Journalism isn’t just the first draft of history. Sometimes it is the work of adding details that were ignored or erased the first time around. That’s what we’re trying to do here, in our first-ever issue dedicated to Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
The mostly-rural land that lies between the Bay Bridge and Ocean City feels far away from Baltimore City, but the two places are linked in things like food, history, and culture.
“This last little bridge you cross coming here,” Paulette Greene tells writer Amari-Grey Johnson, “that’s the Choptank River, and so all of the logs and whatever came from Caroline County went right at the foot of that bridge. And they were put on boats, and the wood went to Baltimore.”
Partners Greene and Donna Dear are stewards of the land that Harriet Tubman was raised on. They talked to Johnson about their lives together and the legacy they are building on Mount Pleasant Acres Farms.
“For the Aunties, the orientation of the farm as a space for agricultural, historical, and spiritual learning bridges both meanings of the word — saving a history that, in their lives, had often gone unspoken, and making a new history of Black people’s presence on their land,” Johnson writes.
Kylynn Couture picks up the thread of histories unwritten in her piece about growing up in Chestertown and the legacy of The Uptown Club, an Eastern Shore stop on the once-vibrant Chitlin’ Circuit.
“[My grandmother] never spoke of the history that once existed outside of her front door, and she wasn’t alone,” Couture writes. “During that time, local Black history wasn’t something that was highlighted or recognized. This erasure was also assisted by the fact everything surrounding her neighborhood had been “built up” — the rural term for gentrification.”
Rhea Ramakrishnan talks to artist Jason Patterson about his work drawing and painting portraits based on photos from Washington College’s digital archive.
“There’s so much of American history, of African American history, that I think should be fundamentally known, and it is overwhelmingly not known. And to me, the purpose of the work is to make people know those things,” he told Ramakrishnan.
Bry Reed writes about history through food, explaining and exploring the ways her family makes seafood salad.
“Seafood salad is recession-friendly, climate-adaptive cooking. It’s my go-to when the week’s forecast is too hot for any meals requiring the stove or the oven,” Reed writes. “My recipe is different from my mother’s, and I’m sure hers is different from my Granny’s. My mother swears she’s always used wet mustard in hers, and I disagree!”
The Eastern Shore, the place that gave us not only Tubman but Frederick Douglass and Gloria Richardson, is rich in history around organizing and protest. Allana Haynes writes about the centuries-old church that has played a significant part in the movement for Black civil rights.
“Established in 1847, Bethel AME Church is one of the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Churches in Cambridge. Founded by free Black shoemaker Simon Brown and other local trustees of the Cambridge ‘African Methodist Bethel Church,’ the congregation met in wooden structures before constructing its current Gothic Revival brick building in 1903,” she tells us.
Our resident film critic, Dominic Griffin, writes about Baltimore-born multimedia cultural worker Nia Hampton’s film “The Labor/The Luxury.”
“The visuals feel like home, familiar, inviting, and indicative of the ways the mastication of crabs can be a culturally specific balm,” Griffin writes. “But the subject matter of the conversation strikes such a different register. They coexist in a whole that is illuminative and stimulating, setting the viewer on a course in several directions, wanting to pull more and more of the world into their mental orbit, as can happen when you have tough conversations over a pleasant meal with beloved friends and family members.”
We have plenty more of what you have come to expect from us in this issue, too. We have plenty of things for you to do in our calendar and What’s Poppin’. You can find the best of new local music in Best Beats, and our tarotscopes will get you right for the upcoming month.
Thank you so much for reading.
