Читать книгу Dredging the Choptank - Kimberley Lynne - Страница 13

May 23rd

Fictionalized Reality

Snug in my eighty-year-old, ex-abortion clinic of a house, I slogged through the nautical history of the Chesapeake Bay. I had read a line from the Oyster War book three times without understanding when my blonde, mermaid, mystic friend Korinne called from New Hampshire. She’s the one who saw the old man ghost in my living room. Her interruption was a relief. We discussed the tour and the origin of myth.

“What is a ghost story?” I asked her.

“It’s a story about a ghost,” she giggled.

“Thanks. The borders between history, myth, legend, folklore and ghost story seem so sketchy,” I said.

“It’s a scale difference,” said Korinne in her forthright New England vowels.

“I’ve read Edith Hamilton and Joseph Campbell,” I rationalized, “but I don’t want to study too much mythology before I write this ghost walk. They might color my conclusions. I wanna try to sort through the massive ideas on my own. The brain’s the final frontier. I should be able to figure out the answers.”

“It’ll take you longer,” she finally said. “Years even. No offense.”

“No offense taken. I guess.” I still struggled. “But if I figure it out on my own, won’t that be especially archetypal? As a member of the group, individual thought might actually be a collective metaphor or concept of the group.”

“Of course and that’s the point,” she said, a little exasperated. “What if you started with the dictionary? It’s a good place to start. Find out what the dictionary says and call me back.”

“Wouldn’t that be cheating?” I asked.

“More like cribbing,” she replied.

According to Webster’s Dictionary, a myth shoulders this sweeping definition: “a traditional story of unknown authorship, ostensibly with a historical basis, but serving usually to explain some phenomenon of nature, the origin of man or the customs, institutions, religious rites of a people.”15

“Basically, some big stuff is explained through stories over a long time,” I said when I called Korinne back.

“And no one knows who started it or how it grew,” she said.

Mythology might match history; it might not. Myth begins with history, which might be true or might not, and then it’s layered with hyperbole anda believed by alot of people.

“Myth and the Roman and Greek religions,” Korinne said.

“The lessons of the Old and New Testaments are told in myth,” I said.

The Oxford Dictionary defines legend as a “traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.”16 American legend tells heroic tales of George Washington and his cherry tree and of John Henry and the steam engine. Both myth and legend have an unverifiable basis, but missing from the legend definition are the big storms and the big-why. Legend is implied myth-light, yet legend and myth are often synonymous.

Both dictionary sources define folklore as “the traditional beliefs, legends, sayings and customs of a people.”17 Folklore can take the shape of anything from dresses to songs to stories to dances.

“If folklore explains the customs of a people, then myth can describe folklore,” I puzzled through with Korinne, “But legend’s part of the folklore list and legend and myth are synonymous.”

“It’s a logic equation gone way wrong,” she said.

The English language embraces little logic.

Legend and myth require loose historical mooring, and repetition of the story and the embellishments by the storytellers smudge the line between documentation and manufacture. Folklore must be laced with some skinny threads of history; it wasn’t created in a vacuum. But folklore doesn’t, by definition, require history; it can be completely fabricated.

“Total fabrication,” I said.

“I hope that folklore’s a mix,” she replied. “What?” She asked when I laughed at her hope. “I hope there’s some truth in it. There better be. John Henry did work for the railroad.”

“George Washington was once a boy,” I said.

“And cherry trees grow in Virginia,” Korinne riffed.

“And Big Liz’s plantation owner John Austin did own a plantation outside Cambridge during the Civil War.”

Folklorist George Carey includes legend among types of folktale: fairy tale, joke, song, tall tale and legend.18 There is no ghost story specifically in that list; tall tale might be its closest cousin. Like the missing, xenophobic, state nationalism word, the English language doesn’t have an exclusive word for the tall tale that is ghost story. It’s not surprising; ghost lore is mostly oral and not printed. The public doesn’t read much of the written versions of folklore-developed ghost story; the public mainly reads completely fabricated ghost stories. How can we believe the fictionalized version and scoff the folklore version?

Simple. Fear.

Like myth and legend, ghost stories are told over generations, have an unknown authorship or the shared group authorship of a community, sometimes have a historical basis, and occasionally involve the phenomenon of weather.

“But ghost stories don’t describe religious rites. Every day ghost stories . . .” I started.

“As opposed to Holy Ghost ghost stories!” Korinne laughed.

“Don’t fit easily into religious doctrine,” I continued, “unless the spirits are the poor souls trapped in Purgatory.” Regardless of denomination, some people believe that ghouls are stuck between life and death, trapped in denial at the spot of their demise. “Big Liz shuffling through the swamp could be in Purgatory,” I said.

