The Bottom of the Harbor Read online

  In the space of less than a quarter of a mile, midway in its length, Bloomingdale Road is joined at right angles by three other back roads—Woodrow Road, Clay Pit Road, and Sharrott’s Road. Around the junctions of these roads, and on lanes leading off them, is a community that was something of a mystery to me until quite recently. It is a Negro community, and it consists of forty or fifty Southern-looking frame dwellings and a frame church. The church is painted white, and it has purple, green, and amber windowpanes. A sign over the door says, “AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL ZION.” On one side of the church steps is a mock-orange bush, and on the other side is a Southern dooryard plant called Spanish bayonet, a kind of yucca. Five cedar trees grow in the churchyard. The majority of the dwellings appear to be between fifty and a hundred years old. Some are long and narrow, with a chimney at each end and a low porch across the front, and some are big and rambling, with wings and ells and lean-tos and front porches and side porches. Good pine lumber and good plain carpentry went into them, and it is obvious that attempts have been made to keep them up. Nevertheless, all but a few are beginning to look dilapidated. Some of the roofs sag, and banisters are missing on some of the porches, and a good many rotted-out clapboards have been replaced with new boards that don’t match, or with strips of tin. The odd thing about the community is it usually has an empty look, as if everybody had locked up and gone off somewhere. In the summer, I have occasionally seen an old man or an old woman sitting on a porch, and I have occasionally seen children playing in a back yard, but I have seldom seen any young or middle-aged men or women sitting around, and I have often walked through the main part of the community, the part that is on Bloomingdale Road, without seeing a single soul.

  For years, I kept intending to find out something about this community, and one afternoon several weeks ago, in St. Luke’s cemetery in Rossville, an opportunity to do so presented itself.

  I had been in the cemetery a couple of hours and was getting ready to leave when a weed caught my eye. It was a stringy weed, about a foot high, and it had small, lanceolate leaves and tiny white flowers and tiny seed pods, and it was growing on the grave of Rachel Dissosway, who died on April 7, 1802, “in the 27th Yr of her Age.” I consulted my wild-flower book, and came to the conclusion that it was peppergrass (Lepidium virginicum), and squatted down to take a closer look at it. “One of the characteristics of peppergrass,” the wild-flower book said, “is that its seed pods are as hot as pepper when chewed.” I deliberated on this for a minute or two, and then curiosity got the better of me and I stripped off some of the seed pods and started to put them in my mouth, and at just that moment I heard footsteps on the cemetery path and looked up and saw a man approaching, a middle-aged man in a black suit and a clerical collar. He came over to the grave and looked down at me.

  “What in the world are you doing?” he asked.

  I tossed the seed pods on the grave and got to my feet. “I’m studying wild flowers, I guess you might call it,” I said. I introduced myself, and we shook hands, and he said that he was the rector of St. Luke’s and that his name was Raymond E. Brock.

  “I was trying to decide if the weed on this grave is peppergrass,” I said.

  Mr. Brock glanced at the weed and nodded. “Peppergrass,” he said. “A very common weed in some parts of Staten Island.”

  “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I like to look at wild flowers, and I’ve been studying them off and on for years, but I don’t know much about them. I’m only just beginning to be able to identify them. It’s mostly an excuse to get out and wander around.”

  “I’ve seen you from a distance several times wandering around over here in the cemetery,” Mr. Brock said.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “In New York City, the best places to look for wild flowers are old cemeteries and old churchyards.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mr. Brock, “I’m aware of that. In fact, I’ll give you a tip. Are you familiar with the Negro community over on Bloomingdale Road?”

  I said that I had walked through it many times, and had often wondered about it.

  “The name of it is Sandy Ground,” said Mr. Brock, “and it’s a relic of the old Staten Island oyster-planting business. It was founded back before the Civil War by some free Negroes who came up here from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to work on the Staten Island oyster beds, and it used to be a flourishing community, a garden spot. Most of the people who live there now are descendants of the original free-Negro families, and most of them are related to each other by blood or marriage. Quite a few live in houses that were built by their grandfathers or great-grandfathers. On the outskirts of Sandy Ground, there’s a dirt lane running off Bloomingdale Road that’s called Crabtree Avenue, and down near the end of this lane is an old cemetery. It covers an acre and a half, maybe two acres, and it’s owned by the African Methodist church in Sandy Ground, and the Sandy Ground families have been burying in it for a hundred years. In recent generations, the Sandy Grounders have had a tendency to kind of let things slip, and one of the things they’ve let slip is the cemetery. They haven’t cleaned it off for years and years, and it’s choked with weeds and scrub. Most of the gravestones are hidden. It’s surrounded by woods and old fields, and you can’t always tell where the cemetery ends and the woods begin. Part of it is sandy and part of it is loamy, part of it is dry and part of it is damp, some of it is shady and some of it gets the sun all day, and I’m pretty sure you can find just about every wild flower that grows on the South Shore somewhere in it. Not to speak of shrubs and herbs and ferns and vines. If I were you, I’d take a look at it.”

