On the marsh-bound causeway to Chincoteague Island on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, cars and their drivers seemed to float across the still waters of Queens Sound. As I made my way across, I thought of how, in centuries past, skiffs drifted through the region’s bays, channels and coves in search of shellfish. Back then, before fish-farming became popular, the land itself functioned as a sort of natural pier for its residents who wrangled clams and oysters and terrapin, as thick as treasure, from beds in the brackish water.

My visit to Chincoteague last September was part of an exploration of an American tradition rich in history and lore. A few weeks after that trip, I would head to the opposite side of the Chesapeake, to Leonardtown, Md. — home of the St. Mary’s County Oyster Festival and National Shucking Competition. On my journey through the region, I wanted to delve into something that had been a part of my childhood: the culture surrounding oysters. I was curious about the difference between the tradition, here, along the eastern Virginia coast, and in places like New York City and New Orleans, where I’m from. As an African American and native Southerner, I also wanted to explore how Black culture figured in — to see if the world of oysters reflected something larger about the American experience across racial lines.

Years ago, growing up on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, I’d watch oyster shuckers, usually Black men, popping open shell after shell, joking with guests on the opposite side of the bar while they worked. They reminded me of my uncles at our family seafood boil, who shared stories as they stood around an 80-quart pot. In New York and other cities to the north, the lifestyle surrounding oysters seemed altogether different, from the well-attired shuckers at fancy restaurants, down to the serving plates and wine pairings. I wanted to know more about this difference in attitude toward the shellfish and the kinds of experiences they conjured.

Famed Black oysterman

Chincoteague was quiet on this clear blue day in September, but between the succession of seafood shacks and ice-cream parlors I felt the pulse of a town aware of its history. The regional boom in oysters that began in the mid-19th-century still hangs over the place whose nearness to waters that were once rich with oyster reefs allowed the industry to thrive.

I stopped at the town’s museum, where I found rustic oyster tools and shells, and exhibits in the front room on the boats that were used for various maritime activities, such as duck hunting and shellfish dredging. Past the “Misty” exhibition (about a beloved wild pony), I fiddled with a pair of traditional oyster tongs, which are rarely used these days and resemble a pair of rakes slanted across one another and bolted together, and tried my hand at raking loose shells from beneath a mound of boxed-in sand.

In one corner, there was an area dedicated to the African American experience on Chincoteague Island. I read through the text on the wall and then examined a photo of Black men shucking oysters in an adjacent section. Strangely, I didn’t come across any mention of one of the area’s most famous Black oystermen — Thomas Downing, who would eventually become the acclaimed proprietor of Downing’s Oyster House, a 19th-century oyster cellar in New York City.

Downing was born on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 1791 to a Black family whose freedom had been granted after a traveling preacher convinced the Downings’ slaveholder that it was bad faith to be both a member of the Methodist Church and hold enslaved people. Post-enslavement, the Downings stayed in Accomack County on the Virginia shore and eventually acquired a small plot of land. The family became a part of the Chincoteague community where they were said to have regularly hosted prominent whites of the county before and after church on Sundays — a relationship that at least appeared to approach being neighborly, though it still evoked a resemblance to antebellum culture, in which enslaved Black people cooked meals for white plantation families.

19th-century oyster cellars

When Downing moved to New York City in 1819, he quickly became acquainted with the Hudson River, where he fixated on finding the best of the best on the New Jersey side of the river. Downing knew that oysters were sought after in New York, and he made friends fast and patrons faster. Eventually he opened his own cellar, Downing’s Oyster House, on Broad Street in 1825, where he’d serve Charles Dickens and a whole world of white elites. Even Queen Victoria ate oysters sent to her by Downing.

The culture surrounding oysters started changing during the 19th century. There were the blue-collar oystermen that Downing left behind on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, but New York City had its own oystermen who would transform their homes into dining cellars for those wanting a no-frills meal fresh from the sea.

When Downing arrived in New York, oyster cellars — many of them Black-operated and supplied by Black oystermen — were already popular, but they were not considered respectable places for serious dining. Downing believed that he could distinguish himself by appealing to the businessmen in the Financial District. With savings from years of working as an oysterman in Philadelphia and New York, he decorated his restaurant with damask curtains, a chandelier and fine carpeting. In the evening, businessmen would even bring their wives to Downing’s, which was significant since oyster houses typically weren’t thought of as “proper.”

His restaurant flourished. The new dining haven signaled a shift in the way people perceived oysters, both as a food and social experience. It’s this complexity in the cultural interpretation of oysters and the way they’ve been represented over time that fascinates me.

Oyster festival

About a month after my visit to Chincoteague, on a windy October afternoon, I walked through the gates of the St. Mary’s County fairgrounds in Leonardtown, Md., to attend the county’s annual oyster festival and national shucking competition. There seemed to be more beers and ball caps than you’d see at a baseball game.

I tried the day’s first pair of raw oysters in a tasting tent that featured craft beers alongside a bounty of regionally farmed oysters. The shuckers themselves worked as unpretentious ushers to the whole experience, prying open the oysters and revealing the glistening shellfish.

The feeling was homey, relaxed, a far cry from the patina of luxury apparent in many places in the Northeast, a connoisseurs’ arena, much like winemaking. Bluepoints (an oyster native to Long Island’s Great South Bay) are as much of a brand name as Bordeaux, each denoting a region as a way to signify value and authenticity.

The shucking competition spanned two days. The first day had been cut short by bad weather; on the second, I traded bits of conversation with a woman sitting beside me. She and her husband, she said, were from the county and attended the festival every year, which she said had stayed pretty much the same. Many of the people on the stage were familiar to her, including a woman named Deborah Pratt, who was introduced as a champ who’d won the national competition at least four times.

Pratt, older now and equipped with an oxygen tank, received a warm welcome from the crowd as she took her place among the other competitors in the women’s final. It was clear that she had become a fixture at the festival, which was celebrating its 55th year. As a Black woman from Jamaica, Va., farther south along the Chesapeake, in a mostly white crowd, she appeared to be something of a star. Before the final commenced, she gave a speech where she seemed to announce her retirement, calling out farewells to the crowd before thanking the people who had, in her words, thrown their arms around her in protection as the lone Black woman in competitions throughout the years. “Ain’t everybody bad,” she said. “There’s a lot of good people in this world.”