Washington College Magazine
Race on the Water
Albin Kowalewski '07
The life of an Eastern Shore waterman is hard. Being black makes it all that more difficult. In the course of Chestertown's history, much has changed for the tongers and "drudgers" of the Chesapeake.
But not everything.
Illustration: An Earned Moment/Thomas Clyde. Watercolor by Marc Castelli from the Collection of Dr. Mel Rapelyea.
Click to enlarge illustration.
About The Artist
Marc Castelli has been photographing and painting the workboats of the Chesapeake for 11 years—the last seven from aboard the skipjacks, log canoes and pungys that still ply the waters. The watercolor used to illustrate this story depicts two laborers aboard the Thomas Clyde—a skipjack owned by Lawrence Murphy of Tilghman Island—working the Hodges oyster bar off Rock Hall. The intense observation evidenced here calls to mind the work of American master Winslow Homer. Yet as much as a focus on nature, Castelli is finely tuned to the maritime culture and the watermen who he says have been socially marginalized.
While it is true that no one making a living on the water will ever be materially rich, it is also true that no African American has ever owned and operated his own skipjack. What connects owner and crew may be, as Castelli describes it, that "deep and profound magic in the light carried by the wind on the water. It insinuates itself in certain people that will respond to water no matter where [or who] they are."
Castelli's work is available through the Carla Massoni Gallery in Chestertown, with a special show during the schooner Sultana downrigging weekend, November 3 and 4.
I saw a bumper sticker that read, "A true Eastern Shoreman is like an aryster, he stays right where he's at." The turn of the twentyfirst century, however, has brought environmental and economic pressures that are precipitating the demise of an entire culture of watermen. The history of the maritime community is steeped in struggle and conflict, much of it colored by racial tensions. The harsh conditions the Chesapeake hurled at black watermen provide only half the story of their struggle. From Crisfield to Rock Hall, African Americans living along the Shore did the only job they knew—oystering.
The same saltwater that ran through their white captains' veins pulsated through their hearts; the Bay was part of their biology, it was their lifeline.
As prevalent as oyster shells in the lives of black watermen was the specter of racism. Racism was not the trash of a passing workboat that happened to wash ashore; it was engrained into the culture of whites and blacks alike who resided along the Bay shorelines and the scattered plantations that once defined the Shore economy. "Jim Crow" worked the water and walked the docks of every Shore town. The roots of racism ran from the Bay to the oyster packing houses and tangled the lives of every waterman who lived and worked throughout the past three centuries.
The methods used to retrieve oysters from the bottom of the Bay are as diverse in history and technique as the delivery and pitch of the Shore language used to describe it. Each waterman had his own style. Even the spoken language of watermen was unique, as words woven into colorful native tapestries hung over the docks of each port town. But on the water, oystermen did not get paid to talk; they manned the sails and "drudge" winches or skillfully plucked oysters from the bars with tongs.
Dredging, or "drudging" to use the local term, was a faster way to harvest oysters than tonging, but this controversial method caused more damage to the beds. Before boats began to use electrically powered dredgers, hand dredging was harsh labor. An abundance of willing men desperate to provide for their family by laboring on the water lived on the Shore; many of those men were black.
Out of necessity, slaves worked symbiotically with the Bay, which provided food as well as the promise of escape. Beginning in the 1730s and through the Civil War, the forefathers of black oystermen honed their navigation and sailing skills on the Bay. For slave owners along the Chesapeake, especially on the Eastern Shore, a seafaring slave was vital. Slaves with navigational ability were given command of their masters' vessels and entrusted with crops and supplies. Intimately acquainted with the waterways, enslaved captains often used their skills to obtain their freedom. As African American maritime historian Jeffery Bolster says, "By 1770 it was common to refer to runaway slaves' considerable experience as watermen."1
Once the food of paupers, oysters became an everyday staple in the Shoremen diet. And, after the Civil War, this economic mainstay was at risk, thanks to drastic changes in state policy. Virginians and Northerners illegally poached the beds in Maryland waters, and black oystermen had to fight white captains and "foreigners" for economic security.2 Violence erupted on the Bay and the lawlessness normally associated with the Wild West ran rampant on the Chesapeake between oystermen, lawmen and poachers. The Kent News reported that the "Chester River is said to be filled with dredgers who are taking off oysters by boatloads"3; most of these poachers worked out of Baltimore with northern employers. Captain Hunter Davidson, head of the "Oyster Police," for example, began filling courthouses, Chestertown's included, with oyster rustlers.4
Financial burden for blacks employed on the Bay was not a new phenomenon. Racism perpetuated the imbalanced socioeconomic dynamics prevalent in such an unstable business. The Fourteenth Amendment created even more tensions on the water, and not just on the Chesapeake. A white captain from the Great Lakes felt that "we have to keep [blacks] from white sailors" resulting in uniformly racial crews.5 Other captains attempted to employ "checkerboard" crews made up of both races in an attempt to incite competition.6 In Maryland the oyster boats belonged to the white captains looking to generate profit through cheap labor.
