Читать книгу Dredging the Choptank - Kimberley Lynne - Страница 9

Before April 2nd

Walking with Ghosts

Stories need context, geographic and historic references needed for understanding localized archetype. These ghost stories and I emerged from the same lush cradle that is the state of Maryland. I was born just south of the Mason-Dixon Line at the beginning of the Kennedy administration. I was a Junior Oriole. I was a Girl Scout. I was raised Episcopalian. I didn’t consider myself Southern or Northern until I lived in Texas.

Northern states clump the state of Maryland with the South, but the Southern states clump Maryland with the North. When I lived in Dallas, I tried to explain the Mason-Dixon Line, the geographic delineation between southern Pennsylvania and northern Maryland. The boundary line was surveyed in the 1760s to settle a land dispute between two families. In 1820, Congress used the Mason-Dixon Line to separate the slave-owning states from the free states as part of the Missouri Compromise, and during the Civil War the Mason-Dixon Line evolved into a representation of the foggy border between North and South.

“I was born south of it,” I explained to blank faces. “In Baltimore. In the South.”

“That’s not the South,” they’d drawl, one arched eyebrow up. “This is the South. Baltimore? Isn’t that in one of those Yankee states? Near New York City?”

The biggest battle of the Civil War was barely ten miles from the Mason-Dixon Line. I hiked up Gettysburg’s Little Round Top when I was short enough to need a leg up onto the cannons. My father, my brothers and I would strike out across the hot graveyard fields, thick with goldenrod and fat flies and steeped with the blood of 50,000 ghosts. My father was born in Fargo, North Dakota, and he taught us that the horse’s legs on the battlefield statues chronicled the rider’s destiny. All legs on the ground meant he survived unscathed. One leg up meant he was wounded but survived. Two legs up meant the rider bought the farm. Their battle death plot became a crucible of mud, blood and bone, the chemistry of history. Traces are still woven through the earth and our communal memory. The dead men on rearing horses fascinated me; they had a glorious crossing under the roar of battle. Their stories were told in bronze. If I stood stock still in front of them and concentrated and opened myself up to the wondrous possibility of them, I could hear the bray of stallions and the hiss of buckshot. It seemed far away and oddly beyond the next ridge at the same time. I had no idea how close it was.

Not until I lived in Texas in the late 1980s, did I realize that the War Between the States, or that altercation sometimes referred to as The War of Northern Aggression or The Civil War, was not yet over and that I was considered a Yankee, one who hailed from the Aggression side. I’ve always been Union philosophically, but Yankees seemed somehow harder than the people where I lived, not tougher at the core but harder on the surface. Southerners seemed fiercer at the center and softer on the outside.

I was raised in a Civil War border state in a city that has been a battlefield several times. In 1861, Maryland was a slave-owning state. Her governor Thomas Holliday Hicks owned slaves and was a native of its Eastern Shore Dorchester County. In April 1861, Confederate sympathizers attacked Union troops in Baltimore, and President Lincoln placed Maryland under martial law with cannons on Federal Hill and troops on Pratt Street. Hicks declared Maryland’s Union loyalty, but Maryland’s wealthy Eastern Shore was decidedly Confederate and smuggled goods and gold to Richmond throughout the Civil War. Maryland was filially split, cousin against cousin and brother against brother.

Our dead brothers still follow us. Ghost stories born during the Civil War still haunt the Eastern Shore.

Not only split by war, Maryland is geographically torn in half by the world’s largest fresh water estuary, the Chesapeake Bay, dividing the state into its Eastern and Western Shores. Despite the Chesapeake Bay Bridge spanning its watery gap, Maryland’s halves are forever different socially, economically and politically: Yankee vs. Confederate and industrial vs. rural. We keep to ourselves and are wary of each other.

