“Life goes fast.”
That’s what old people used to tell me, but I wasn’t convinced. Sure, summer vacations went fast. But that was about it. Everything else went slow. Math class went at a snail’s pace. Church service went the speed of a turtle. Handwriting thank you cards after a birthday took at least a millennium.
“I don’t feel sixty-five.”
That was another one. And one of the more curious things I remember hearing from old folks when I was a kid. I found it incomprehensible. It just wasn’t possible that someone so old looking could possibly feel young.
Now that I am officially old, I can say with emphasis that there’s some truth to these two common prognostications handed down from veterans of life. Life does go fast, and when you get old, there’s a good chance you’ll still feel young. Sure, there will come a day when you’re old and feel it. And as my very elderly father tells me, “That’s when the Senior Lunch becomes your main meal of the day, and you get lost driving to the barbershop.”
You see, Blackbeard’s Lost Head is based on my true-life events. And it’s time to get it on a silicon chip before that hooded guy with that hook thing shows up. Of course, names have been changed and certain facts hidden within a woven tale of adventure and mystery. But the story really is based on true events and my memories.
Blackbeard’s Lost Head
In 1718, Blackbeard’s decapitated head was hung on the banks of the Hampton River, in Hampton, Virginia. It was an official British Navy posting ostensibly meant as a message to those involved in high seas thievery that they too, could count on the same royal treatment.
The severed head swung freely for several years until one day it disappeared, its whereabouts becoming the stuff of legend.
In 2025, former FBI agent Dodge Chee Jones is sifting through the estate of a deceased friend on the Port Gamble S’Klallam Reservation in Puget Sound when he stumbles on a 1920 letter from a long dead Native attending Hampton Institute. Originally founded exclusively for African American students, Native Americans also attended the school in the early twentieth century.
The intriguing letter explains that Blackbeard’s lost head is boxed comfortably, and secretly in the basement of the school museum, leaving its whereabouts indisputable, at least in 1920. But is it still there? Instinct, prompted by a childhood memory on the Rez tells Dodge that it isn’t, and while a cross-country trip to Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) confirms his intuition correct, the trip nevertheless provides a bounty of clues that all point back to Puget Sound Indian Country where Blackbeard’s long-lost head is surely hiding.
