Jubilee

credit: Squire Fox

I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, at Battles Wharf. I was born in 1941, a good time to have arrived. When I was a child, I was blessed with having Duke Cox as my mentor. He lived nearby, off Twin Beach Road, and we would begin our fishing adventures when he’d walk to my house, usually carrying his mullet net in a croaker sack over his shoulder. I slept at the end of the screened porch, and he would scratch on the screen to wake me up.

 We had an old cypress cross-planked rowing skiff that limited our geographic radius only by the distance to which we were willing to row. We lived by the tides and the moon, and kept mental notes on the exact conditions of every jubilee we saw to the point that we were familiar with all the prerequisites to bring about these unique occurrences. If the conditions were right, we stayed out all night and very seldom missed one.

Whereas most places have four tides a day, here on the Alabama coast we only have one high tide and one low tide in a twenty-four hours. Once, on a test in the third grade, one of the questions was, how many tides are there in a day? That was probably the easiest test question I ever saw, so I answered, two tides a day. The teacher marked it wrong. I normally kept a low profile, but this was just too much, so I questioned her. She opened the book and showed me that it said there were four tides in twenty-four hours. I could not wait to discuss this with Duke, and when I did his reply was, “Just goes to show you that just ‘cause it’s writ in a book don’t mean it’s true.” 

A jubilee is a phenomenon that, as far as we know, only occurs on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, though there have been a few reports of jubilees on the western side of the bay but they are very rare. Certain specific conditions must be present for a jubilee to take place — and, even then, it does not guarantee a jubilee — and as a child I kept a log of them: Jubilees occur only in the summer, and usually the day before is overcast or cloudy, with perhaps a light rain. They only occur on an incoming, or rising, tide, with a gentle east wind and calm water. I noted through the years that there were more jubilees during a full moon or a new moon. I also noted that a squall, a ship wave, or anything that will stir up the water, is the end of a jubilee.

For years, jubilees were a complete mystery; now they are thought to be the result of a drop in oxygen in the water caused by decaying organic matter at the bottom of certain parts of Mobile Bay. When an incoming or rising tide pushes this oxygen-depleted water shoreward, bottom-dwelling marine life, in order to survive, is forced to advance ahead of it until it reaches the beach. Rather than finding oxygen-rich water, flounders, stingray, eels, crabs, and shrimp end up trapped on the beach in a sluggish state. Slow to respond, they are easily harvested. Jubilees can be confined to a small area or stretch up the Eastern Shore for miles; they may bring flounders, crabs, shrimp, and eels, or might consist of just crabs or just flounders. You never know what the bay may bring forth.

When I was a child, it was common practice for anyone discovering a jubilee to wake everyone up and notify them of what was going on. Some people even rang bells and hollered “Jubilee!”  Duke and I were just like Tar Babies — we didn’t say nothing. We may have seemed selfish, but knowing jubilee conditions was serious business for us: We sold the flounders that we gigged to Mister Stern, up in Fairhope, at his fish market. He gave us top price for our flounders because we would gig ‘em in the head and not mess up any meat. He would not buy “jubilee flounders” — small ones that most people gigged during jubilees — because he said their flesh was soft and their shelf life was short. We therefore only gigged the big ones. Duke said, “It didn’t make sense to gig ‘em before they were ripe, anyway.”

 Once a jubilee had been discovered by the masses, Duke and I would just stop and stand in the shadows. He would pull out his can of Prince Albert and roll a cigarette, and we would observe a scene that was almost as interesting as the jubilee itself. We called it a “people jubilee.” Women who would not think of going out of the house without the proper attire and makeup were running around on the beach in their pajamas and bathrobes, with their hair in rollers. People would run around with nets, gigs, pitchforks, washtubs, and all kinds of paraphernalia. Duke once said, “You can tell a lot about a person by how they act during a jubilee… The only other things I know of that make people act such a fool is alcohol and sex.”   It was time for us to head up to Mr. Stern’s to sell our catch before he realized there had been a jubilee and lowered his prices, or even refused to buy jubilee flounders