Most Baltimorean experience of the Eastern Shore is transitory; we vacation in Ocean City and drive through the Shore to reach the Atlantic. We rarely leave Route 50 as we travel on it through the Shore; we stop to buy corn, strawberries, tomatoes, and gasoline. On those quick stops at filling stations and fruit stands, in my home state, I’ve felt the same itchy alienation that I’ve felt hovering uncomfortably in a Mississippi grocery store. I don’t belong. I’m the outsider.

Someone in the back of the store whispers, “You ain’t from round here, are ya?” Their sharp stares singe my clothes. Their voices and vowels are rounder. Their sky seems bigger and their air thicker. I’m amazed that we use the same currency and root for the same baseball team.

How could we possibly belong to the same state?

Separated from half my state or not, I like being a Marylander; I feel for my state the same sort of pride I hold for my country, maybe more. Certainly, I defend Maryland with a greater vengeance than America. I personally relate to a greater percentage of Marylanders than Americans. I exhibit unconscious, state-specific, jingoistic behavior. I like Delaware and Pennsylvania, but I couldn’t live there. My college buddy lives in Virginia, and I wonder how he can spend all those nights there. Still, no matter how crowded and conservative Virginia seems, my allegiance to Maryland is far from logical. Maryland’s a lovely place, but there’s no rational reason why I should feel so strongly about her, except that she’s my home, she’s haunted and she shares my first name.

I am xenophobic of Virginia. Xenophobia, the fear or hatred of foreigners or of anything foreign or strange, riddles America, but strangely, Americans have few words to describe state-specific, xenophobic nationalism except parochialism with its negative connotations. We are still swayed by Darwin’s strict niche rule of evolution. We like to group ourselves into same-type bunches and identify ourselves that way. We categorize and compartmentalize; it’s an easier process. We like to live with people like us; it’s safer. That safety is the cradle of xenophobia.

I was taught xenophobia early. My high school, Towson Senior High, played Dulaney Valley High in football, so we Towson kids were supposed to hate the Dulaney kids. It made little sense to me; I went to elementary school with a third of them. They were friends of mine. Why loathe them because they lived on the other side of Seminary Avenue? There isn’t enough geographic change between both sides of Seminary Avenue to warrant the fear of difference between the inhabitants; it’s a two lane road that runs through the middle of middle-class suburbia. But, certainly, there’s literal gulf enough between the Maryland Western and Eastern Shores to brew that xenophobic disparity, a crevasse-sized gap between mountain foothills and sea-level marsh.

For me, loving my split, soggy state to an illogical extreme is the same as hating everything and everyone outside of it. Maybe words are constrictive boxes, and maybe none are big enough to hold the wide loyalty that people feel for home and its land, its stories and its ghosts.

When I told Chief Winter Fox of the Eastern Shore Tribal Council that I was searching for a word to define state-specific, xenophobic behavior, he understood. “For the Native American Indians,” he said, “xenophobia is a matter of survival.” They have to stick together to maintain their culture, and they use their stories, their stories that come from rich marsh, to maintain that culture. Geography slices our thoughts, carves our voice and shapes our hearts. Despite technology and the transitory nature of our living patterns, Californians are different than Floridians; northern Californians are different than southern Californians; Texans are different from everybody; and Western Shore Marylanders are different from the natives of the Eastern Shore. I recently received an email that listed humorous definitions of state-specific behavior. “You live in Mississippi when you can rent a movie and buy bait in the same store and after five years you still hear, ‘You ain’t from ‘round here, are ya?’” Other people from other geographies talk differently, and differences define our stories.

Many an August, my parents threw the three of us kids into the back of a series of Volkswagen buses and hung under the limitless sky of the U.S. Highway system, visiting relatives and gaping at incredible geographic wonders. My relatives speak a variety of dialects; they’re all over the map. My imitations of the Minnesotan branch drove my brothers crazy.

“Tell her to stop talking like that,” my older brother would gripe, weeks after we had returned to the Eastern Seaboard.