  A man carrying a long-handled shovel in one hand and a short-handled shovel in the other came into the cemetery and started up the main path. Mr. Brock waved at him, and called out, “Here I am, Joe. Stay where you are. I’ll be with you in a minute.” The man dropped his shovels.

  “That’s Mr. Damato, our gravedigger,” said Mr. Brock. “We’re having a burial in here tomorrow, and I came over to show him where to dig the grave. You’ll have to excuse me now. If you do decide to visit the cemetery in Sandy Ground, you should ask for permission. They might not want strangers wandering around in it. The man to speak to is Mr. George H. Hunter. He’s chairman of the board of trustees of the African Methodist church. I know Mr. Hunter. He’s eighty-seven years old, and he’s one of those strong, self-contained old men you don’t see much any more. He was a hard worker, and he retired only a few years ago, and he’s fairly well-to-do. He’s a widower, and he lives by himself and does his own cooking. He’s got quite a reputation as a cook. His church used to put on clambakes to raise money, and they were such good clambakes they attracted people from all over this part of Staten Island, and he always had charge of them. On some matters, such as drinking and smoking, he’s very disapproving and strict and stern, but he doesn’t feel that way about eating; he approves of eating. He’s a great Bible reader. He’s read the Bible from cover to cover, time and time again. His health is good, and his memory is unusually good. He remembers the golden age of the oyster business on the South Shore, and he remembers its decline and fall, and he can look at any old field or tumble-down house between Rossville and Tottenville and tell you who owns it now and who owned it fifty years ago, and he knows who the people were who are buried out in the Sandy Ground cemetery—how they lived and how they died, how much they left, and how their children turned out. Not that he’ll necessarily tell you what he knows, or even a small part of it. If you can get him to go to the cemetery with you, ask him the local names of the weeds and wild flowers. He can tell you. His house is on Bloomingdale Road, right across from the church. It’s the house with the lightning rods on it. Or you could call him on the phone. He’s in the book.”

  I thanked Mr. Brock, and went straightway to a filling station on the Arthur Kill Road and telephoned Mr. Hunter. I told him I wanted to visit the Sandy Ground cemetery and look for wild flowers in it. “Go right ahead,” he said. “Nobody’ll stop you.�
� I told him I also wanted to talk to him about Sandy Ground. “I can’t see you today,” he said. “I’m just leaving the house. An old lady I know is sick in bed, and I made her a lemon-meringue pie, and I’m going over and take it to her. Sit with her awhile. See if I can’t cheer her up. You’ll have to make it some other time, and you’d better make it soon. That cemetery is a disgrace, but it isn’t going to be that way much longer. The board of trustees had a contractor look it over and make us a price how much he’d charge to go in there with a bulldozer and tear all that mess out by the roots. Clean it up good, and build us a road all the way through, with a turnaround at the farther end. The way it is now, there’s a road in there, but it’s a narrow little road and it only goes halfway in, and sometimes the pallbearers have to carry the coffin quite a distance from the hearse to the grave. Also, it comes to a dead end, and the hearse has to back out, and if the driver isn’t careful he’s liable to back into a gravestone, or run against the bushes and briars and scratch up the paint on his hearse. As I said, a disgrace. The price the contractor made us was pretty steep, but we put it up to the congregation, and if he’s willing to let us pay a reasonable amount down and the balance in installments, I think we’re going ahead with it. Are you busy this coming Saturday afternoon?” I said that I didn’t expect to be. “All right,” he said, “I tell you what you do. If it’s a nice day, come on down, and I’ll walk over to the cemetery with you. Come around one o’clock. I’ve got some things to attend to Saturday morning, and I ought to be through by then.”

