PART I
The Mullet Fishermen
For a small boy living with the fishing
crow on lonely Topsail Island in 1934 it was
another world.
When I was seven — in the summer
of 1934 — 1 went out with Uncle Percy
to spend some five weeks on a fishing
crew on the outer beach of North Car¬
olina. The crew consisted of about 35
back-country watermen and farmers,
who stayed from August to November
in simple huts or thatched “bullpcns”
on the sand sea bluffs of Topsail Island
and seined for mullet.
That was less than fifty years ago.
yet the economy and the way of life
that supported such an operation have
vanished beyond revival, and a de¬
scription of that operation may serve
to illustrate some of the profound
changes which separate today's
American from the America of only
two generations ago. The men wrho
worked those fishing crews are not in¬
clined to write memoirs, and their gen¬
eration is passing. With the help of
some of them — my uncles Percy
Granville Grant and Sterling Grant, my
father — let me attempt to reconstruct
that life while it can still be done.
The Mullet Migration
The mullet is a curious fish. They
can be caught in remarkable numbers,
or not at all. They seldom take a hook,
though in Florida they are sometimes
caught using com (of all things) as bail.
They feed on the vegetation along the
edge of tidal rivers. While feeding at
night, they will jump toward a light.
Once in Georgia my father and I . with a
local restaurant owner and his son.
caught some 200 in one night simply by
building a frame on one side of a skiff,
hanging burlap sacks on the frame and
a kerosene lantern in front of the
sacking. We were bombarded by mul¬
letjumping toward the light and falling
into the boat. (Parmelee's Restaurant
on St. Simons Island featured mullet
for days.) But that is a different story.
Mullet are plentiful in the tidal es¬
tuaries from Cape Lookout south to
Florida, but apparently the popula¬
tions do not mix. In the Carolinas. for
reasons yet unclear, they begin a mi-
8
By LIXDSEY GR.AYT
gration southward along the outer
beaches in schools. The movement
continues until November, the mullet
growing larger with the passing
months. Each school is remarkably
uniform in size. In August, they may
weigh a pound apiece; in November,
they may weigh five pounds. The
fishermen believed that they later re¬
turn north to their tidal rivers by
swimming farther at sea. in the Gulf
Stream, but nobody really knew.
The mullet's flesh is rather soft and
oily, which appeals to European more
than to American tastes, but the
schools could be caught efficiently
with a haul seine, salted in kegs and
shipped inland, where they provided
protein for those more interested in
economy than in gastronomic ele¬
gance. In the I930's, there were many
such people. I ate a lot of mullet in the
summer of 1934 and very few since
then, but my memory suggests that
they have been maligned as an eating
fish.
A Lonely Island
My grandfather, James Benjamin
Grant, opened the New River Fishery
under the title Daniel Lindsey Grant
and Canaday. sometime in the late 19th
century. Nobody remembers just
when. The family scat was located in
the low country of piney woods and
brackish marshes northeast of Wil¬
mington. Camp Lejeune has sub¬
sequently been built in the area, and
generations of Marines will remember
the place primarily for its mosquitoes.
The New River Fishery was located
on the dune-formed sea bluffs some
two miles south of the New River Inlet,
where the New River enters the Atlan¬
tic through one of those fickle, shoal
and twisting inlets common to our
southern coast. Whatever the Marines
may think, there was a desolate and
wild beauty about those barrier is¬
lands. The Atlantic washed onto the
long beach in straight lines. Behind the
beach was a bluff where the sea had
When the coll come, certoin men were designated to move the seine from the shed to the pilot boot; ond once
on opprooching school of mullet hod been sighted, there wos no time to woste. (photos courtesy of Daniel L.
Gront)
THE STATE. MAY 1979