I missed the sound of my father’s youth. I liked wrapping my mouth around the middle-of-the-country vowels. As a child, I was maintaining oral family history; I was tracking my family’s lore.

“Maryland, stop talking like that,” my mother said. My mother trained my brothers and me to speak in accent-less voice. She didn’t want us to sound as nasal and consonant-sloppy as the other Baltimoreans, so we ended up sounding like we’re from nowhere.

My red-haired friend Harp says that the nasal Baltimore accent is southern but fast. “We’re city folks and don’t have time for all the syllables,” he says. Harp’s a native Baltimorean, he’s in three bands, and he sometimes refers to himself as the King of Peru. “The people on the Eastern Shore,” he said, playing a chord on his base. “Now, they have plenty of time for all those syllables.”

“And I don’t have time to go to the Eastern Shore,” I joked in a heavy Southern accent.

Maryland’s Eastern Shore found time for me. In November 2002, the Dorchester Arts Center of Cambridge in the xenophobic, vaguely-Confederate, rural Eastern Shore county of Dorchester commissioned me to write a ghost walking tour for High Street in its historic West End. Formed in 1970, the Arts Center “is dedicated to providing and supporting art activities in Dorchester” and offers to the community “gallery shows, classes, art guilds, lectures and offices.”1 The Arts Center promised to pay for my travel and provide the research, and I feel sure I underbid everyone on the Eastern Shore.

My contact at the Center was its education and arts coordinator, Judy; she had a very slight Southern accent. She told me on the phone that she was “not from Cambridge but originally from the Eastern Shore.”

I didn’t hear from Judy again until late March 2003 when the grant money arrived and she called me.

“You have to meet the committee as soon as possible,” she said urgently.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me when.”

I had never, as a Marylander, heard of any Cambridge ghosts, and, since I was a kid, I loved ghost stories.

Thirty years ago, my mother organized the annual Hampton Harvest School fair, and the highlight of the Fair was its Spook House, a 1960s ghost tour. It wasn’t really a house; it was an underground crawl space the length of the building. Hampton Elementary School’s built into the side of a hill, and its crawl space is a narrow, concrete path next to a hip-high wall and, beyond that, tightly packed, cool earth, sloping slowly up to the low ceiling. Its smell of moldy damp and decay creeped me out as a child; it stank of crypt and confining earth. I’m sure that stench contributed to the experience of our customers who walked along the darkened path, past the graves of monsters and the open caskets of the undead. My father painted cardboard freaks so realistic, that when we suddenly lit the fiends from below with big flashlights, the first graders screamed. My brothers and our friends dressed as mummies and popped out from behind the flimsy gravestones. We wrapped ourselves in rags and rolled bandages; we used red food coloring mixed into Vaseline for shiny blood. We laid out a smorgasbord of ghostly delicacies for the patrons to finger: peeled grapes for eyes, limp spaghetti for guts, gloves filled with wet sand for armless hands and Jell-O for gore.

Thirty years later, I was commissioned to write a ghost walking tour of one of the most prestigious streets in the state. I wanted to tell those stories. Bandaged like a mummy and crouched in the earthen dark, I wanted to be the story of the undead, to know the twisted history of the ghoul’s previous life. What deviant path led to the cursed fate of the mummy?

Ghost tours have returned to popularity. Battle reenactments, haunted houses and ghost tours are all the American rage. We Americans occasionally grapple with our past and its inherent hyperbole, but, mostly, we’re a teenage culture and just like being scared.

I took one of the Fells Point ghost walking tours to hear some Baltimore legend and to discover how much truth rippled through it. Fells Point is riddled with violent past; it was Baltimore’s rough and tumble port neighborhood for years. The Point harbors enough phantoms to sustain two ghost tours; the one I took gathers every Friday at a toy store on Thames Street.

