With no organized after-school sports to play at the Virginia island’s small combined school, and no girls to date because he’s known them all since kindergarten, Evans heads out most afternoons in a small skiff toward what remains of the Uppards, part of the Tangier settlement that was abandoned in the 1920s.
That doesn’t surprise his mother, Hope, a Tangier native who went away to college in Delaware. She returned to marry her high school sweetheart, Norwood, who grew up on neighboring Smith Island. In addition to Cameron, they have a seven-yeaer-old daughter, Lacee. For years, Norwood crabbed and Hope tended to his shedding shanty, where they supervised crabs about to shed their shells to become soft crabs, an expensive delicacy regionally. Now, Norwood is a lineman with the electric utility.
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