The Lesson of Malaga Island
The Lesson of Malaga Island
Caroline looked across the waters of the racing channel as the tide consumed the waters from the upper reaches of the New Meadows river. A fisherman hurried his strokes as the oars of his dingy occassional struck the side. He paid no mind to the small dark skinned girl with radiant blue eyes watching quizzically as the gawkers gathered on the opposing shoreline. They raised
their fingers, as if with one mind, incapable of individual thought, to point at Caroline.
She suddenly felt naked, exposed, and felt their collective indignation seemingly stripping away her faded flower print dress that the missionaries wife had brought her the year before.
She could here the collective murmur of the crowd that sounded more like gulls clamoring over a school of pogues
watched up on the shore.
She sensed an unexplained hatred that stemmed from
ignorance from them that made her eyes well with tears and her jaw chatter as if she were freezing.
"There you are." Spoke her mother Nester. "Oh baby." The large black woman swept Caroline up into her protective arms and hurried back towards the settlement.
....
Nester had escaped a South Carolina cotton plantation with her older brother and another man, just before the outbreak of the civil war. At the time she was twelve, not much older than Caroline is now, but she was already hardened by life experiences and repeated mistreatment by the owner of the plantation who would pull her from her bed in the still of the night.
Along the route North, hunted like animals by dogs. They hid in a thick thorny bramble as the dogs scratched and clawed at the thorns. Her brother Zachari said to Carl, the old man that fled with them, "Look after her." Zachari dove out from under the bushes, thorns raking long gashes across his back. And dashed out across the hay field. The dogs were
quickly on his heels and brought him down with a viscous bite to his ankle. Zachari, feel unforgivingly to the ground. Nester watched in horror as the men on horseback rode up and called the dogs off. Carl grabbed Nester"s hand and dragged her in the other direction down the gully to the creek below.
Nester thought back to the foggy memory of that day as she cradled Caroline in her arms. Carl kept true to his word for the next couple of years until he came down with a persistent cough then a fever then he died.
By then she was working in the mill town of Medford Massachusetts along the ----' river, making expensive linens for lavish homes in Boston and New York. She worked there until she heard Gracie rave about Malaga island.
Gracie, had never lived south of Boston. She had gotten pregnant at 14 and her parents threw her out of their brownstone at 15 and kept the baby as their own. Gracie was a long legged red head with a fiery temper and irrepressible personality who welcomed everyone into her life, "Nester come on, come with me. Malaga is like an oasis off the coast of Maine."
Nester, with eyes furled, "An oar what?"
"An oasis, a sanctuary, a place we can be ourselves and not need to hide."
The two spoke of Malaga often over the next few weeks. Gracie's arguments becoming more and more pervasive. But they didnt leave until the week before Thanksgiving 1892.
That was the morning when Nester found Gracie barely conscious, with bleeding lips and womb, in the stock room for yarns and thread. Gracie murmured, "Lester."
For many weeks before, Nester noticed how Lester the, shop manager, had been looking at Gracie and touching her in ways that made Nester jealous and angry remembering her nights in the barn with her owner
Nester helped Gracie to her feet and whispered, "Malaga" into her ear before tenderly kissing the tear tracing down her cheek. Gracie managed a smile.
Gracie's rosy color returned on the way to Maine. Her spirits lifted by the thought of adventure and unknown. Nester just smiled lovingly as Gracie went on and on about their new life and being together.
They stepped out of the train in Portland's west end and asked direction to Harpswell.
"It's twenty miles.", the man said behind the counter."We have a narrow gauge heading out tomorrow."
Out of money and eager to find home, Gracie said thank you but no. And walked back to Nester, and started the last leg of their journey on foot.
Just before sunset, on the longest day of the year, Nester and Gracie stood on a rickety dock looking out across the mouth of a river a few hundred yards from Malaga. So close but neither could swim. Gracie didnt hesitate and untied an old rowboat tied to the dock.
With each sweep of the oars the boat lurched towards a tiny settlement nestled amongst the pines and hemlock of the mostly wooded shoreline.
