Dredging the Choptank. Kimberley Lynne
Korinne was born in Detroit and lives in New Hampshire. She has the long blonde hair of a mermaid and the terrible gift of prescience. She says that something big is going to happen to me, but something happens to everyone.
Before April 2nd
Walking with Ghosts
Stories need context, geographic and historic references needed for understanding localized archetype. These ghost stories and I emerged from the same lush cradle that is the state of Maryland. I was born just south of the Mason-Dixon Line at the beginning of the Kennedy administration. I was a Junior Oriole. I was a Girl Scout. I was raised Episcopalian. I didn’t consider myself Southern or Northern until I lived in Texas.
Northern states clump the state of Maryland with the South, but the Southern states clump Maryland with the North. When I lived in Dallas, I tried to explain the Mason-Dixon Line, the geographic delineation between southern Pennsylvania and northern Maryland. The boundary line was surveyed in the 1760s to settle a land dispute between two families. In 1820, Congress used the Mason-Dixon Line to separate the slave-owning states from the free states as part of the Missouri Compromise, and during the Civil War the Mason-Dixon Line evolved into a representation of the foggy border between North and South.
“I was born south of it,” I explained to blank faces. “In Baltimore. In the South.”
“That’s not the South,” they’d drawl, one arched eyebrow up. “This is the South. Baltimore? Isn’t that in one of those Yankee states? Near New York City?”
The biggest battle of the Civil War was barely ten miles from the Mason-Dixon Line. I hiked up Gettysburg’s Little Round Top when I was short enough to need a leg up onto the cannons. My father, my brothers and I would strike out across the hot graveyard fields, thick with goldenrod and fat flies and steeped with the blood of 50,000 ghosts. My father was born in Fargo, North Dakota, and he taught us that the horse’s legs on the battlefield statues chronicled the rider’s destiny. All legs on the ground meant he survived unscathed. One leg up meant he was wounded but survived. Two legs up meant the rider bought the farm. Their battle death plot became a crucible of mud, blood and bone, the chemistry of history. Traces are still woven through the earth and our communal memory. The dead men on rearing horses fascinated me; they had a glorious crossing under the roar of battle. Their stories were told in bronze. If I stood stock still in front of them and concentrated and opened myself up to the wondrous possibility of them, I could hear the bray of stallions and the hiss of buckshot. It seemed far away and oddly beyond the next ridge at the same time. I had no idea how close it was.
Not until I lived in Texas in the late 1980s, did I realize that the War Between the States, or that altercation sometimes referred to as The War of Northern Aggression or The Civil War, was not yet over and that I was considered a Yankee, one who hailed from the Aggression side. I’ve always been Union philosophically, but Yankees seemed somehow harder than the people where I lived, not tougher at the core but harder on the surface. Southerners seemed fiercer at the center and softer on the outside.
I was raised in a Civil War border state in a city that has been a battlefield several times. In 1861, Maryland was a slave-owning state. Her governor Thomas Holliday Hicks owned slaves and was a native of its Eastern Shore Dorchester County. In April 1861, Confederate sympathizers attacked Union troops in Baltimore, and President Lincoln placed Maryland under martial law with cannons on Federal Hill and troops on Pratt Street. Hicks declared Maryland’s Union loyalty, but Maryland’s wealthy Eastern Shore was decidedly Confederate and smuggled goods and gold to Richmond throughout the Civil War. Maryland was filially split, cousin against cousin and brother against brother.
Our dead brothers still follow us. Ghost stories born during the Civil War still haunt the Eastern Shore.
Not only split by war, Maryland is geographically torn in half by the world’s largest fresh water estuary, the Chesapeake Bay, dividing the state into its Eastern and Western Shores. Despite the Chesapeake Bay Bridge spanning its watery gap, Maryland’s halves are forever different socially, economically and politically: Yankee vs. Confederate and industrial vs. rural. We keep to ourselves and are wary of each other.
Most Baltimorean experience of the Eastern Shore is transitory; we vacation in Ocean City and drive through the Shore to reach the Atlantic. We rarely leave Route 50 as we travel on it through the Shore; we stop to buy corn, strawberries, tomatoes, and gasoline. On those quick stops at filling stations and fruit stands, in my home state, I’ve felt the same itchy alienation that I’ve felt hovering uncomfortably in a Mississippi grocery store. I don’t belong. I’m the outsider.
Someone in the back of the store whispers, “You ain’t from round here, are ya?” Their sharp stares singe my clothes. Their voices and vowels are rounder. Their sky seems bigger and their air thicker. I’m amazed that we use the same currency and root for the same baseball team.
How could we possibly belong to the same state?
Separated from half my state or not, I like being a Marylander; I feel for my state the same sort of pride I hold for my country, maybe more. Certainly, I defend Maryland with a greater vengeance than America. I personally relate to a greater percentage of Marylanders than Americans. I exhibit unconscious, state-specific, jingoistic behavior. I like Delaware and Pennsylvania, but I couldn’t live there. My college buddy lives in Virginia, and I wonder how he can spend all those nights there. Still, no matter how crowded and conservative Virginia seems, my allegiance to Maryland is far from logical. Maryland’s a lovely place, but there’s no rational reason why I should feel so strongly about her, except that she’s my home, she’s haunted and she shares my first name.
I am xenophobic of Virginia. Xenophobia, the fear or hatred of foreigners or of anything foreign or strange, riddles America, but strangely, Americans have few words to describe state-specific, xenophobic nationalism except parochialism with its negative connotations. We are still swayed by Darwin’s strict niche rule of evolution. We like to group ourselves into same-type bunches and identify ourselves that way. We categorize and compartmentalize; it’s an easier process. We like to live with people like us; it’s safer. That safety is the cradle of xenophobia.
I was taught xenophobia early. My high school, Towson Senior High, played Dulaney Valley High in football, so we Towson kids were supposed to hate the Dulaney kids. It made little sense to me; I went to elementary school with a third of them. They were friends of mine. Why loathe them because they lived on the other side of Seminary Avenue? There isn’t enough geographic change between both sides of Seminary Avenue to warrant the fear of difference between the inhabitants; it’s a two lane road that runs through the middle of middle-class suburbia. But, certainly, there’s literal gulf enough between the Maryland Western and Eastern Shores to brew that xenophobic disparity, a crevasse-sized gap between mountain foothills and sea-level marsh.
For me, loving my split, soggy state to an illogical extreme is the same as hating everything and everyone outside of it. Maybe words are constrictive boxes, and maybe none are big enough to hold the wide loyalty that people feel for home and its land, its stories and its ghosts.
When I told Chief Winter Fox of the Eastern Shore Tribal Council that I was searching for a word to define state-specific, xenophobic behavior, he understood. “For the Native American Indians,” he said, “xenophobia is a matter of survival.” They have to stick together to maintain their culture, and they use their stories, their stories that come from rich marsh, to maintain that culture. Geography slices our thoughts, carves our voice and shapes our hearts. Despite technology and the transitory nature of our living patterns, Californians are different than Floridians; northern Californians are different than southern Californians; Texans are different from everybody; and Western Shore Marylanders are different from the natives of the Eastern Shore. I recently received an email that listed humorous definitions of state-specific behavior. “You live in Mississippi when you can rent a movie and buy bait in the same store and after five years you still hear, ‘You ain’t from ‘round here, are ya?’” Other people from other geographies talk differently, and differences define our stories.
Many an August, my parents threw the three of us kids into the back of a series