by Earl Swift
She entered the ministry in 1994 and pastored rural churches around the state. She was beginning her fourth year at a church in the Blue Ridge southeast of Roanoke when her district superintendent told her he’d found her a “wonderful appointment opportunity” that suited her evangelical bent and love for close-knit communities. You’re going to Tangier Island, he announced.
So Pastor Stover landed at Swain and met with the church’s board, led by Principal Denny Crockett. The introduction went well. “I really did feel welcome,” she said. “I had wondered about that, because I knew they were very conservative, and I was told that if ten years earlier someone had said they’d have a woman preacher, they would have said, ‘That won’t happen.’”
The parsonage, more than a century old by then, had fallen into disrepair. During its lengthy renovation, the pastor bunked in a small King Street cottage. Otherwise, her inaugural two years seemed to go smoothly. “Everything looked great on the surface,” she said. “Money coming in. They had tithers. And they knew their Bible—they’d get up in class meeting and just amaze me.” Beneath that healthy veneer, however, Pastor Stover “could feel an undercurrent in the church. I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.” Was it because some of the congregation, both men and women, couldn’t accept her in the pulpit? She didn’t want to think so, but she wondered. Whatever its cause, she was “convinced that there was a spirit of schism there,” she told me, “and a spirit of lawlessness.”
Some of the faithful attending Swain at the time acknowledge that there was, in fact, a brooding unrest in the congregation. They cite a common source: The wider Methodist Church was becoming too liberal, especially in its views on homosexuality and its internal debates over whether to ordain gay and lesbian ministers. “I ain’t got nothing against them,” Cook Cannon said, summarizing the thoughts of many. “I ain’t a basher or anything like that. But it ain’t right. I don’t feel like being in a place that supports that.”
The United Methodist Church did not permit homosexuals in its leadership at the time and does not do so today. The church does not permit its ministers to perform same-sex marriages and doesn’t allow such ceremonies in its sanctuaries. But that’s not to say that these issues haven’t been argued for years. In fact, they’ve split the national membership down the middle, and some fear that a Methodist summit on LGBT roles in the denomination, scheduled for 2019, will trigger a permanent breakup. That they were discussed at all was enough, it seems, to upset many on Tangier.
Duane Crockett, who was deeply involved in Swain as a Sunday school teacher, youth leader, and organist, identified a more immediate, local problem. “There was just no participation anymore—it was the same few people doing everything. Everybody would say, ‘I can’t do it. I’m too busy,’” he said. “And a lot of the older, devout people had passed away.”
Pastor Stover agreed that a very few were, in fact, running things. But, she recalled, they were “loud and kind of controlling” and “had a stranglehold on the church.” Nancy Creedle backed her up. “You had a few—quite a few, I might ought to say—who wanted to run the church,” she said, adding, “That’s a common situation.”
Against this backdrop, Swain Memorial dispatched its delegates to the 2011 Virginia United Methodist Conference.
EVERY JUNE, the United Methodist Church gathers thousands of its Virginia ministers and church members to tackle the denomination’s business for the coming year. The 2011 conference was held in Roanoke, in the state’s mountainous west. As is the custom, Swain sent two delegates to the meeting: its pastor and Eugenia Pruitt, a member of the laity who had represented the congregation at the conference for more than ten years.
Eugenia is the daughter of Edwin “Eddie Boy” Parks, Leon’s first cousin. She’s the granddaughter of Miss Annie Parks, whom islanders regard as the closest thing to a Tangier saint since the days of Charles P. Swain. Stocky, with a frizz of dark hair, and graced with a booming voice, Eugenia was sixty-nine years old in 2011 and had been saved for fifty years.
“When you’re elected to be a delegate, I take that very serious,” she said one afternoon, as we sat in her home on the West Ridge. “So before conference you get this book. It’s a handbook, like, and you’re asked to read this whole book so you know what’s going on. And in it are all the resolutions that have been proposed, that the conference is going to vote on.” The document in question is the annual Book of Reports, a dry read if ever there was one, and deep in the 2011 edition were the eighteen resolutions for that year. One of them, Resolution 13, captured Eugenia’s attention.