Fells Point has a carnival feel to it, even on non-festival weeknights. Its cobblestone streets are crowded with a brightly painted array of several hundred-year-old row houses and flocks of drunken locals and ambling tourists. Most of the narrow buildings house bars, so, despite its charming architecture, the stench of flat, grainy beer perfumes the sidewalks, even in the rain. It was raining that night but Baltimoreans didn’t care; it had been raining for weeks in March and we had become accustomed to the damp. I met my friend and fellow playwright, Kathleen, at Bertha’s Restaurant for dinner, and over wine and mussels we updated ourselves on our various writing projects.

Kathleen was born in Baltimore, and we met in a playwriting class. She has sparkling eyes and is always impeccably dressed. Her curly, chestnut hair frames her pixie face. “Appropriate, you telling ghost stories,” she said, grinning.

I wasn’t too sure how to react. “Actually,” I admitted, “I’ve never written ghost stories.” Had I told her about the Hampton Spook House?

“How’d you get the Cambridge gig?” She asked.

“Young Audiences of Maryland referred me,” I explained. Young Audiences of Maryland is a non-profit that supplies much-needed arts programs to the state’s schools. “They market my . . .”

“The suffrage play, right. Cambridge. I don’t know if I’ve ever been. Have you ever been?” Kathleen asked.

“Once or twice,” I said, absently stabbing at my lettuce, trying to remember if my family had stopped at Cambridge on a houseboat tour of the Chesapeake years ago. In high school, I had hiked through Blackwater Wildlife Refuge in Dorchester County south of Cambridge. “Is it presumptuous of me to think I can write the ghost history of another town?” I wondered out loud. “I used to think that being a Marylander meant something.”

“It does,” Kathleen said.

“But what?”

“That we were all born in the same place.”

“But the land in the state is so different. What does that mean?” I drank some water and stared out the window at the tourists wandering down Broadway. “That some of us know the state song?” I asked. The Maryland state song has the same tune as Oh, ChristmasTree. Most of the collective story that Americans share are Christmas carols and commercial jingles. We all can sing about the first Noel, Oscar Mayer and Coca Cola.

“Maryland, my Maryland,” Kathleen said. We both hummed.

“This is my favorite verse,” I said, singing. “Avenge the patriotic gore That flecked the streets of Baltimore, And be the battle queen of yore, Maryland, my Maryland!”2

Kathleen finished with me, laughing. The waiter gave us a funny look. “I don’t remember learning that verse in school,” Kathleen said, eating a bite of her omelet.

“It might be the first verse,” I said, remembering. “I liked it as a kid because gore rhymed with Baltimore and yore.”

“You would.”

“Me and John Wilkes Booth. Apparently he liked quoting it too.”

“Not my favorite Marylander,” Kathleen said darkly.

“I heard that he plotted Lincoln’s assassination with the Catholic Church.”

“Maryland! He was a Confederate spy and had nothing to do with the church.”

“He was part of a conspiracy of Southern Maryland Confederate sympathizers that killed the best president in U.S. history. I like history.”

“So, maybe you’re perfect for that Cambridge job. Where will people walk on the tour?” Kathleen asked.

“They say it’s a hike from the graveyard to the dock and back,” I explained.

“Well, the graveyard has ghost promise,” she replied.

“That’s what I’m hoping,” I said.

Later, as Kathleen and I walked through the light drizzle, I wondered at my literary arrogance. “The Eastern Shore’s so different than Baltimore,” I said to the back of her umbrella. “Almost like another country, another world. It’s not just the Confederate Eastern Shore vs. the Yankee Western Shore but also the difference between country and city communities. How can I write it?”

“Really, Maryland, you’re overreacting. They’re people, aren’t they?”

I shouldered against the crowd. Eastern Shore Tribal Council leader Chief Winter Fox once asked me about living in Baltimore, “Do you like living in the middle of all those people?” He lives in a thirty-person village deep within the southern swamps of Dorchester County.

“The store should be right on Thames Street,” Kathleen said, forging ahead through the crowd and drawing me out of my thoughts.

