O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [121]
Matthew Fancy died before his daughter, Willow, was born. One of Horace’s accountants went over Fancy’s books. He’d earned a good living and lived pleasantly but had given it all back, and more, to his never-ending petitioners. Horace awarded Laveda a generous share of stocks, which allowed her and her daughter to lead a gracious life.
Laveda’s only surviving brother, Ned Green, ended up sharecropping on a defunct plantation on the Eastern Shore. The land was eventually taken over by forty black families, who created the crossroads village of Nebo.
Veda, as Laveda was called by her kin, purchased a 160-acre farm for Ned and his wife, Pearly.
It was hard-luck soil, variable loam and a marshy mix of sand and clay. The villagers of Nebo were all survivors of slavery, mostly tobacco workers.
Ned was one of the leaders. He and his people reckoned that if they could dam and trap the spring runoff waters, they could build up a decent topsoil.
After slavery, no one wanted anything to do with tobacco or cotton. The Nebo settlement, in communal agreement, rotated general crops. After trial and despair, they were able to get decent yields of corn per acre, crops from a fruit orchard, vegetables, peanuts, and some grain. This would have provided a marginal existence, but it was augmented by the men’s doubling as hunters, trappers, and baymen.
The community owned four Chesapeake Bay skipjacks and was allotted a Negro fishing ground the boundaries of which were marked by buoys, a bridge, and a lighthouse. It was not a prime area, but the black baymen had a sense of sea harvest in their fingertips.
They tonged and raked oysters and clams and trapped the melding crabs and terrapin of growing popularity. There were fish aplenty, from catfish to drum, if the creeks and marshes were played right.
Very special permits for guns and ammunition were issued and the men became dead shots at the blizzards of waterfowl, sea ducks, honkers and geese and deer and muskrat.
Wild horses were captured and broken.
Wild horses, you say? In the beginning, they were transferred from the mainland to dodge the tax collector and gained their freedom, like some of the slaves.
In the crabbing season, women picked and packed in a nearby canning factory, and some winter jobs were to be had in the boatyards.
By order of a council of elders, which included the preacher and women, only the pick of the harvest went to market, and Nebo got a reputation as sweet as their onions.
Mind you, a black man was a black man on the Eastern Shore, where he trod with caution, fear his constant companion. Yet there was an arm’s length of accommodation and civility, so long as the black man kept his place. Most of the night riding and lynchings took place at the southern end of the shore, which was in Virginia.
Nebo found itself a niche and was mostly let alone. Much of the slave labor had come from Barbados and other Caribbean Islands but had always been in transit. Those who stayed in Nebo were second generation, from the tobacco fields, and kept fine Christian traditions.
One must remember that the Eastern Shore was the birthplace of Harriet Tubman and Frederick A. Douglass. She, of Dorchester County, had operated a brilliant underground railway, and he, of Talbot County, was the greatest and most powerful black voice the nation had ever known.
Since pre–Revolutionary War days, a community of Quakers farmed around Wyman Creek Landing and built a small town and a Friends meetinghouse. In the beginning, the Quakers were ardent abolitionists. Over time, many broke away from Wyman Creek in order to own slaves. The core that remained were antislavery, so their community and fields had served as a friendly buffer for Nebo.
Out of the mainstream, Nebo fared well. Many of the cottages were brick and painted and had charming flower gardens and nibblings of finery. They kept the skipjacks and nets in prime condition. The hunters and trappers in the village were