“Where’s the dentist?”
“Tied up, too.”
“Oh, he’s busy. Well, maybe I can talk to him another time,” I replied. “And what about your- teeth? I see you have braces and it appears you’ve had several extractions as well. And I’m noticing that your rubber bands keep flying off when you talk.”
“That’s it!” Fonny Boy covered his mouth with a hand and looked embarrassed. “The dentist, he better mind his step!”
“While we’re chatting,” I said, edging closer to the table, where a dental chart was out in plain view, “would you mind if I flipped through this chart and see what all you’ve had done? I assume this is your chart? Is your name Darren Shores?”
“Ever one on Tanger calls me Fonny Boy.”
Fonny Boy and I fell into a conversation and he was very well versed in the lore of the island because of his fascination with the history of shipping, especially in the bay. As we got to know each other better and a level of vague trust developed, Fonny Boy got more specific and began to talk about pirates, or picaroons, as he called them. They used to be everywhere, he told me. At one time, there were so many pirate ships off the shores of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas that cities like Charleston were paralyzed. No one dared set sail out of the harbor for fear they would be seized by pirates who thought nothing of killing people in very unpleasant ways.
Fonny Boy went into elaborate detail about Black-beard in particular, whose Christian name was Edward Drummon when he was an honest seaman in his home port of Bristol, England, in the late seventeenth century. When he decided to become a pirate, he changed his name to Edward Teach, which has frequently been misspelled in records as Thatch, Tache, and Tatch. After Queen Anne’s War, Blackbeard sailed into Jamaica to go after French ships and began to cultivate the most vile, terrifying persona imaginable to entice other vessels to surrender without a second thought, assuming the warning flags weren’t enough. He would braid his long beard into little pigtails and set them on fire with slow-burning matches, Fonny Boy said, and strap pistols, daggers, and a huge cutlass to his waist, and wear additional weapons on the bandoleer across his chest.
Soon enough, Blackbeard and his flotilla began to haunt the North Carolina coast and the Chesapeake Bay. The people of Tangier would hoist the Jolly Roger whenever Blackbeard’s ship was spotted nearby, and from time to time the ruthless, evil pirate himself would visit the island and drink Jamaican rum and carouse to his dark heart’s content. Nobody wanted him on the island or slept much while he was visiting. Women and children hid inside their homes, and Blackbeard began to suppose that Tangier was an island of men only. This made his visits progressively shorter and less frequent. According to Fonny Boy and almost-nonexistent historical records, Blackbeard was most curious as to how an all-male island had survived down through the decades and could continue.
The answer Blackbeard got was lost forever until a three-hundred-year-old account book was discovered. This extraordinary find, according to legend, somehow made it from Blackbeard’s ship Adventure into the attic of a descendant of Alexander Spottswood, the governor of Virginia during Blackbeard’s bloody rampages. The account book focused on the disposition of the loot Black-beard took and offered details of his sadistic cruelty and lust for chopping people into pieces and shaking his empty rum cup at the heavens and daring God to defy him. Blackbeard’s handwritten entries mentioned one hundred and forty barrels of cocoa and a cask of sugar he had stolen and buried under hay in a North Carolina barn. There was a cryptic reference to buried treasure that only Blackbeard and the devil knew the location of, and to this day it has not been found.
I realized it wasn’t possible that Tangier could have remained populated without women and pressed Fonny Boy for the explanation Blackbeard was given. Fonny Boy repeated what had been passed down through the generations.
“Damnation seize your soul if you are lying to me!” Blackbeard thundered to a clever but untruthful islander named Job Wheeler, a childless widower who, as the story goes, invited the pirate into his home on an area of the island known today as Job’s Cove.