“Do you find it vaguely creepy that a ghost tour starts in a toy store?” I muttered inside my windbreaker. “I mean, do toys bring ghosts? And vice versa?”

As we passed a knitting store close to the corner of Thames and Broadway, I saw a hard-looking man in black period dress with a long cape, seemingly out of place amongst the skeins of wool.

“That must be it,” I called out to Kathleen, since this guy screamed ghost tour to me.

The man turned suddenly and threw me a very knowing glare, as if he was reading the lining of my xenophobic brain. His rugged face looked in its forties; his deep wrinkles burned into my skin. I froze under the fine rain, my bloated secrets spilt on the wet cobblestones, naked, wriggling and glistening. With a dizzying effort, I pulled away and reeled back. I looked up and saw the toy store sign further down the street. I swung back and the man was gone from the tiny shop. I blinked against the rain.

“Did you see that man, that man in the knitting store?” I asked Kathleen.

She had stopped under a dripping tree. “Man? Are you flirting again? You write too much romance. Ah, there’s the store,” she said, pointing down the street.

Kathleen’s much more pragmatic than I am. I didn’t want to tell her that I thought I had seen an apparition. I was embarrassed and my shame clammed me up. Before this April, I would’ve needed a drink before I spilled my ghost stories to my friends. For the most part, they’d believe with me, but sometimes not.

When I told my friend Todd a ghost story, he tilted his salt and pepper curls and said, “Yeah, but you see things.” Todd was born in Bel Air, Maryland and climbs a ladder faster than anyone I’ve ever met. I didn’t quite know how to process his statement. It wasn’t exactly positive reinforcement for ghost storytelling. Or maybe it was.

“Do I let myself see things that are already there?” I mumbled to myself as Kathleen shook her umbrella outside the toy store. “Or do I convince myself I see them?” My friend Laura says that she doesn’t see ghosts because they don’t believe in her. Laura was born in Baltimore and is smart and blonde and loves shoes. Her family’s ancestral home was built on land deeded from Lord Baltimore.

I hoped to see the hard man later on the ghost walk, perhaps as a different tour guide. I hoped he was just another Fells Point freak in a cloak, yet the tingling fear of his chilling glance planted doubt. We eventually crossed paths with the other tour, but the dark, caped man wasn’t guiding it. I was mystified why a grown man, such a hard man, would be skulking in period dress in a knitting store.

In the ghost tour toy store, Kathleen and I shopped for nieces and nephews until the damp tourists gathered to hear phantom folklore. One family had traveled from Australia. Our guides were in their mid-twenties, winsome and dressed in black. They told this profitable tour to over 600 clients during the summer of 2002 for $12 a pop with a little research and no overhead.

Our two young guides collected the group outside the store, and the stories began.

The tour moved as a loose pack, under scattered raindrops, hiking two blocks north to Friends Bar. As we passed an open bar door on Lancaster Street, the bouncer on his stool said something sotto and a male voice inside called out the stereotypical, wavering wail of a mournful ghost. The bouncer grinned and waved. The tour members giggled self-consciously, feeling sheepish about paying to hear spiritual folklore. The guides rolled their eyes and staunchly continued, shaking water and derision from their wet capes.

Many Fells Point ghost stories happen around last call in bars; you gotta like that in a neighborhood. Friends Bar regulars speculate that their ghost was a madam because of the midnight click of her high heels and her moans of bodiless passion. One tenant said she tried to pull him into his rumpled bed at 2 A.M., but I question his alcoholic state at that time.

The tour looped back to our dinner site. Bertha’s Restaurant and Bar is a green-painted brick cornerstone of the wide square at the base of Broadway in Fells Point. The guide with the striped stockings and the fringed cloak of memory closed her eyes as she re-told a Bertha’s ghost story. “The waiter opened the locked door and found himself face to face with a little girl in Victorian clothes sitting there, skipping rope,” she said.

