It is a city whose heartbeat changes from block to block as subtly as its architecture; a city of
seventeenth-century schoolhouses, churches, and taverns; of ceiling fans and Tiffany windows, twostory atriums, blue barrel dormers, Georgian staircases and Palladian windows and grand, elegant
antebellum mansions that hide from view among moss-draped oaks and serpentine vines.
Dunetown is a stroll through the eighteenth century, its history limned on cemetery tablets:
HERE LIES JENIFER GOLDSMITH
LOVING WYF OF JEREMY
WHO DIED OF THE PLAGUE THAT KILED SO MENY
IN THESE PARTS IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD, 1744
JAMES OLIVER
A FAST TONGUE AND HOT TEMPER
DEAD AT 22 YRS. OF HIS ACE
IN A DUEL WITH LT. CHARLES MORAY
WHO SHOT QUICKER AND WITH KEENER EYE
These are its ancestors. The survivors become the city?s power brokers, the rulers of the kingdom,
dictating an archaic social structure that is unchanging, and defined by its metaphor, the Dune Club,
restricted to the elite, whose money is oldest, whose roots are deepest, and who, for more than a
century, have sequestered it from time.
Thus the years have passed Dunetown, leaving behind a treasure: an eighteenth-century serfdom
whose history trembles with ghost stories, with wars and brawls and buried loot on shaggy Atlantic
beaches; whose people have the heritage and independence of islanders, their bloodlines traced to
Irish colliers, Spanish privateers, to Haiti and Jamaica, and Cherokee reservations.
Its bays, marshes, and rivers still weave a city composed of islands: Alec, Skidaway, Thunderhead,
Buccaneer, Oceanby, Sea Oat, and the wistful, Gatsby-like isle of Sighs, a haunt of the rich, its
antique houses serene against the backwaters of the sea, where one might easily envision a solitary
and forlorn Jay Gatz, staring across the water at the solemn light on Daisy?s pier
Reality, to Dunetown, is history to the rest of the world.
INTRODUCTION
