IN MID-SEPTEMBER OOKER HAS RIGGED THE SREEDEVI FOR scraping, as he does for two or three weeks every year. One morning, after we motor past Uppards’s eastern flank to the few remaining dots of marsh in the shallows below Smith Island, he cuts the engine. We float beside Long Tump, a grassy shelf that no longer lives up to its name; fifty yards long at most, it barely clears the tide. It is quiet here, empty of traffic save for Leon and Short Ed Parks scraping a quarter mile to our north, their boats gleaming bright against the low, ragged green of Smith’s coastline.
The weather has cooled over the past few days on the back of an easterly breeze. Gone is the drenching humidity and brutal heat of the Labor Day weekend, when Ooker was moved to erect a giant rainbow-striped beach umbrella over his steering console. The morning could not be more pleasant. But when Ooker hauls the scrape up and dumps its contents, he finds just three doublers in a tangle of eelgrass. “Before the cold snap, I was getting fourteen, fifteen doublers a lick,” he tells me. “That’s the trouble with the snaps. They feel nice, but they’re no good for the crabs. A shedder wanting a cold snap is like a farmer wanting a drought.”
These are the closing days of the scraping season. As a rule, the shallower the water, the quicker its temperature will shift with changes in the weather, and the sooner crabs will respond. The animals like heat, so scrapers working the shallows are always the first to feel the economic effects of autumn’s chill. Ooker will return to potting in a few days, and at month’s end Leon will lay up his barcat until next May. Even for potters, the season brings changes. Peelers in the shedding tanks will take longer to molt. “In the middle of the summer it might take three days,” Ooker says. “But when the days get short, it can take a week.”
Another lick catches a huge porcupine fish, which islanders call a thorn toad. Like its cousin the northern puffer, it’s self-inflating, but boxier and covered with spikes. “That’ll bite,” Ooker says, grasping the fish with one hand while searching for something to stick in its inch-wide mouth. He comes up with a crab shell. The thorn toad chomps down on the thick piece of exoskeleton and splinters it with a loud crunch. “Don’t want to get a finger stuck in there,” Ooker advises. He lobs the fish overboard.
A few yards to our west, a stained and gouged concrete cylinder rises from the water, the stump of a wooden pole jutting from its top. Fifty yards to the north is another, and beyond that a long chain of them crossing the open water. They’re the remains of an old power line from Tangier to Smith—and the work of a come-here who is still talked about on the island seventy years later.
Henry Jander was a Connecticut building contractor who visited Tangier with his wife, Anne, while on vacation. They were so charmed by the place that they sold their New England home, bought an old house in the marsh below Hog Ridge, and moved here with their children in 1943. At first, islanders were uneasy about the new arrivals. Both were college-educated sophisticates, which were in short supply on Hog Ridge. They shared a yen for art and classical music. And their surname sounded suspiciously German. A war was on.
But Henry Jander turned out to be a handy man to have around, and soon found himself elected to the town council. When the old electrical plant failed, he took the lead in trying to get service restored, making the island’s case to the Rural Electrification Administration. He was rebuffed—the REA judged Tangier too small to warrant its help—so Jander and other town leaders sold shares in a town-owned system, promising to repay their investors with interest. They raised enough money to build a new Meat Soup powerhouse equipped with two war-surplus generators. When Jander couldn’t track down transformers for the system, he went back to the REA. While the agency didn’t produce the equipment he needed, it took another look at Tangier’s situation. Smith Island, it noted, was also in the hunt for help, and the REA saw that by combining the two populations, it could create a customer base that qualified for federal assistance.
With that, the Chesapeake Islands Electric Cooperative was born. By 1947, these poles, girded with concrete, carried power lines across Uppards and the crabbing grounds to Smith. Tangier’s lights returned that winter.
THAT IT TOOK an outsider to lead the drive for electricity illuminates a curious aspect of the Tangier character, one that natives readily acknowledge: As individuals, the islanders are fiercely independent and self-sufficient—modern-day cowboys, or so they like to think. As a group, however, they show precious little initiative. “Nobody wants to jump in and volunteer,” Anna Pruitt-Parks told me one day at the firehouse. “People seem to think that, ‘Okay, you got elected to the town council, you take care of it,’ especially if getting involved gets in the way of being on the water.”
I heard much the same from Nina Pruitt, the school principal. “When people come from the county or state and we have a meeting, maybe thirty or forty people might come to it, and twenty of them will be aged sixty-five or over. And you have to imagine that all those officials go home thinking, ‘Why should we spend all that money on so few people, and all of them so old?’”
