Summer of ’68: Crab Feast by Lisa R. Roy
Photo credit: Photo provided by Lisa R. Roy. The picture is of the author eating crab in Maryland, summer 2021.
For my family, summer in Turner Station was synonymous with crab feasts, with newspaper on the picnic table loaded with mallets, metal crackers and picks, and beer for the adults. Our small town outside of Baltimore City sat on a river and erupted with various hues of green from the trees, bushes, and grasses. The bright golden sun was situated as a spotlight in the true-blue skies, the white cotton-ball clouds shaped like circus animals. The breeze from the river was pungent yet salty. As the oldest grandchild and child in the Scotland and Drexel Harris clan, I would learn to eat crabs—or not eat at all—during this sacred and frenzied tradition.
My grandparents’ yard, where we held the crab feasts, was a right triangle. Their white, two-story, asbestos-shingled house, with its sun porch and den, was parallel to the base of the triangle and faced the street of the perpendicular side of the triangle. Across the street was a tall chain-link fence, bordering what was formerly the sports fields for Sollers Point High School. All the schools in our community were closed by the “powers that be” due to desegregation. Many Black teachers and principals lost their jobs because White students refused to be bussed to Turner Station, so we were bussed to White schools, split by income and taught by predominately White female teachers. Middle-class, home-owning Blacks went to Dundalk Elementary with middle-class White students, and students who lived in multi-units and rentals went to the working-class White elementary school. Sollers Point High School, across the street from my grandparents, became a trade school mostly for Whites, preparing them for professions at Bethlehem Sparrows Point Shipyard, where my grandfather worked as a crane operator.
The third side of my grandparents’ yard was lined with the backyards of New Shiloh Baptist Church and several houses. The tip of the triangle pointed to the third house that my great-grandparents, Cicero and Ida Franklin Harris, owned. They were part of the great migration. They sold the ten acres they inherited from my great-great-grandparents, Osborne and Delia Harris, rented an extremely large house for their family of twelve, and leased space to two single men, a couple, and a family of five in the 1930s. By the 1940s they bought another large house down the street that would meet their needs and those of their ten children. By 1968, my great-aunt Maude (an invalid as they called her back then, bound to a wheelchair with rheumatoid arthritis), her husband William Drewitt, and my great-uncles Cleveland (a mute) and James Harris were still living there. My grandfather, Scotland Harris, was the youngest of their children.
Ida Mae Toney, my grandfather’s niece, worked for my great-grandfather, Professor John W. Bruner, the superintendent of colored schools in Frederick, Maryland. Following her graduation from Wilberforce University (our nation’s oldest, private, historically Black college), Ida Mae was recruited to teach with my grandmother Drexel Bruner, my grandmother’s paternal aunts and sisters, and my great-grandmother Jeannette Offutt Bruner. Ida became the catalyst and matchmaker, introducing my grandparents to each other. The pairing resulted in my grandmother moving to Turner Station to marry my grandfather and having six children. Knowing my family history has taught me the importance of telling the stories of Black America in all its facets. History books only teach about slavery and the Civil Rights movement—if you are lucky. My family history illustrates the limited narrative of free Blacks and their contributions as pioneers within the United States.
My grandmother, Drexel Fredrica Bruner Harris, hated Turner Station; she felt stuck in this segregated part of the world. Though Turner Station was self-sufficient with its own Black doctors, stores, plumbers, bars, and nightclubs, she felt it was not as cultured as Frederick, where her family had been landowners among White families since the 1700s. My grandmother’s place of birth was not as segregated as Turner Station, though she did attend and teach in segregated schools. Her greatest personal comfort was her garden, which lay on the side of the house at the base of the triangle and along the fence facing the trade school. Like her mother before her, my grandmother loved roses, and she had many types. As a young child, I personally hated her red, yellow, pink, and white roses because I could not touch them without being pricked by thorns, and as a bonus, they made me sneeze my head off. The beauty and scent of these flowers was not worth the pain and suffering. I much more preferred dandelions to roses and contributed to their spread in the yard—causing my grandmother great consternation.
The picnic table was near the back door, closest to the church, and next to her white and yellow lilies. We had a tree bush there for shade and to give us a little privacy; otherwise, Reverend Everett might come to get a few of our crabs. This picnic table was where all my memories of eating crabs come from, starting in 1968 as a five-year-old and then annually until I moved to Denver in 1981. I would visit a few more times, such as when I married my now ex-husband in 1984, before my grandmother’s death in 1994.