“Sure, she could,” Korinne replied, “But you don’t want to think that dead Grandma banging around the attic or re-arranging the silver is in Purgatory! Grandma can’t be in Purgatory!”

Purgatory in the Roman Catholic doctrine is a transitory state of punishment for worldly sins.

Maybe because of its lack of specific religious affiliation, ghost lore forces us to question our individual concepts of spirituality.

“Like Rebecca who doesn’t believe in a god but believes in ghosts,” I said to Korinne.

My friend Rebecca is a pale, dark-haired stage manager and the distillation of all that is ironic and sarcastic. She was born in Massachusetts and reminds me of a Charles Addams character. “I’m a very logical person,” she once said to me, “and a card-carrying atheist, but I completely believe in ghosts. There’s no question about ghosts.”

She was on tour and calling a show from backstage of an old Philadelphia theatre. She was calling a complicated light sequence and she saw someone out of the corner of her eyes. She turned, thinking the person was a stagehand who had a question. She saw an older man with a sweet smile on his face and wearing an orange sweater, standing by the fly rail. As she opened her mouth to ask him what he wanted, he disintegrated, vanished into air. She kept quiet, afraid that the old union guys in the theatre would think she was crazy if she mentioned what she had seen. She realized that whenever she wore her orange sweater, the old man appeared and then disappeared. Right before the show left Philly, she finally asked the stagehands what was going on.

“Oh, that’s Babe,” they replied. “Were you wearing orange that day?” Babe had died by the fly rail and wore a lot of orange.

“I helped carry him out,” said one stagehand.

“You gotta believe in ghosts,” Korinne said. “Well, you do.”

“Maybe ghosts are memories come alive,” I speculated. “Is folklore fictionalized reality?”

“Reality is fiction” Korinne affirmed. “And what’s scarier than a once real ghost in an orange sweater that has the power to return?”

Regardless of the hair-splitting, myth, legend, folklore and ghost story are all subjective narrations of some reality, and their difference is that of process, how the account evolves, and that might create a different product.

Maybe folklore is the poor man’s history.

I asked my friend Terri the difference between a historian and a folklorist. She put down the newspaper she was reading and said, “A tie.” She’s from Brooklyn, and she speaks her mind. Even when she’s sleepy, she has fire in her eyes.

Written history is only slightly more reliable than oral myth. Read the newspaper; it’s laced with mistruths. Every day corrections are listed. Such are facts. Every day we journal the world and argue about which version is closest to what happened yesterday. Japanese history books still don’t mention the 1937 Rape of Nanking when over 300,000 Chinese were killed and 80,000 women were raped in six horrifying weeks. It’s so horrifying that they can’t acknowledge it. Regimes dictate history; the winners write it.

For as Winston Churchill said as he wrote his account of his war adventures, “History will be kind to me because I intend to write it.”

Maybe there’s no such thing as non-fiction. Everything is made up. Everything has spin.

Napolean said that history was the myth that man agreed upon.

There is no such thing as a completely objective reality. We are constantly all inside the personal film of our lives. We are producer, director, actor and audience for this constant film called reality. We all put spin on every single moment.

How can we honestly recount the adventures of our ancestors when we can’t accurately and objectively report what happened yesterday? How can we recite six generations when the average American nuclear family barely has two parents?

Thomas Flowers, for all his charming vernacular, attempted objectivity. In his folklore book, Flowers vows to one source to tell her story “as close to what you told me as I could remember,”19 which is valiant effort, but, like any folklorist, he can only narrate from his perspective with his voice. Each time a story is chronicled with a new voice it changes, hence, the different versions of the same tradition. Written folklore is the distillation of generations of gossip and the telephone game.

Perhaps we can’t be objective about history because the human brain cannot distinguish between perception and memory. Scientists have mapped the area of the brain that sees an object and the area of the brain that remembers the image of that same object, and those areas are identical. Seeing an apple in front of us is the same as remembering that apple in front of us. We create reality in our heads.

I heard a wonderful legend of Columbus’ arrival in the West Indies. He dropped anchor offshore and remained there for several days. The natives, who had never seen objects like the Portuguese ships before, could not recognize them, and, therefore, could not see them. A shaman, staring at the bay, noticed ripples around the ships’ hulls and finally, after much concentration, saw the full image of the vessels. Not until he told the rest of the tribe could they also see.

Are there unknown objects, like ghosts and aliens, around us constantly, but we don’t see them because we’ve never experienced them? Do we only allow ourselves to see them in places that we expect to confront them, like old houses, darkened swamps and dilapidated hotels?