Denny Crockett, the former principal, figures that the island’s faith might play a role in its lack of gumption. “We’re a very religious community, and I think that sometimes we put it in God’s hands,” he said. “We do believe that God takes care of things.” But, he acknowledged, “there’s also the view that sometimes God expects us to take care of ourselves.”
The collective lethargy, or apathy, or whatever you choose to call it, showed itself early in the summer, when the grapevine carried word that homecoming had been canceled. Much lamentation followed, for homecoming is the island’s biggest party, a days-long affair that draws those who’ve moved away back to their birthplace. This time, the one Tangierman who put it together every year couldn’t manage the job. No one offered to step in.
I saw it again one summer afternoon in the Situation Room, when those assembled discussed a rumor that the state might cancel the 2016–17 oyster-dredging season, an important source of wintertime income. “There ain’t no question that they can do it,” Leon growled. “They can do anything they want, any time they want. But I thought there’d be more talk about it than they’re doing.”
“There ought to be,” Allen Ray said.
“Somebody better call somebody,” Ernest Ed Parks said, “and find out.”
Bruce Gordy: “That’d be a good way to start.”
Allen Ray: “We need one man to go down there who can talk.”
“Need a man with education,” Leon said.
Jerry Frank Pruitt entered the room. Leon asked whether he’d heard the rumor. “Yeah,” Jerry Frank replied. “I know that Billy Boy”—William Ayers Pruitt, a Tangier-born former head of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission—“put on the website that we’d all better get down to the meeting. I think it’s Wednesday. It’s very important for people to go. They’re talking about stopping oystering in Virginia.”
“What are they thinking?” Leon wondered.
“Don’t know,” Jerry Frank replied.
I spoke up. “So, who will go?”
“Somebody should,” Allen Ray said.
“Somebody needs to go,” Jerry Frank agreed.
“But who will do it?” I asked.
Allen Ray: “Somebody should.”
Me: “Will you go?”
“Well,” Allen Ray said, “somebody should.”
At its meeting two days later, the VMRC didn’t suspend the season after all, but not because Tangiermen spoke against the idea. Not one islander showed up.
OOKER PULLS UP his scrape and we motor north, into a wide expanse of shallow water that crabbers call the Knoll. “Like the one in Dallas, the grassy knoll,” he tells me. “Only here it’s seagrass, of course.” The line of stumped power poles glides by to our west, forming a de facto dividing line between bay and sound. Just to our south, where the poles crossed Goose Island, is where Elmer Crockett brushed a drooping wire with his head while hunting geese, and Half-Ass Buck saved his life. Used to be that the wire ran north to the southern shore of Smith Island, then across its marshy underside to a powerhouse in Ewell, the biggest of its three villages. In the intervening decades, however, Smith’s southern coast has retreated to the north and east. Now the poles run a straight line into a patch of open water and stop.
One has to wonder how long Tangier would have endured life without electricity, had not Henry Jander intervened. One must wonder, too, how many islanders would have succumbed to illness or accident without the health center in which the Situation Room meets. It would not have been built without Oscar J. Rishel, one of Swain Memorial’s come-here pastors, who spearheaded the project after suffering a heart attack in the parsonage. His personal advocacy with Virginia officials brought the well-equipped building to Tangier in 1957.
Rishel also played a principal role in finding a doctor to staff the building. Dr. Charles Gladstone, a general practitioner who arrived to treat the sick during the worldwide flu pandemic of 1918, had stuck around for thirty-six years, earning his keep by charging a small weekly subscription fee from every household. When Gladstone announced his retirement, the pastor led the scramble to find his replacement. The task occupied Rishel and state medical officials for four years before Dr. Mikio Kato—a thirty-three-year-old bachelor from Kobe, Japan—arrived in April 1957. It was Kato who delivered Ooker at his parents’ home in King Street in July of the following year.
Jander and Rishel were among a parade of come-heres who accomplished what Tangier was unable or unwilling to do for itself. The most beloved, hands down, was Dr. David B. Nichols, who started visiting Tangier on his days off in the late 1970s, when the island hadn’t had a resident doctor for more than a decade. Nichols, who ran a family practice on the western shore, was the next best thing. He came every week for the next thirty-one years.