Blue crabs, known as Callinectes sapidus (Latin for “beautiful swimmer”), are regional to Maryland, in and around the Chesapeake Bay. These crabs were always plentiful in the summers of my youth. One choice my family had to make when buying or catching them was if we wanted males or females, or a combination. Males are known as “jimmies” and have an apron with an inverted T, while the mature females, “sooks,” have a broad, rounded apron and red-tipped claws. I preferred female crabs because they are usually sweeter, but I never turned down any crabs.
What made our Maryland crabs so unique and delicious was that they are known to eat clams, oysters, and mussels. Our Blue crabs go through several molting and metamorphosis stages over a twelve- to eighteen-month cycle. My dad loved fried “softshell” (molting) crabs. Dad did not want to fight with his food, and if it was fried, even better! According to ChesapeakeBay.net the predators of blue crabs are large fish (croakers and red drum), fish-eating birds (like blue herons), and sea turtles. Humans and my family members were not listed on the website. Imagine that! In fact, if it were up to any member of my family, the crab would never make it to the end of its three-year life span.
Unlike our Louisiana cousins who boil crabs, we Marylanders steam them, and we use Old Bay seasoning with its eighteen herbs and spices. If you run out of Old Bay…well, let’s just say: don’t! Supposedly, the recipe for Old Bay has never been disclosed, but the rectangular yellow box with the red top and a picture of a crab, a shrimp, and baked chicken on a blue strip lists the ingredients as celery salt, red and black pepper, and paprika. Gustav Brunn is credited with creating the spice in 1939 for his Baltimore Spice Company. McCormick bought the spice company in 1990 and some claim they changed the recipe. I think it tastes the same as it did with my first memory of eating crabs seasoned in Old Bay in 1968.
I remember it like it was yesterday. One summer afternoon, my mother’s youngest brother, Uncle Mike, who was ten years older than me, proudly carried a bushel of live crabs into my grandparents’ kitchen and placed them on the large art deco metal-and-laminate table, but the entire bushel got knocked over. The crabs ran everywhere: behind the refrigerator and stove, and under the kitchen table. As an eight-year-old, I stood on the chair, scared that they would attack me. My grandmother was yelling “Oh my!” while my uncle ran around grabbing crabs with his hands and putting them in the steaming pot. I am not sure if it was me screeching or the crabs. I wondered for years if there were crabs hiding out somewhere behind the oven or the refrigerator, but that day I was not so scared as to miss out on my fair share of the feast.
Eating crabs requires skill. I was taught to rip off the legs first and suck off the exposed meat, putting the legs to the side to devour later. I then turned the body of the crab over with its top shell (cephalothorax) on the table and its underside (abdomen) facing up, and pried the apron open with my fingernail, like a ring pull on a tin can of tuna. This maneuver opened the crab by separating the cephalothorax from the abdomen. With the top shell removed, the gills, heart, digestive gland, gastric muscles, fat (mustard), and, potentially, roe from the female crabs were exposed. I pulled all these organs out like a surgeon, being warned by my uncle that the alien sea-creature-looking gills would make me sick. As I scooped out the mustard and the eggs, I learned to leave a little mustard behind because it tasted great with the spices and the meat. Next came the reward: I took the meat out of the various compartments of the crab’s inner shell. I preferred to do this all by hand but occasionally I used the metal picks. The goal was to hold your own and eat as many crabs as possible. I did not talk and eat, as it wasted time and could lead to choking. Once I finished the body, I started all over again. My hands were covered with Old Bay seasoning, which again mixed perfectly with the sweet crab meat.
When the entire crab pile had been decimated and replaced with carcasses, it was time to eat the claws and the legs. I snapped apart the claws (chelipeds) at the joints (dactyl, propodus, merus, and carpus) and sometimes the meat was right there, and there was no need to dig into the claw or break it. The claws had more meat than the walking (pereopods) and swimming legs. I learned to just suck on the legs if they were not big enough to warrant the work. I dropped a leg on the floor. My uncle stuttered, as he did when he was excited or upset: “you . . . you . . . have to eat some dirt before . . . before . . . you . . . you die.”
The only childlike concession at the crab feast was the cartoon newsprint on the table. Although there were no Black people in the “funnies,” as we called them, Lil’ Abner and Archie kept us entertained between the bites, cuts, and bruises earned from battling with a dead crab for its sweet, succulent meat.
