Blue Highways (10 page)

The Duchess went back to the kitchen, and the waitress set out my platter of fried fresh fish, grilled potatoes, and slaw. Basic food, tasty without expertise, prepared by the Duchess and her daughter personally.

Maybe she was right that tourists want half-timbered facades and stained-plastic windows; maybe they want an Elizabethan town even when the real Manteo had been clapboard and shingles. Progress, retrogression—the Duchess knew best. But for me, I headed toward the town that hadn’t seen neon light.

I
N
1584, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, the leaders of Raleigh’s first colonial exploratory expedition, returned to London from Roanoke with tobacco, potatoes, and a pair of “lustie” Indians to be trained as interpreters. Their names were Manteo and Wanchese. The Virgin Queen and the courtiers in their lace ruffs were fascinated by the red men. Months later when the Indians returned to the sound, Manteo, the first man baptized by the British in America, was on his way to becoming a proper English gentleman. But Wanchese, after seeing London, came back an enemy of “civilized” society. Four hundred years later, the towns carrying their names, sitting at almost opposite ends of the island, still show that separation.

Wanchese, smelling of fish and the sea wind, was on the lower tip of Roanoke. For generations the trawlers had passed through Oregon Inlet of the Banks to tie up at the little stilt piers of Wanchese. They still did, although the fleet worked out of here only in winter. The boats, maybe a hundred and fifty strong, came from the north—Massachusetts and Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey—to work the milder waters, where they trawled for flounder and dragged the mud for hibernating hardshell crabs. In spring, they followed the fish north, and the summer party-boats and a few yachts motored in.

The town had a craft shop now, but mostly it was splintered pilings and warped gangways and fish barrels. The small houses, built by seamen used to working in limited quarters, were made even smaller by the expanse of marsh weed and scrub loblolly stretching away to the sound. Rusting boilers and winches and broken hulls bobbed up like buoys from the waving grass; on lawns, under the crimson violence of camellias, fishermen had set admiralty anchors rusted to fragility or props painted red, white, and blue. From any home the boatmen could look to the wharf and see the white wheelhouses trimmed only in black, and the booms with lines and nets dripping like kelp.

The sun was just gone, the time Carolinians call “day down.” I walked the wharf and read names of the trawlers:
Country Cousin, Brother’s Pride, Blue Chip.
I came to a wooden shed with two windows gleaming like cat eyes in the night. A sign above the door:
JAMES GRIGGS WHOLESALE.
As I passed, a low, dusky whisper slipped from the side of the building, and a shadowy arm hooked me. “Hey, sport. You be here to help load?” It was a small, compact black man without age. He fixed me with his left eye while the milky right one shone like a moonstone.

Then a rasp from the shed: “Bring him in, Balford, and let’s git the hell movin’.” Balford motioned for me to follow inside. He stood behind me in the doorway and said, “Here, Griggs.”

The room, a glowing of yellow bug lights and redolent with fish and diesel fuel, was stacked with crates of hardshell crabs. The crabs clacked their bony claws and reached through the slats at my eyes. Griggs, a white man, took a good pull on a can of beer. “Our third man ain’t comin’. Kin you work? For money.” Why not, I thought. I told him I could. “You a strong boy?”

“Lift my own weight with two men helping.”

“How much you weigh, topper?”

“About one-thirty-five.”

“Fancy that. These here crates weighs one thirty-five. Some’s a tot heavier.”

So we started. The truth was they all were a tot heavier. Balford and I slid crates to the scales, I weighed them, Balford in a slow and uncertain hand wrote down the number, and we hoisted them to Griggs on the truck.

There were more crabs than crates, and the critters kept hopping out of the overfilled boxes like popcorn in a hot skillet. The floor crawled with their oblique scuttles for the nearest dark underside. They scrabbled and clacked, and we crunched them into an agony of yellow ooze as we heaved on the crates. I started shuffling to avoid stepping on them. Balford got mad. “Pull on that drawhook, sport. They’s crabs, not custard pies.” A jimmy reached up and clamped onto my pant leg and slid back and forth across the floor with me until we finished. I had to break its claw to free my cuff.

The pickup, loaded beyond the legal maximum, listed to port. I asked Griggs how far he had to take them. “Over to Belhaven, couple hours away.” He gave Balford and me a beer, relieved himself against the shed, and fished up his wallet. His fingers fumbled among the bills and drew out a five. He said, “There you be.”

