It’s like me and Pap got seawater for blood. If it’s swimming in the water, we just know by instinct how to catch it. We not only catch any type of fish God made, but all nature of water creatures. Porpoise, turtles, oysters, crabs, eels, and sometimes whales, depending on if we need the money that bad to go off on the hunt. I will say that whaling is much easier when the beasts wash dead onto your beach.
But fishing on a June day like today is my favorite thing to do, being mere inches above the sound. It’s like a passel of little miracles happening all day long, just for me.
The rest of the country can scurry around like rats, packing guns or politicking, but out here people are free to be simple. I like to think of mainland North Carolina as a great big brass band a-playing in a stuffed-up room, and the Outer Banks as one easy stroke on the fiddle, cutting right through the clean ocean air.
But it ain’t often easy. Pap and me arise afore dawn and follow the sun all the way across the sky, most days. Oftentimes we just catch a few winks on the boat, an old sail for a blanket. We breakfast on seafood, we sup on seafood. And shitting over the side of the skiff in broad daylight isn’t a circumstance.
As a way of living, it was all getting old to me.
Today I was sloppy pulling the nets up, and Pap was getting real cross with me. But try as I might to think on hauling, I kept wondering on Miss Abigail Sinclair. There was just some unruly quality to her, even though she was all shelled up in those fancy clothes. ’Course, she was easy on the eyes, no denying that.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have myself a gal, Eliza Dickens. She’s a hard worker and a good cook, make me a fine wife. I’ve known her since we was ’bout yay high, no taller than my shinbone. She’s got me thinking it might be a good idea to have a wife, set up house. So maybe early next year we’ll tie the knot, once I get some learning. I figure if I’m a lettered man, there ain’t nothing holding me back from a decent job.
See, a new lighthouse is set to get built down the Banks a ways, in Cape Hatteras. The whole Banks is in an uproar over its construction. Number one, they say it’s to be the tallest brick light in the world. And number two, its building is expected to give Banker folks jobs left and right.
And it won’t stop there. Word has it that the U.S. government wants to build lighthouse after lighthouse on the Banks. Plenty of jobs for able men, if you are so inclined to believe the talk. And there’s not a soul on the Banks that don’t want to get hired.
Sure, there’s lifting and hauling jobs aplenty, but I like the notion of those finger-pointing jobs, myself. It’s my bet that they’re having a devil of a time finding men around here to scribble down the little whatnots, and mull over the bigger ideas, and that’s where I hope to fit in.
I’ve heard tell these government jobs pay men regular good money by every hour they work, and a steady job like that is mighty tempting, out here where we never know when our next catch of fish or flock of geese might show up. Just thinking on the money to be made in Hatteras by a bookish type of man, and with skills like mine to boot, makes me want to dive off this old boat and start swimming down there today. But I’m far too yellow-bellied to reveal my highfalutin plans to Pap just yet.
Still, I’ve been reciting the list of letters in my head over and over, sometimes backwards to frontwards even. My mind seems real natural at it, so far. I been wanting to learn reading and writing since I was a young feller, seeing the Banks visitors, and sometimes the Reb and Fed’ral soldiers a few years back during the occupation, reading their thick newspapers and carrying ’round books that looked like they told of the mysteries of the world. Made me feel a big old buoy-head, not even able to write my own name.
But native folks ’round these parts don’t read or write much, so there was nary a soul to teach me. Pap told me to forget about schooling. But I don’t want to haul pound nets and live in Pap’s humble abode for the rest of my life. I sure don’t want to trade kegs of fish and strings of bird for every last thing I lay my hands on in this world.
I see how bone-tired my pap gets nowadays, with a lifetime of labor riding his back. I try to haul extra hard to make up for his loose limbs. I look on him, his pouched-up red face and his white shaggy brows, and feel terrible sad for the thoughts in my head. I’d miss Pap greatly if I were to leave him. I’d miss the water, too, and this skiff. This skiff we called Tessa, after Ma, but no one would know that because we didn’t know how to write the letters on her. And Pap was too proud to ask anyone to do it for him.