A lattern shown, like the first star at night and Gracie made for that light. As they reached the dock the hairy arm of a big burly black man with a sprinkle of gray in his bearded reached down to help them both out of the boat.
"Hello ladies.", he said with a booming voice, that he tried to subdue because of the lateness of the hour. "I am Bear, who might you be."
Bear, was as imposing a man as you'd ever meet. But he was also the most gentle. He assisted both from the boats with ease. Since even a subdued bear's voice is never quiet, everyone in the community was awake and came to see the visitors.
Before arriving on Malaga, Bear was called Arthur, by the family in Philadelphia, but that was after emancipation. Bear couldn't remember what he was called as a boy on the plantation. He couldn't remember much about the plantation at all except he worked very hard and he was frquently beaten. In Philadelphia, for the Smithfield family, he barely did any work at all.
He was told to say, "Hello may I take your hat?" When a gentleman came to call. He even said that once when a gentleman came without a hat. But Mr. Smithfield hollered at him and called him a simpleton. So Bear always made sure to look for a hat first.
One day Mrs. Smithfield handed Bear 5 dollars and said they couldn't use his services any longer and akwardly put one of Mr. Smithfields hat's on his head.
Bear complained, "But this ain't my hat."
Mrs. Smithfield said Arthur it's cold outside." She shut the door behind him. Arthur walked back to his room, on the other part of town, in an area called the Bowery.
The next day, he showed up at the Smithfields but was greeted by a finely dressed black man who quickly sent Arthur back out into the street. Arthur went back to his room in the bowery.
A week later, Mr. Lentz evicted him because he had no money for rent.
So Arthur began to walk. And he walked. It was at that big hotel in New Hampshire where bigger mountains still loomed with a purplish hue when the sun set on a summer's day, that Bear got his name.
At the hotel, Bear did as he was told, he spoke to no one as he carried the manure for the fairways that he'd invariably soil himself with as he spread it out. He would occassionally look up and watch the men play the game chasing the little ball. Once a ball landed near him when he was fixing a small foot bridge in the woods. He threw it back onto the fairway. Moments later two men stood over the ball, both dressed entirely in white, and argued over it. Bear decided not to touch a ball again.
On a cloudless day Bear saw a white man walk towards him as Bear toted two large bails of hay, one on each shoulder, to reseed the approach to the 18th green.
The man spoke, "Jesus, are you a man or a Bear?"
Francis was immaculately dressed and had moustache so fine it looked like it was drawn with a pen. His ebony shoes were polished so brightly that they shown like the edge of a newly sharpened knife glinting in the sunlight. His hair was carefully quaved in a style unique to himself. And his clothes fit him loosely particularly his elegant purple button down shirt.
While still holding the bales of hay Arthur said, "I'm a man."
Frances patted him on the back and said, "No you're a bear."
Francis was last to join the circle as the others greeted Gracie and Nester. He watched smiling as some embraced the two new combers. Then almost out of reverence a dozen or so people parted so that Francis could approach.
"Hello." He said offering both a handshake that became a hug. "Welcome to Malaga."
......
"Momma, why are the people angry with me?"
Nester looked into Caroline's eyes. "They aren't angry 'song bird', they just don't understand us."
Frances stood on the dock on the other side of the island, with Bear at his side watching the people gather and reporters scribble in their journals. It was slack tide, and the ignorant epithets were easi
ly heard above the gentle breeze.
"Why are they so angry at us. What did I do wrong?" Bear asked imploringly.
"Nothing my friend. We've done nothing wrong at all." But still Francis stoicism dissolved and he embraced Bear.
A larger furor erupted from the crowd. Quickly bear and Francis retreated to the woods. Followed by the now muted voices from the other shore.
A week later Francis read the article that appeared in the Portland paper. It seemed the governor was hellbent on soliciting public support behind an effort to force the owners of the island, the Perry's, to evict the residences of Malaga, who were technically squatters.
They were considered degenerates and of poor moral character with races intermingling and bastard children living like they were in sodom and gomora. Frances found the illusions made and conclusions drawn reprehensible but feared the moral conviction of the crowd.
