FLORIDA’S FORGOTTON COAST: LIFE ON THE APALACHICOLA BAY
WORKING THE BAY
Melaine Cooper Covell
James Hicks
Monette Hicks
Monica Lemieux
Carl McCaplan
James & Betty McNeill
Charles & Rex Pennycuff
A. L. Quick
Henry Tindell

TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Wes Birdsong
Corky Richards
Bobby Shiver
Charles Thompson
Genaro “Jiggs” Zingarelli

PROCESSING THE CATCH
Terry Dean
Grady Leavins
Lynn Martina
Fred Millender
Janice Richards
Anthony Taranto
Tommy Ward

THE SWEET SIDE
Donald Smiley
George Watkins

VINTAGE APALACH
Seafood & Honey

WHERE TO EAT
Apalach Eateries

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Interviews & photographs by Amy Evans

This project sponsored by the St. Joe Company.

Born in 1916, Monette Hicks grew up in Eastpoint. In those days, boats didn’t have motors, there weren’t any bridges over the bay, and there were no houses on St. George Island. Seafood was all anyone knew. Monette’s family worked the bay harvesting oysters. She quit school at the age of twelve, when she was big enough to shuck. Oystermen harvested their catch nearby on Cat Point and Porters Bar. Shuckers would work daylight to dark, without electricity. In 1933, at the age of sixteen, Monette married a shrimper, Louis Hullman Hicks. Louis sold his catch to Taranto’s Seafood in Apalachicola. But together, the Hickses eventually owned and operated an oyster house of their own. There, Monette shucked until she was well into her seventies.

Listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Monette Hicks talking about a devastating hurricane that hit the Apalachciola Bay area in 1929.
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What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Subject: Monette Hicks, longtime resident of Eastpoint, FL
Date: December 8, 2005
Location: Mrs. Hicks’ residence
Interviewer: Amy Evans

Amy Evans:  This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways Alliance on Thursday, December 8th, 2005, and I'm in Eastpoint with Terry Dean and her grandmother, Mrs. Hicks. And could we get y’all to say both your names, since you're both on here, for the record?

Terry Dean:  Okay. Terry Dean. [To her grandmother] Say your name.

Monette Hicks: Monette Hicks.

Mrs. Hicks what year were you born? What's your birth date?

MH:  The 3rd of September 1916.

Were you born here in Eastpoint?

No, I come here when I was three months old.

From Carrabelle? Is that where your family [is from]?

[No]. Well you know where Overstreet [Florida] is? Well it's on the other side of [Port] St. Joe. Between St. Joe and Panama.

And you had two sisters, is that right?

I had a half-sister and a half-brother and two sisters or—my own sisters. My momma [Lizzie] had been married before and her husband died and then she married my daddy [Charlie Evans] and had three children—three girls and the baby girl died when she was nine years old.

So tell me what it was like growing up here [in Eastpoint].

Well [Laughs] we come here—well, there was one big oyster house right down on the point and right where the bridge [to St. George Island] comes—lands down there now. And a man from Carrabelle owned it, and they said that he got a bunch of people from where—? Oh well, from somewhere else come down here and opened oysters. They call it opening oysters now; we called it shucking oysters back then. And my daddy and two three of his brothers come down there and moved us down here, and we had to come from Overstreet on a boat around to the point and—They built—my daddy and my uncle built a shed they called it—just a top for Momma and my aunt and my cousin to shuck oysters under. And they oystered. Daddy and his brother and his son oystered. Unloaded them there on the beach at that shed, and Momma and my aunt and my cousin shucked them and would carry them down to that big oyster house.

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[The point] was Cat Point before they moved [the town] back?

Yeah. I can remember me and my sisters playing on the beach while Momma and my aunt shucked oysters, and they'd open the oysters and pour them in a—a galvanized washtub. Pour them in there all day long. [Laughs] And ice in there. And when Dad and them come in the evening, they'd carry them down to that big oyster house and a boat would come from Apalach[icola] and pick them up and carry them back to Apalach[icola]. And that's about all I know about.

Do you have any idea how many people worked here [in the oyster house]?

Well when them Baltimore shuckers, they called them, was there, I imagine there was close to 100 and that—that's not it. It was bigger than that. And there was a bunch of them from Baltimore and they built—the man that owned it lived in Carrabelle and he built a long house—just one room, big room, they called a kitchen. That's what was mostly men that come to sell them oysters. And they called that a kitchen, and that's where they cooked and fed them and then he built another one—two-story house there, and that's where they all slept.

Terry Dean: How many people were shucking on the beach besides grandma?

