Accomack Spit, The Protected Land

Bay-facing scarps to the east 
bound beds of yellow-orange 
sand and sedge. And broken mollusk valves

stud the loamy fill in this paleochannel 
of the Susquehanna. Pollen records tell 
of pine, spruce, and birch— temperate days

following the violent whoomph 
of a bolide that scooped out 
Chesapeake Bay, leaving a crater

to fill first with seawater 
and then fresh as hundreds of new rivers 
gushed from the continent’s mangled edge.

We’re twelve miles south of Temperanceville, just 
six from Modest Town, closer yet 
to Gargatha, its name a corruption 
of Aramaic Golgotha, “place of 
skulls.” Lackadaisical Parker Creek

curls through the marsh here, 
and as the tide goes out, 
the slick gray mud

of the creek’s 
bank is bared 
like the gum of a snarling dog.

Below the mudflats of cordgrass, 
worms, pea clams, and small 
crabs quiver in place, sludge-coated,

barely visible even to rails or the stalking 
black-necked stilt. There beyond the dock, 
where a dredged pocket of creek widens,

skimmers rake the surface and slo-mo 
cattle-egrets wade the shallows and least 
terns plunge headlong into brown, sun-warm water.

These dreaming, mosquito-riven sixty acres, 
henceforth to be preserved intact, 
were excised over years of inheritance and 
sales from a larger tract of swamp 
and high land that neighbored, to the northwest, 
the plantation of one Benjamin West who found himself

At a Court held in Accomack County 
for the Examination of Moses Riggs on suspition of Murdering 
a negro boy named Stepney Belonging to Benjamin West Junr. on Thursday, November 15, 1770.

Sarah Colony aged twenty one years or thereabouts 
being sworn Saith that about nine o’clock in the morning 
on Tuesday the ninth day of this Instant the said Moses the Prisoner 
came to the house of Benjamin West the elder…and 
had the Barrel of a Gun in his hand 
which was Bloody and had Brains upon it 
and said that Gun was Left him as a Legacy by his Daddy 
and that he had killed the Devil with it 
just Beyond Benjamin West the younger’s fence 
and thrown it in the roadside 
and that there was his Blood and Brains Showing on his trowsers 
and that she [the Deponent] went along with Eliza. West the other witness 
to where the sd. Moses said he had thrown the Devil he had killed 
& saw the negro boy Stepney Lying with his head Beat all to Pieces 
and the Brains in the road and Saw the But end of a Gun 
and Several Broken pieces of a Gun Stock Lying there… 
and that she saw a hole in the Body of the said negro 
which answered to what the said Moses had said 
that he Punched the Muzzle of the said Gun into his Body 
until the Green Poison ran out. And this Deponent 
saith that at the time [Moses] came & related the said Murder 
he seemed to be much out of his senses 
and further saith not. 
             [Signed] Sarah X Colony, her mark

Her mark preserved on the page 
and on the land on which she lived. The land 
which has always belonged to the land. History

is never far below the surface. Those people 
have gone off. We see them 
in our minds, but the sound is off. Our

listening fills in with fragments of our own story 
while the soil swallows rain and gore, pesticides 
and the incessant rupture of plows. This land—

inhabited by a religious people, planters and oystermen 
and shoemakers. In October, Nelson’s Sparrows flicker 
through the marsh. Come winter, skeins of Atlantic Brant

fly in from the east. Clapper rails, heard 
more than seen. In the creek’s meandering bends, 
Southern Two-lined Salamanders breed in what we call

silence. Accomack, a quiet hamlet named 
for the Accawmacke Indians who presently comprise 
less than .9 percent of the population.

I’d like to leave the violence behind. 
Whoever thinks that they themselves 
are the ones who commit the irrevocable? 
Protecting these acres where 
generations of families knew 
happiness and felt connected to 
each other, to the chafe 
of grit between their toes, the 
swamp-muck smell, the shrieks 
of peacocks, is a good thing. I’d 
like to honor the gesture of willing 
this property into conservancy. It 
cannot be subdivided and sold. 
Still, it’s hard to overlook the report 
of the first census in this county 
when a third of the total population 
was enslaved. I imagine I’m not unlike 
the property owners then, thinking 
there’s nothing in me of moral blindness, 
of the torturer’s lust, of a self- 
righteous conviction in the absolute
of my evangelical religion. A lapse
of judgment? I won’t presume 
to speak for others. I’m old enough 
to also want to hold an image clear 
from time’s smudge. To propose 
that a singular, seasonal orchestration 
of birds and crickets and frogs play 
on repeat. To sign my mark to an assurance 
that what I remember won’t disappear. 
And then to sit back and admire the durable 
allure of this place. But even on the un- 
settled land I’ve come to call my own, 
I sometimes feel a low tremor 
beneath what it is I think 
I stand on.

The protected property includes 
a historic farmhouse, a second residence 
called The Tree House. Supporting

structures include a horse barn, 
storage buildings, a paddock, and a seafood kitchen 
down near the dock on Parker Creek.