Nichols grew to so love the island that he learned to fly helicopters and had a helipad built beside his mainland practice, the better to shorten the trip. In addition to treating virtually every Tangierman, he hired Inez Pruitt and mentored her transformation from high school dropout to physician’s assistant, encouraging her to obtain first her GED, then a degree from the University of Maryland, and, finally, to navigate the labyrinth of state licensing. Nichols also helped lay the groundwork for the new $1.4 million David B. Nichols Health Center, which opened in September 2010. He died of cancer four months later, at age sixty-two, but his modern clinic is still staffed weekly by a fly-in doctor and is otherwise in Inez’s capable hands.
Another part-timer saved the P’int. In 1959, George Randolph “Randy” Klinefelter, a Pennsylvania insurance executive and avid sailor, bought the islet and renamed it Port Isobel for his wife. Over the ensuing years, Klinefelter filled the marshy island’s center with shipped-in soil and planted a thick forest of pines on its now-solid ground. Had he not done so, much of the P’int would have vanished by now, leaving Tangier’s east side unprotected. Klinefelter bought Watts Island, too, which was fast crumbling into Tangier Sound. When he found that its cemetery was washing away, he rescued the gravestones and created a monument to the Parker family, who farmed the island in the nineteenth century, in the woods at Port Isobel.
Finally, in 1988, Klinefelter donated the 250-acre P’int, and a lovely retreat he’d built on its shore, to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. In doing so, CBF told its members, he “opened up a treasured and historic piece of the Chesapeake to thousands of students, teachers, and citizens.” Klinefelter served on the CBF’s board for eleven years. Upon his death in 2007, the organization mourned the loss of “a friend, trustee, and one-of-a-kind donor.” That he was.
Perhaps no come-here had as lasting an impact on Tangier, from so short a stay, as Susan Drake Emmerich. She moved to the island in June 1997, when the relationship between Tangiermen and the CBF was at its worst—and no surprise, because objectively speaking, islanders were poor stewards of their island and its waters. The marshes were studded with their discarded kitchen appliances, bicycles, and outboard motors. Litter made eyesores of the ridges. Watermen routinely threw trash, including motor oil, overboard; the harbor’s shallows had acquired a sharp-smelling and colorful sheen. And Tangiermen had nothing but enmity for environmentalists, who warned that the bay’s blue crab population was overfished, teetering on collapse, and would rebound only with tighter regulation of the commercial harvest.
Emmerich, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, came armed with powerful ideas for improving the fishery, the island’s long-term economy, and communications between the watermen and CBF. First idea: that the bay was God’s creation and its stewardship a Christian duty—and that Tangier’s ingrained disregard for the environment thus conflicted with its beliefs. Second: that the CBF and government officials overlooked the importance of faith in their dealings with the island, much to everyone’s sorrow.
Over a few short months, Emmerich challenged the islanders to examine their relationship with the bay and its bounty, and to bring their behavior on the water into compliance with the scriptural teachings they otherwise strove to follow. The effort culminated in fifty-eight Tangier watermen—Ooker among them—signing a Watermen’s Stewardship Covenant, in which they pledged to obey the laws of God and man. That meant following fishery, boat, and pollution regulations, and supporting one another in times of doubt and duress. Many of the island’s women signed a stewardship commitment of their own. Emmerich also fostered dialogue among islanders, regulators, and the CBF that made plain to all that they’d been talking past one another.
The fifty-eight who signed the covenant constituted just over a third of the island’s licensed watermen, and they found themselves harassed and ostracized by the majority. Emmerich herself encountered fiercer resistance. Behind her back, Tangiermen threatened to kill her and to run her off the island. They were only slightly less brazen to her face: At a New Testament gathering she later compared to a witch trial, she was castigated as an “Earth-worshiper,” a “distorter of scripture,” and even as a “beguiler.”
Nevertheless, a March 1998 conference Emmerich organized on Tangier for watermen, state and federal officials, scientists, and environmental activists was a success. It gave Tangiermen a venue for sharing their “vision for environmental, economic, and cultural stewardship—based on their faith, an integral part of who they are as people, and how they relate to the natural world,” she wrote in her dissertation. As for environmentalists and officials, “hearing the Tangiermen’s testimonies of transformation enabled them to recognize, for the first time, the centrality of the Tangiermen’s faith to their view of their environment and of the world.”