From the darkness, a man with legs like masts and arms like spars and great blue-ebony lips walked up. Griggs called him Big Man. Never had I heard speech like his. “We bean oat since yahstudy. Got mebbee leven hunred pounds o’ blues.”

He had missed his regular truck and wanted Griggs to take his crabs. Griggs pointed to the crates stacked high on the pickup. “Be money for me could I haul them, but surely I cain’t.”

Big Man said he would have to take his blues out in the sound and dump them. “It gone hurt me someten good.”

Griggs was sorry. “See if the fish house can put them on ice.” He gave Big Man a beer. The diesel engines of Big Man’s trawler mumbled at the wharf, and Griggs’ crabs clacked and chattered in the crates, and the men looked for a solution. Then Big Man went off to the fish house, Griggs and Balford to Belhaven, and I walked to my truck.

Later that night, just before I fell asleep, I heard Big Man’s boat pull out, and I knew he was heading for open water to dump a half ton of blue crabs. He had said, “Most, day nebba make it to da bottom what da big fish eatem.” For me, it had been one fine day.

I
ENCOUNTERED
Thomas Harriot, who died in 1621, the next morning because I had on the red suspenders I wear on the road. I was finishing breakfast at the edge of Wanchese harbor, my legs dangling over the pier as I watched the fishermen, rubbing sleep from their eyes and squinting into the sun, move about the docks.

A man sat down beside me, nodded, and unfolded a pair of glasses; on the temple was an embossed plastic label:
NEAR.
He removed the pair he wore,
FAR
, and put on
NEAR
. A person shows himself in the way he opens an orange. Some tear jaggedly with fingers, some slice with a thumbnail, some spiral latitudinally, while others go at the longitude. That man pulled out a pocketknife and precisely quartered the skin stem to navel so the fruit came out in sections. When he finished cutting, the peel, still attached at the base, lay on the pier like an open blossom.

He was not a young man. “I used to wear braces,” he said. “We all did. I’m afraid I can’t remember why I put them away. And that’s odd because old men traditionally wear them. They are of surprising comfort. Would that be your reason for wearing them?”

“Part of it. When I’m traveling, I wear clothes in layers to be ready for a range of temperatures. Jacket, khaki shirt, turtleneck, and T-shirt. I have to buy pants a size bigger to get everything tucked in.”

“So you peel like our friend the onion?”

“Or put on. Comfortable from about ninety degrees to thirty.”

“And every ounce is cotton?”

“One hundred percent.”

“You might guess that North Carolinians, with our heritage, are not fond of plastic fiber clothing. We believe pure cotton is the most civilized of fabrics. We and the ancient Egyptians. At least we used to before we made tobacco the crop of our hands. Now, what about the military shirt?”

“Army issue. It’s a heavy twill. Doesn’t wrinkle much.”

He opened to a smile. “Would you say this garb suits you?”

I laughed with him. He said, “I read not long ago—I mention this because of the license on your panel truck—that there’s a Missouri bank named after Jesse James. Now, is there any truth in that?”

“It’s near where James lived.”

“Well, then, may I say it might be the only honestly named bank in the country?” We laughed again. “I’m not apologetic about my lack of respect for bankers—and I’m not speaking of those out there.” He pointed toward Bodie Island Light on the Outer Banks. “You wouldn’t recall the tenant farmer system that developed after the War Between the States, but it was bankers—and I speak of men, not institutions—that worked hand in glove with landowners—sometimes they were one and the same—to keep so many Carolinians propertyless. Living in rural America without land is to be without strength.” He paused for a slice of orange. “May I suggest how it was that Jimmy Carter rose from what some have called ‘nowhere’ to the Presidency?”

“You may.”

“Because he showed us he came from the land. To an American, land is solidity, goodness, and hope. American history is about land.”

I kept my silence, and he finished the orange and with precision wiped his fingers with a tissue. “Now I remember the sharecropper families. My father was a county agent. The sharecropper system descended from the plantation system but left behind the protective responsibility of the head of house for his workers. Farmers—black and white—became economic helots. The tenant system is indeed gone, but corporate farming comes on apace and systems and machinery will dispossess men one step further. The hired hand will never see the boss’s face—unless he goes to Hartford and reads the corporate bylaws.”