....
Nester had lived on Malaga for seven years with Gracie. They lived in relative peace and harmony.
Life is hard on a Maine island. The food they could grow was insufficient for the population and they needed to accept charity whenever offered. Tom and Claire Barton were frequent visitors to the island. When they came they often brought food and clothing. But on this late fall day in 1901, Claire also carried a bundle swaddled in the finest pale blue blanket Nester had ever seen. It was a baby girl of mixed race and she needed a home. Claire and Tom both felt that no orphanage would care better for the baby then the love of Malaga island.
Without a moment's consideration Nester said, I'll take her and outstretched her arms with glee. Nester looked at Gracie and Gracie smiled and nodding her head.
Nester looked up and said. "I'll call her Caroline."
Caroline grew, happy as a claim, in an isolated community just a few hundred yards from mainland. Shielded from the division and unaware of prejudice and bias.
....
All knowledge is good, or so Francis once thought. He had been the unofficial teacher of the island's dozen children. When the first teacher was forced upon them from the governor's office.
Almost immediately and to the child, they'd return home in tears believing their community was a sin.
In Augusta, the Governor read the reports and wanted the blight of Malaga erased. He continued to speak out against the sin that was Malaga and through the media left the Perry's with little recourse but to evict the inhabitants.
Bear was labeled retarded and Francis a deviant and sent to an institution for the feeble minded. Caroline was separated from Nester and Gracie and lived until she was 18 at an orphanage outside of Boston.
Gracie and Nester couldn't find how to live together in the outside world. Although they tried for years. The resentment around them bred resentment between them. And Gracie found an old wealthy man who would accept the occassional dalliance, but not with a negro.
Nester lived out her days working and sleeping in a soup kitchen in Portland. And would fall asleep nightly to dreams of Malaga dampening her pillow.
Gracie learned of Nester's passing and quietly had her body moved from the potters field to the East End Cemetary and that's where you can find Nester today under a stone with the barely discernable letters, "Love thy neighbor." Right next to a much larger edifice "Fredrick - Gracie Turnbull".
Caroline looked across the waters of the racing channel as the tide consumed the waters from the upper reaches of the New Meadows river. A fisherman hurried his strokes as the oars of his dingy occassional struck the side. He paid no mind to the small dark skinned girl with radiant blue eyes watching quizzically as the gawkers gathered on the opposing shoreline. They raised
their fingers, as if with one mind, incapable of individual thought, to point at Caroline.
She suddenly felt naked, exposed, and felt their collective indignation seemingly stripping away her faded flower print dress that the missionaries wife had brought her the year before.
She could here the collective murmur of the crowd that sounded more like gulls clamoring over a school of pogues
watched up on the shore.
She sensed an unexplained hatred that stemmed from
ignorance from them that made her eyes well with tears and her jaw chatter as if she were freezing.
"There you are." Spoke her mother Nester. "Oh baby." The large black woman swept Caroline up into her protective arms and hurried back towards the settlement.
....
Nester had escaped a South Carolina cotton plantation with her older brother and another man, just before the outbreak of the civil war. At the time she was twelve, not much older than Caroline is now, but she was already hardened by life experiences and repeated mistreatment by the owner of the plantation who would pull her from her bed in the still of the night.
Along the route North, hunted like animals by dogs. They hid in a thick thorny bramble as the dogs scratched and clawed at the thorns. Her brother Zachari said to Carl, the old man that fled with them, "Look after her." Zachari dove out from under the bushes, thorns raking long gashes across his back. And dashed out across the hay field. The dogs were
quickly on his heels and brought him down with a viscous bite to his ankle. Zachari, feel unforgivingly to the ground. Nester watched in horror as the men on horseback rode up and called the dogs off. Carl grabbed Nester"s hand and dragged her in the other direction down the gully to the creek below.
Nester thought back to the foggy memory of that day as she cradled Caroline in her arms. Carl kept true to his word for the next couple of years until he came down with a persistent cough then a fever then he died.