Titled “Effective and Constructive Peacemaking Between Palestinians and Israelis,” it opened by noting that the church sought “to act as an advocate for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The preferred route, it declared, was “the creation of two independent sovereign nations, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and in economic justice and cooperation.” It noted that “a viable Palestinian state must have a sustainable financial foundation” and argued: “To this end, positive financial investment for the Palestinians must be encouraged.” And it committed the church to “study and make recommendations for concrete measures” that could be taken by its boards, agencies, and members “to encourage, aid and assist the Palestinian people in their efforts in nation building.” That was the meat of the resolution, but that is not what Eugenia took away from her reading. She understood it to call on “the Methodist Conference to donate money to Palestine for them to become a state,” as she put it to me.
“Well, when I read it I stayed very troubled. I prayed about it until I let Ooker read it. I saw him up to Fisherman’s Corner. He was up having dinner, and as he read it he was doing this.” She shook her head. She showed it to Dewey Crockett, who did the same thing, and to Duane Crockett, too. Eugenia drove with her husband, Fred, to Roanoke. She spoke against the resolution. She voted against it. It passed nonetheless. She and Fred drove home. The following Sunday morning, she followed church custom by giving a conference report to Swain’s congregation.
“I don’t think anybody thought she’d say anything at all—that it would be some boring report,” recalled Jean Crockett, who served on the church board. “This was not a boring report.”
NO MATTER THAT the resolution did not call on the Methodist Church to give money to Palestine, as Eugenia interpreted it to say, and as many Tangiermen believe it said to this day. Some at Swain objected to it on other, more fundamental grounds: It encouraged the creation of a Palestinian state, which they viewed as a de facto attack on Israel and which, in turn, ran counter to their reading of Scripture. “Israel is God’s chosen people,” Duane informed me. “If there’s no Israel, there’s no kingdom. If there’s no kingdom, there’s no king. And if there’s no king, the whole Bible is a lie.”
One might argue that the Israel of the Bible and the modern nation-state of the same name are different entities entirely—that the former refers to a people and an ancient, vaguely defined territory, while the latter is a creation of secular law and politics dating only to 1948. But that isn’t accepted thinking among many of the faithful on Tangier. As they see it, Israel is Israel, and any support for Palestine constitutes aid to Israel’s enemies and is sufficient to provoke God’s wrath. “[Palestinians] got one aim in their life, one aim, and that’s to kill everybody in Israel,” Cook Cannon explained to me. “I support the Jews. The Bible says all the land belongs to the Jews, and they’ve never gotten their land back.”
“I think that’s something that will make God mad.”
Duane, who knew beforehand that Eugenia planned to denounce the resolution, followed with his own comments to the congregation: “I said, ‘If you stand with our decision to stand against this, will you please show that by standing?’” Some in the congregation were confused by all the fuss and weren’t sure what such a “stand” involved. Nevertheless, most of them stood.
The service ended, but the disq
uiet did not. Pastor Stover said she “tried to explain to them that our resolutions are a statement, that there’s no teeth to it, that there’s no action. I said, ‘There’s no money involved in the resolution whatsoever.’ I said, ‘It’s just a statement, and some people support it, and it’s just one of those things where we agree to disagree.’” But many in Swain, convinced that the Virginia Conference had turned on Israel, remained up in arms.
The subject came up again at a Swain board meeting. “I asked the board if I could write to the district superintendent and the bishop,” Duane said. “The board voted unanimously to let me do that.” He also asked whether he and Carlene Shores, Leon’s oldest daughter, could write to every newspaper in Virginia, “to let the people know what was going on.” The board agreed to that as well.
The letters appeared in dozens of newspapers late that summer. I found one preserved on the website of the Herald Courier of Bristol, Virginia, in the state’s far southwest. “The members of Swain United Methodist on Tangier cannot support the building of a nation, who is Israel’s sworn enemy,” it declared, adding, “We call on members of the Virginia United Methodist Conference to take a stand against this unbiblical resolution by contacting your pastor, District Superintendent, and Bishop, and stand on the Word of God.”
