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Black Men, Blue Waters

Slavery, Freedom and the Chesapeake

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By Harold Anderson

For years Chesapeake Bay watermen have captured the imaginations of writers, photographers, filmmakers and others who love the region. The solitary oysterman balanced on the edge of his workboat tonging for oysters, the skipjack under full sail dredging dark waters for Chesapeake gold, the crabber hauling out pot after pot or scooping crabs along a trotline – these are the iconic images that evoke an independent life lived in the open.

Watermen are quintessentially American. When people think of Chesapeake watermen, though, rarely do they think of blacks – and yet African Americans have been harvesting and sailing the Bay since first coming to its shores. Though long and rich, this tradition has until recently remained largely undocumented. Does the life experience of a black waterman differ from that of a white waterman? Some of the similarities and differences emerge in the interviews that follow. These stories provide a glimpse into the lives of men – Sam Turner, Wilson Cannon and William Wallace – from three generations of black watermen on Maryland's Eastern Shore, whose collective memories span much of this century.

Captain Sam Turner, Bellevue

Dapper and eloquent, Captain Sam Turner is a dynamic presence at the age of 85. Turner was born and still lives in Bellevue, Maryland, a tiny historically black community nestled on the Tred Avon River just opposite the town of Oxford. Turner and two of his sons own and operate Bellevue Seafood Company, Inc., located on their property along the river, where they process, package and sell oysters and crabs. Turner's conversation ranges from working the water and building boats to social policy to seafood marketing strategies on the World Wide Web.

Turner's father and grandfather were both watermen who made a living oystering, crabbing and hauling freight on their boat to and from Baltimore. They were poor, says Turner, but "everybody was poor, black and white." According to Turner, most local black people made their living on the water because there was more money doing that than anything else. They also grew vegetables and raised a few animals; there was always something to eat: "We didn't know we were poor – we had a place to eat, we had friends."

Turner began tonging for oysters when he was in high school. "At that time, people would start up here at the ferry wharf and go all the way to Benham's Point, which is about three miles...you could catch oysters all the way down there." Atypically for the time, Turner went on to obtain a high school diploma. "A high school education then," he says, "was more than a college education now."

On the subject of black-white relations, Turner says, "You hear a lot about discrimination and all that stuff, but you didn't have none of that on the water. White folks and black folks all worked out there together." The schools weren't integrated, he says, but the life of the black and white watermen was the same. "That was what made us get along so well – he was just as poor as I was. We had white friends, we had black friends, but there wasn't no friction down here amongst the watermen. We'd work on the same [oyster] bar right alongside them. There ain't no color line out there on that river."

During the Depression, things were difficult for Turner and his family, as they were for everyone, though the hard times also brought new opportunities. Turner joined the Civilian Conservation Corps and for two years worked in Dinwiddy, Virginia. He sent his money home, and when he returned in 1939, he and his father used the accumulated capital to buy the land where his business is still located today. "My father bought from a [white] man down here and that was unusual then, selling property to black folks. But somehow he sold it to us." Turner's father had a head for business and the family did well. During World War II, Turner served for two years in Europe and Japan, and when he returned his father had expanded the business, putting up a second, larger building next to the first and employing more than 40 oyster shuckers.

Turner's father often bought oysters from whites, who caught most of the oysters. "Money ain't got no color," says Turner. After the war, he and his father managed the business together, selling in Baltimore as many oysters as they could process. In the '50s, Turner expanded his business to include shucking clams, and he eventually bought clamming boats as well.

While business continued to go smoothly, social change was in the air, says Turner. "I remember in '54 when the school segregation thing [Brown vs. the Board of Education] happened. A [white] friend of mine, well, he didn't think it was a good thing! He surfaced – [his attitude] never revealed itself until they passed that law."

In rural areas like the Eastern Shore, and particularly among watermen with their self-sufficient ethos and independent lifestyles, racism and conflict were more muted than in cities. "We knew that racial mess was going on – we felt it," says Turner. If you went out, you felt it, even if it didn't show itself." Turner's son Edzel adds, "This was a part of the culture and it's almost like the hum of an electric motor – it's there but you don't really hear it until something calls your attention to it..." Turner's children were in high school at the time. "They had me out there in that stuff, demonstrating in front of restaurants. A lot of older people had too much to lose. They had bank mortgages and other responsibilities. But we was all for it! Those college boys went in there and really broke it open."

"There wasn't no friction down here amongst the watermen. There ain't no color line out there on that river."

Turner's business took a beating during the '70s when Hurricane Agnes hit the Bay, flooding it with fresh water and wiping out clams, the most lucrative part of his business at the time. "Agnes was the one that almost put us out of business," he says. Turner had to borrow money, which he eventually paid back, but he says that his business never returned to what it was before Agnes. Even so, the business does well enough to support his sons Edzel and Hayward, who run it these days, while Captain Turner keeps busy helping out.