If one were to pinpoint when relations between the island and CBF began swinging positive, it would be that conference. Same goes for the island’s appearance. Though it’s still pretty disheveled in places, Tangier is far cleaner and tidier today than when I first visited. Its people turn out in numbers for organized cleanups of the guts and marshes, and watermen are likely as not to bag their trash and bring it ashore. Small gains, perhaps, but they started with the work and the courage of Susan Emmerich.
FIVE YEARS AFTER Emmerich’s departure, the Kayes arrived.
“Yeah, the Kayes,” Ooker says when I bring them up, and although I expect him to say more, he merely sighs. Doctors Neil and Susan Kaye are a complicated subject on Tangier—even for Ooker, who was close to them, and whose four daughters were closer still; Devi even lived with the Kayes on the mainland for a year, and still refers to them as “a second set of parents.”
Mention the Kayes to most islanders, and the response is almost always something like: They were good people who loved the island and who did a lot of good while they were there. They were generous with their money, their time, and their sweat. They midwifed positive change. “I’ll tell you what,” former mayor and town manager Danny McCready told me, “if Dr. Neil were still here, we’d have that jetty by now.”
Likewise, ask islanders why the Kayes left Tangier, and their answers tend to follow a predictable course. “You can’t come into a community and try to change it,” said one of the Kayes’ close neighbors, Hanson Thomas. “That weren’t going to work with the island.”
“You’ve got to adapt to our ways,” Eugenia Pruitt said. “I think that’s where the Kayes went wrong. When they first come, they were a lot like Mr. Jander—they wanted to help the island. But then they tried to change it.”
“We loved the Kayes, then didn’t,” said Lisa Crockett, my own next-door neighbor. “That’s how we’ll do. If you do something to cross us, you won’t stay here.”
Cross Tangier is exactly what the Kayes managed to do, even after they spent years making themselves all but indispensable to the place. They seemed unlikely émigrés, these New York natives. He Jewish, she Catholic, they’d spent most of their married life in Wilmington, Delaware, and first touched down on the island in September 2002. Neil, a psychiatrist, had just earned his private pilot’s license in helicopters and was at the controls of their first of many choppers. Susan, a pathologist, was along for the ride.
“They were extremely friendly,” Neil said of the islanders they met. “They were welcoming. The physical beauty of the place is unbelievable. You have a mile and a half of beach to yourself, and it’s pristine. The town is cute. There are birds everywhere. The wildlife of that island is just outstanding.”
“We were both taken by it,” Susan recalled. “When you first go there you don’t see the bad, underbelly stuff.”
The Kayes had been in the market for a weekend home and found one on the Eastern Shore a few miles south of Onancock. After closing the deal, they flew to Tangier for celebratory crab cakes, and on a post-dinner stroll they passed a brick rambler for sale on Hog Ridge, just a few doors from the beach. The mainland place suddenly seemed a mistake; they changed their minds on that house and closed on the island property in August 2003. “Tangier was a terrible investment,” Neil told me thirteen years later. “It was already sinking and disappearing. But we thought it would be an easy place to sneak off to on weekends. We had no intention of getting involved in the community at all.”
That changed when Hurricane Isabel raked the Chesapeake a few days after they moved in. “We had a chain saw and lent the chain saw to people,” Susan said. “We took the mayor up [in the chopper] so he could take pictures for FEMA.” Neil flew to the Eastern Shore for more chain saws and handed them out to their new neighbors. Though grateful, the islanders were mystified by the pair. That didn’t change.
That fall, the Kayes stepped up their involvement. “They have proposed an idea of doing a genealogy of the entire island,” the minutes of the town council’s November 2003 meeting reported. “The end result would be to place the Tangier Island Family Tree on the side of the Rec Center as a conversation piece.” The report included a line that would characterize much of the couple’s island activity: “They have indicated that they would fund the effort.”
Sure enough, the Kayes assembled an immense computer printout of the family tree with the help of schoolteacher Donna Crockett, herself a come-here. The years-long effort culminated when they installed the printout around the inside of the rec center in 2010. Islanders still talk about it.
In the meantime, Susan led a drive to create a library. The couple bought a sixteen-by-twenty-foot shed, installed it on Hog Ridge, and filled it with books. It opened in December 2005. At about the same time, they launched and paid for an artist-in-residence program that drew painter Ken Castelli to Tangier. The Kayes also sought to remedy a problem they had noticed soon after their arrival: The island lacked public restrooms. When they learned the town had not followed through on a state grant to build a visitors’ center, they won permission to commandeer the project. Early in 2007, they applied for money for a museum of island history and culture, along with a system of walking and paddling trails. With Castelli’s help, they built out a closed King Street gift shop to house the new attraction. “We’d go down every weekend and work,” Neil said.
