Tfie Last Daugliter of Davis Ridge by David Cecelski, PhD The Waterman's Song looks most closely at the slave boatmen who plied southern waters before the Civil War, but also includes this evocation ofa black maritime community in the first years offreedom.
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henever I pass the old clam house between Smyrna and Williston, I glance east across Jarrett Bay to Davis Ridge. You will go that way if yo u drive Highway 70 across the broad salt marshes of Carteret County to catch the Cedar Island ferry to the Outer Banks .... Few coastal visitors know that the secluded hammock of Davis Ridge was once home to an extraordinary fishing community founded by liberated slaves. Nobody has lived at "the Ridge" since 1933, yet the legend of those African American fishermen, whalers, and boatbuilders still echoes among the elderly people in the maritime communities between North River and Cedar Island that locals call "Downeast." I had heard of Davis Ridge when I was growing up 25 miles to the west. When I became a historian, I searched for the history of those black Downeasterners with much ardor and little success. For a long time, I assumed all record of them had been lost. I found no trace of D avis Ridge in history books. Exploring the Ridge by boat and on foot, I uncovered only an old cemetery in a live oak grove surrounded by salt marsh and, only a few yards away, Core Sound and Jarrett Bay. All the documents that I examined in research libraries, archives, and museums yielded only tantalizing clues to the communi ty's past. T he best sources I could find were a few mostly secondhand recollections from elderly people who had grown up in fishing villages nor far from Davis Ridge. At last, after I had given up, I stumbled upon a rape-recorded interview with Nannie Davis Ward in a storage pantry at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort. Most success in historical research comes from persistence and hard work; finding Ward's interview was an undeserved act of grace. Folklorists Michael and Debbie Luster had interviewed Ward in 1988 only a few years before her death. At that time, Ward was apparently the last living soul to have grown up at Davis Ridge. A retired seamstress and cook, she was born at the Ridge in 1911. Ward was blind by the rime the Lusters interviewed her, bur she had a strong
SEA HISTORY 98, AUTUMN 2001
This engraving ofa mulleting gang at Shackleford Banks demonstrates the.fraternity ofblack and whitefishermen on the islands around Davis Ridge. (From George Brown Goode, ed., The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United Stares. Washington DC: Commission ofFish and Fisheries, 1884-1887, sec. 5, vol. 2)
memory and a firm voice. Listening to her eloquent words, I found a vivid portrait of her childhood home raking shape in my mind. Her story fills in an important part of the history of the African American maritime people who inhabited the coastal villages and fishing camps of North Carolina before the Civil War. It is the story of only one community, Davis Ridge, bur it speaks to the broader experience of the black watermen and -women who came out of slavery and continued to work on the water. W hen Nan nie Davis Ward was a child, Davis Ridge was an all-black community on a wooded knoll, or small island, on the eastern shore of Jarrett Bay, nor far from Core Sound and Cape Lookout. A great salt marsh separated the Ridge from the mainland to the north, which was known as Davis Shore. Davis Island was just to the so uth. A hurricane cut a channel between Davis Ridge and Davis Island in 1899, bur in her grandparents' day it had been possible to walk from one to the other. The founders of Davis Ridge had been amo ng many slave watermen at Core Sound before the Civil War. Ward's family was in many ways typical of the African American families along the Lower Banks. They were skilled maritime laborers with a seafaring heritage. They had eighteenth-century family roots in the West Indies and had black,
white, and Native American ancestry. They moved seasonally from fishery to fis hery, working on inshore waters, rarely the open sea. They also had a history of slave resistance. Nannie Davis Ward's mother, who identified herself as Native American, had grown up on Bogue Banks, a 26-mile-long barrier island west of Beaufort, and her mother's grandfather had evidently been a slave aboard a French sailing vessel. According to Ward, that great-grandfather had escaped from his French master while in port at New Bern and had been raised free in the family ofa white waterman at Harkers Island, ten miles west of Davis Ridge. It was Sutton Davis, Ward's paternal grandfather, who first settled Davis Ridge. As a slave, he had belonged to a smal l planter and shipbuilder named Nathan Davis at Davis Island. Sutton had been a master boatbuilder and carpenter. According to his granddaughter, he had learned the trade at a Wilmington shipyard owned by a member of the white Davis family and then moved back to Davis Island. Family lore on one side of the white Davis fami ly holds that Nathan was Sutton's father. Nannie Ward did nor address rhar question in her interview, except to note that Sutton and his children were very light skinned. When U nion troops captured Beaufort and New Bern in 1862, Sutton Davis led 15