  Saturday turned out to be nice and sunny, and I went across on the ferry and took the Tottenville bus and got off in Rossville and walked up Bloomingdale Road to Sandy Ground. Remembering Mr. Brock’s instructions, I looked for a house with lightning rods on it, and I had no trouble finding it. Mr. Hunter’s house is fully equipped with lightning rods, the tips of which are ornamented with glass balls and metal arrows. It is a trim, square, shingle-sided, two-story-and-attic house. It has a front porch and a back porch, both screened. The front porch is shaded by a rambler rose growing on a trellis. I knocked on the frame of the screen door, and a bespectacled, elderly Negro man appeared in the hall. He had on a chef’s apron, and his sleeves were rolled up. He was slightly below medium height, and lean and bald. Except for a wide, humorous mouth, his face was austere and a little forbidding, and his eyes were sad. I opened the door and asked, “Are you Mr. Hunter?” “Yes, yes, yes,” he said. “Come on in, and close the door. Don’t stand there and let the flies in. I hate flies. I despise them. I can’t endure them.” I followed him down the hall, past the parlor, past the dining room, and into the kitchen. There were three cake layers and a bowl of chocolate icing on the kitchen table.

  “Sit down and make yourself at home,” he said. “Let me put the icing on this cake, and then we’ll walk over to the cemetery. Icing or frosting. I never knew which was right. I looked up icing in the dictionary one day, and it said ‘Frosting for a cake.’ So I looked up frosting, and it said ‘Icing for a cake.’ ‘Ha!’ I said. ‘The dictionary man don’t know, either.’ The preacher at our church is a part-time preacher, and he doesn’t live in Sandy Ground. He lives in Asbury Park, and runs a tailor shop during the week, and drives over here on Sundays. Reverend J. C. Ramsey, a Southern man, comes from Wadesboro, North Carolina. Most Sundays, he and his wife take Sunday dinner with me, and I always try to have something nice for them. After dinner, we sit around the table and drink Postum and discuss the Bible, and that’s something I do enjoy. We discuss the prophecies in the Bible, and the warnings, and the promises—the promises of eternal life. And we discuss what I call the mysterious verses, the ones that if you could just understand them they might explain everything—why we’re put here, why we’re taken away—but they go down too deep; you study them over and over, and you go down as deep as you can, and you still don’t touch bottom. ‘Do you remember that verse in Relevation,’ I say to Reverend Ramsey, ‘where it says such and such?’ And we discuss that awhile. And then he says to me, ‘Do you remember that verse in Second Thessalonians, where it says so and so?’ And we discuss that awhile. This Sunday, in addition to the preacher and his wife, I’ve got some other company coming. A gospel chorus from down South is going to sing at the church Sunday morning, a group of men and women from in and around Norfolk, Virginia, that call themselves the Union Gospel Chorus. They sing old hymns. Reverend Ramsey heard about them, and got into some correspondence with them. There’s seven of them, and they’re coming up on the bus today, and they’ll spend the night in Asbury Park, and tomorrow, after they sing, they’re coming to my house for Sunday dinner. That’ll be ten for dinner, including the preacher and his wife and me, and that’s nothing. I have twenty to dinner sometimes, like at Thanksgiving, and do it all myself, and it doesn’t bother me a bit. I’m going to give them chicken fricassee and dumplings for the main course. Soon as I finish this cake, I’ll take you in the dining room and show you what else I’m going to give them. Did you have your lunch?”

  “I had a sandwich and some coffee on the ferryboat coming over,” I said.

  “Now, you know, I like to do that,” Mr. Hunter said. “I never go cross on the ferryboat without I step up to the lunch counter and buy a little something—a sandwich, or a piece of raisin cake. And then I sit by the window and eat it, and look at the tugboats go by, and the big boats, and the sea gulls, and the Statue of Liberty. Oh, my! It’s such a pleasure to eat on a boat. Years and years ago, I was cook on a boat. When I was growing up in Sandy Ground, the mothers taught the boys to cook the same as the girls. The way they looked at it—you never know, it might come in handy. My mother was an unusually good cook, and she taught me the fundamentals, and I was just naturally good at it, and when I was seventeen or eighteen there was a fleet of fishing boats on Staten Island that went to Montauk and up around there and fished the codfish grounds, and I got a job cooking on one of them. It was a small boat, only five in the crew, and, the galley was just big enough for two pots and a pan and a stirring spoon and me. I was clumsy at first. Reach for something with my right hand and knock something else over with my left elbow. After a while, though, I got so good the captain of the biggest boat in the fleet heard about my cooking and tried to hire me away, but the men on my boat said if I left they’d leave, and my captain had been good to me, so I stayed. I was a fishing-boat cook for a year and a half, and then I quit and took up a different line of work altogether. I’ll be through with this cake in just a minute. I make my icing thicker than most people do, and I put more on. Frosting. Speaking of wild flowers, do you know pokeweed when you see it?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Did you ever eat it?”

  “No,” I said. “Isn’t it supposed to be poisonous?”