The question is not whether or not the invisible world exists; the question is what stories do we create to describe it. I know there is another world, invisible to me now, like I know that my foot is below my chair yet I can’t see it, like I can feel a basement under a floor. Yet, if we could see actual electrons spinning around us in constant, overlapping dust, we would shut down. If we could daily see ghosts in other dimensions, we wouldn’t be able to function. Who could make it to work on time with dead swamp girls on Route 50? Maybe the gift of seeing the dead is a curse, and its truth is so scary that it’s cloaked in story.

We’re a species of storytellers, genetically wired to tell narrative, and religion and history are our biggest stories.

Webster’s Dictionary defines history as “an account of what has or might have happened, especially in the form of a narrative, play, story or tale.”20

Maybe those who write history should be named historytellers. Why not? History tellers exist.

Maybe when the stories of religion meet the stories of history, we create ghost stories, and it’s so big that one descriptive word can’t contain it.

And it’s so big that we talk about it for centuries and centuries.

Folklorist Carey spins a pirate legend that has survived over two centuries of turbulent change and has been recounted by at least ten generations.

Three Eastern Shore teenage boys heard rumor of pirate gold buried in the sand dunes along a river’s edge. They spent all morning unearthing the treasure; the sand was not yielding. The sun was hot, and the boys sweated and complained. Finally, they dug out the line of the chest’s lid. The lock fell away with the swing of a shovel. As they cracked the rusted lid, they were knocked back by a wind and the stench of decay. The ghost of the pirate Blackbeard rose up over the dunes, spewing fire. He was ten feet tall and wore a long, curved sword. His untrimmed beard extended down his chest and was plaited into ribboned tails. He wore lit firecrackers in his hair. When he laughed, a tooth flew out of his wide mouth and his ropes of gold necklaces tinkled. The boys fled and cowered in the reeds. After a few shivering moments, they returned to find no chest, no hole, just the blasé land and the whispering pull of the river as it lapped gently against the shore. No treasure, no tooth, and no ropes of gold.21

As a historical figure, Blackbeard ratchets that ghost story up a level into legend or myth; pirates’ tales are not all yarn. Blackbeard was real.

I called one of Judy’s leads, a volunteer librarian in the Maryland Room of the Cambridge Library. Her name was Thomasine. “Judy said I could ask you some questions, if you don’t mind,” I started. I explained the project and asked about Blackbeard.

“Chesapeake Bay pirates are all myth!” Thomasine replied in a voice that pierced the air like a ship’s whistle.

“Well, if you define myth as hyperbolic history,” I argued.

Despite this classic Cambridge denial, it’s not fabrication that pirates pillaged Chesapeake waterfront property for hundreds of years. In 1635, the first act of piracy was committed on the northern Chesapeake on Palmers Island, and from 1691-1715, freebooters or pirates so roamed the Bay that all waterfront plantations were built like small-armed forts. There were so many pirates that they impacted local architecture, and that’s not myth. Several Dorchester legends tell tale of phantoms guarding treasure boarded up in secret panels, rooms and compartments in early homes. As late as 1779, the lower counties of Maryland were infested with pirates who daily stole boats, sheep and cattle. From 1780-1781, three picaroon attacks ravaged Vienna in eastern Dorchester County. But of the pirates who terrorized the Eastern Seaboard, Edward Drummond or Edward Teach or Blackbeard was the most legendary, and he often “wore loosely-twisted hemp cord matches, dipped in saltpeter and lime water, lit and slowly burning, hanging from under his hat”22 that looked like firecrackers.

Most Maryland ship-related folklore focuses on sunken shipwrecks or shanghaied sailors but some is laced with themes of transition. As early as the 17th century, phantom ships have been sighted on the Chesapeake, and Dorchester County has its own ghost ship story.

Two men were fishing at twilight on the Nanticoke River near Roaring Point where a navigational light flashes to warn ships of a shallow sand spit. As the sun set, a low fog slowly climbed up the river through the mist. The fishermen saw a trawler coming up the channel; it had a red and green light on the bow, a white light on the stern and another white light in the center of the ship. The fishermen heard no motor but the ship was obviously not a sailing vessel. Still, it steadily sailed up the channel. Horrified, the fishermen watched as the ship headed straight for the sand bar. They called out warnings, but the boat did not respond. Instead of running aground, the ship disappeared into the foggy line between the water and the land.23

The spirit vessel crossed dimensions safely, regardless of physical impossibilities, and the warnings of the living fishermen fell on dead ears.

The Chesapeake has long been a violent battlefield. The British blockaded the waters of the Choptank and the Chesapeake during the Revolution and the War of 1812. During that later war, the British berthed in the Patuxent River and stole provisions, burnt small craft and often kidnapped able-bodied men as prisoners of war. Ships sank. People drowned. The Dorchester sand’s paved with ancient coins, and Cambridge residents still dig for buried gold on nearby Golden Hill.