Pay was split three ways aboard oyster boats, supporting maintenance, captain and crew. Thirty-three percent of the profit was divided among the boat hands, usually around four to five depending on the size of the vessel and the harvesting method.
During the 1960s Leroy Jones, a black deckhand aboard the Robert C. Webster, made about $100 a week dredging oysters in the Bay, enough for modest living.7
The oyster industry solidified as a major player in Maryland's economy. By the 1880s, "Maryland, with its millions of invested capital, and the thousands, aye, the tens of thousands of human beings dependent upon [the oyster industry]"8 had an economic juggernaut in its midst accompanied by an increased demand.
Black oystermen could see their stock rising. Black watermen led a rough-and-tumble lifestyle, with a "live for the moment" attitude, for their lives were subject to natural and economic fluctuations. In the opinion of Thomas Weeks, an industrial statistician for the Maryland government, "the oyster dredgers of Maryland are the most ill-conditioned body of labor... It is poor and beggarly, exposed to cold and hardship without restraint or protection of law."9
Time spent on terra firma and the dock was money lost, and in the winter the Bay and the rivers would often freeze solid.10
For the poorest watermen—the black oystermen—each day off the water was financially devastating. Depending on the harvest as much as the weather, a black waterman had little control over life's circumstances. Yet he was connected to the oyster bars as much by a sense of belonging and history—by familial and cultural ties—as by a paycheck.
Communal support was vital to the black waterman; when a black sailor drowned, the neighborhood grieved. More times than not, it was an African American who was the victim by either fair or foul play. John Wennersten, who documented oyster conflicts on the Bay, wrote that, "deaths on the Chesapeake were seldom investigated...and local judges rarely prosecuted ship captains, no matter how heinous their crimes on the Chesapeake."11
The close quarters within which watermen worked led to antagonisms between class and race. Frustrations would inevitably build, leading to fatal run-ins. Racial mutinies were not unheard of on the water and when they did occur they were well documented by the local newspapers.
On June 16, 1893, Captain J. Frank Cooper was murdered on his pungy, the James V. Daiger, by Arthur Courtney and Henry Taylor, his two African-American mates. Feeling cheated out of money and unwilling to attempt escape since their personal items were locked away in the captain's chest, the two deck hands murdered the captain.12 This was not the first instance of racially motivated murders. A few years prior to Captain Cooper's murder, one Captain Johnson and his white mate were killed at the hands of an enraged "colored crew."13
Common amongst Kent County watermen, from late nineteenth through the twentieth century, was the use of shanties.
Close relationships were formed between bunkmates and other arks.14 These living situations more than likely prevented any black watermen from rooming with white companions on these floating homes. Without that close contact for extended periods of time the chance of racial violence was greatly reduced but not necessarily eliminated.
The majority of Kent County's racially inspired conflicts happened on land, notably during the Civil Rights movement. Chestertown was "segregated to its very roots" and was not unique in that sense.15 The older generation was content with their situation, while the young had to choose between history and tradition, and the chance for a better life by moving elsewhere.
16 The NAACP had little impact on county politics, and tensions erupted when freedom riders attempted to demonstrate against a local restaurant. A quasi race riot ensued and three "local Negroes" were arrested and charged for their part in the demonstration.17
The years following integration in Kent County were laced with racism, as old habits die hard. During the Civil Rights Movement, Captain Charles Crouch, a 52-year-old white waterman from Rock Hall, was a young man learning the ways of the water. And though he is not racist, "most of the watermen's that way," he says, "not all, but most." In all the years that he captained his boat he heard of few instances of racism on the water off Rock Hall. Apparently there "wasn't many colored people who worked on the water up [in Kent County] — a couple on the Bay and three or four on the [Chester] river" but most were "from Kent Island." He had one black "fella" who worked with him, "crabbin' for probably seven or eight years," but very few owned their own boats.18
Though Crouch lived in a place divided by race, he claims that there were virtually no instances of it dominating the watermen industry. In comparison to local politics, the account, though it may be accurate, might be tainted by an engrained bias. Because discrimination was an everyday occurrence in Kent County, Crouch may not have realized that what he was witnessing was actually racially biased.
