Seasoned by Salt A Historical Album of the Outer Banks (review)

Abstract

bates in the South and North about the future ofblacks newly freed following the Civil War. His book teases us as well to reflect on the struggles for racial equality in our own century. Seasoned by Salt A Historical Album of the Outer Banks By Rodney Barfield University of North Carolina Press, 1996 192 pp. Cloth, $34.95; paper, $18.95 Reviewed by Loyd Little, author of three novels and winner of the Pen-Hemingway award. He is presendy communications officer at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Around four in the afternoon on 1 2July 1996, the wind ofBertha reached a maximum of 105 miles per hour at our home on the mainland side ofBogue Sound across from Salter Path. The plywood was up; the boat and car had been moved to high ground; and water jugs were full. The wind was knotted with salt water, destructiveness, darkness, and its roar vibrated in every nail and board. Through the glass portion ofthe front door, I watched the water climb closer, and quickly. Normally, the sound was one hundred feet away and eight feet lower than our home. But at 4:00 p.m., the water was within a few feet of the porch. The waves on the sound were about five-feet high, and each time a wave roiled upward, the wind snatched the top two feet and threw it across the front of our home, like a giant slinging a van-sized bucket ofwater. Several hours earlier, our eighty-foot pier had broken apart and disappeared, and trees already lay uprooted around the house. We had lost our electricity early that morning, and only later did I find out that at the moment I was looking tiirough the door, the eye of Bertha was crossing onto the mainland thirty miles south at Snead's Ferry. Still, compared with the legendary San Ciriaco hurricane that forever changed Shackleford Banks, east ofBeaufort, Bertha was just a bad blow. In Seasonedby Salt, author Rodney Barfield speaks eloquendy and dioughtfully about the forces such as San Ciriaco that shaped the people and the landscape of North Carolina's Outer Banks during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Barfield, director of the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, says the notion of his book grew from listening to museum visitors as they looked at pictures and speculated on life and times a century ago. "There is something inherent in recorded images from the past that touches us at our very centers," he writes. Reviews 87 Women and boys mending nets at Manteo, ca. 1900. Courtesy ofthe North Carolina Collection, University ofNorth Carolina at ChapelHill. Seasoned by Salt, printed in an oversized format of eight-by-nine inches, focuses primarily on the period from the Civil War to the mid-1920s. The book is divided into four sections: "An Overview of the Outer Banks," "The Civil War," "Storms and Shipwrecks," and "Sharpies and Other Boats." The Outer Banks are considered those barrier islands from Currituck Banks at the Virginia—North Carolina border to Core Banks, whose southernmost point is Cape Lookout. However, Barfield includes Shackleford Banks, which darts westward from Cape Lookout, because Shackleford's story is as dramatic as that of any of the other islands. Barfield gathered his information from books, early records, and talks witii museum visitors and witii the oldest generation on the banks. Seasoned by Salt is not a history of the Outer Banks and it is not a definitive work. Its goal, Barfield writes, is to focus on the "collective memories and lore of the residents of die large forces that shaped their personalities and heritage." In this Barfield succeeds admirably. His prose is clear, clean, and careful, and his research is detailed. But more than the writing, the magnificent pictures and drawings—more than 1 50—will entice readers to return again and again to Seasoned by Salt. The photographs , many published for the first time, come from the archives ofthe Maritime Museum, the Cape Lookout National Seashore, the North Carolina State Division ofArchives and History, and the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at...