Dredging the Choptank. Kimberley Lynne
Delaware. Calvert’s son, Edward Sackville, then granted land to all his friends and began the colony of Maryland.
Clearly, the English monarchs wanted Lord Baltimore to be a Catholic on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, so they tempted him with American land. They compensated his religious oppression with distant dirt and created my home state. A lot of Catholics followed Lord Baltimore to Maryland. Did the sweet tang of religious freedom make the swampy earth precious? Does the blot of that religious persecution still stain the land?
I lay in bed beside Karl, reading and wondering if I could stay awake during the research sections of the project.
I dreamt that I stood in the bumpy Christ Church graveyard, my back to the stone wall. A wind blew my hair, and the door to the church flew open. Lord Baltimore walked out, in full wig and frock coat. He smiled at me and offered me a cigarette.
“I thought you were Catholic,” I said.
I awoke as Karl lifted my hand off the book that had fallen on my rhythmic breast.
“Was I asleep?” I asked ridiculously.
“Not for long. You can’t read in bed. You’re lousy at it,” he said, leaning over me to put the book on the floor. “That thing on your face looks better.” He landed back on his side with an exhaled breath and returned to his dictator volume. He was living on a grant to research Stalin’s tyrannical reign. We slept with books and highlighters and left the lights on.
I trudged to the bathroom to splash my face with water and check the damages.
The raised bumps where the water damage drop splashed me were vaguely red, despite hydrogen peroxide cleanings and Neosporin applications. The bumps were no longer leaching clear fluid. In the busted capillary beds of my cheeks, there was a slightly rosier curve, daily less and less swollen, still a mark of the Dorchester Arts Center, a branding of a foreigner in a strange land.
May 20th
Read Folklore
I read Flowers’ history book before his folklore book; that was a mistake because most of the ghost stories lurk in the latter.
I showed the history book to my kirky friend Debbie and told her the story of calling Olivia and Flowers as we drank coffee in her Rodgers Forge living room; Debbie’s a caffeine addict. She serves coffee. The sun shone brightly through the blinds and etched a barred pattern on the Oriental rug. Birds chirped in the maple in the front yard; cars whooshed by. We seemed far enough away from marsh country to discuss its ghosts. I handed her the history book. “Check out the sea monster sketch,” I said smugly.
“Oh my God, Mary.” She giggled. “It’s hand drawn.”
“I know; bless his self-published heart. No ghosts yet, though. It’s probably in his folklore book. I gotta find that. Guess I’ll look in the old Waverly bookstores. Aren’t ghost stories folklore? And not history?” I sipped her strong coffee. “What’s the diff?” I asked.
Debbie flipped past my marker in the history book and read the end. “I don’t think there is one,” she said slowly.
“I mean, is it all semantics?”
“Somebody made up both of them. Look. Here they are, Mary,” Debbie said.
“How’d you find them?” I asked her from the couch. Reading the history book was a like learning German to me: slow going. I had trouble remaining conscious during the Byzantine renditions of Maryland land grants.
“Skip to the Civil War,” she said. I’ve known Debbie twenty years. Her vocal tones were saying: skip to the Civil War, you idiot, as if to question, where else in this country’s patchwork history is our greatest concentration of phantoms?
“Of course,” I said, “The 600,000 ghosts of The Civil War. They were bound to surface.”
“There’s a headless ghost slave named Big Liz in the Green Briar Swamp,” she said. She read aloud the directions to Big Liz’s eerie corner of this world, south of Cambridge at DeCoursey Bridge. “She haunts a bridge off Route 50,” Debbie said, shaking her head and laughing. “You pull over and honk your horn and she shows up, holding her head in her hands.” Debbie knows Route 50 well; her parents own a Delaware beach house. “I don’t remember seeing a sign on 50 for a dead slave girl on DeCoursey Bridge Road.”
“Dorchester County doesn’t sign much. They don’t want foreigners like us driving the back roads,” I speculated.
Big Liz’s story inspired Debbie to want to go on a pilgrimage to Green Briar Swamp. “We have to see her, Mary,” she said. “She’s right outside town. We should go and explore.”
During the Civil War, Big Liz’s plantation owner, John Austin, forced her to bury some ill-gotten, Confederate booty in the densely-thicketed Green Briar Swamp. After she dug the treasure’s watery hole, he decapitated her, and she still haunts the marsh and guards his abandoned gold. According to local legend, the treasure’s still buried in the swamp. If you drive to the DeCoursey bridge, honk your horn and flash your headlights, then the wind will blow, and you’ll soon hear her shuffling step. The car engine will stall as she limps into view, shoulders stooped, cradling her head in her arms, her eyes glowing. You’re trapped, frozen, and can’t move as she draws closer and closer.9
“A swamp monster. That’s more like it,” I said. “She’s definitely going into the tour.” Still, I was a little peeved by this story. “Didn’t Big Liz notice that Austin was wearing a tobacco knife big enough to decapitate?” I asked Debbie. “Did he always wear it? Did he bring it to hack through the brambles?”
“And if she was big, why didn’t Big Liz fight back?” Debbie returned.
Instead, Big Liz exhibited a passive, abused woman streak that’s more frightening than her haunting. Did she crave death? Was that option better than slavery? Was there resignation? Did she secretly love Austin? Hate him? Did he bury her headless body? He would’ve been a fool not to try, even in a marsh where the tides and the crabs daily vacuum up all detritus.
“Read the folklore book, Mary,” said Debbie. “Find out. It’s your mission.”
“I’ll report back,” I promised.
The next day, I found the folklore book in a used bookstore in the Waverly section of Baltimore. I sank to the bald carpet and began to read beside the listing bookshelves. I was riveted. Customers stepped over me. Time flew by. The terrifying stories hailed mostly from just outside of Cambridge. The book’s jammed with many rocking-good ghost stories, so many that before one tall tale a paragraph postscript categorizes the myriad varieties of Dorchester ghost story. According to Flowers, spiritual visitations are driven by: task, collection of body parts, message delivery, reluctance to depart, protection of treasure, or being trapped in a time warp.10 That last one’s my favorite.
On the crooked floor of the old bookshop, in my periphery I saw a small, black shape zip around a crowded shelf. I blinked. Did I really see that? Did it come out of the shelves of local folklore? I stood suddenly, shaking my long skirt, fearing a cockroach.
“Some people in this area are afraid to leave their homes at night”11 reported folklorist Brice Stump about the residents of Bucktown, the closest village to the Green Briar Swamp. Green Briar Swamp is seven miles square of razor-sharp marsh grass and gritty, foul-smelling mud lined with thick huckleberry bushes. Some locals claim to have seen Big Liz’s image emerge from the tidal waters under DeCoursey bridge. Fishermen have drowned there, in several feet of dark water. Some locals claim to hear gunshots over the marsh in the middle of the night and seen headless bulls, pigs and strange lights over the cattails. Hunting dogs won’t go through the huckleberry bushes into Green Briar; they possess the sixth sense to remain outside its haunted boundaries.
Flowers’ folklore book describes an extended version of the Big Liz story, embellished with motive. I phoned Debbie to elaborate. “I called to tell you the Big Liz back story,” I said, feeling like a fledgling phantom storyteller. Big Liz discovered Austin’s Confederate