The poverty of the late 1800s reverberated through the years that followed as few blacks could afford their own workboats. They remained dependent on the white watermen for employment, amplifying the importance of community in a small town where "everybody knows everybody in winter." If the hometown were larger, connections would have been rarer.19
Further south on the Shore, the experiences were the polar opposite. In Talbot County "the growth of the black community was often hampered by racism and fear of competition."20 Still, by 1930, there were 5,956 blacks living in Talbot County, approximately 32.1 percent of the total population.21 Many of these men and women worked on the water or held positions related to the Bay.
Downes Curtis, for example, who lived in Oxford as a child, had to attend an all-black school, passing the white school on his way. He relates that "that's the way it was in those days...and no one gave it a thought."22 He worked as a sailmaker to pay off debts and was offered a job to continue—not out of kindness, he feels—but because his employer "felt a black fellow would hang around for awhile, wouldn't go off on him as a competitor."23 His white boss played on the stereotypes and tendencies of the black population to limit Curtis's opportunities.
Coinciding with the oyster season, the packing houses were open throughout the winter into early spring. As an advertisement in the Kent News highlighted, they "give employment to many worthy but needy women...and employment is thus afforded to the poor and helpless female," the majority of whom were black.24
Depending on the harvest, oyster packers were at the mercy of the dredgers and tongers. Fortunately for those in Kent County, "The Chester River oysters are unsurpassed for richness and flavor by those of any other water."25 They were in great demand by the oyster-loving public, and packers were practically guaranteed a job during the winter months.
During the twentieth century, oyster packing houses became a major industry on the Shore, especially in Talbot County. Tilghman Packing employed only African-American women. The packing houses "provided a social environment" for the women as they invented original songs or sung traditional hymns.26 A poem entitled "The Bombardment of Wittman," written "by the Colored Claw Workers of Tilghman Packing Co." and signed by five oyster shuckers, recounts an occurrence that happened in their hometown of Wittman. Their recognition and credit for their work exhibits a feeling of pride in the situation and their ability to make the most out of it.27
Though not segregated by race, the packing houses discriminated by social order. Black workers from the area were more highly regarded than their migrant counterparts. The foreigner/native matrix heavily influenced intra-company politics and led to inequities between those who had familial roots and those who were seasonal inhabitants.28
The bigotry experienced by African-American workers was reciprocated to an extent. Instead of lashing back at their white employers, they absorbed the "others" mentality and transferred it to those considered "outsiders."
The seasonal migrant workers who followed the money solved housing issues by living in shacks on company grounds. Just big enough to sleep in, the shanties were inhabited from September through April of each year.29 For the nomads of Tilghman Packing Company, the shanty communities were alive with activity as the black workers rarely ventured into the white-dominated town.30 The shanty boroughs encouraged segregation but helped ease stress through communal involvement.
During the first half of the twentieth century, Rock Hall emerged as the oyster epicenter of Kent County. Alvin Johnson, born in 1932 in Rock Hall, grew up at the height of "Jim Crow" in the county.
As a boy he recollects having rocks thrown at him by the white boys his age as he walked down the street. As he grew older he followed his peers and worked for the oyster houses in Rock Hall. Paid by piece rather than an hourly wage, Johnson received 65 cents a gallon for removing the oyster meat from the shell, which was better than the "two dollars and a half per week" he received working on a chicken farm. He would "sometimes work until twelve [o'clock] at night and be back out there at five o'clock in the morning." When he arrived to work there would be a "line [of] oysters down the middle of the house" roughly four feet high waiting to be shucked. With "only two potbellied stoves in the house," escape from the bitter cold of the winter months was futile.31 Only work and daydreams provided a shelter from the cold.
The oyster houses in Rock Hall were "always segregated." For lunch they had "to go in the cubbyhole" to retrieve their food, kept separate from that of white workers. This account is in stark contrast to the one given by Captain Crouch who worked and lived during roughly the same period. By the time Crouch came of age, Johnson would have been in the packing houses, experiencing racism in the workplace in full fury.
As described by Lewis Mac Williams Kirby, who reported on the state of the Maryland oyster industry in 1938, "shuckers being composed largely of colored people, one is reminded of the cotton fields of the South because of the music they produce while working."32 To place shucking on the level of sharecropping is a testament to the living and working conditions these black women endured.
