LETTERS FROM HOME: FINDING BLACKBEARD AND THE BEAUTIFUL LIFE ON OKRACOKE ISLAND

Oct. 2, 1997

Dear Leslie

Few signs of Blackbeard the pirate remain on Okracoke, the most pristine island along North Carolina's outer banks.

Blackbeard plundered the Virginia and Carolina coasts in 1717 and 1718 aboard the Queen Anne's Revenge. According to legend, he had 14 wives, tied the braids in his beard with ribbons, cultivated a sulphuric air and kept his crew rummed up to prevent mutinies.

Locals say Blackbeard was at least as much showman as scoundrel, but planters tired of being robbed cornered him one day at Ocracoke Inlet. They combed his beard with lead, cut off his head and stuck it on a pole in Virginia.

It's a colorful place of untread beaches, wild ponies and people who don't need much more.

The woman who filled us in on Blackbeard's saga turned out to be a descendant and not at all ashamed of it. Another member of the family keeps a shop filled with Blackbeard mementos.

Okracoke would appear to be much more sedate today, the pace slowed by Winnebagos and the peace broken only by the pre-dawn drone of sport-fishing boats on their way out to sea. Most of the 700 inhabitants make their living from the sea or the people the sea brings.

The rising and setting of the sun brilliantly bookend the days. Okracoke is so narrow you can see the sun rise on the Atlantic, walk a short distance, wait about 12 hours and watch the sky turn scarlet across Pamlico Sound.

Our temporary home on Okracoke was the Island Inn, which served as the Oddfellows Lodge at the turn of the century and later became a school. Now the weathered building is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The proprietess was a healthy-looking blonde woman named Cee, who often was surrounded by three bronze and blond children who didn't see a barber regularly. Cee and her husband, Bob, bought the inn in 1990, moving to the shore from a comparative metropolis in the Piedmont.

What a wonderful life to give your children, I said to DC. But she wondered if the kids could be happy, since no movie theaters or video games are to be found on Okracoke and ferries or planes provide the only ways on or off the island.

Indeed, I imagine anywhere else looks alluring when you're 12 years old or so and stranded on an island with your parents and having to play host to tourists decompressing from life on the mainland.

When I was boyish, my parents considered moving to a farmhouse in a rural area outside town called Egypt Mills. I remember being taken out to see the house and hoping I didn't have to leave my neighborhood.

As is the egocentric way with children, I thought my wishes were the deciding factor when my parents announced we wouldn't be moving. Much later I learned it was the cost of school tuition.

Since then, the childhood that might have been in the country has become a wistful fantasy. Of course, I might have gotten run over by a tractor.

Today I read a U.S. News & World Report story about how quickly kids grow up in Southern California. How their youth-obsessed parents are raising cynical, jaded teen-agers obsessed with their own looks and designer clothes, kids who think something must be terribly wrong with anyone who isn't thin and beautiful.

The little Blackbeards.

Those kids on Okracoke are the beautiful ones.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.