlessness began. The island’s wheezy electrical plant had failed two years before, and under cover of darkness, persons unknown vandalized the storefront sanctuary, tearing up hymnals, hauling out chairs and tossing them onto the roof, and several times pitching the small organ into the harbor. Prowlers regularly lurked outside the Richardsons’ house on the West Ridge. The harassment gradually increased in brazenness over the winter and spring of 1947.
Then, with summer, it got completely out of hand. During five nights of prayer meetings in August 1947, the House of Prayer came under siege from noisy mobs hurling bricks, cans, and shells at the converted store. An islander confronted Richardson as he crossed a bridge over the Big Gut with an armload of groceries and did his best to knock him into the water. His followers found copper paint poured into their boat engines, their windows broken, their presence ignored by kin and lifelong friends. Richardson’s boat was again sunk. Rumors flew that the former pastor and his family would be kidnapped or forcibly run off the island. The mayor and a member of the town council advised that they could not guarantee his safety.
One Saturday night in late August, while Richardson attended a conference in Indiana, vandals once again broke into the makeshift church, dumping slop jars full of excrement on the floor and chairs. The next day the congregation met in the home of a member, who soon lost his fishing nets and a storage building to arson. For another six weeks the attacks continued unabated: Someone broke the pillars supporting the church’s front porch, and again dumped slop jars in the sanctuary, and broke out the windows, and painted graffiti on the walls, and ruined a second organ.
Richardson met these trials with “surprise or sadness,” Grace Kimpel says, but she does not recall seeing him angry: “My dad had the idea of outliving and outloving his critics and adversaries.” Still, by early October he was clearly frustrated, which was manifest in letters he wrote to the mayor and Swain’s lay leader. “It has been suggested to me that these things continue because the young men who are responsible for them feel that they have the approval and moral support of the Mayor, the Town Council, and the leaders of the community,” one letter read. “I do not find it in me to believe that the people of Tangier approve such actions. Yet, I have waited in vain to hear any protest from any official of the town, or to see any printed notice to discourage such actions and attitudes.”
Incredibly, the town had taken no official position on depredations that had been going on for nearly a year and seemed destined to bring serious injury or worse—and Richardson’s letter failed to shame it into doing so now. A week later, he wrote an open letter to all of Tangier, the gist of which was contained in a single sentence: “It is a time for sinners to think on their ways.”
Perhaps it struck a chord among the pious. Perhaps it even prompted the lawless to self-examination. We’ll never know, because just two days after that, on October 13, Newsweek published a story titled “Trouble in Tangier” that put the crisis before all of America. “As in many isolated communities, religion is taken seriously on Tangier, and for more than a century Methodism has been its only denomination,” the story read. “Last week reports reached the mainland that the island was in turmoil over religious differences. Old friends were snarling at each other. Families were split. Prowlers hurled rocks through church windows. Boats were sunk at their docks. And a minister, afraid for his life, huddled with his wife and two children in a little house with shattered window panes.”
It went on to report that Swain’s members denied condoning the attacks. “They blame them on young rowdies who have overheard family discussions of the dispute,” the magazine reported. “With amusements nonexistent, they say, some youthful residents might start drinking and commit acts of vandalism.”
Embarrassed by the story, Virginia governor William Tuck enlisted Accomack County Circuit Court judge Jefferson F. Walter to bring a halt to the unrest, and at month’s end the judge convened a grand jury to look into the matter. Its members summoned the mayor, town council, and a procession of church and community leaders, along with several islanders recently returned from the war—the presumed “rowdies” mentioned by Newsweek. The grand jury returned no indictments, but the judge made clear to all that any further harassment would be answered swiftly and harshly. And with that, the trouble stopped.
Richardson moved his fledgling church out of the store and into his own home, knocking out a hallway wall to enlarge the living room so that fifty-one chairs could be shoehorned within. Children squeezed three abreast on the stairs, and an adjoining room seated more adults. The pastor stood at the front door, often using a blackboard to illustrate his messages. “Not everybody could necessarily see my dad,” Grace Kimpel recalled, “but everybody could hear him.”
There the New Testament congregation met for the next eight years, until it raised the money to build its spartan two-story church down at the seam between King Street and Black Dye. The first service there was held on Easter Sunday in 1957. Though dwarfed by Swain, it thrived for years, offering a brand of evangelism as unassuming and stripped of frill as its building. Richardson shared its leadership with a handful of church elders, who took turns at the pulpit. Most worked the water, and all were men.
Children grew up in the church—Jerry Frank Pruitt and Ed Charnock among them—and younger islanders joined the congregation of their own accord. But eventually New Testament’s original faithful aged and started to die faster than they were replaced.
PIETY AND LAWLESSNESS—examples abound of these competing facets of the Tangier character. Take the shirt factory down near the south end of the West Ridge: A Baltimore clothing company opened the plant in 1919, employing sixty island women in the daily creation of “dress and work shirts as well as rompers of different qualities and styles,” as an Eastern Shore newspaper reported in 1927. “That the employees are contented is proven by the fact that some have been there since the factory was opened.”
The factory burned. Contented though its workers might have been, island tradition holds that their men weren’t pleased with the independence that jobs afforded their wives and daughters; the plant’s destruction was no accident. Fanned by a strong southerly wind, the fire consumed the building, then raced across the marsh and devoured the Heistin’ Bridge, too, and only the frantic efforts of bucket brigades kept it from pushing on to Black Dye, where it might have leaped from house to house up the Main Ridge. No one was ever made to answer for the crime.
I could offer further examples from history, but let’s instead consider a happening three weeks after Duane Crockett’s sermon on the yoke of bondage: One night late in July, someone steals into Swain Memorial’s small office, which occupies an addition on the church’s west side, and makes off with about $3,000.
The news reaches the Situation Room two days later, when Hoot Pruitt, Swain’s current lay leader, informs the regulars that only $600 of the loot was in cash, with the remainder in personal checks and useless to the thieves, assuming they aren’t so stupid as to try to cash them. The money was not stored in the church safe, he says, but it wasn’t lying in plain view, either: It had been cached in piles of paperwork in three different parts of the room.
“Somebody
knew where it was at,” Hoot says. “They went right to it.”
“Somebody very familiar with what was going on,” Jerry Frank muses. “And they’ll probably get caught.”
“I hope so,” Hoot says.
“When did this happen?” Leon asks.
“Sunday night after church to Monday morning,” Hoot says. “A lot of hanky-panky people hanging around there.” He adds, after a pause, “And they might not have done it.”
“Inside job,” Ooker theorizes.
“The way it looks,” Hoot says, visibly stricken, “you have to think so.”
A few hours later, an air of apprehensive curiosity hangs over Swain as the Wednesday evening church service begins. A deflated-looking John Flood paces the front of the sanctuary. “By now you’ve probably guessed that it’s going to be a little different this evening from a normal Wednesday evening service,” he says, his breathing labored and transmitted over the PA by his headset microphone. “You know me. I don’t like secrets. I try to provide any information I have.
“I’m sure by now everybody knows on the island that we were robbed Sunday night or early Monday morning. The tithes and collections were taken, and some of the money from the men’s prayer breakfast was taken.” He pauses for a long moment, during which he studies his congregation, and we listen as he catches his breath. “The thing I really want to ask is that you not let this harden your heart. I have to tell you that I feel so violated by this. I have trouble putting into words how I feel about it. I will be honest with you: I felt anger, along with the hurt. They didn’t take my money. They didn’t take your money. The moment it touched that plate, it became God’s money. They took God’s money.”