Machines can’t do what Deborah Pratt can.
Standing in the cinder-block oyster house where she works – clad in her usual pearls and rubber boots – Pratt picks a muddy oyster from a pile on the concrete slab before her.
She grips the bulbous handle of a 2-inch blade, bores into the shell, twists both hands, turns one wrist and – presto! She plops a perfectly shucked, raw oyster into a gallon bucket beside her, no nicks, no shell, no grime.
She sends the empty shells clattering down a diagonal chute that ends in a pile outside the shucking house, and picks up another. Twist, plop. And another. And another. Plop. Plop.
Pratt can shuck an oyster in less than 5 seconds. She can shuck 2 dozen in 2 minutes, and fill a gallon bucket in 35 minutes or less.
"Depending on the day, and the oyster itself," Pratt said, her hands moving continuously, effortlessly, like a knitter’s.
In fact, Virginia’s perennial state champ shucks faster than just about anyone in the world. Today, she’ll vie for the national title at the St. Mary’s County Oyster Festival in Maryland, attempting to win some cash and add to her cache of 14 national titles.
If she takes the women’s championship – which she has won 10 times – Pratt will advance to a showdown with the top male shucker. A win in that round, and she would represent the United States for the fifth time at the Galway World Oyster Opening Championship in Ireland.
Raised in Middlesex County by an oyster shucker and a fisherman, Pratt, 58, marvels at her life – traveling internationally, meeting Bob Hope, getting her picture in Southern Living magazine, being able to send her children to college, and enjoying the paid performances: Once a West Virginia man offered her $700 to shuck for a fancy party.
"I was raised in a small home that didn’t have much of nothing," Pratt said.
"This. It’s a dream world. I just can’t explain it, that 24 oysters got me around the world."
Deborah Pratt opened her first oyster out of necessity.
In 1975, on the porch of her Jamaica, Va., home, she learned her front-in shucking style from her sister, Clementine Macon, who had picked it up from their mother.
In Middlesex County, bound by the Rappahannock River and the Chesapeake Bay, opening oysters offers a way to make decent money, if shuckers work fast.
Working alongside friends and family members, Pratt got paid on Fridays, the amount based on volume.
Early on, she was second-rate. She once stabbed herself in the palm, and it felt like her whole arm was going to fall off. The doctor sent her home with a tetanus shot and a sling.
"After that, I learned to obey the knife," she said.
Her first paycheck totaled $5. That was back when a gallon of shucked oysters paid $2.50. But with her husband unemployed and young children at home, she kept at it.
"I just went to work to make sure my kids had," she said. "I didn’t want them not to have."
Pratt got faster, and over the years she came to understand her mother’s love of shucking. In the big oyster houses, "it was a lot of fun," she said. "You get in there and talk and play all day."
At the state and national contests, competitors race the clock in front of huge, cheering crowds to lay out 24 oysters on the half-shell. Judges add one second for an oyster presented on a broken shell, two seconds for an oyster not placed properly on the shell, three seconds for grit or blood, and 20 if an oyster is missing. Shuckers can get up to 10 seconds deducted for outstanding presentation.
"Deborah is an exceptional oyster shucker, and she’s worked very, very hard," said Bill Hight, former Urbanna festival chairman and judge. "It really is an acquired art."
It’s an endangered art, too.
Engineers have experimented with steam jets, microwaves, shock waves, infrared radiation and laser beams, trying to develop a viable, automated shucking method.
Meanwhile, Hight said, young people aren’t flocking to the oyster houses. At his marine supply store in Urbanna, he used to sell oyster knives by the lot. "Now I sell them by the piece," he said.
He especially appreciates Pratt’s "old-fashioned" technique, which she has held fast to, no matter the oyster’s origin.
Rappahannock River oysters are Pratt’s favorites to open; they have shells so hard that some people use hammers to get inside.
But of all the oysters she’s shucked – from New England, Canada, Mississippi and Maryland – only one oyster ever scared her.
In 1992, Pratt boarded an airplane for the first time in her life, bound for Ireland to compete against national champions from around the globe – Germany, Canada, Belgium, Sweden, France, Austria and England were represented.
Few women were in the contest, and the children at the festival marveled at Pratt’s dark skin, some rubbing her forearms in wonder.
She laughed and told them, "No, Baby, it won’t rub off."
In Ireland, everything seemed different. Then she met the Irish oyster, with its snow-white shell, translucent and brittle as bone china, and its lip as ruffled as a party dress.
In Pratt’s vernacular, mid-Atlantic shuckers are "stabbers," the only ones who bore into bivalves from the front. Europeans and others prefer attacking oysters at the hinge, a method she thinks too often results in lacerated meat.
Not about to abandon her front-in style, Pratt collected a few oysters from Galway restaurateurs and worked into the wee hours to find just the right ruffle to start on.
Homing in on that sweet spot, Pratt finished with the second-fastest time, opening 30 oysters in 2 minutes and 49 seconds. But judges added nearly a minute for shell chips, and she wound up in seventh place.
Pratt won the Virginia and national titles again the next year and returned to Ireland.
This time, she decided to slow down a tad. This time, she placed third in the world, with a time, including penalties, of 3:09, just 17 seconds behind the Irish winner.
Pratt returned to Ireland again in 1994, and took fourth place.
In 1998, she finished second, tying for time with the French champion, who eked into first place with points for presentation.
Today in Maryland, Pratt will compete against her sister and teacher, Clementine Macon, a skilled shucker in her own right, who has taken the women’s national title five times and is the defending champion.
Pratt is determined to return to Ireland and claim the world title. To do that, she’ll have to overcome her nemesis – a tendency to shuck so quickly that she leaves a thread of muscle intact.
"I think about it when I sleep," she said.
"I say to myself, ‘Deborah, you need to stay straight to the bottom of that shell.’ "
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Lorraine Eaton, (757)446-2697,
