The Watery Part of the World Read Free Page B

Old English brogue. They claimed Woodrow spoke it too, though how Woodrow could have come out talking like an Old English did not square with the story they liked to tell about how he’d come to be on this island in the first place. Said Woodrow’s people were brought over back when the island did big business as a seaport. Seven hundred settlers and one hundred of them slaves. Ships too heavy with goods to cross the bar needed their cargoes transferred to smaller vessels to navigate the shallows. Lightering, they called it, and his people were the ones did the lightering. That was before the war come and the Confederates turned tail and abandoned the fort over on Meherrituck and that time it wasn’t a storm forced everybody off island except the slaves and a single white woman named Ophelia Roberts, so fat she could not fit through the front door. Like as not Woodrow’s people tookcare of her until the war was over and only half the population of the island returned from the mainland, according to the Tape Recorders. Then it was a steady dwindling. Ships went north to Hatteras where a storm had opened up a new inlet. Woodrow heard all this from the Tape Recorders and yet he’d heard other stories contradicted their so-called facts. His own father had talked about his ancestor, a man named Hezekiah Thornton his daddy claimed come to the island a free man. Never did a lick of lightering in his days, according to Woodrow’s daddy.
    He could have come back at the Tape Recorders with all this but Woodrow did not much mess with them. Oh, he’d sit for them but he wouldn’t answer the questions like they wanted him to because seemed to Woodrow they had the answers already, that the questions were swole up with the answer, like a snake had swallowed a frog.
Tell us what it has been like for your family living here all these years the only blacks on the island. How have you kept up with your heritage? Do you think the gains of the civil rights movement have reached you here on this island? How have these gains affected your day-to-day existence?
    Woodrow said the only thing affecting his day-to-day existence was where them fish was hiding.
    The story of the three of them on this island, to Woodrow’s mind, was just that: three people on an island. You could even leave off the island part, though the Tape Recorders, why would they do that? They wanted to turn it into something else again: something they wanted to believe in, something about how lostthe three of them were across the water, all cut off from the rest of the world and turned peculiar because of it.
    Seemed to Woodrow they weren’t all that interested in Maggie’s telling her side of the story because she’d up and start in on something inside of her, which the Tape Recorders, excepting that little Liz who tended just to let you talk, weren’t interested at all in what somebody felt. Also, Maggie when it came down to it did not give a squat for history. She lived up in the right along through now.
    Well, no, Woodrow took that one back. He believed it was Boyd she thought about nearly all the time, not Boyd as he was now, across the sound, but Boyd back when she had him, Boyd when he got off the boat and come asking Woodrow to teach him to fish, young Boyd, green smiley innocent Boyd.
    It drove the Tape Recorders crazy how Woodrow would not act the way they needed him to, say the things they wanted him to say. They were all the time trying to get him to act like he hadn’t ever been off island at all. He played along even though he’d spent more time off island than either of the white women sisters. Two years at the Coast Guard base up at Bayside, four years in the Norfolk shipyards. There he took up welding and he did decent at it. Now his children reached right up the East Coast to Troy, New York, like stops on a train: Morehead City, Elizabeth City, Norfolk, Baltimore, Philly, Brooklyn, all the way up to