I frowned, trying to visualize that one. Raindrops rolled down my nose. I felt especially human and damp.

As our guides led us to the next stop at the Whistling Oyster, a bar across the wet square, Kathleen muttered to me, “How could the little girl ghost sit and skip rope at the same time?”

“I wondered that too,” I said. “And how could the manager see ghosts on the video camera?”

Later, my friend Joan debunked the tour’s phantom story of two spirit sailors in Bertha’s bar, ostensibly viewed via surveillance camera by an invalid manager in the office. Joan tended Bertha’s bar in the 1990s, and she and I met during a play. She’s a Scorpio with beautiful hands. She can drive a tractor and write an elegant grant.

“There’re no managers,” she said, “It’s just Tony and Laura, and there’s no way that Tony would pay for a video surveillance camera of the bar. And even if the invalid was the manager, she couldn’t get to the office with a broken leg; it’s on the third floor.”

The Fells Point tour guides used a little hyperbole.

Hyperbole builds tall tales. The legend of King Arthur evolved for five centuries before Sir Thomas Mallory wrote it down in 1469. In Arthur’s early iterations, he’s not a king. The growth of his story matches the evolution of the British Isles; his story grew bigger as its country developed.

We daily fall into hyperbolic traps. Each time a story is told, it morphs. My friend Adrienne said of a story that her husband tells of the night actor Bill Pullman checked her out, “Each time he tells it, Pullman does another double take. Eventually, he’ll break his neck.” Adrienne is a lighting designer from Long Island who taught herself to knit. She has creamy skin, and her hair and eyes are the color of warm mahogany. Each time her husband Lou elaborates his Pullman Tale that newly embellished version cements in his head until he begins to believe it himself. That’s how legend evolves. We all perpetuate myth.

I am pretty regularly accused of exaggerating, but I’m a storyteller. I’m a flawed human source, and therefore muddied, muddy like a meandering river carving up an ancient marsh. Sunlight can’t reach the bottom through all the suspended sediment of local and personal history. Maybe story can.

I had heard the story of the Friends Bar ghoul, and I’ve seen first-hand the phantom drink at the end of the bar that the bartenders nightly leave out for their spectral madam. I’ve heard that the liquor vanishes each night, but it’s an untended shot of whiskey in the wilds of Fells Point. Joan and I have heard stories about the upstairs Bertha’s ghost and have felt an odd, cold, vibrating energy in the storage room where the waiter saw the skipping girl, a nearly palpable thickness in the air and the sense of being watched.

The tour’s a mix of local legend and complete fabrication, and I’m not too sure where the demarcation line of fabulism wiggles.

Joan was born in Westminster, Maryland, but her mother’s people hail from Kent County, north of Dorchester County on the Eastern Shore. She tried to explain the Shore separation to me. “They still haven’t gotten over the Bridge being built,” she said. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge was built in 1952 and shortened the trip from Baltimore to the Atlantic beaches by some four hours.

“The Bridge!” I replied. “They’re not over the Civil War!”

“No, they’re not,” she agreed.

Americans are still defined by Civil War labels, and we like acting out our bloody history. I took my father to a Gettysburg reenactment where we watched General Longstreet’s fight against the Louisiana regiments. The reenactment was the biggest in history: 30,000 reenactors and spectators converged on southern Pennsylvania to try to resolve our nation’s unresolved rift. One reenactor proudly told me that he was wearing his great-granddaddy’s Confederate coat. The grandstands were packed shoulder to shoulder, and I felt terribly Roman as we watched men shoot at each other and dodge pyrotechnics in full uniform.

When Longstreet won, we spectators applauded. “Thank God, we won!” rose up a general cheer. We were genuinely happy. We are no longer split. We are still united. We are one nation divergent, under some God. We had to say it out loud, like a conjuring, like a prayer, to remind not only ourselves but the 51,000 phantoms hanging above us, right over our unsuspecting heads.