By then she was working in the mill town of Medford Massachusetts along the ----' river, making expensive linens for lavish homes in Boston and New York. She worked there until she heard Gracie rave about Malaga island.
Gracie, had never lived south of Boston. She had gotten pregnant at 14 and her parents threw her out of their brownstone at 15 and kept the baby as their own. Gracie was a long legged red head with a fiery temper and irrepressible personality who welcomed everyone into her life, "Nester come on, come with me. Malaga is like an oasis off the coast of Maine."
Nester, with eyes furled, "An oar what?"
"An oasis, a sanctuary, a place we can be ourselves and not need to hide."
The two spoke of Malaga often over the next few weeks. Gracie's arguments becoming more and more pervasive. But they didnt leave until the week before Thanksgiving 1892.
That was the morning when Nester found Gracie barely conscious, with bleeding lips and womb, in the stock room for yarns and thread. Gracie murmured, "Lester."
For many weeks before, Nester noticed how Lester the, shop manager, had been looking at Gracie and touching her in ways that made Nester jealous and angry remembering her nights in the barn with her owner
Nester helped Gracie to her feet and whispered, "Malaga" into her ear before tenderly kissing the tear tracing down her cheek. Gracie managed a smile.
Gracie's rosy color returned on the way to Maine. Her spirits lifted by the thought of adventure and unknown. Nester just smiled lovingly as Gracie went on and on about their new life and being together.
They stepped out of the train in Portland's west end and asked direction to Harpswell.
"It's twenty miles.", the man said behind the counter."We have a narrow gauge heading out tomorrow."
Out of money and eager to find home, Gracie said thank you but no. And walked back to Nester, and started the last leg of their journey on foot.
Just before sunset, on the longest day of the year, Nester and Gracie stood on a rickety dock looking out across the mouth of a river a few hundred yards from Malaga. So close but neither could swim. Gracie didnt hesitate and untied an old rowboat tied to the dock.
With each sweep of the oars the boat lurched towards a tiny settlement nestled amongst the pines and hemlock of the mostly wooded shoreline.
A lattern shown, like the first star at night and Gracie made for that light. As they reached the dock the hairy arm of a big burly black man with a sprinkle of gray in his bearded reached down to help them both out of the boat.
"Hello ladies.", he said with a booming voice, that he tried to subdue because of the lateness of the hour. "I am Bear, who might you be."
Bear, was as imposing a man as you'd ever meet. But he was also the most gentle. He assisted both from the boats with ease. Since even a subdued bear's voice is never quiet, everyone in the community was awake and came to see the visitors.
Before arriving on Malaga, Bear was called Arthur, by the family in Philadelphia, but that was after emancipation. Bear couldn't remember what he was called as a boy on the plantation. He couldn't remember much about the plantation at all except he worked very hard and he was frquently beaten. In Philadelphia, for the Smithfield family, he barely did any work at all.
He was told to say, "Hello may I take your hat?" When a gentleman came to call. He even said that once when a gentleman came without a hat. But Mr. Smithfield hollered at him and called him a simpleton. So Bear always made sure to look for a hat first.
One day Mrs. Smithfield handed Bear 5 dollars and said they couldn't use his services any longer and akwardly put one of Mr. Smithfields hat's on his head.
Bear complained, "But this ain't my hat."
Mrs. Smithfield said Arthur it's cold outside." She shut the door behind him. Arthur walked back to his room, on the other part of town, in an area called the Bowery.
The next day, he showed up at the Smithfields but was greeted by a finely dressed black man who quickly sent Arthur back out into the street. Arthur went back to his room in the bowery.
A week later, Mr. Lentz evicted him because he had no money for rent.
So Arthur began to walk. And he walked. It was at that big hotel in New Hampshire where bigger mountains still loomed with a purplish hue when the sun set on a summer's day, that Bear got his name.
At the hotel, Bear did as he was told, he spoke to no one as he carried the manure for the fairways that he'd invariably soil himself with as he spread it out. He would occassionally look up and watch the men play the game chasing the little ball. Once a ball landed near him when he was fixing a small foot bridge in the woods. He threw it back onto the fairway. Moments later two men stood over the ball, both dressed entirely in white, and argued over it. Bear decided not to touch a ball again.