“Work,” Susan emphasized.
The museum opened in June 2008 to justified praise: It tells the story of Tangier’s past and cultural quirks, but even more it effectively captures the island’s ongoing struggle with the bay. Among the highlights are Castelli’s wonderfully detailed map of Tangier, occupying an entire wall, and a backlit exhibit of the island’s shrinking footprint that is rendered in colored film on multiple layers of Plexiglas. “It began with the quest for the bathrooms,” Neil said, “and a museum just happened to go along with the bathrooms.”
The Kayes designed and ordered trash cans shaped like the old Tangier Lighthouse and placed them around town. They created a walking history trail spotlighting the island’s older homes. And their good works took more personal forms. Neil, who was licensed to practice medicine in Virginia, offered free psychiatric care to a few islanders, whose kin cite his intervention as lifesaving. He flew the sick to mainland hospitals at no charge, ferried equipment during emergencies, and offered helicopter joyrides during the annual homecoming celebration. When Ooker’s son Joseph asked him to photograph his wedding, Neil said yes—and served as photographer at Tangier weddings for years after. The photo in Swain Memorial of the rainbow descending on the church is his, too.
By any measure, the Kayes were terrific neighbors and a boon to the community. Which makes what happened later all the more frustrating.
IN APRIL 2009, the couple found themselves the subject of, as they put it, a “classic Tangier rumor.” That spring they were immersed in a new project: trying to establish a government-subsidized, year-round ferry link with Onancock. This made sense, they figured, because the town’s reliance on Crisfield denied it ready access to the Virginia services it supported with its tax dollars, from substance abuse treatment to driving tests.
But the effort stirred a deep and long-standing fear among Tangiermen about their school and its drain on rural, cash-strapped Accomack County. In 2009 the school’s thirteen teachers taught eighty students, giving Tangier Combined one of the lowest pupil-teacher ratios in the state, at 6.2—lower by half than any other school in the district.
Islanders had long assumed that the only thing keeping the county from transferring their kids to mainland schools was the expensive and difficult commute across Tangier and Pocomoke sounds. But if the state were already running a ferry and paying for it—what then? “If the mailboat went to Onancock,” Nina Pruitt told me, “maybe our schoolchildren would be on it.”
So it was no small matter when word circulated not that the Kayes were trying to start a ferry service, but that they were trying to close the school. As is typical with island rumors, it spread like lightning and was treated as fact before the couple learned of it. “A lot of people got pissed off,” Neil said. He and Susan responded with an open letter to the town, which they posted in the grocery store, the post office, and on telephone poles around the island. “This is not true,” they wrote. “We are 100% in favor of children being in school on Tangier from K–12, of the school being fully funded, of grades being kept separate, and of Tangier students getting all of the same benefits and opportunities that all children in the state receive.”
As the Kayes saw it, kids wouldn’t be schooled on the mainland, with or without a ferry. No matter how big the boat, it would have to contend with the Chesapeake’s darker moods, and the district couldn’t well have its students getting seasick on their way to class or racking up absences due to rough weather and ice. So the couple continued with the ferry project for another three months, until the town council voted unanimously that it wanted no part of the idea.
Folks got exercised, too, when the Kayes “floated the idea that Tangier could go to the government and get bought out,” Neil told me. From their helicopter he and Susan could see the effects of climate change unfolding week by week, and the island’s eventual fate seemed plain. They suggested that the town make itself “a model for how you relocate a community. We might be able to move Tangier as a block.” This idea upset many.
So islanders already had a few qualms about the Kayes to go along with their admiration and gratitude when, one Saturday afternoon in August 2010, Susan opened Facebook while at home in Wilmington and saw a photo of the newly repainted Tangier water tower. As with the old paint scheme, Tangier’s name faced north and south. New to the tank’s east side was a big orange crab. Facing west was a startling addition: an enormous budded cross, its four tips ending in trefoils. She showed it to Neil.
“I was pretty horrified,” he said. It seemed clear to both that the cross violated the separation of church and state: It had been painted at the town’s behest on a tower that had been built with government money and was maintained at public expense. And besides being unlawful, it was bound to make many tourists uncomfortable, as it did them. “When I was in first grade, I was the only Jewish kid in my class,” Neil said. “One of my friends had a birthday party. It was at a country club. They had no Jewish members. So I was the only one of my friends who wasn’t invited to the party. I am passionate in my opposition to this sort of thing—to religious bigotry and exclusion.”
