A recent visit to a museum exhibit reminded me of two very important things: why I roll my eyes when people ask why everything has to be about race, and how much I don’t know about my native state.

“Spark!: Places of Innovation,” a Smithsonian traveling exhibit about creativity in rural towns, is currently housed at the charming waterfront Captain Avery Museum in Shady Side. In turn, that collection sparked a local, deeply personal companion exhibit about how Black and Jewish communities survived and thrived on the Chesapeake Bay.

“We were just country people,” said Alice Ennals, who grew up among the enclave of Black watermen. “We were very self-sufficient. We didn’t know we were poor.”

Ennals, 76, is one of the local residents whose memories and experiences growing up on the water provided the basis for “Buyboats to Beaches: 100 Years of Resiliency on The Chesapeake Bay.” Through maps, photos and some of the most intricate hand-carved models I’ve ever seen, it tells a story of crab traps and celebrations, segregation and survival, and pride of place.

The “Spark!” exhibit, which has visited six Maryland museums and next ventures to the Iredell Museums in Stateside, North Carolina, requires that each local host institution create a companion event fitting the theme of innovation, which was “a carrot and a stick,” according to Avery Museum board member Peggy Oriani.

The result was the “Buyboats” exhibit, capturing the ingenuity of the marginalized people of the area who created a way of life and leisure when society was unaccommodating.

The exhibit’s origins are found, in part, in the museum itself. It was once the home of 19th-century waterman Salem Avery, who ran buyboats that went out into the Bay to purchase seafood from watermen. The site eventually became “Our Place,” a Catskills-like summer vacation colony for Jewish families unwelcome at all-white resorts.

The area was lovingly referred to as “The Swamp.” Local Black families that lived in the area like Ennals, who now resides in Glen Burnie, and fellow participant Darlene Washington, 81, who still lives nearby, have their own story to tell. Their history is plotted by a map in the exhibit titled “The Great Swamp: Our Place, Our Home, Our People.”

Yes, it was shaped by the Jim Crow laws that saw them commute about three hours round trip to Annapolis’ Bates High School, the only one Black students in the county could attend. But such constraints strengthened them into a solid core. “We know everyone in Anne Arundel County,” Washington said. “I absolutely loved it.”

Their experiences, as told in “Buyboats,” were not primarily about tragedy, but about joy, community and a testimony of thriving.

“White people didn’t live on the water [then],” said Washington of growing up in the area, which had terrible mosquitos and harsh heat in summer, and extreme cold coming off the winter waves. “It’s the reverse now. We lost all that.”

But back then, you would find a society of hardworking people who were the heartbeat of the bay and the instrument through which the state found its seafood.

“Most of our parents were entrepreneurs who all worked on the water,” said Washington, whose father was a waterman. Ennals’ was the ice man, delivering heavy blocks of the frigid substance to local kitchens.

That history is literally carved into those aforementioned miniature workboats, the work of artist Norman Gross. Each is based on a real-life vessel, such as the Puddin or the Miss Myrtle, with tiny people depicted as working and sitting on them, all based on Gross’ family members.

After the seafood was brought in, Washington said, “those workboats were transformed into pleasure boats” where residents enjoyed the beauty of an area from which they were often excluded.

“Buyboats” celebrates the reality of the day, which did of course feature the exclusion of the area’s Black residents from most local beaches. Nearby Columbia Beach was founded by wealthy Black Baltimore and Washington, D.C., residents who were rejected from other such places, but became an exclusive enclave itself.

“We weren’t invited,” Washington said wryly of the local kids who found themselves outside the goings-on in Columbia Beach. But those lines could sometimes be conquered with camaraderie and an inescapable beat. “We had our own dances,” she remembered, “and when they found out, we all became friends.”

My Prince George’s County parents mostly avoided taking us to the shore until we were in high school because of their memories of Ocean City’s “Colored Excursion Days,” the one day during the summer season they were allowed on the beach. They were like “Nah, you can keep it,” and took us to day trips to Cunningham Falls State Park instead. The closest we got to O.C. was Anne Arundel’s Sandy Point.

“We couldn’t go to Sandy Point,” revealed Ennals, explaining that Black swimmers were initially relegated to the less-pretty and undeveloped East Beach. I didn’t know that!

This is why people like Ennals and Washington, who can tell the firsthand story of our not-so-distant past, are crucial to the truth. It’s why “Buyboats and Beaches” is such an important tool against those who want us not only to go back in history, but to erase all records of it.