When Pap slumped over for a catnap on the way back to Nags Head, I pulled out the paper that Miss Abigail Sinclair had given me last week. The paper was getting all bent up and stained from my pulling it in and out of my pockets, and from tracing my fingers over the letters.
I recollected the way the pink tip of Miss Sinclair’s tongue peeked out the corner of her mouth a bit as she wrote the letters on the paper, and my face reddened as if from a long day in the sun. I’d sure hate to have Mister Sinclair read my thoughts right about now. He’s the breed of man you just don’t want to disappoint, like a man o’ God.
Mister Sinclair is the tallest, broadest man I’ve seen hereabouts, a rare giant of a man. Every man, woman, and child around stares after him like they seen a Jesus miracle walk by, all wide-eyed and pointing. His head is crowned with a mess of curly red hair, and his short beard is ruddy gold. The trimmed facial hair gives him such a dignified look that I have a mind to grow hair like his on my own chops.
I’m no bootlicker, but I’ve been studying him, his high-bred manners and such, ever since that day last autumn when I took him goose-hunting up yonder on the North Banks.
He’s what they call a “gentleman” planter, come down a few generations. I know he’s rolling in money since he always sports the finest fashions, even though all we do is fiddle around in the dirt and water and mess with bloodied fowl and fish. And anyone that’s willing to pay good money for some other man to help him hunt and fish must have a pocket full of rocks.
Back in December I picked out some men hauling pine over to the ocean, and we all watched Mister Sinclair’s cottage grow up bit by bit during the winter. We’d take to gathering at the ocean on our time off, to cook up some bluefish or trout on a fire and polish off some mountain dew while we looked on the unlikely sight of a house being built smack on the ocean sand.
It seemed of late to be the fashion for the rich men on the mainland. We all liked to speculate on what kind o’ men’d like to do something like that—must have sponge for brains. Either that or they’d never seen the ocean wash clear across the island and meet up with the sound.
But when I met Mister Sinclair, he was so high ’n’ mighty like, seemed to know more than even I did about his chances, that it didn’t seem right to back-talk him. He said he planned on sending his family to the cottage in the summer, to take the air, like many mainland folks been doing for years now, just not on the ocean side. We Bankers, we all hunker down under the trees, and if you don’t mind me saying, it’s a much safer spot.
Once we docked in Nags Head, I helped Pap salt and load our catch in crates and haul it to the hotel. The summer folk were almost on their knees begging for fresh fish, enough so that we were talking about bringing in Jacob Craft, a comrade of mine known widely for his ability to tell a good yarn while plucking a banjo. He was also hands down the best waterman around. He had about ten years on me, though, so I cut myself some slack.
Coming back from the hotel, I saw Mister Sinclair waiting on me near the pier. He was early and all slicked up, as usual, in spite of the heat.
“Something wrong, Mister Sinclair?”
“Something’s come up. There’s to be a change of plans today.” He turned to look across the Roanoke Sound. “You familiar with that runaway-slave colony over on Roanoke Island?”
No one really called it a colony for “runaway slaves” ’round here. It was the Freedmen’s Colony, a much nicer turn of phrase. But I just said, “Oh, to be sure. Not many
left in the colony proper, but there’s a number of folks that look to be staying on the island.”
He slapped at a gallnipper on his neck with a big hand. “You got time to take me over there today? I’ll make it worth your while.”
“No fishing, then?”
“Plenty of fish to catch tomorrow. I need to see this place. It just can’t wait.”
He called the shots, as usual. But it did sound mighty peculiar to me. Not many folks cared to see the Freedmen’s Colony these days.
I wasn’t much bigger than a boy when the colony got started, but I recall watching a steady stream of Negroes hitching boat rides to the island during the war. They’d heard that the island was Union territory after the Battle of Roanoke Island, and they were hell bent to get to free land.