  “It’s the root that’s poisonous, the root and the berries. In the spring, when it first comes up, the young shoots above the root are good to eat. They taste like asparagus. The old women in Sandy Ground used to believe in eating pokeweed shoots, the old Southern women. They said it renewed your blood. My mother believed it. Every spring, she used to send me out in the woods to pick pokeweed shoots. And I believe it. So every spring, if I think about it, I go pick some and cook them. It’s not that I like them so much—in fact, they give me gas—but they remind me of the days gone by, they remind me of my mother. Now, away down here in the woods in this part of Staten Island, you might think you were fifteen miles on the other side of nowhere, but just a little ways up Arthur Kill Road, up near Arden Avenue, there’s a bend in the road where you can sometimes see the tops of the skyscrapers in New York. Just the tallest skyscrapers, and just the tops of them. It has to be an extremely clear day. Even then, you might be able to see them one moment and the next moment they’re gone. Right beside this bend in the road there’s a little swamp, and the edge of this swamp is the best place I know to pick pokeweed. I went up there one morning this spring to pick some, but we had a late spring, if you remember, and the pokeweed hadn’
t come up. The fiddleheads were up, and golden club, and spring beauty, and skunk cabbage, and bluets, but no pokeweed. So I was looking here and looking there, and not noticing where I was stepping, and I made a misstep, and the next thing I knew I was up to my knees in mud. I floundered around in the mud a minute, getting my bearings, and then I happened to raise my head and look up, and suddenly I saw, away off in the distance, miles and miles away, the tops of the skyscrapers in New York shining in the morning sun. I wasn’t expecting it, and it was amazing. It was like a vision in the Bible.”

  Mr. Hunter smoothed the icing on top of the cake with a table knife, and stepped back and looked at it. “Well,” he said, “I guess that does it.” He placed a cover on the cake, and took off his apron. “I better wash my hands,” he said. “If you want to see something pretty, step in the dining room and look on the sideboard.” There was a walnut sideboard in the dining room, and it had been polished until it glinted. On it were two lemon-meringue pies, two coconutcustard pies, a pound cake, a marble cake, and a devil’s-food cake. “Four pies and four cakes, counting the one I just finished,” Mr. Hunter called out. “I made them all this morning. I also got some corn muffins put away, to eat with the chicken fricassee. That ought to hold them.” Above the dining-room table, hanging from the ceiling, was an old-fashioned lampshade. It was as big as a parasol, and made of pink silk, and fringed and tasseled. On one wall, in a row, were three religious placards. They were printed in ornamental type, and they had floral borders. The first said “JESUS NEVER FAILS.” The second said “NOT MY WILL BUT THINE BE DONE.” The third said “THE HOUR IS COMING IN WHICH ALL THAT ARE IN THE GRAVES SHALL HEAR HIS VOICE, AND SHALL COME FORTH; THEY THAT HAVE DONEGOOD, UNTO THE RESURRECTION OF LIFE AND THEY THAT HAVE DONE EVIL, UNTO THE RESURRECTION OF DAMNATION.” On another wall was a framed certificate stating that George Henry Hunter was a life member of St. John’s Lodge No. 29 of the Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons. While I was looking at this, Mr. Hunter came into the room. “I’m proud of that,” he said. “There’s several Negro Mason organizations, but Prince Hall is the biggest, and I’ve been a member since 1906. I joined the Masons the same year I built this house. Did you notice my floors?” I looked down. The floor boards were wide and made of some kind of honey-colored wood, and they were waxed and polished. “Virgin spruce,” he said. “Six inches wide. Tongue and groove. Built to last. In my time, that was the idea, but in this day and time, that’s not the idea. They’ve got more things nowadays—things, things, things; kitchen stoves you could put in the parlor just to look at, refrigerators so big they’re all out of reason, cars that reach from here to Rossville—but they aren’t built to last, they’re built to wear out. And that’s the way the people want it. It’s immaterial to them how long a thing lasts. In fact, if it don’t wear out quick enough, they beat it and bang it and kick it and jump up and down on it, so they can get a new one. Most of what you buy nowadays, the outside is everything, the inside don’t matter. Like those tomatoes you buy at the store, and they look so nice and shiny and red, and half the time, when you get them home and slice them, all that’s inside is mush, red mush. And the people are the same. You hardly ever see a son any more as good as his father. Oh, he might be taller and stronger and thicker in the shoulders, playing games at school and all, but he can’t stand as much. If he tried to lift and pull the way the men of my generation used to lift and pull, he’d be ruptured by noon—they’d be making arrangements to operate. How’d I get started talking this way? I’m tired, that’s why. I been on my feet all morning, and I better sit down a few minutes.” He took a tablecloth from a drawer of the sideboard and shook it out and laid it gently over the cakes and pies. “Let’s go on the back porch,” he said.