As for black men working on the water, Turner says, things have changed. "My generation was the last of the Mohicans. None of my boys followed the water. They went to school and got educated. Just about everybody down here went to college. It's much better than on the water. More opportunities. We didn't have opportunities the children have now. There ain't no excuse for them not doing nothing."

Says Edzel, "We did have [limited opportunities] when I came along. Most of us went to school and moved out of the area. What prejudices there were here, we ran away from them." Yet he and Hayward later returned to join the family business. "It's a good place to raise children," he says.

Bellevue is unchanged in many ways, but some things are different. Turner now has white neighbors too, people who moved there from the city. "A lot of white folks are coming down here because it's nice country," Turner notes. "They're welcome. They come down here and go to the churches. The churches couldn't survive without some of these white folks' donations. The old people are dying out." Asked to compare the past to the present, Turner sums it up like this, "You know they talk about the good old days, well they really wasn't that good. I'd rather have it like it is now. Even with its problems."

Wilson Cannon, St. Michael's

"Of all the work I've ever done I'd rather work on the water than anything in the world." says Wilson Cannon, who began life 63 years ago in Crisfield, Maryland. "[Working the water] is the hardest work in the world, you know," he says. "And I still love it – nothing like working on the water for me. You can get up in the morning and see the sun when it's coming up."

Cannon left Crisfield as a young man in the early '50s for St. Michael's and an opportunity to work as a waterman. He didn't know any black watermen in Crisfield at the time. Most of the work for blacks there was in packing houses picking crabs and shucking oysters. When he left Crisfield, there were 26 oyster and crab houses with "plenty of work for anybody who wanted it." But Crisfield did not fare well economically over the years. "There are only two or three crab houses left in the town. You wouldn't believe that place has gone from being the biggest seafood [processing] industry in the world to where it is now. Half the town is closed up – no work or anything down there now. The poorest place around," says Cannon.

In contrast to Crisfield, St. Michael's had not only a well established community of black watermen, but once had two black-owned processing businesses – Colbourne and Jewett, which went out of business around 1946, and the Turner family's operation, in nearby Bellevue. Cannon moved up from Crisfield to learn how to work the water from his brother-in-law. He went on to make his living tonging for oysters and crabbing. Six or seven years ago he stopped tonging because of the decline in oysters, but he still crabs occasionally. Over the years, when he wasn't out on the water, Cannon also worked for Bellevue Seafood shucking oysters.

According to Cannon, when he first started working in St. Michael's, "there were so many black watermen, you couldn't count them. Today there are only three."

As far as differences between whites and blacks on the water, Cannon says he saw very little. "Both have to go through the same hardship," he says. At one time there were some differences in the way some buyers treated the black watermen, Cannon remembers. Whites got paid "a few dollars more than we did. There used to be a little bit of that, but not a lot." There were also times when he says he would catch the same quality oyster and the buyer would say that his weren't as good as those being sold by a white man. He says it's changed a lot since then.

Life for watermen, both black and white, began to change in the late '70s, says Cannon. He recalls one year when the river froze up during Christmas week and didn't thaw until the first week in March, leaving them idle. What little credit they had was gone and it was a tough time. Cannon feels that the business has been slowing ever since. "Most of the young people are not getting into the water business anymore," he says. "It used to be a pretty good living, but not anymore. You might only have a couple of months of the year that you might do well. Young people are looking for a better job with more security."

Everybody wonders about him, he says. "How did I manage to send three kids to college when I didn't know what I was going to make from one day to the next?" It wasn't easy, he concedes, and Cannon has looked for an easier time for his children. "I seen it coming and I talked mine out of [working on the water]. You gotta look for something better than that," he says. "And they're glad they did."

Reverend William Wallace, Deal Island

William Wallace started early getting "that salt water in your face." He remembers being on the water with his father before he even started school.

At age 47, Reverend William Wallace is now pastor of the Waugh United Methodist Church in Cambridge. Though he eventually left the water – entering the ministry in 1974 – Wallace comes from a long line of watermen. Both his father and grandfather were watermen, as were several uncles and cousins. Wallace grew up surrounded by water on remote Deal Island, where he was born. At one time his grandfather owned several boats, but they were lost to accidents over the years – and lost completely, Wallace says, because the family was unable to obtain insurance on them.

The Wallaces were one of five black families that lived in a predominantly white neighborhood on Deal Island. "I remember having to go to the store and having to fight to get there. Then when I got to the store, I'd have to fight with the clerk because I'd buy two things and she'd put three on the books. Then I'd have to put down my purchase [on the way back and fight] to get home again. But then [at other times], you went together, white and black, as a group and if you picked on one, you picked on all."