Uncle Mike was not only the chef, but the DJ. He blasted all the hit 45s from 1968 on his record player: “Dance to the Music” by Sly and the Family Stone, “La-La Means I Love You” by the Delfonics, “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells, and a Harris family favorite—James Brown’s “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.” That year was tough for the adults in my life; both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Rallies, protests, and police shootouts were commonplace. But my family also celebrated some incredible firsts that year: Arthur Ashe became the first African American to win the U.S. Open and Private First-Class James Anderson became the first African American to receive the Medal of Honor, for sacrificing his life by jumping on an enemy grenade. Of note, there were many African Americans who sacrificed their lives before this, including members of my family during the Civil War, but this was the first true acknowledgment of such a sacrifice.
My hometown of Turner Station, Maryland, is on the Patapsco River, which flows into the Chesapeake Bay. It is nestled between Dundalk Marine Terminal, Riverside Power Plant, the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and Grey’s Landfill (formerly Sparrow Point/Bethlehem Steel Mill and Shipyard). White and Black employees and students worked and learned together but were separated by tracks and invisible boundaries when returning home at the end of the day. What we shared across color lines was that we lived on the water but could not swim in it. The river was toxic. As children we learned it was not safe after my brother Stephen’s friend (who could also have been a relative, as he was a Harris) drowned in the sludge and sink holes caused by oil leaks in the river. We, Black and White, all went crabbing in our respective neighborhoods, using raw chicken in the four-door metal cages, or setting up two poles with a line and up to five strings with pieces of raw chicken wings. We were all eating the same toxins from the companies our families worked for.
Since becoming an adult, I’ve learned that the Chesapeake Bay is even more polluted than we realized when Stephen’s friend drowned, by a whopping 72 percent, mostly with PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), lead, and mercury. Shellfish eat these pollutants off the bay floor. As we were eating these delicious crabs, we were also ingesting carcinogens that increased our risk for cancer. Our favorite food, the water we drank, the vegetables my grandmother grew in her garden, and the air we breathed—all contributed to health risks. Every member of my family that attended our crab feast in the summer of 1968 has died, is dying, or has been diagnosed and treated for some form of cancer.
I find it ironic that in 1951, years before my first crab feast or even my birth, Johns Hopkins Hospital stole Henrietta Lacks’s cancer cells and used them to create the HeLa cell line. Corporations have made billions of dollars doing medical research, and yet there is still no cure for cancer. I am proud of her, as a Black woman, for her contributions to science, yet I mourn the lack of compassion for her life and death. She became immortal without her consent.
Interestingly enough, cancer is Latin for crab, and the crab is the zodiac sign for Cancer. The story in Greek mythology has the crab pinching Heracles as he battles with Hydra. The crab is crushed by Heracles but rewarded by Hera (Wife of Zeus, and Heracles’s enemy). In lore, Hera places the crab as a constellation of stars in the heavens. In reality, the multinational corporations and researchers sent a Turner Station resident’s cells into space without her or her family’s permission or knowledge on both Sputnik and the Discoverer XVIII satellite in 1960. Henrietta Lacks’s cancer cells are alive and have floated with the crab and other stars in the heavens. As I ate crabs under these stars while visiting Maryland during the pandemic, and as a fifty-eight-year-old mother and grandmother, I told myself, “Moderation is key!” If I don’t eat them all the time, I should be okay, right? If I just eat them a couple times a year by myself or with my dying aunt, I can keep that connection to home and the memory of what made crab feasts special as a child—crack, break, pile, eat, smile.
My grandchildren will never know the pleasure of the Harris family tradition of eating crabs under the white cotton-ball clouds, nor of listening to “Dance to the Music” on Uncle Mike’s record player. I have made a commitment that I will not risk the health of my loved ones by sharing my love of cracking crabs on newspaper. For now, we barbecue and eat ribs, hot links, kosher hot dogs, burgers, and chicken while we listen to music on Uncle Jason’s or Uncle James’s smart phone and the laughter of my grandchildren playing with each other in my backyard in Omaha. They, like me, can listen to stories about their ancestors and eat delicious, maybe healthier, food. I know we will build our own memories that are full of the hope and the promise of 1968.
Lisa R. Roy, Ed.D., is the Director of Program Development at the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska. She has a doctorate in educational equity from the University of Colorado Denver and is currently finishing her Graduate Certificate in Advanced Writing from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Lisa is proud of her culture, heritage, and history and hopes that her grown children and grandchildren will carry on her legacy.
