The Outer Banks were very isolated from mainland North Carolina and from the mainland South until the twentieth century, and the community, white and Black, was small, interconnected, and relatively tight-knit. Buried beneath those stories was this rich and complicated history-about race and Americanness-that appealed to me from the first. And it turned out that I knew more about the region than I recognized, pieces of Americana that had taken place in the Banks, like the Lost Colony and the Wright brothers’ first flight. The landscape is stark and rugged, really beautiful in that way. As he and I started working toward what would eventually become “ Fire on the Beach,” our narrative history about the crew and about the community that forged them, we spent a lot of time out there. Zoby himself had stumbled upon a picture of them that summer but not known of them before, and he’d lived in the Outer Banks.
Life-Saving Service, the forerunner of the Coast Guard. I’d never heard of the Outer Banks and couldn’t have pointed it out on a map, even though it was only a hundred and fifty miles away.įew, it turned out, had heard of the Pea Island surfmen-the only Black lifesaving crew in the history of the U.S. I lived abroad for much of my twenties, much of the time in Paris, and when I came back, to enroll in grad school, in Virginia, David Zoby, a fellow first-year, asked me one day if I’d heard of the “Pea Island surfmen.” I must have looked utterly befuddled, because he added, as though clarifying, “In the Outer Banks.” When did you first start thinking about using this time and place as the setting for a work of fiction? Your story “ The Sand Banks, 1861” is set on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in the early months of the Civil War.
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