I don't know anybody except our family. And then when the weather got cold, why they moved down to the big oyster house, and the Baltimore shuckers and more people coming in all the time, and they left pretty soon. I don't know how long they stayed after we come down here.

Do you know why they came from Baltimore?

I don't know. They was helping when we come. I imagine they hauled them down here on a bus or something. [Laughs] I don't know.

Did they come to show the locals how to shuck oysters or were they—?

Yeah, [they] showed my momma and them how to open them. Then they used—called them oyster blocks. Those were the round pieces of pine or oak or something with a breaker in it, and they used a knife and hammer to crack that oyster and shuck it. And later on, my daddy—Mr. Rice, in Apalach got him to build him an oyster house, and it wasn't as big as the one that the Moore's had there, but it was a pretty good size. I reckon it was about sixty stalls. And my daddy run it, and then my daddy later built him a store and a cafe and had a gas pump. You didn't see but one gas pump back then. It was that kind of—that was the only kind they had. And my baby sister got sick and daddy sold out and we moved to Apalach, where it would be close to her doctor. And it wasn't no bridge or nothing then [from Eastpoint to Apalachicola], but they had started to run the ferry. The same man that had them boats coming over here [from Apalachicola did that]. And they'd go to Carrabelle and back here and to Apalach. And the ferry had taken the place of them, and then later on they built the bridge to the island—a long time after that. They built the bridge in [nineteen] thirty-five, I believe.

So [your] father made a good living shucking oysters to get his own house?

Yeah, he did, uh-hmm. And oysters was a lot bigger than they are now. And they would just go out to Cat Point, they called it down there, and catch as many as they wanted. But they worked all day and come in—a big boat load and unload them there and my—in that shack. [Laughs] My momma and aunt and my cousin opened them the next day, while they went and got some more. Now, if you handle oysters like that, it would kill you. [Laughs] As a matter of fact, it wouldn't—I never heard of anybody dying from them. But just to—shucking them and pour them in—when they carried them down to Moore's Oyster House, why they washed them and measured them and put them on there. They'd bring the bags—they'd bring the bags over, and sit them on the back of the dock for six and seven days [without refrigeration].

Because they had so many, they couldn't process them fast enough?

And the thing was, the oysters were a lot bigger. Because I can remember when I was a kid, a regular oyster would hang off two saltine crackers that was hooked together. It would hang off both ends. They're a lot smaller than they used to be.
And my daddy built a lot of houses for Mr. Rice…Or pay for the men then to come that would work for him…I guess I must have been twelve years old—at least twelve…My sister got sick or moved to Apalach and oh, my daddy sold out everything he had down there [in Eastpoint]. And that hurricane come in [nineteen] twenty-nine, taking care of it. Boy, it got most everything. My grandmother and granddaddy lived in a house on—they called it the Indian Mound on a shell bank. They had their house, and my uncle had built him a new house, and that house is still down there on the point close to the bridge. And they was the only two houses left down there on the point after the hurricane.
But we lived in Apalach then. My daddy was still living over here, and Momma was living over there, sending us to school, and he was running the store and the—everything, and the hurricane come. Why, he told them—the people—he said, “You're welcome to come up to my house. It's further away from the water, but I won't be there, but you're welcome to come stay the hurricane out.” And that's what they did. And they said they would stand out there and watch the houses floating down the bay and pieces of houses. It got all them new houses they've built for the shuckers—everything else. All that that daddy built, that hurricane got that too.

So did he rebuild after that?

No, he had sold out the store and the cafe and, of course, the oyster house belonged to Mr. Rice and Mr. Rice in Apalach and it took—tore all that—the hurricane tore it all down and more fell off the house too. And it was a two story building. People that worked for him lived in there; they got them a hotel there so they could live in there—sleep in there.

TD: What did he do then? For a living, your daddy?

Well, he oystered some and then whatever he wanted to. [Laughs]

TD: When did you start shucking?

When I was about twelve years old—after my—when my baby sister was sick we come back over here because the doctors in Apalach wasn't seeming like they were doing any good. We come back over here so she could have a doctor from Carrabelle come down there. And she died.

TD: When Grandpa Charlie built his house up here, how many families were in Eastpoint? How many lived down there at Cat Point?

Not many when they built that house up here.

TD: How many was down there before the hurricane?

It was a good many down there. I don't know just how many houses daddy built for Rice for the workers, but all the way from the bridge is on up there to where my uncle's house is it's on—it's not where them houses are going to the island is.

TD:  How many families were down there not counting them workers that weren't from here? How many families were living here?

I don't know, about ten or twelve, I reckon. There weren't many.

TD:  Did everybody move from Cat Point after the hurricane?

