Other days, she would go crab picking with her aunts. Only boys could be on the dock, and her father needed help fishing and hauling traps. Perhaps, if I listened long enough, the island’s history could help me learn how to inhabit two spaces in one.īorn across from the sardine factory in South Ferry, Portland, Marnie Darling Voter was disguised as a boy until the age of twelve. But I wondered if learning about the descendants of this island might help me consider and navigate the experience of being a mixed-race person in this very white state. I knew that I could not lay claim to Malaga’s history: I am neither Black nor a Mainer. There were other people here once, living on an island twenty-five minutes away from my white town, people who confounded the essentialist ideas of race I kept encountering. Then, sifting through old issues at the newspaper where I worked, I found Malaga. If I could find an exact story to match my complexity, perhaps I, too, could fit into a larger narrative make sense of the world around me. The world often presented narratives of race as monoliths-Black, white, brown-but I found fewer lampposts for being mixed-race. How many times could I splice myself on the basis of imagined biological facts and the cultural codes they carried? They are constructs, and yet I molded myself around them, every day. But inwardly, I found myself obsessed with quantifying my own identity: half-white, half-brown, part-Indian, mostly American, not Hindu, raised Christian, speaks broken Arabic no, not Muslim either. “My mom’s from India,” I grew accustomed to saying, and leaving it at that. The answer is neither linear nor easy to weave into casual conversation. The questions were always variations of the same: Where are you from? And why are you here? Yet it was here, not in Texas, that I found myself confronted by carefully couched questions while waiting tables or reporting for the local paper. Maine prides itself on its supposed progressivism: Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin here, not too far from Malaga one story claims that she read passages to celebrated Union general Joshua Chamberlain, who was known for his valiancy at the Battle of Gettysburg. I was startled to view the coastline, to see the pines open up before me, to know a landscape that is both vast and deep. I came to Maine for college, a girl who shaded in “two or more races” on the SAT test, who left Texas for the whitest state in the nation. For those whose connections to the place run deep, the story of Darling’s granddaughters and their families is a tale of a quiet island community, “dyed in the wool,” that subsisted on what the Atlantic could offer and committed to teaching their children how to read, write, and eke out a life from the sea. Intermarriage was illegal, but the white mainlanders of nearby Phippsburg pretended not to notice-at least in the beginning. Originally home to Darling’s mixed-race descendants, the island soon blossomed into a multiracial fishing community. Fifty years passed and the Civil War had reached its end by the time Darling’s granddaughters made a home on their own island, half a mile to the north of Horse, forty-one acres without a name. Eventually, he bought his own island, Horse Island. He was mauled by a bear while trying to defend his neighbor’s corn patch. A fair and upright citizen, he was a reliable worker at the local salt mill. At the time, Maine was just a word on the tip of no one’s tongue.ĭarling saved his master in the shipwreck in return, he was granted freedom and his name. It’s said that Benjamin Darling was enslaved by a New England merchant when his master’s ship collided with this jagged shore in the 1790s. Over the years, they have witnessed native Abenaki, English colonists, French missionaries, summer tourists headed north, and asylum seekers hailing from East Africa. When large gusts sweep in off the Atlantic, the time-worn crags that guard the shore stand firm against both wind and wave. The soil on the coast of southern Maine is untenable, full of stony, dense, glacial till.
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