Neil banged out an email to the town council:
I just saw the photo of the water tower painted with a cross. I am asking you to repaint this. As a Jew, it is offensive. Further, it may be illegal. As the Constitution requires a separation of Church and State, if any public funds were used to paint this, it would be a breach of that sacred separation and will bring a lawsuit against the Town as soon as others who are also upset take note.
While I have deep respect for all religions and everyone’s right to practice his/her own brand of religion, Tangier should not be taking a stance on religion in this manner. . . .
Citizens are free to erect crosses in their yards, to build temples, churches, mosques, sweat lodges, perform rituals, sacrifices, or whatever else they want. But, Town sponsored public displays endorsing a particular religion are a different situation.
In hindsight, his use of the word “offensive” in the opening paragraph was probably a mistake, because when news of the dispute raced through town, it was distilled to The Kayes called the cross offensive, which was all that many Tangiermen needed to hear. Within hours, the island’s greatest benefactors were personae non gratae. “It was pretty clear that they saw it as attacking their religion,” Neil said. He and Susan tried to clarify their objections to the paint scheme and offered to pay to have the cross modified into an anchor. The islanders weren’t interested. At a town council meeting a few days later, Ooker announced that “the cross would not be taken off unless ordered to by a judge,” according to the minutes. The vote backing him up was unanimous.
“Verbally, we were told by at least one member of the town council that if we insisted that the cross come down, we were ‘done.’ We took that threat seriously,” Neil said. “It also probably caused us to reflect a little more—and we reflected on the whole crazy experience of Tangier. We realized that going to Tangier was some sort of calling and that probably the cross thing was the signal that our calling was over.”
A week after their Facebook discovery and seven years after setting up house on the island, the Kayes again emailed the town council. “Our time on Tangier has come to an end,” they wrote. “We realize that we cannot live under the shadow of the cross, and we know we also cannot live under the shadow of the hard feelings if the cross were removed. We have chosen instead to move off and sell our home.” The next day, they were packed up and gone.
The conventional wisdom on Tangier holds that a host of other, more complicated issues, unconnected to island government, provoked the Kayes to leave and that the cross was merely a handy excuse. As Anna Pruitt-Parks observed, the tower’s new paint scheme could hardly have been much of a surprise, as “Tangier was notoriously famous in our Christian faith.”
But not only do the Kayes say the cross, and only the cross, drove them away, their emails and journal entries from the period offer compelling testimony that the conventional wisdom has it wrong. Five days before the couple’s Facebook discovery, Neil, a faithful diarist, wrote that they’d bought lamps for their Tangier house. Just hours before finding the cross online, he wrote that they’d bought a painting for the place. Neither seems the action of people already mulling a move. After that, Neil’s diary abruptly shifts in tone. His entry for the day after the town council’s vote reads: “Susan and I are struggling to comprehend the enormity of leaving Tangier.” The next day’s reads: “Devastated.”
When I asked Ooker about the controversy, he told me that the town council never considered taking the cross down. “We heard from some who didn’t like it, who said they thought it looked like a Catholic cross. But that one’s staying there,” he said. “Me and some other citizens, we decided that if they took us to court, they’d have to paint over it. And if they paint over it, we’d take turns climbing up there and painting a new one.” Ooker also told me that the idea for the cross came from Dr. David Nichols, the town’s beloved “Doctor Copter”: “He said, ‘I think you should have a crab and a cross. Those are the two things that make you who you are.’”
The Kayes, who counted Nichols as a friend, heard the same thing, and brought it up in a September 2010 email to the doctor. “We later learned that you had suggested the designs to represent the pillars of the community, faith and crabs,” they wrote. “We in no way hold you responsible for any of what transpired. But, it freaked us out.”
Nichols replied a few days later. “I did mention to one of the Tangier clinic staff, when asked, that the Crab and Cross would be representative of the community,” he wrote. “I must admit the notion of separation of church and state never came to my mind, but of course you are correct in this fortunate constitutional fact. I also was remiss in not thinking how this would impact all the islanders including yourselves. I understand your concerns and for this I sincerely apologize.”
Eight years later, the cross remains.
So does the museum. So do the library, the trash cans, the historical markers.
The Kayes have been back just once, for Dr. Nichols’s memorial service.