The black families at Davis Ridge 

 were what local historian Norman 

 Gillikin in Smyrna calls "saltwater 

 farmers" — the old-time Downeast- 

 erners who lived by both fishing and 

 farming. They hawked oysters across 

 Jarrett Bay and raised hogs, sheep and 

 cattle. They grew corn for the animals 

 and sweet "roasting ears" for them- 

 selves. At night they spun homegrown 

 cotton into cloth. Their gardens were full 

 of collard greens and, as Ward recalled 

 vividly, "sweet potatoes as big as your 

 head." They worked hard and prospered. 



Sutton Davis and his 13 children 

 also operated one of the first successful 

 menhaden factories in North Carolina. 

 He built two fishing boats, the Mary E. 

 Reeves and the Shamrock. His sons 

 worked the boats while his daughters 

 dried and pressed the menhaden — 

 known locally as "shad" or "pogie" — 

 to sell as fertilizer and oil. 



"Men should have been doing it," 

 Ward explained, "but he didn't have 

 them there, so the girls had to fill in for 

 them." In fact, Ward pointed out, at the 

 ridge, "the girls did a lot of farm 

 working, factory work too." 



Davis Ridge was a proud, indepen- 

 dent community. When Nannie Ward 

 was growing up in the 1910s and 1920s, 

 seven families — all kin to Sutton Davis 

 — lived at the ridge. They sailed across 

 Jarrett Bay to a Smyrna gristmill to grind 

 their corn and to a Williston grocery to 

 barter fish for coffee and sugar, but 

 mainly relied on their own land and 

 labor. They conducted business with 

 their white neighbors at Davis Shore or 

 across Jarrett Bay by barter and by 

 trading chores. "You didn't know what 

 it was to pay bills," Ward reminisced. 



While the Davis Ridge men worked 

 away at Core Banks mullet camps or 

 chased menhaden into Virginia, the 

 island women cared for farms and 

 homes. They gathered tansy, sassafras 

 and other wild herbs for medicines 

 and seasoning. They collected yaupon 

 leaves in February, chopped them into 

 small pieces and dried them to make 

 tea. In May, they sheared the sheep. 

 Nannie Ward's grandmother spun and 



wove the wool. They produced, Ward 

 explained, "everything they used." 



Davis Ridge was a remote knoll, 

 but Ward could not remember a day of 

 loneliness or boredom. She told how two 

 Beaufort menhadenmen, William Henry 

 Fulcher and John Henry, used to visit 

 and play music on her front porch. "We 

 enjoyed ourselves on the island," Ward 

 said. "There wasn't a whole lot of things 

 to do, but we enjoyed people. We visited 

 each other." 



The camaraderie of black and white 

 neighbors around Davis Ridge was still 

 striking to Nannie Ward half a century 

 later. For most black coastal Carolinians, 

 the 1910s and 1920s were years of 

 hardship and fear. White citizens 

 enforced racial segregation at gunpoint. 

 Blacks who tried to climb above "their 

 place" invited harsh reprisals. The Ku 

 Klux Klan marched by the hundreds as 

 nearby as Morehead City, and word went 

 out in several fishing communities — 

 including Knotts Island, Stumpy Point 

 and Atlantic — that a black man might 

 not live long if he lingered after dark. 



Davis Ridge was somehow differ- 

 ent. Black and white families often 

 worked, socialized and worshiped 

 together. "The people from Williston 

 would come over to our island," Ward 

 said of school recitals and plays, "and 

 we'd go over to their place." Sutton 

 Davis' home, in particular, was a 

 popular meeting place. Hymn singers 

 of both races visited to enjoy good 

 company and the finest organ around 

 Jarrett Bay. 



Ward even recalled a white midwife 

 staying with black families at the ridge 

 when a child was about to be born, a 

 simple act of kindness and duty that 

 turned the racial conventions of the day 

 upside down. 



In the 1950s and 1960s, many 

 white ministers across the South lost 

 their jobs for inviting black choirs to 

 sing at a church revival. Yet the Davis 

 Ridge choir sang at revivals at the 

 Missionary Baptist church at Davis 

 Shore two generations before the civil 

 rights movement. An old legend even 

 tells how, in 1871, black and white 



worshipers rushed from a prayer meeting 

 and together made a daring rescue of the 

 crew and cargo of a ship, the Pontiac, 

 wrecked at Cape Lookout. 



I know that I must be careful not to 

 exaggerate the racial harmony around 

 Davis Ridge. Not a crossroads in the 

 American South escaped the ugliness of 

 racial oppression. But Sutton Davis and 

 his descendants had two things that most 

 black Southerners could only dream of 

 — land and a fair chance to make a 

 living. And, unlike the rest of the Jim 

 Crow South, the broad waters of Core 

 Sound could not so easily be segregated 

 into separate and unequal sections. 

 Self-reliant, in peonage to no one, the 

 African Americans at the ridge joined 

 their white neighbors as rough equals in 

 a common struggle to make a living 

 from the sea. 



Ward left Davis Ridge in 1925. 

 She first went to Beaufort to attend high 

 school, then moved to South Carolina 

 and New York. While she was gone, the 

 great 1933 hurricane laid waste to the 

 island's homes and fields. The ridge was 

 deserted when she returned in 1951. 



"I still loved the island," Ward told 

 the Lusters only a few years before she 

 died in Beaufort. "When you grow up 

 there from a child, you learn all the 

 things in the island, you learn how to 

 survive, you learn everything." 



I heard a low, wistful sigh and a 

 deep yearning in her voice. "We were 

 surrounded by so many good things that 

 I don't get anymore, that I never did get 

 again." I knew that she was not speaking 

 merely of roasted mullet and fresh figs. 



She was silent a moment then, with 

 a laugh, exclaimed, "I'd like to be there 

 right now." □ 



David Cecelski is a historian at the 

 University: of 

 North Carolina- 

 Chapel Hill's 

 Southern Oral 

 Histon Program 

 and a regular 

 columnist for 

 Coastwatch. 



COASTWATCH 19 