According to Judy, Thomasine has “dug up some doubloons” in local swamps with her husband and a metal detector. I asked Thomasine about her coin search.

“I never dug through the marsh for buried treasure! Who told you that?”

“Well, Judy had heard . . .”

“Only crazy kids go into the DeCoursey marsh to look for Big Liz, and they’re usually drunk and get into car accidents!”

“Well, they probably need the liquor for bravery.”

“And I never read anything about pirates or the hangings at the courthouse!” Thomasine continued in a high-pitched whine.

Hangings at the courthouse, I wondered. Who brought that up? And how wonderful. “When were there hangings?” I asked.

“I don’t know dates.”

I was getting nowhere fast. “Judy said that maybe I could give you a short list of topics to research . . .” I started.

“Not if it includes pirates!”

“Well, yes, pirates, witches, the Oyster Militia, dredgers poaching, Big Liz, any ghosts you got . . .”

“You’re talking about myth!” She protested shrilly.

No, I thought, I’m talking about the hazy line between history and myth.

“Don’t talk to me about ghosts on High Street! I have to work there!” She screeched and hung up.

Buried not too deeply under our seemingly solid sidewalks and parking lots is the blood-soaked, story-drenched soil of our not-too-distant history. We block out the secret life of the past. We forget that not too far behind every myth is a real life adventure. We forget that our own lives are ghost stories.

I was looking underneath the Cambridge sidewalks for something more, something missing, just out of my reach. I couldn’t wait to interview Olivia and see the graveyard.

Getting no help from Thomasine, I read more history, digging for the gem of a ghost story. Regardless of its unreliability and its inherent fiction, our stories are our roots; they’re our culture’s childhood.

In the 1870s, the oyster market exploded, and Cambridge and other Chesapeake towns like St. Michaels and Crisfield became oyster boomtowns, no different than the rough and brawling Western mining towns of the same period, rippled by arson, theft, murder and rape. Virginia watermen poached Maryland oyster beds, so the oystermen took to sea with Winchester rifles. Maryland created an oyster navy comprised of several steamers and fifty men to suppress the anarchy, but the Baltimore Sun reported that the bloated bodies of dead oystermen were clogging the Choptank. Full-scale battles raged on Maryland waters over oyster beds. When Virginia dredgers threatened to fire on Cambridge and burn it to the ground, the citizens organized the Dorchester County Oyster Militia in order to protect their oyster beds.24

Amazingly enough, despite all this violent nautical history and all the folklore about sunken vessels and hidden gold, I found no Cambridge oyster war ghosts lurking in High Street houses. Maybe like Nanking, Cambridge doesn’t want to glamorize that part of its rough history with story.

I was reading at my desk and an elongated black shape whipped by along the baseboard, heading out into the hall. The phone rang. I blinked, and my heart pounded. Did I see that?

I answered the phone; it sounded real. “How was Thomasine?” Judy asked.

“She doesn’t dig for coins in the swamps.”

“Oh, I heard she and her husband did . . .”

“Nope. Or if they do, she denies it. Vehemently.” I took a deep breath. “And she doesn’t believe that pirates ever existed.”

“Oh, dear. Well, they did. Blackbeard sailed the Chesapeake and murdered and stole and hid in the backwater of the Eastern Shore to clean his ships.”

“I know. There were pirates in Vienna.”

“The Oyster Wars on the Choptank happened right at the end of this street.”

“I know. I read the book,” I said.

“Maybe you could make something up. I’ve read your work, certainly you can make up a little something.”

“I don’t like the idea of fabricating,” I said. “It seems like cheating somehow. Like all those fascist regimes that made up history.”

“I don’t think it’s the same as all that. Well, if you can’t find the stories, then you have to make them up,” she argued.

I didn’t want to see the logic in that, but considering that all of history is made up, I shouldn’t have any qualms about embellishing some ghost folklore.

After a month and a half and no direct High Street ghost legend, I fabricated a short story for the tour on #115 High Street, the once home of Joseph H. Johnson, the man who is credited with writing the Maryland oyster laws. Inspired by the Dorchester Arts Center’s gravity-defying porch puddles, I wrote that even in dry spells puddles appear in the downstairs hall and sometimes the puddles have a pristine oyster shell in the middle.

I wondered if one person could start folklore, like literature, or if folklore took a community. I felt guilty that I even considered writing a story of shanghaied oysterman rising out of the river grass by the wharf, bloated by watery death, dripping, hulking, thick with revenge. I wrote a puddle story for the tour, but I swear that all the stories in this compilation are as true as I found them.

This is all truth, as I know it. “It’s the gospel truth,” as they say in the county.