On the day George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, we had just finished transiting the full 1,200-plus miles of the Atlantic ICW from Key West all the way to Norfolk VA. We tied up at the Waterside Marina, part of a relatively new “festival marketplace” of shops, bars and restaurants along the waterfront. The Waterside is probably lively on a normal spring day, but nothing is normal this spring, and it was shuttered and still except for one seafood place offering takeout and outdoor dining.
In general it’s been hard to get a sense of places we pass through these past few months; with everything shut down, mostly what we can tell you about is what a place looks like. In Norfolk we saw: mermaid sculptures, Navy ships, pleasant streets lined with trees and brick row houses, a cement mixer turned into a giant kaleidoscope, and a really really big gun shop.
In Town Point Park we came across the Armed Forces Memorial, 22 bronze sheets reproducing letters written home by soldiers serving in wars from the American Revolution all the way through to Iraq and Afghanistan. Each letter included the date it was written and the date the author was killed, in most cases very soon after the letter had been sent. It was quietly engaging and deeply effective at driving home the consequences of war – much better than the usual imposing obelisk.
After we left Norfolk, Town Point Park became one of several gathering places for local Black Lives Matter protests. We read that some white pastors asked their parishioners to kneel to ask for forgiveness for the church’s history of racism, and the chief of police marched with demonstrators. We wish we could have been there, but by then we had moved on to a series of smaller Chesapeake towns: Yorktown and Deltaville in Virginia, and in Maryland, Crisfield and Solomons. If anybody in these places had concerns about racial justice, they were keeping it to themselves. The Crisfield Elks Club did have a signboard announcing that “Black Lives Do Matter.” Not sure what the extra “Do” was meant to convey. But mostly we saw “blue lives matter” flags (and the usual Trump flags) flying about town.
What’s weird is that Crisfield itself is both racially diverse and struggling, still trying to recover from Hurricane Sandy back in 2012 and more generally from the decline in maritime livelihoods across the Chesapeake. Almost all the shops in the tiny downtown are shuttered, and not just because of COVID-19. Many houses are abandoned and collapsing, some almost entirely consumed by bushes and trees. If anybody should be signing up for social transformation, you’d think it would be the people of Crisfield.
We met the mayor while waiting for food pickup one day (it’s that kind of town – turns out his daughter runs the place), and he seemed justly proud of his investments in infrastructure improvement. Tom, who works at the harbormaster’s office, told us about his efforts to attract more boaters to town. (Not sure whether everyone gets this gold-star treatment, but Tom also took Matt and Felix out with his 2 sons to catch crabs and then gave us the entire half-bushel catch. Too much Old Bay on the fingertips to take photos of THAT.) But nationwide protests? WE know they’re happening, thanks to Zoom and Instagram and Twitter and all that. But we’re not sure that anybody else here does.
Change has to start somewhere, and we desperately want to believe that this change is going to be real. But change is hard. It’s easier to look away, to disengage, to believe that what might be happening in New York or Minneapolis or Seattle has nothing to do with your community. Maybe we need to build equivalent of Norfolk’s Armed Forces Memorial, focused on social justice. After all, you could argue that systemic racism in the U.S. basically BEGAN in the tidewater tobacco plantations of Maryland and Virginia. Acknowledging that — and then working to build a more just and equitable community from the ground up — would probably do a lot more to revive Crisfield than another new waterfront condo complex.