The Outer Banks

American Visions, April-May, 1995 by Bridgette A. Lacy

Folks in North Carolina call the 130-mile stretch of shoreline running from Corolla to Ocracoke Island the Outer Banks. I call it the best spot in the state to hear your inner voice, to listen to the lap of the ocean's waves, to linger undisturbed in bed with a cup of tea, to feel the crunch of sand beneath your feet and watch sea gulls suspended in the sky.

To all these joys are added two others: (1) a surprising wealth of black-heritage and other historical sites and (2) an absence of fastfood "restaurants," high-rise hotels and amusement parks. The first is a bonus; the second, a blessing.

Red crape myrtle lines the entrance of the Elizabethan Gardens, a living, flowering memorial to the first English colonists of North America. The gardens are a feast for the eyes, as well as the nose. Masses of blooming azaleas, roses, magnolias and dogwoods are scattered around the gardens in the tranquil setting on the shores of Roanoke Island.

Today, this is Fort Raleigh National Historic Site. But in 1587, this was the spot where 117 men, women and children arrived in the New World seeking a better life. Two decades before John Smith and Pocohontas ensured their place in the pantheon of American history, these settlers established a colony. Three years after their arrival, all traces of their presence were swallowed up by the verdant wilderness, leaving behind the first American mystery story.

Visitors who arrive at Fort Raleigh during the summer months get to feed their minds, as well as their eyes: On view at the Waterside Theatre is The Lost Colony, Paul Green's spellbinding drama about the strange and unsettling disappearance of the first English-speaking colony in the New World. The play had its debut in 1937, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt watched the performance from his car.

Green was a Harnett County, N.C., playwright who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for his In Abraham's Bosom, a brutally honest depiction of the life of a black educator in the segregated South. Green was one of the few white Southerners of his day to value and promote black artists such as Richard Wright; he sufficiently impressed Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston that she wanted to collaborate with him to form a national black theater group. Unfortunately for the history of American theater, the two never managed to pair up, probably because at heart neither was a collaborator.

Not only the lost colony makes the Outer Banks a land of "firsts." The shore here was also the spot of mankind's first powered flight--a historic revolution only slightly less momentous than the English colonization of North America. On Dec. 17, 1903, at Kitly Hawk on the Outer Banks, Wilbur and Orville Wright kick-started the 20th century and led us onward to the lunar landing on the Sea of Tranquillity.

Today, at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, visitors can see unfold before them the first steps of a journey whose end lies beyond our imagining. Those first steps had a mundane beginning--and a stereotypically American one, for the Wright brothers fell in the long line of Yankee tinkerers. If it was mechanical, the brothers reckoned they could improve on it. They began with bicycles; moved on to publishing their own newspaper in their hometown of Dayton, Ohio; and then got interested in the internal-combustion engine.

In one regard, the brothers went very much against the typical American grain--and sadly, the museum here fails to bring out this story. Both of the brothers were friends of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African-American poet to achieve a national (white) reputation. A classmate of the Wrights in Dayton (and also the star of the school's debating team, the president of its literary society, the editor of its newspaper, and the school's sole African American), Dunbar edited the Dayton Tatler that the Wrights published.

Although Dunbar had no direct connection to the flight at Kitty Hawk, it's a shame to have failed to include this aspect of the men whose fame will outlive even the poet's. Nevertheless the museum does extend the story of flight on to Bessie Coleman, whose photograph hangs in the picture gallery with other pioneers of flight. Coleman, known as Queen Bess, was the first licensed black woman pilot. She received her pilot's license in 1921 from the Aeronautique in Paris--France being more hospitable to people of color than the States. Five years after receiving her wings, Coleman was killed as she practiced for an air show.

Richard Etheridge was another black pioneer who made history. In january 1880, the former Union soldier of the 36th United States Colored Troop, who had been promoted to sergeant in October 1864 following the bloody Battle of New Market Heights outside Richmond, Va., became the first black keeper of the U.S. Lifesaving Service. Etheridge (see sidebar) and his allblack crew at the Outer Banks Pea island station were known as some of the most daring lifesavers on the Atlantic coast--and this in the days when there was no upside to promoting the achievements of African Americans.