All his father ever did was work on the water, says Wallace. He tried some inland jobs, but was never satisfied with them. "I think it's the freedom, the freedom of being able to determine your own fate. If you went out there and worked hard, then you made money. If you went out there and didn't do anything, then you didn't make any money. You determined that – no one else."

Wallace also saw an intellectual challenge. On a skipjack, he says, you have to know where to find the oysters and at the same time you have to know the wind and current and the force of that current and know when to drop the dredges and when to pull them in. Then there is the physical challenge and the danger. Dredging for oysters meant living on a boat during the winter, without the comforts of home. It meant sleeping on a berth the size of a table and not being able to take a bath because the boat would be away from home for five days at a time. "You only get the day off if it's too windy," he says. "If it's rain, you're out there; if it's hail or snow, as long as it's not blinding, you're out there."

"The water," Wallace says, "does something to you. To view a sunrise from your backyard...somehow fails to capture the beauty of the sunrise that comes up over the water in the morning. Even the cold and the wind...to feel it in your bones. That has some kind of mystic attraction to it. It might take me out of here, but it's not a frightening kind of thing. You welcome it. You go home in the evening soaking wet and get up the next morning and start all over again. You're either crazy or there's something else that pulls you there."

Though most of the people, white and black, who lived on Deal Island worked the water, his father and one other man were the only black skipjack captains on the island (the boats were owned by white men). "There is a strong bond between watermen," says Wallace, "regardless of race.... Somehow that water bonds them together. There were no secrets, as much as others might have liked there to be." He remembers that word got around – about price for example. "My father would argue with buyers that were giving white guys $10 a bushel and only giving him $8," Wallace says. "Needless to say, he stopped selling to that particular buyer."

"It's the freedom, the freedom of being able to determine your own fate."

Wallace also remembers the civil rights movement and demonstrations by college students in Somerset County in the '60s. Most of the demonstrators were not from the area – the local people tended to avoid involvement because there was a heavy dependence by blacks on whites. "A lot of them did not have bread the next day unless they got the quarter from white folk to feed their children." Some locals did boycott local businesses, opting to go to the trouble of taking a bus to Princess Anne or Salisbury to shop instead. He remembers his parents talking about the rioting and subsequent burning of the black section of Cambridge in 1967 after H. Rap Brown spoke there. "It scared everybody...to death." Somerset County never experienced that kind of violence, he says.

Wallace's father's dream was to own a skipjack, but it was difficult for blacks to get financing to buy boats. He recalls his father talking about trying to get a loan from the bank. The owner of the skipjack his father captained heard about it and went to the banker and said, "If you give him the money, who's going to dredge my boat?" So, Wallace says, his father didn't get the loan. A few years later he had another opportunity to purchase a boat: "I remember my dad went to the banker and the credit references are fine, no problem there, and the banker refuses him the loan. At the same time there's a white fellow who is interested. My father overheard the banker saying to him, ‘Well you owe me money now, you're behind in your payments, but I'm going to let you have the money.' So my dad didn't get the boat."

Despite the obstacles, Wallace's father persisted. Years later, in 1975, he was finally able to purchase the skipjack Claude Somers. Before he could complete needed repairs, dredging season began and he couldn't afford to miss an opportunity to work. He and his crew worked through the winter with no problems – until mid-March, two days before the end of dredging season. The Somers went out on a day when the weather seemed workable, with no signs of trouble, but a violent storm blew in late that afternoon, one of the worst storms Wallace says he had heard of. "There was wind, rain, fog and lightning," says Wallace. The batteries went dead on the pushboat and they were forced to sail – the skipjack began taking on water and eventually foundered. Lack of radio communication and dense fog prevented rescuers from locating them. His father and the crew, including Wallace's older brother, uncle, two cousins and a family friend, all perished of hypothermia. "They were in Hooper Straits – if you go to Deal Island and look across you can see where they were. They were that close to home."

Though Wallace still has a brother on Deal Island who works as a waterman, he says that as much as he loved it, he doesn't do it anymore. "I think now that I've been out of it for too many years – I think I've grown soft," he says. Still he appreciates what it takes to live that kind of life. "I never appreciated the wisdom of my father [years ago] and the skill of being a water person."

Wallace remains connected to the water, he says, because water is also very significant in the black experience. Water in African American tradition, he says, "is symbolic of freedom, of separation, of purity. It's symbolic of birth and death. The whole world's experiences are transformed by that water. The [Middle] Passage [the forced transportation of slaves from Africa across the Atlantic to America] is part of that. The untold numbers that are a part of that experience. With all of the ugliness, yet the beauty of that – being able to endure and survive."

Harold Anderson is a freelance researcher, writer, lecturer and musician who specializes in African American social history and arts.

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