He put the orange peel in his pocket. “Must hurry. When you get as slow as I have, you spend a lot of time hurrying. I’m late for breakfast, and my daughter expects me. She doesn’t like me down on the water alone. I have no worry. Dried-out old men float like sticks. I consent to a partial cooperation for her. These are the days when parents accommodate children.”

He switched to
FAR
and rose carefully. “At times, I find I miss my nimbleness.” He straightened his coat. “Two things—remember the land and visit Fort Raleigh. Thomas Harriot is the greatest unknown Elizabethan.”

F
ORT
Raleigh—the second group of settlers optimistically named it “the Cittie of Ralegh”—is both more and less than it once was. The sixteenth-century thatched huts, outbuildings, and palisades are gone, but an amphitheater, administration building, museum, parking lot, and “Elizabethan garden” have come. And more trees surround the fort than four centuries ago. Win some, lose some. At the beginning of this century, the raised earthworks of the bastioned fort had washed back into the moat, leaving only humpy ground covered with live oak and yaupon holly. Restoration work began in 1950, and now the outline of the fort is clear.

Because of its setting in deep woods, its age, its Croatoan mystery, and because it is the lone remnant of the first English attempt at settlement in America, Fort Raleigh is fascinating. But it is also a monument to the disease of an old world, gone tired and corrupt, trying to exploit a newer land. The whole ugly European process is here in capsule history: England, wanting to emulate Spain’s financial success in pillaging the New World (but learning nothing from Spanish mistakes in dealing with Indians) and at the same time trying to circumscribe the expansion of colonial Spain out of Florida, sent a group of men, most nothing more than gentlemen pirates called “privateers,” to establish a colony and enrich England with marketable commodities.

Many of the adventurers came infected with the European attitude toward America, expressed by a man no less than John Donne, who referred to Virginia, which then included North Carolina, as “a spleen to drain ill humours of the body.” The privateers did not come to build a new society, for Raleigh was no utopian like Thomas More or Roger Williams; rather he was merely an intelligent man who envisioned a continuation of Elizabethan mercantile society. They came as Raleigh, the leading sponsor of the Roanoke expeditions, himself said, “to seek new worlds for gold, for praise, for glory.” And John Smith, who built on Raleigh’s failures, wrote in his
General History of Virginia,
that there was “no talk, no hope, nor work, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold.” There was, of course, no gold anywhere about.

Although Edmund Spenser called Sir Walter the “Shepherd of the Ocean,” much of Raleigh’s motivation for colonizing Roanoke Island came from the basest of motives, and the Cittie deserved its fate. The second expedition, the one of 1585 that returned Wanchese and Manteo, was led by Raleigh’s cousin, Sir Richard Grenville. Surely there were Englishmen less suited to found a colony than Grenville, but it’s hard to name them. As a seaman, he was hell on the high sea; as a colonist, he was a pirate. He manifested an outlook toward the Indians, a people whose help the new colony desperately needed, that the New World hasn’t yet gone entirely beyond. Never mind that Arthur Barlowe earlier reported to Raleigh that the Indians were a “very handsome and goodly people, and in their behaviour as mannerly and civil as any of Europe.” Never mind that Granganimeo, brother of Chief Wingina, greeted the English by making “signs of joy and welcome, striking his head and his breast and afterwards on ours to show we were all one, smiling, and making show the best he could of all love and familiarity.” Never mind that the natives greeted whites “with all love and kindness and with as much bounty, after their manner, they could possibly devise.” Columbus, too, had carried back reports about Indian gentleness—it helped him take sixteen hundred Indian slaves to Spain on the second voyage.

In spite of the propitious Anglo-Indian relations of Raleigh’s first expedition, Grenville still saw Indians as savages and ignored their kindnesses. The Manitowocs planted crops and made fish traps for the colonists and Indian women washed English stockings; but when a native stole a silver cup, Grenville’s men burned a village and “spoiled” the Indians’ corn—corn the free-booting white men would need that winter. Unwilling to tend fields or catch their own fish, they began stealing from the natives. During the skirmishes that ensued for the next months, Grenville’s men were not satisfied with shooting the red people—they beheaded in the old European manner. Commander Ralph Lane even launched one attack with the watchword, “Christ Our Victory!” On and on. Whitman says: