The Haunted Town

These days, people joke about Gen X being raised on hose water, but the 1980s were a weird time. Our parents weren’t boomers – they were too old to be boomers – but they nonetheless had a lot to do and not a lot of time for children. It wasn’t solipsism, it was meeting the reality that one salary alone wasn’t going to do the job of maintaining a family anymore. There was the divorce epidemic, of course, but even for couples who remained together, both parents were working, and either you wore a housekey on a string around your neck, or you had to dig it out from wherever it was hidden – in the case of my family, in an old rubber boot that my little brother had long outgrown, but which for some reason still sat in the gap between the garage wall and the three wooden steps that led up to the door to the family room entrance of the house.

We couldn’t be arachnophobes, either – that just wasn’t a choice. Why spiders liked that particular little rubber boot, I’ll never know, but they did, and we just had to flick them aside as we reached in to grab the red-colored nickel key, unlock the door, and drop the key back into the boot so it would be there for next time.

Then it was homework time. No TV – Mom would feel the TV console as soon as she entered the house to see if it was cool – and no roaming the neighborhood. That was summertime stuff. Homework, practice piano (or trumpet, or even just singing), and then you could always clean your room as an option. I usually curled up with a book instead.

Mom would come home first – usually around four o’clock – from her job as a secretary. Then Dad would arrive sometime between four-thirty and five-thirty, from being a minister at one of the 17 churches in town. By the time Dad arrived, Mom had dinner underway, and we were helping – setting the table, cutting vegetables for salads.

After dinner, there were dishes to wash and dry and put away. There was trash that had to go out. There were showers and baths to take. Then we got an hour of TV all together as a family – Cosby, Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Family Ties. Never Cheers, because that took place in a bar, and Dad didn’t want to normalize bars. Two sitcoms, a snack, and then we were banished to our rooms to read, draw, dream, craft. Then it was Mom and Dad’s time in front of the TV, watching Masterpiece Theatre on PBS with Alastair Cooke, with a glass of sherry each. Not normalizing bars.

As we grew older, our arrival home from school grew later – there was band practice, piano lessons, math league, the school newspaper, the yearbook. We no longer had to root around in that tiny rubber boot for the housekey because Mom was already home. Homework happened after the sitcoms and before bed, and on the weekends because there was literally nothing else to do in town.

We didn’t really have our parents. But we had our friends – bonds tighter and yet more ephemeral than any sibling bond could ever be. Our friends were what kept us sane in that tiny town, that tiny horrible town. And then, after graduation, we scattered, and memory was erased.

It all seems very innocent. Or, if not innocent, then at least part of a fabric that we can name as “normal”. This intergenerational shit happens. But there’s a lot more to it, in this specific portrait. I struggle to make sense of this, but I think Seaford is unique in how lonely its children are.

I think of the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson:

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Seaford is not sane. It’s built on the graves of horrors unexpressed. Not too far from the town, over in Maryland, Octavia Butler’s Kindred took place. The plantations were real – Delaware’s own governor, William H. H. Ross, had his own mansion. Those slave quarters have been preserved. He, of course, fled to the England during the war. Because he liked being a slaveowner and he was a chickenshit.

One of those graves of horrors is the Patty Cannon estate.

In high school, when my friends got their drivers’ licenses, I’d ride around with them out to Reliance, which was a crossroads of a village on the border between Maryland and Delaware. Three counties converged on that spot. I’m still not sure why the boundary of our driving ended there, but we’d turn around and go to Pizza King afterwards. Or just…back home, because there wasn’t much to do in Seaford.

That crossroads, though….During the 1820s, it meant that the long arm of the law got twisted into a pretzel trying to enforce ordinances against kidnapping.

Patty Cannon – aka Lucretia Hanly – operated a kidnapping ring focused on both runaway slaves and free Black people. The Reverse Underground Railroad, it has since been called. Patty Cannon kept a lot of her victims chained up in her house. She murdered at least four, that we know of. She confessed to many others. And her story – no, her victims’ stories – have never properly been told in all their gruesomeness. There was a novel called The Entailed Hat, but that fucker is just about unreadable. She confessed to two dozen more murders, and poisoned herself in prison before she was due to be executed.

The house that stood there, in that pocket of Reliance, when I was in high school was not the true house of Patty Cannon – that had been demolished in the 1948. A nearby house went up in the 1840s, and locals got confused as to which structure was which. And that was the house that we knew as the Patty Cannon house. Her skull resides in the Smithsonian, for reasons I will never know.

But that’s the horror on which the town stands. The unmarked graves of Black children, women, and men, and those who helped them. The souls that haunt the whole town, unavenged, unjustified, unnamed, unvalidated.

Those are the conditions of absolute reality. That town holds darkness within. Whatever walks there, walks unassisted, and underpins everything that goes on there. And it’s not finished.