But before anyone knew it, Roanoke Island was overrun with nearly starved black folks with nothing to do and no food in sight. Man alive, was it pandemony. More folks on the island than there ever had been. Few thousand people, at one point. And it ain’t very big—only eight miles long and two wide.
Next thing I heard, the Yankee government took over the island’s unoccupied land—the land that belonged to the white Rebs, you know—to build the colony. The local white folks gritted their teeth and complained among each other, but went along with it even so. Trees got felled, then a handful of schoolhouses and churches got built, and houses with proper roads between. The colony even got a steam sawmill. Things were on the up-and-up for those folks.
The colony did all right for a few years, before the Reb soldiers came home to the island after the war and realized that Negroes had set up hundreds of homes on their land. That didn’t go well a-tall. ’Course, the freedmen ended up with the little end of the horn, in the end. Got forced out one way or the other. But some stayed on, hoping things would turn around.
Still, it wasn’t much to see, and I couldn’t prophesy what business Mister Sinclair might have there.
Pap was done for the day, so I used Tessa to get us over to Roanoke Island, a couple miles west of Nags Head across the Roanoke Sound. With the skiff docked, we borrowed two horses and rode over to the remains of the Freedmen’s Colony on the northwest side of the island.
It had been a while since I’d ventured over here, but I could tell this part of the island had seen better days. The trees that used to grow on the northern part of the island were almost all gone, cut down for firewood and freedmen houses and wartime buildings. Must have taken a lot of wood, for sand was all that was left.
In the village itself, three wide avenues—called Lincoln, Burnside, and Roanoke—cut through about twenty-six streets, but the lines marking the sides of the streets were less and less clear-cut. Everywhere were weeds and little trees already taller than a youngun, no one with the gumption to pull ’em up no more.
The square lots looked to have a bit less than an acre apiece. Good-sized, if you ask me. But the split-log houses on the lots were right sad. I could see the cracks between the logs just by standing in the street. They all had clay chimneys and little vegetable gardens, half of ’em covered in weeds and rabbits, nary a vegetable in sight.
We rode up and down the empty dirt streets. He asked me, “Where is everyone? Don’t tell me they’re working?”
“Oh, but they are. Trying, at least. Fishing or progging ’round, I reckon.”
He snorted, looking down the street. “They got places of worship here?”
Seemed to me like he was looking for something particular, but he wouldn’t say what it was. I pointed through the streets. “I know of one church. Over yonder a ways, in a grove of trees off Burnside.”
We rode to the church, a small thing not much better than the log houses. But I liked the way it was situated among a few oak and pine trees. Mister Sinclair dismounted and walked ’round and ’round it, peeping in the windows and such.
After a good while of staring at the church from all different angles, we made to go back to the docks. Along the way I pointed out the falling-down schoolhouse, near the old Union headquarters. He shook his head sadly and said, “And folks like you—good, hardworking white folks—don’t even have a schoolhouse. That, Benjamin, is a travesty. What is this country coming to?”
I guess I could see his point. I always pined for a schoolhouse, and would have built one myself if I could have found a teacher for it.
He guffawed at the building in front of us. “By God, that is one pathetic schoolhouse. It hardly looks to last another winter out here.”
“Well, it don’t matter to them. They all want to learn their letters, and you really can’t blame ’em.”
He squinted his eyes as he looked me over. “Ben, think on this. Do you want the darkies to learn their letters before our little white children do? Would you prefer to hand over the white man’s land to former slaves? Just give them our hard-earned fields, our family’s land? How about our homes, our horses, and our places of business?”
His long arms made big sweeps through the air as his voice rose. His face was red and slick with sweat. “Hell, let’s just hand over our wives and children! Because they’re as good as Negro fodder if we don’t do something to stop them.”
My face burned like I’d been slapped backhanded. This black hate was surely a side of Mister Sinclair I never thought to see, even though I knew he was a well-to-do planter man.