Yeah, because there weren't nothing for them to live in down there. [Laughs] They had a flowing well down there to furnish water for them oyster houses, and they were wood—made out wood. And I'd seen ice—it would get so cold that water would run over in that big old tank out there, and there’d be icicles hanging down to the ground. And it would be so cold, the ground would burst, the ice we spew up. Us kids would come out and see which one could get there and knock it over—little old sprigs of ice sticking out of the ground—half of [the kids were] barefooted. And we went to school out there where the Baptist Church is down the road there. And I guess it was after I was twelve years old where Momma went to—or carried us back and moved back to Apalach with us, so we wouldn't have to ride the bus. They started running a bus to Carrabelle then. And she didn't want—her and daddy didn't want us to ride on it. That was after my sister died.

TD: Tell [the interviewer] what the bus was like.

Well it didn't have seats in it like it does now. They had seats like a bench on each side, and the man that drove it, he never did learn how to drive. [Laughs] And that's why Momma and Daddy didn't want us to ride.

TD: [To interviewer] It was like riding in the back of a truck, literally. [To her grandmother] Tell them about the bridge in Carrabelle you had to cross on that old bus.

Well mostly it was a ferry when was going—no barge. It weren't a ferry—just an old barge. They pulled the cars across on that. And then later they built the bridge after they finished this road down here. That was after me and Louis got married.

TD: How often did you go to school if you was shucking and going to school too?

Well, I didn't go to school after I got big enough to shuck oysters. [Laughs]…I was in the sixth grade. And the reason I quit school was because we moved back over here. My momma and daddy left with my sister and her husband and with my baby sister, and me and my other sister stayed with my grandma and we had to shuck oysters to help out with the expense because Momma and Daddy stayed right with Isabel all the time 'til she died.

How long a day would you shuck oysters?

Well it would start before daylight [Laughs] you might say, just as soon as they could see what they was going to shuck and shucked 'til we got all the oysters out or it got so late they couldn't see how. We didn't have no electricity.

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Can [you] tell me about the boat that they went on [to oyster]?

Well, if you didn't have an inboard motor on the boat that you were on, you used the pole, and they did just went out to Cat Point…None of the outboard motors—motors in the boat. Nobody didn't know nothing about no outboard motors then.

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So who was buying all these oysters from the bay?

TD: [To her grandmother] Mr. Russ in Apalach was buying the oysters weren't he?

Uh-hmm.

TD: What was he doing with them?

Shipping them out on the train [to] different places. I don't know just where they went.

TD:  They sent them oysters to them rich folks up north, didn't they?

Yeah, I imagine they did. But my goodness. [Laughs] They didn't give nothing for them.

TD: How much did you make for a gallon back then?

If he caught them and his wife shucked them they got a dollar a gallon…That's a big difference from what it is now. And if you shucked for somebody you got—I have shucked for fifteen-cents [per gallon], and then they raised it to eighteen-cents. And when they got to being a dollar a gallon, buddy we was making the money then.

What is it now, about?

TD:  What is a gallon of oysters now—ten dollars a gallon, I think? Yeah, I think it's about ten dollars a gallon now.

This oyster house that's right down the road across the road down there washed away—it tore up with this last hurricane. We—after my daddy built a house up here, well my husband built one nearby him, and we worked there at that oyster house. And by then we was getting about four [dollars] and fifty [cents] a gallon, if the man caught them and the woman shucked them. And they raised them fifty-cents, I reckon. I went to work with the ladies in there and they said, “Come on girl, get busy.” They said four gallons was five dollars. They was really making big money then.

[To Terry] So was she saying before that they only oystered out in one part of the bay right here?

TD: [To her grandmother, Monette Hicks] Y’all only oystered at Cat Point?

Mostly, because they didn't have—many of them didn't have motors to go anywhere else. Cat Point or Porters Bar. They didn't go across the bay…And the secret, though—they didn’t oyster much, they fished. Mullet fished.

TD: Back then, y’all didn't oyster in the summer did you?

No.

TD:   What did y’all do?

Well my daddy always went somewhere and got him a job.

TD:  What did the others do?

Bummed around, I reckon. I don't know what they did.

TD: [To interviewer} Crabs and fishing and shrimping.

What kind of job would her daddy get in the summer?

TD:  What kind of job did Grandpa Charlie get in the summer?

Well he carpentered and worked on the road, anything he could do. Yeah, he worked at sawmill some.

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When did you get married?

When did I get married—me? Fourteenth of January 1933. I was sixteen years old and he was twenty-four. [Laughs] And we lived together sixty-one years when he died.

How did you meet your husband?