On a cloudless day Bear saw a white man walk towards him as Bear toted two large bails of hay, one on each shoulder, to reseed the approach to the 18th green.
The man spoke, "Jesus, are you a man or a Bear?"
Francis was immaculately dressed and had moustache so fine it looked like it was drawn with a pen. His ebony shoes were polished so brightly that they shown like the edge of a newly sharpened knife glinting in the sunlight. His hair was carefully quaved in a style unique to himself. And his clothes fit him loosely particularly his elegant purple button down shirt.
While still holding the bales of hay Arthur said, "I'm a man."
Frances patted him on the back and said, "No you're a bear."
Francis was last to join the circle as the others greeted Gracie and Nester. He watched smiling as some embraced the two new combers. Then almost out of reverence a dozen or so people parted so that Francis could approach.
"Hello." He said offering both a handshake that became a hug. "Welcome to Malaga."
......
"Momma, why are the people angry with me?"
Nester looked into Caroline's eyes. "They aren't angry 'song bird', they just don't understand us."
Frances stood on the dock on the other side of the island, with Bear at his side watching the people gather and reporters scribble in their journals. It was slack tide, and the ignorant epithets were easi
ly heard above the gentle breeze.
"Why are they so angry at us. What did I do wrong?" Bear asked imploringly.
"Nothing my friend. We've done nothing wrong at all." But still Francis stoicism dissolved and he embraced Bear.
A larger furor erupted from the crowd. Quickly bear and Francis retreated to the woods. Followed by the now muted voices from the other shore.
A week later Francis read the article that appeared in the Portland paper. It seemed the governor was hellbent on soliciting public support behind an effort to force the owners of the island, the Perry's, to evict the residences of Malaga, who were technically squatters.
They were considered degenerates and of poor moral character with races intermingling and bastard children living like they were in sodom and gomora. Frances found the illusions made and conclusions drawn reprehensible but feared the moral conviction of the crowd.
....
Nester had lived on Malaga for seven years with Gracie. They lived in relative peace and harmony.
Life is hard on a Maine island. The food they could grow was insufficient for the population and they needed to accept charity whenever offered. Tom and Claire Barton were frequent visitors to the island. When they came they often brought food and clothing. But on this late fall day in 1901, Claire also carried a bundle swaddled in the finest pale blue blanket Nester had ever seen. It was a baby girl of mixed race and she needed a home. Claire and Tom both felt that no orphanage would care better for the baby then the love of Malaga island.
Without a moment's consideration Nester said, I'll take her and outstretched her arms with glee. Nester looked at Gracie and Gracie smiled and nodding her head.
Nester looked up and said. "I'll call her Caroline."
Caroline grew, happy as a claim, in an isolated community just a few hundred yards from mainland. Shielded from the division and unaware of prejudice and bias.
....
All knowledge is good, or so Francis once thought. He had been the unofficial teacher of the island's dozen children. When the first teacher was forced upon them from the governor's office.
Almost immediately and to the child, they'd return home in tears believing their community was a sin.
In Augusta, the Governor read the reports and wanted the blight of Malaga erased. He continued to speak out against the sin that was Malaga and through the media left the Perry's with little recourse but to evict the inhabitants.
Bear was labeled retarded and Francis a deviant and sent to an institution for the feeble minded. Caroline was separated from Nester and Gracie and lived until she was 18 at an orphanage outside of Boston.
Gracie and Nester couldn't find how to live together in the outside world. Although they tried for years. The resentment around them bred resentment between them. And Gracie found an old wealthy man who would accept the occassional dalliance, but not with a negro.
Nester lived out her days working and sleeping in a soup kitchen in Portland. And would fall asleep nightly to dreams of Malaga dampening her pillow.
Gracie learned of Nester's passing and quietly had her body moved from the potters field to the East End Cemetary and that's where you can find Nester today under a stone with the barely discernable letters, "Love thy neighbor." Right next to a much larger edifice "Fredrick - Gracie Turnbull".