Judith Mercier

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Unimagined when the British built colonies at Roanoke Island to the south and Jamestown to the northwest, unnamed when the Wright brothers flew just a stone’s throw away, still largely undiscovered when Rusty Schweikart snapped his famous photo of the North Carolina coast from Apollo 9, Duck is the last boom town on the Outer Banks. In just a few decades, it has been transformed into a place where there are a thousand summer tourists for every native, where absentee landlords own far more property than do year-round residents.

Part personal essay, part oral history, Duck: An Outer Banks Village is the lyrically told story of an unforgettable place. Built on a spit of shifting sand barely a half-mile wide, highly subject to the wind and the sea, the village has always placed unusual demands on those who would live here. Duck old-timers had to be hunters, fishermen, farmers, and “wreckers”—all at the same time.

Author Judith D. Mercier captures both the village’s glory days—when shooting six hundred ducks constituted merely an average day for a market hunter—and its forgotten moments—like one man’s heroic attempt to create an African-American beach resort during the Jim Crow years. What emerges is a portrait of a community—or, in the words of the locals, a neighborhood—seeking to preserve its past as it tackles the future.

My Review: Academic and writer Mercier finds paradise on the Outer Banks in the form of Duck, NC, a dinky little dune burg between the mighty Atlantic and the estuarine remnants of a bay that got cut off from the sea by the inevitable actions of time and tide. She then sets about excavating as much as she can of town history, both black and white, to preserve and present the face of change in a sad little elegy to the Good Old Days.

I am uncomfortable with made-up conversations in this sort of book. An entire chapter on the largely unchronicled life of Duck's black folks contains imagined dialogue that makes me squirm. It's condescending, and I don't think for an instant that it's what they said, and why in the hell didn't the lady stick to facts and let the cutesy impulse go? She could, and maybe should, write a novel about the life of the couple she places at the center of the black world of Duck. Better still, let someone more ept do it.

But don't lard it in to the "growth has prices, always has and always will" book that you've got here, Dr. Mercier. It detracts from the real merits of the book as it is, and it isn't your forte, quite frankly. It's not really recommended by me for that reason, unless you're a fanatical enthusiast for the Outer Banks. (Guilty.)


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