We had to go to Apalach on a boat. There weren't no bridge or no ferry. My granddaddy used to—we lived right on the beach, you might say. We lived on a shell bank—the edge of the shell bank, but the road part of it was on the beach, and I guess all of it was before they made the road there. And he used to tell us children, “I want to tell you something.” He said, “One day you're going to see a bridge to that island, and you're going to see one to Apalach.” We said, “Yeah, granddaddy, I'm sure we will.” I said, “I'm sure that we will.” We didn't believe him. [He said,] “All right. I won't see it, but you kids will.” And they finished the bridge to Apalach the year he died, but he wasn't living here then. He had moved to Alabama. But they finished that bridge just before he died.

How long did it take them to build the bridge?

I don't really know. A pretty good while, though…That's not the bridge that's there now. The other one was—wasn't good as this one and wasn't as wide and all.

How did you meet your husband?

He come and his family moved down here. And really, before, I guess, they moved down here two years before we got married. I remember me and my cousin—one of my cousins—my sister was on the oyster house dock they called it, and my husband and his momma and daddy was coming by and going down on the point, and he was chewing tobacco. [Laughs] I never will forget that. He was walking between his momma and daddy chewing tobacco, and he spit. I said if that youngin' was mine, I'd tear him up. [Laughs] I thought that was just awful.

What was your husband's name?

Louis Hicks—Louis Hullman Hicks.

Was he oystering when you met him?

Yeah. And shrimped, mostly. And snapper fished. He done a little of all of it…And then in later years, after the kids all got grow,n we built an oyster house—built our own oyster house, and it’s still down there. It got some damage in that hurricane, but it’s not as bad as some of them. My son and his wife lost everything they had in that hurricane.

So before [you and your husband] built [your] own oyster house, were [you] working for [your] father?

Well he didn't run, no—he didn't run no oyster house after [nineteen] twenty-nine, but he oystered some and he crabbed and he didn't never do much fishing—mullet fishing…I think he mostly worked for Joe Taranto [of Taranto’s Seafood in Apalachicola].

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You and your husband, you were still shucking with your husband?

Yeah, uh-hmm…Well, the oyster house we run, we would run for the Segrees down here, and then we built one up there across from Ard's Service Station [in Eastpoint], and I don't know what to tell you about what it was like. You either done that or you done without because there weren't no more work around here. When they started building the road and the bridge to Apalach, my husband worked at that then. And he built the oyster house. We moved to Panama [City] one time and stayed a while and come right back. [Laughs] I don't care where we went, we come back to Eastpoint.

How [have you] seen the seafood industry and the bay change all these years?

How has it changed? Well, I don't know how to tell you that. About the only thing I know about it is it's gotten—you get more money for your work now than you did then and—but there's a lot more problems to it, too, than there was then.

TD: Did they ever close the bay when you was growing up?

No.

TD:  When did you find out about red tide?

After the kids was all grown and married. We shucked oysters on the beach, poured them in a wash tub and—Momma and them did, I didn't…They'd sit there all day. Daddy and them would come in from the oyster bar, and they'd carry them down to Moore's Seafood House, and they washed them and measured them, put them on [a boat], the Jessie Mae or a Terrapin—whichever one come. One of them would come—the Terrapin come every Thursday. That was a big old boat made like a barge or something, and they would come from Mobile [Alabama], and they picked up oysters over in Apalach and fish and whatever they could get…The boat brought mail—a boat like that one in the picture brought mail over here. Like this big old long boat—

What is this picture?

TD: We found that picture—me and my cousin took some of Grandma's pictures and we made copies of them, and we had to take them out of the frames, and when we took them out of the frames we found that behind one of the pictures. It's in Apalach. We can figure that, and we know about where it was at in Apalach, but we don't know anything else about it. And we blew it up enough to know that the boat's name was Maribelle but Grandma don't remember a Maribelle boat, so—. Well the oysters are smaller now aren't they?

Oh yeah, I mean they are.

TD:  And there ain't as many of them. And there's all kinds of regulations.

Yeah, there weren't no regulations, weren't no inspectors coming around then that I know anything about. Lord if anybody that had oysters now like they did then they'd swear—kill them.

[Do you] like eating oysters?

Uh-hmm, sure do…Any way I can get them. [Laughs]…I like them fried, and I like oyster stew.

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So are many of the families that [you] grew up here with, are they all still in Eastpoint?

Some of their families is here, but I don't know of anybody that's as old as I am that growed up with me.

TD:  She's lived in Eastpoint longer than anybody else has.

What do you think about all these generations after you staying here?

Well I don't think nothing about it; I think it's kind of natural. [Laughs]

TD: Would you tell these younger kids to work on the water?

