Customer Reviews

Bring Me Duck, Folk Tales and Anecdotes from Duck, N.C.

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This book is filled of the kind of little life stories that your grandmother would tell you. Realy hokey and not very interesting.

A series of reminiscences by Ruth Scarborough Tate, presumably a relative of the author, furnish the core of this book. Bring Me Duck is one of Tate's oral histories, which also include Whalehead, Memories of Manteo and Logs & Moonshine. Slightly over a quarter of Bring Me Duck's forty-eight pages are pictures of Duck, which might have been scattered through the text to better effect. The remaining thirty-three pages (there is also a one-page glossary of local terms - at p. 48) of reminiscences include local sayings ("`He's so tight he'd skin a louse for his tallow'" - at p.6) and the origin of personal nicknames (at pp. 8-10). Ruth Tate talks about the hutches used to sweeten sweet potatoes (at p.11), pounds used to keep carp alive (at pp. 13-14), and
net-mending (at pp. 15-16). She also reports pre-War rumors of German spies in the area (at p. 23), traditions of local witches (at pp. 23-24), and stories of pirates and buried treasure (at p. 24). One tale concerns a lost Civil War safe from Baltimore allegedly dumped off Martin's Point Creek (at p. 26), and Tate is also informative about the practice of fire-lighting for swans (at p. 27). Taken in sum, these stories are an interesting addition to information about the area and the book does a service in preserving them.