He kept on with it, too. “I’m not the only white man who’s dismayed at the direction this country is heading in. We want what’s ours to stay ours, and we’re willing to do what’s necessary to keep things the way they always have been.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” I choked. A ropy knot had tied itself into my throat.
“Can’t exactly tell you that,” he said.
I looked off to the Croatan Sound, through the line of old barracks that lined the shore. The water shone so bright through the dark patches that I had to turn away. I closed my eyes for a second so I could think a bit more. It sounded like he was mixed up in one of those secret clans of men that were cropping up around the South. Bunch of sore losers, banded together in fear.
I swallowed a hunk of spit that had some trouble going down the pipe. “Well, if I get your meaning right, the freedmen on this island have riled you all in some way?”
“I guess I need to explain it all to you,” he huffed, and shook his head. “After the war, the native white folks here needed our help. They wanted their land back, because the good-for-nothing runaways just wouldn’t leave. Thought the land was theirs, fair and square. But it never was. It never was, Ben.” He leaned in so close to me I could see his red nosehairs. “The natives want the island to be like it used to be, without so many blue-blasted Negroes all over the place, taking what few jobs are out here and planting land meant for them, for their children. It’s time for them all to go.”
I fought down the urge to just ride away, leave him in the dust. Yet on he went, and with a smile on his face, too. “Our interest in this colony paid off. A real uppity darkie has come to our attention.” He started snickering, then lowered his voice, even though not a soul was about. “Friends of mine have been looking out for this man for years now, and there he sat, in plain view. But here’s the best part—from what I’ve gathered, all the runaways follow him around like he’s made of chitlins and corn pone. If he goes, they all go. The so-called Freedmen’s Colony will be done for good, and things will be turning in the right direction.”
“But where will they go? What will they do?” I asked, my brain mired in a fog that wouldn’t rise.
He snorted. “I don’t give two handfuls of horse shit where they end up, as long as they’re back on the state’s plantations doing work that needs doing. This is a small island. A family island. It’s about justice for North Carolina.”
“And the man you’re after? What of him?”
His eyes took in the little rows of houses through the dust from the horses’ hooves. “We’ll get our justice, too. It’s been a long time coming now.” He spit o
ut a hunk of tobacky juice and stared at me with squinty eyes, not answering me. “If you tell anyone about this little talk, white folks included, I won’t be pleased—and I don’t have to tell you that my friends are not a group of men to disappoint. But if you help me out when I need your services this summer, and keep real quiet, I’ll put in a word for you with Dexter Stetson. He’s the lighthouse construction supervisor. Choosing his crew as we speak, no doubt.”
I started to sweat bad, but not from the heat. I already knew that a crew was getting raised—word travels fast around here—but just the mention of his knowing Mister Stetson raised my interest. I had a gnawing feeling this was how things got done in the big world, knowing folks that mattered.
He watched me careful as he said, “I heard they need a crew to start building their own barracks and blacksmith shop, to get the site ready for work in the fall. And they’ll need good local men to build the crane, and the lightering boats and wharf. I thought of you right away.”
It was bad business, but the scenario sounded good to me, even so. Government paychecks steady in the mail. Two solid years of nonstop work, easy. They were laboring jobs, but still. I could work my way up to the better ones.
I gripped the reins so hard the leather almost cut my skin. “What sort of ’services’ would you have me do, to get me such a job? I ain’t a man-napper, if that’s what you’re after.”
He wiped his brow with a crisp hankie, then looked down at it to see what he had mopped off. “I like you, Ben. I’ve seen the way you move around these islands. It’s like you’re made of sand and seawater instead of bones and blood. Never seen anything like it. You’re a natural, son. Fact, you remind me of my brother, Jack. He was a born farmer. He was happy as long as he was out of doors and tending to the land. Not such a hardy soldier, though, as it turned out.”
I nodded, sweat pouring down the small of my back. “Sorry to hear that.”
Diann Ducharme Page 5