The Crab Co-op in Tylerton, Maryland, is like a mini-encapsulation of Smith Island’s culture. Throughout much of the year, jobs drawn along traditional gender lines put men out to sea in search of seafood, and the women stay together on land. The work world of women at the Crab Co-op is made up of manual labor and the telling of yarns by the women who own it. These women, who pick crabs on large metal tables, have a reputation, broadcast in news articles and tourism guide books, for their harmonious hymns, and for a three dollar donation you can sit and listen and taste fresh crab meat steamed on the premises.
On the day of this writer’s visit Linda Kellogg, who co-owns the Inn of Silent Music B & B made a surprise visit to present crab picker Louise Clayton with a birthday cake. The women offered a rousing, fast-paced rendition of “Happy Birthday,” in which the name “Louise,” was substituted with, “God bless you.” Why? “You get to be her age and you need all the blessings you can get!” one of the pickers, Robin Corbin, teased.
Dora Corbin has been picking crabs for over 30 years. In the early days, she picked in her kitchen. And there weren’t many other opportunities to make a living. “Ladies outside the school or the post office had no jobs,” she explains.
She has less to pick nowadays. “The crabs are less plentiful,” she says and looks around at the empty places at the table where pickers once sat. “We used to have a full building. It’s changed completely.” The co-op at its peak seated twenty pickers at once, according to Corbin. “Now it’s down to six.” While she talks she works, removing claws, the back shell, then the lungs, extricating the meat—she finishes up a single crab in about sixty seconds to the awe of this outsider who takes ten times the amount of time to do the same (albeit less thorough) job. “This is the only commercial, USDA approved crab seller on Smith Island,” she points out. Running a building that meets USDA standards is more expensive than picking at home without federal supervision, so co-op owners pay out of pocket to keep it running. A shadow crosses their faces when I mention the “black market pickers,” the women who undersell the coop owners by skirting the FDA rules and picking in their home kitchens.
Crab picking, FDA regulated and off the books, is on the decline. There are fewer crabs, and other jobs pay better and demand less labor. Corbin worries not only about the diminishing crabs and local business competition but about the societal changes happening around her. “If there’s no children being born, we’ll probably see…I hate to say it. I can’t say it. Our way of life is going away and that’s sad.”
Smith Island’s youth often choose to not follow in their parents and grandparents’ footsteps and become watermen or crab pickers, but to move to the mainland for work. Many of the next generation of Smith Islanders leave a place where the elements are an intimate part of life to earn a living in the shelter of a maximum security prison. The sisterhood of the Co-op is dying off, it seems. A few young people are staying, growing up and choosing to make their home in a place of crime-free quiet, where kids roam unsupervised and without moms’ worrying, and where people living in the 21st century can hear still hear a dialect very much like the spoken tongue of Elizabethan English. Money is extremely tight, but so are the community connections. There are more bikes than cars, and those bikes are never locked.
donna whicher © 2011