Well I think now they'd be better to have a different job than seafood work because too much regulations and stuff to—and it's not as plentiful as it used to be. Of course, they'll get more money for it, but you've got everything cheaper, too—groceries and everything. And we didn't have no electricity—had kerosene lamps.

TD:  Weren't your momma and daddy the first ones to get electricity?

Well there was several of them around here that got it about the time they did. They were just one of the first ones that lived out there—about the second house down there.

TD: Weren't your momma the first one to get a ringer washer?

Yeah. [Laughs] And that thing started shaking, and she went and put her hand in it and liked to knocked her down. To start with, she had those tubs sitting on the porch, and she was standing in the yard, and she put her hands in that water in that tub and that electricity met her there. And she said, “Hmm, my feet has gone to sleep.”  She was just a-stomping, “My feet has gone to sleep. I wonder why my feet has gone to sleep.” She found out pretty soon after that electricity from that washing machine. She got up there and put her hands in, and it she got a full dose and then she knowed what it was.

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How long would it take you to get to St. George Island on a boat?

It wouldn't take very long, but usually we didn't have no motor. They had oars. You know what that is? Some people calls them paddles and we'd go around—you couldn't hire me to do that now. [Laughs] No one ever did get lost or anything. If they got lost in the fog, why they'd—my husband would hear them running around, and if they had a motor on their boat, they'd—he'd go get them. He rowed a lot of people in because they was lost in the fog. Not long before he died, two men come to the house and one of them said, “I wanted to come and thank you again for saving mine and my daddy's life.” He said if he hadn't have went—if Louis hadn't have went out there, they said they'd have just drifted right out in the Gulf. But Louis heard them running around out there, and they didn't know where they was. [Laughs]

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What do you think about how things have changed since you were born?

Well I don't think about that much. [Laughs] But I don't know.

TD: It's changed a lot, ain't it?

Oh yeah, a real lot. People was more friendly back then than they are now. They had a hard life, I can tell you that. But they didn't know it; they didn't know it was as bad as it was.

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What do you want people to know about Eastpoint, where you've lived your life?

What do I want them to know? I don't know how to answer that…I think they have it a lot easier than they did when I was growing up, but there wasn't any churches here. I guess—I guess the Pentecostal Church was the first one that built over here. Then somebody would come once a while and—not very often—run a revival at somebody's house or an empty house that there was down there at that [Mister] Rice had had Daddy to build.

TD: Tell her about the house you and grand-daddy first lived in when you got married.

[Laughs] Well that was after the hurricane, and his momma lived in a house that my daddy had built, and she was a widow woman. And the house that she lived in was just two rooms—a bedroom and then a room for the kitchen. And the big part of the house washed away, left the kitchen, and it was about—it was wide enough to put a bed across the—just fit in there and they had a bed and a dresser. The dresser sat by the bed then and the bed here and the dresser here and the door here and then the table. [Laughs] We lived in that. That was our first house. And then we lived in a house on the beach that was made out of tar paper. A man had made it for to store his nets in. He was a fisherman—to store his nets in there. But we never did like to live with nobody and he told Louis, he said, “I'll take them nets out of there. I'm not using them anymore. And if y’all want to camp in there, well you can.” And we did, and I had malaria fever and liked to died. And I'd lay up there and just burn up in that tar paper house. [Laughs] But we made it all right.
We lived in an oyster house in the summer time. And he was going fishing one night, and he smoked, and they was out in bay going to the island and gas had leaked in the boat and he didn't know it and he struck a match to light a cigarette and the head popped off down there in that boat and there was gas leaked in there and it blowed him overboard. And he burned—he wore his sleeves rolled up and it burned real bad there where his sleeves was rolled up and all the way down to the ends of his fingers and his face and his neck, and he was burnt real bad. And they rode to Carrabelle on the fender of a car so the wind would blow on him. He couldn't be still he was burned so bad, and they carried him to Carrabelle. It was Doctor Sikes down there, and then we moved up in a house—in the oyster house where it would be a lot of wind down there, and God Almighty I don't whether you know what a mosquito bar is or not—goes over them. Used—people used to have them to put over their beds to keep the mosquitoes from eating them up, and we put—lived in that oyster house—had big doors on the back over the water and his—that's the way he could make it, that wind a blowing on him.
He didn't have any [scars] hardly. He was burned bad, and when it got cold you could see the scars on his face a little bit. But everybody knowed that it was just going to be scarred real bad, but he'd go to this doctor every day and he would peel all that new skin off—all that dead skin and make him get out in the sun. They couldn't stay but just a minute, and then they'd go backwards and forth in the sun, and he said that would keep him from scarring, and I guess it did.

To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.