So many great voices

After 10 years 'Listening,' author and photographer reflect on the chronicling of N.C. history, one speaker and one image at a time

I will never forget my first "Listening to History" interview. It was with a retired nurse named Gretchen Brinson. She was 82 years old and lived in a waterfront neighborhood in Morehead City called the Promise Land. That part of town was settled originally by fishermen who had been driven off their island home on Shackleford Banks, eight miles east, by devastating hurricanes in 1896 and 1899.

Ms. Gretchen was a nurse in Morehead during the Second World War, when German submarines sank more than 140 merchant ships off the North Carolina coast. She had cared for the sailors rescued at sea - the ones who had jumped off their sinking ships, plunged into the waves and come up into burning oil slicks.

I can't keep writing "Listening to History" -- other duties now call -- but I will sure miss visiting people like Ms. Gretchen. As I thought about these past 10 years, I remembered many voices and faces, but especially that first interview in the Promise Land.

Comic book and a burger

I later traveled, tape recorder in hand, from the Outer Banks to the Blue Ridge Mountains, listening to our oldest residents' stories. But I started close to home. I grew up near Morehead City, and when I was a child, my grandmother used to take me to the Promise Land every Saturday morning to see my great-great-aunt Rosa.

Those visits were part of our weekly shopping trips to "town." We treated them like a sacramental rite. Every week we'd start in Beaufort. We'd go to the Rose's Five and Dime, the Colonial Grocery Store, and a little newsstand where my grandmother always bought me a comic book. We'd grab a burger at Mike's, a little lunch counter on Taylor's Creek.

Then we'd cross the bridge into Morehead and go to Ottis's Fish Market, where a sea turtle swam in a water tank out front and naked mermaids decorated the walls. Last of all, we'd visit my great-great-aunt Rosa in the Promise Land.

So much to learn

Years later, when I drove into the Promise Land to visit Ms. Gretchen for that first interview, I was nervous. Her neighbor, my friend Miss Alida Willis, had warned me that Ms. Gretchen could be gruff and intimidating. She did not tolerate fools gladly, Miss Alida said. I wasn't feeling like my Harvard doctorate had done much to prepare me for that interview, either. At least not to ask her the kinds of questions I wanted to ask.

I wasn't just interested in the who, what, where and when of things. I wanted to know more. How many times, I figured, will I get the chance to talk to someone who has lived 82 years and ask them anything I want in the world? Especially someone who did what Ms. Gretchen did during the war?

So, yes, I wanted to know about the German submarines. Yes, I wanted to hear about the ships burning for weeks offshore and the way that oil and debris and, yes, bodies, washed up on the beaches.

I wanted to hear how the patients lay in the overwhelmed little hospital's halls because the rooms were all full. And how Dr. Ben Royal, the county's only surgeon, cut away burned flesh, day after day, with Ms. Gretchen at his side. She was a young newlywed, barely out of a Red Cross nursing program.

And yes, of course, I wanted to hear about the caskets they loaded, as she told me, almost every day, onto the 3 o'clock train out of town.

I wanted to hear all those stories. But I wanted more, too. Even riveting tales about an ocean on fire couldn't satisfy my hunger.

Beyond the facts and figures, I wanted to know where Ms. Gretchen got the strength to pull away the scorched flesh that Dr. Royal was cutting. I wanted to know whether she listened to their prayers at night, when they were lying there, so many of them hopelessly burned, waiting to die. I wanted to know what she said to comfort them.