Soon after, with no groundswell of outrage evident in the state’s other churches, the congregation found itself at an impasse. “It began to consume our board meetings and our committee meetings: What are we going to do next?” Duane said. Their answer was to stop sending a share of Swain’s weekly collections and tithes to the larger Methodist Church—to support only the Tangier church and its missions. Some members also thought it wise to confiscate all the Methodist hymnals from the pews.
So things stood when, early that fall, Tangier earned a visit from Tammy Estep, the district superintendent for the Eastern Shore. Her message was firm: You can’t remove the hymnals—they’re the property of the United Methodist Church. And if you want to leave the Virginia Conference, that’s up to you—but understand that Swain Memorial is UMC property, too. The building stays Methodist.
The protesters hadn’t counted on that. Their ancestors had built the church and they’d assumed it theirs. But sure enough, the Methodist Church held the deed to the property. What had seemed an easy break with the ever more liberal outside world, they now saw, carried a steep price. The Swain sanctuary was the repository of more than a century’s collective memories—christenings, graduations, marriages, and funerals; prayers as storms bore down, babies were born, and neighbors ailed; rejoicing and grief across generations. This was no simple building. This was a spiritual and emotional home.
Building or no, Carlene was the first to go: She quit her post as Swain’s musical director and left the church that December. Shortly after Christmas, five Tangier-born ministers who preached on the mainland came to Swain, advocating cool heads. “We didn’t dispute anything they had to say,” Jean Crockett recalled. “But they mostly talked about our heritage, and our heritage was ending.” The following night, the congregation met to decide what to do. Some argued for staying in the Virginia Conference and promoting Israel from within it. Others suggested that they should all quit the conference, every last one of them, leaving the Methodists with a church no one used.
It came to a vote, which was well short of unanimous. And so the second once-inconceivable event occurred. Swain’s congregation split, though no one knew how many would actually leave until a Sunday in January 2012, when Pastor Stover found her congregation smaller by about eighty people.
“I was hurt to have to leave the church,” Eugenia said. “I don’t want to say it was easy for me to leave. It weren’t. But I left with no doubts about leaving. That Thursday night, when they had all those preachers come talk to us, I knew that night as I left that I was never coming back. I got into the golf cart with Fred and said, ‘Honey, I’m not going back.’
“Those that stayed, I would say a lot of them stayed because of the church—the building,” she said. “We knew that if everybody stood together and left the conference, they’d have come and shut the doors. They’d have boarded it up. But I believe in a year or two we could have bought the church back. What were they going to do with that big building? They’d have sold it back to us.”
THE SPLIT, like that in 1946, divided families. Carol Moore left for New Testament, while her mother, aunts, and her uncle Jack stayed at Swain. Ed and Annette Charnock remained at Swain. Ed’s daughter Danielle left. Allen Ray Crockett stayed put; his brother Dewey, a man who for decades was synonymous with Swain, chose to leave. Bobby and Lisa Crockett left. Lisa’s mother remains a Methodist.
Like the earlier schism, this one bred hard feelings. “It was like a death,” Nancy Creedle told me. “It was so hurtful to be going down the street and to see people I’d seen for so many years in church, and they turned their heads like I wasn’t there. I kept praying that the Lord would help me act like I should act.”
But in time, those wounds began to scab. New Testament, having teetered on the brink of extinction, enjoyed a new vitality, with Sunday attendance equal to the church up the road. And among Swain’s depleted number, Pastor Stover found a cause for celebration. “As soon as the split occurred, the undercurrent wasn’t there anymore, and this sweet spirit emerged,” she told me. “It was just beautiful to see.”
In 2013, the time had come for Pastor Stover’s replacement. Island-born Robbie Parks, a Methodist preacher supervising a central Virginia district, realized that one of the pastors he oversaw might be a good fit for the job. He spent a Saturday with John Flood, who was pastoring three churches in rural Prince Edward County, and his wife, Delores. “I told him all the good things about Tangier,” he recalled. “I told him all the negatives about Tangier.”