The oyster boom hit Kent County during Johnson's childhood. In 1933 there were 443 licensed tongers and nine licensed oyster packing houses Kent County, with $1,887.27 in taxes stemming from the oyster inspections alone.33 The state was generating a substantial amount of money from oysters but for the black workers such as Johnson and his neighbors, racial tensions prevented them from earning fair wages and increasing their status in society.
The twenty-first century has its own version of Bay-related racial tensions, this time within the crab industry. As reported by the Washington Post last year, the crab processing industry on Hooper Island in Dorchester County "[has] come to rely on immigrant labor." According to the owners of the plants on the island, "U.S. workers simply won't do the painful, low-paying job of picking meat out of steamed crabs."34 Hispanic migrant workers are following the money, working the seasonal jobs, a carbon copy of their black predecessors. Will racism continue to define boundaries in yet another maritime vocation?
Albin Kowalewski '07 is a history and American studies major from Bowie, MD. His essay was the winning entry in the Chestertown Essay Contest held in April during Chestertown History Weekend. To read the other top entries, visit the C.V. Starr Center.
1 W. Jeffery Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 24-25.
2 "Oyster Laws," Kent News, Jan. 14, 1865.
3 "The Oyster Question," Kent News, Feb. 6, 1869.
4 "The Oyster Law to be Tested," Kent News, Feb. 13, 1869.
5 Bolster, 218.
6 Ibid, 218.
7 "Deal's Island Tragedy" from Thomas Ewell's Scrapbook of the Oyster Conflict, MDHS; "Maryland's Sunken Treasure: The Almighty Oyster" from The Trailways Magazine, Jan.-Feb 1962, pg 5. The crew of the Robert C. Webster consisted of a white captain, Eldon Willing, white first mate Edward Willing, and a black crew of Mitchell Becket, Ed Anderson, Leroy Jones and Clarence Carr.
8 R.H. Edmunds, "Maryland's Oyster Interest: Our Absurd Protection Laws," Kent News, Feb. 21, 1880.
9 Ralph J. Robinson, "Life Aboard the Oyster Dredgers—1880," Baltimore Sunday Sun, April 1952.
10 "Close of Navigation," Kent News, Jan. 7, 1865.
11 John R. Wennersten, The Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay. (Centreville: Tidewater Publishers, 1981), 58.
12 Ewell, 52.
13 Ewell, 52.
14 Marty King, "Shanty Boats of Kent County, Maryland," The Weather Gauge Vol. XXXII No. 1 Spring 1996, pg. 24-29.
15 Paul S. Cowan, "A Report on Integration in a Maryland Town," The Harvard Crimson, May 23, 1963.
16 Ibid, May 23, 1963.
17 "Arrest Three Here in Race Demonstration," Kent News, Feb 7, 1962.
18 Charles Crouch, interview with the author, April 17, 2005.
19 Ibid.
20 Lamont W. Harvey, "Black Oystermen of the Bay Country...particularly St. Michaels, Maryland," The Weather Gauge, Vol. XXX No. 1, Spring 1994, pg 12.
21 Ibid, 12.
22 Douglas Hanks Jr., "Downes Curtis, Sailmaker," The Weather Gauge, Vol. XXXIII No. 2, Fall 1997, pg 20-21.
23 Ibid, 22.
24 "Oyster Packing," Kent News, Nov. 26, 1864
25 "Oyster Packing," Kent News, March 4, 1865
26 Margaret Enloe Vivian, "Tilghman Packing Company & The transformation of Landscape of Avalon Island," The Weather Gauge Vol. XXXVI No. 1 Spring 2000, pg 16.
27 Ibid, 16-17.
28 Ibid, 17-18.
29 "Amelia Brown Tilghman," Lift Every Voice, 38.
30 Vivian, 18.
31 Interview with Alvin Johnson by the author, April 20, 2005.
32 Lewis Mac Williams Kirby, "Oyster Industry in Maryland" Feb. 2, 1938.
33 "Tables Showing Kinds of Licenses Issued by Tidewater Counties," Thirteenth Annual Report of the Conservation Department of the State of Maryland (Baltimore, Md.: 1933), 124.; Oyster Inspection Tax Collections at Various Points in the State," Fifth Annual Report of the Conservation Department of the State of Maryland, 1927 (Baltimore, Md.).
34 David A. Fahrethold, "On the Hill, Isle's Livelihood Crawls Along: Bay Residents Anxiously Track Bill on Crabbing Labor," The Washington Post, 2 May 2005, sec B.
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