But Possum was distracted when he clicked on FAVORITES and accidentally pulled up Trooper Truth instead of Captain Bonny. Possum was surprised to see that Trooper Truth had posted yet another essay.
"Now what do you think of that?" Possum excitedly whispered to Popeye, who was snoring on the bed. "Two in the same morning! Man, that Trooper Truth's up to something."
The people of Tangier Island are a secretive, sensitive people who know little about the facts of their origin because, unsurprisingly, when one begins to spin legends and pass down misinformation, he eventually forgets what really happened and believes his own distortions.
Throughout the centuries, the people of Tangier hid the truth of their pirate past, preferring to believe their own legends. One afternoon while disguised as a reporter, I visited the island and talked to a local woman who had dropped by Spanky's because things were slow at the gift shop.
"I guess you get fed up with all these tourists invading your island," I commented to the woman, whose name was and perhaps still is Thelma Parks.
"I don't suffer them poorly when they leave us be," she replied, eyeing me with suspicion.
"And I assume they don't."
"Nah, they don't. The other day, they was in my shop with the video camera and they was videoing me and I wanted none of it."
"Did you tell them not to videotape you?" I inquired, taking notes.
"Nah."
Thelma went on to tell me that she now charges a quarter for all photo opportunities while she works the cash register, and the added income makes it somewhat easier for her to tolerate the host of strangers who seem to find her Tangier gift shop exotic and unlike anything they've ever seen, which is inexplicable, she confided. None of the trinkets, such as the plastic lighthouses, crabs, crab pots, lobsters, fish, skiffs, and so on, are made by hand or in America. In fact, she added, lobsters are not common in the Chesapeake Bay and most islanders have never seen one except on TV or in seafood restaurant ads that regularly run in The Virginian-Pilot newspaper.
From Spanky's, I continued my wanderings and happened by the medical clinic. I stepped inside and found no sign of a dentist, doctor, or nurse-only a lanky young man with blue eyes and a mop of blond hair. He was sitting in the dentist's chair, staring off, lost in reveries and completely unaware of my presence. I assumed he was a patient and the dentist would return momentarily, not realizing that the dentist was, in truth, being held hostage, since neither his abduction nor the threat of civil war had been made public at that time.
"Hello?" I politely announced.
The boy's eyes were glazed and he was unresponsive.
"Are you there?" I asked.
He wasn't.
"I'm wondering if I might find any medical staff who have a minute to talk to me," I said. "I'm working on a history of our nation's beginning and present condition and believe Tangier Island is key."
"The key is in my pocket." He suddenly blinked to and protectively covered his pocket with a hand. When he didn't recognize me, he was startled and jumped up from the chair. "What for are you doing here? I thought I locked the door!" He ran to the door and threw the bolt across.
I heard muffled sounds coming from a back area and the scrape of a chair moving across the floor.
"The dog's back than" The young man indicated the area the sound was coming from.
"Why is he making a chair scrape?" I puzzled. "He tied up to it or something?"
"Yass."
The chair scraped some more.
"It must be stuffy and lonely being tied up in there," I worried, not at all pleased by the idea of a dog tied to a chair inside a clinic. "Why don't we let him out so he can get a little air and attention?"
"That's it!" The young man blocked the doorway leading to the area in question as the chair scraped again. "He bites. That's what for he's tied up. He's the dentist's dog."
"Where's the dentist?"
"Tied up, too."
"Oh, he's busy. Well, maybe I can talk to him another time," I replied. "And what about your- teeth? I see you have braces and it appears you've had several extractions as well. And I'm noticing that your rubber bands keep flying off when you talk."
"That's it!" Fonny Boy covered his mouth with a hand and looked embarrassed. "The dentist, he better mind his step!"
"While we're chatting," I said, edging closer to the table, where a dental chart was out in plain view, "would you mind if I flipped through this chart and see what all you've had done? I assume this is your chart? Is your name Darren Shores?"
"Ever one on Tanger calls me Fonny Boy."
Fonny Boy and I fell into a conversation and he was very well versed in the lore of the island because of his fascination with the history of shipping, especially in the bay. As we got to know each other better and a level of vague trust developed, Fonny Boy got more specific and began to talk about pirates, or picaroons, as he called them. They used to be everywhere, he told me. At one time, there were so many pirate ships off the shores of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas that cities like Charleston were paralyzed. No one dared set sail out of the harbor for fear they would be seized by pirates who thought nothing of killing people in very unpleasant ways.
Fonny Boy went into elaborate detail about Black-beard in particular, whose Christian name was Edward Drummon when he was an honest seaman in his home port of Bristol, England, in the late seventeenth century. When he decided to become a pirate, he changed his name to Edward Teach, which has frequently been misspelled in records as Thatch, Tache, and Tatch. After Queen Anne's War, Blackbeard sailed into Jamaica to go after French ships and began to cultivate the most vile, terrifying persona imaginable to entice other vessels to surrender without a second thought, assuming the warning flags weren't enough. He would braid his long beard into little pigtails and set them on fire with slow-burning matches, Fonny Boy said, and strap pistols, daggers, and a huge cutlass to his waist, and wear additional weapons on the bandoleer across his chest.
Soon enough, Blackbeard and his flotilla began to haunt the North Carolina coast and the Chesapeake Bay. The people of Tangier would hoist the Jolly Roger whenever Blackbeard's ship was spotted nearby, and from time to time the ruthless, evil pirate himself would visit the island and drink Jamaican rum and carouse to his dark heart's content. Nobody wanted him on the island or slept much while he was visiting. Women and children hid inside their homes, and Blackbeard began to suppose that Tangier was an island of men only. This made his visits progressively shorter and less frequent. According to Fonny Boy and almost-nonexistent historical records, Blackbeard was most curious as to how an all-male island had survived down through the decades and could continue.
The answer Blackbeard got was lost forever until a three-hundred-year-old account book was discovered. This extraordinary find, according to legend, somehow made it from Blackbeard's ship Adventure into the attic of a descendant of Alexander Spottswood, the governor of Virginia during Blackbeard's bloody rampages. The account book focused on the disposition of the loot Black-beard took and offered details of his sadistic cruelty and lust for chopping people into pieces and shaking his empty rum cup at the heavens and daring God to defy him. Blackbeard's handwritten entries mentioned one hundred and forty barrels of cocoa and a cask of sugar he had stolen and buried under hay in a North Carolina barn. There was a cryptic reference to buried treasure that only Blackbeard and the devil knew the location of, and to this day it has not been found.