John Flood remembers the conversation well. “He said, ‘There’s been problems there. The church has split and there’s been a lot of turmoil. Healing needs to take place.’” Not long after, he and Delores made their first visit. Both were charmed by Tangier and the islanders they met. The feeling was mutual. “As soon as they stepped in the door and said hello, I knew that John Flood was the right man,” Pastor Stover recalled. “I just knew it. He just seemed like he was warm and fuzzy and loving, and just perfect.”
In the years since, Pastor Flood has managed to bridge much of the chasm. He’s done it with a quiet, folksy manner born of his upbringing on a rural tobacco farm and a pragmatism honed in his first career running a trucking company. Years working the fields equipped him with insight into the uncertainties of weather and harvests, the inevitability and variability of seasons—and, by extension, the travails of life on the water.
He has made the entire island his ministry, regardless of church affiliation. If the Maryland State Police helicopter touches down to medevac a Tangierman to the mainland, Pastor Flood is at the airport, offering encouragement to patient and family. If a Tangierman’s in the hospital, the preacher is sure to turn up at his or her bedside.
“The Lord sent Tangier a great gift with Pastor Flood,” Eugenia said. “For a while there were hard feelings, and most of them blamed me. Down through history, I’ll be the one who broke up the church. But the Lord can work in spite of us. There was a lot of forgiveness, once Pastor Flood came.”
One evening I sat in on the congregation’s annual meeting with its district superintendent, Alexander B. Joyner. It opened with testimony from Hoot Pruitt. “We’re blessed to have our pastor, because he knows how to get people in line—not in a rough way, but in a gentle spirit,” he said.
Annette Charnock took the floor. “They all love him, whether they’re a member of this church or not,” she told the Reverend Joyner. “He’s like a gentle giant.”
Marlene McCready: “He’s the shepherd of the whole island.”
Joyner, who was an Eastern Shore pastor during the 2012 drama and who followed it closely, stepped up to a lectern. “It’s a real joy, as your district s
uperintendent, to hear such support for your pastor,” he told the gathering. “It’s especially gratifying to hear it at this church.
“Not because it’s an unloving place,” he added quickly. “But as you know, Tangier can be a difficult place.”
Ooker buys peelers from hard-potter Tabby Crockett. (EARL SWIFT)
Sixteen
BACK IN THE DAYS BEFORE CRABBERS PUT THEIR PEELERS into pump-supplied tanks to molt, many chose not to bother with the shedding process at all. Instead, they sold their peelers to a shedding house that bustered them up and sent them to market.
Nowadays all the island’s peeler crabbers run their own tanks. But one of them still maintains a vestige of the old shedding operations: Ooker buys the peelers that hard-crab potters catch. He pays fifty cents for each. Some days he buys hundreds; I’ve seen him buy seventy at a time from a single crabber. He built a pier extending from his shanty to the channel’s edge, to make it easier for his hard-crabbing neighbors to drop off their baskets, and pays what he owes them once a week or so.
On paper, it’s good business. He more than doubles the number of peelers in his tanks, and the crabs he buys for fifty cents will fetch six or seven times as much once they’re bustered. But shedding has its risks. A July storm sweeps over Tangier with winds so fierce they topple poles carrying electrical lines out to the shanties, knocking out power to the pumps that circulate water over the peelers. Crabs die by the hundreds in Ooker’s tanks and those of his neighbors. When it happens, he’s out not only the crabs and the money they’d bring, but the money he owes the hard-potters for crabs he’ll never sell.
And then comes the mysterious die-off that strikes the tanks of peeler crabbers every year, a phenomenon they say did not occur in the days when peelers were kept in overboard floats. One day in the Situation Room, Ooker announces he’s running three tanks of his own crabs and three of peelers he’s bought, and the die-off is in full effect, especially among the crabs he got from hard-potters. Of the purchased crabs, last night he had thirty busters and thirty-three dead. This morning, he found another forty peelers had died overnight. Of the crabs he caught himself, last night he had fifty-five busters and five dead; this morning, seven more had died.