Browse:Oystermen Hands (Volume 1, entries 2196–2198)
Oystermen Hands
Volume 1, entries 2196–2198. Source context: THE DOCTORS AT WORK: REPORTS FROM LAYMEN → HANDS: MAGIC HELPERS. Entries listed under this heading in the source volume.
Entries
Entry 2196
You kin have them fer fifteen days, thirty days or a year. These hands are for shucking oysters or for finding them. See Introduction for my experience on Deal Island.] [Deal Island, Md., (?), 20:1.] [For hand time limit, see No. 1970, p.577.]
Entry 2197
I know about my father. He was an oysterman. He used to go oystering and to keep people from stealing his tongs, he would tie a piece of red flannel on his tongs and saturate it with coal oil, and he wouldn't lose them. And I have known him to leave bushels of oysters in his boat and put these tongs ring over them, with a red flannel rag on each end, and go back the next morning and the oysters were there. [The father, a young man in slavery, became an oysterman at Hampton, Virginia, inmediately after he was freed and remained one until death some 30 years later. The son, a man of 60, has also lived at Hampton all his life.]
Entry 2198
To keep 'em from comin' down de Sound stealin' 'em? [This man is an oysterman from Wrightsville Sound.] You make a roun' ring, put some sulphur roun' it. Make a roun' ring, I say about twenty yards long roun' de oysters. Can't come ovah dat ring. [Another oysterman hand was given in No. 1767, p.534.]
The ring is a round boundary around oysters; the source size wording remains approximate.