Best Creative Nonfiction of the South, Volume II: North Carolina [1 ed.] 9781680031409, 9781680031393

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BEST

CREATIVE NONFICTION OF THE SOUTH

Volume II:

North Carolina

BEST

CREATIVE NONFICTION OF THE SOUTH

Volume II:

North Carolina Casey Clabough and Michael Chitwood, Editors      

Texas Review Press Huntsville, Texas

Copyright © 2017 by Casey Clabough and Michael Chitwood All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America   FIRST EDITION   Requests for permission to acknowledge material from this work should be sent to:   Permissions Texas Review Press English Department Sam Houston State University Huntsville, TX 77341-2146     Cover design by Nancy Parsons, Graphic Design Group       A brief word about the following information: The Library of Congress directed us to use the CIP data from the first volume of the anthology, even though we have distinct data for other volumes. The correct publication information for this volume is listed first followed by the official CIP data from the first volume in the series:     Title: Best Creative Nonfiction of the South, Volume II: North Carolina Editors: Casey Clabough and Michael Chitwood ISBN-13: 978-1-68003-139-3 paper, and 978-1-68003-140-9 ebook         Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data    Names: Clabough, Casey, 1974- editor. | Moeckel, Thorpe, editor. Title: Best creative nonfiction of the South / [edited by] Casey Clabough,     Thorpe Moeckel. Description: Huntsville, Texas : Texas Review Press, [2016]Identifiers: LCCN 2015047566 (print) | LCCN 2015050241 (ebook) | ISBN     9781680030754 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781680030761 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Creative nonfiction, American--Southern States.   Creative     nonfiction, American--21st century. | LCGFT: Creative nonfiction.  Classification: LCC PS659.2 .B485 2016 (print) | LCC PS659.2 (ebook) | DDC     810.8/0975--dc23  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015047566

    Thomas Rain Crowe

Contents

Native Tongue

Hal Crowther

But Now I See

Jan DeBlieu

An Imperfect Marriage

Clyde Edgerton

A Story

Georgann Eubanks

Of Navigation and Place

Marianne Gingher

Horses and Boys

Judy Goldman

Love in North Carolina

Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Chiefing in Cherokee

Allen Gurganus

A Torrent of Kindness

Scott Huler

Hospitality

Randall Kenan

North Carolina

1 6 12 26 33 42 57 66 85 90 97

Jill McCorkle

Summer 107

Michael McFee

Pickett Road 110

Robert Morgan

Introduction to Boone 121

  Michael Parker

I Could See for Miles

132

Ron Rash

The Gift of Silence 136

Bland Simpson

The Christmas Kayaker 140

Contributor Biographies 147

Permissions Each of the essays in this volume is used by permission of the author. In the case of reprints, this list details where the essay first appeared: •

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• • • • • • • •

• • • • • •

Thomas Rain Crowe’s “Native Tongue” originally appeard in Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods (Georgia UP 2006). “But Now I See” by Hal Crowther first appeared in Oxford American, then in Cathedrals of Kudzu (LSU 2000). Jan DeBlieu’s “An Imperfect Marriage” first appeared as “An Imperfect Marriage: Thoughts on Being Faithful to Home” in the NC Literary Review, number 20 (2011). Clyde Edgerton’s “A Story” is used with the author’s permission. Georeann Eubanks’ “Of Navigation and Place” was originally included in South Writ Large, (Summer 2016). “Horses and Boys” by Marianne Gingher first appeared in A Girl’s Life (LSU 2001). “Love in North Carolina” by Judy Goldman comes from her memoir-in-progress, Together. Stephanie Elizondo Griest’s “Chiefing in Cherokee” was first published by the Virginia Quarterly Review (Fall 2016). Allen Gurganus’s “A Torrent of Kindness” first appeared in the New York Times (October 2, 1999). Scott Huler’s “Hospitality,” originally titled “Southern Hospitality,” appeared in Our State magazine (August 2012). “North Carolina” by Randall Kenan first appeared in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (Harper Collins/ Ecco 2009). Jill McCorkle’s “Summer” was initially published in The Pilot as “Keeping Summer Close” (July 31, 2014). This is the first appearance of Michael McFee’s essay “Pickett Road.” Robert Morgan’s “Introduction to Boone” is excerpted from Boone: A Biography (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007). Michael Parker’s “I Could See for Miles” was first published in Our State magazine (January 1, 2014). “The Gift of Silence” by Ron Rash was originally published in The Ron Rash Reader (South Carolina UP 2014). Bland Simpson’s “The Christmas Kayaker” first appeared in Wildlife in North Carolina as “A Christmas Kayak Rescue” (December 2002) and then in The Inner Islands (UNC Press, Fall 2006).

Series Statement The series editor and the publisher of Best Creative Nonfiction of the South created this state-by-state series of volumes in order to gather together the best creative nonfiction of living Southern writers organized by the states from which they hail or in which they actively have lived for several decades. Creative nonfiction has various definitions but typically encompasses such forms of writing as the personal essay, literary journalism, memoir, and travel writing. It often is described as true stories which are rendered using the tools and craft of fiction. Best Creative Nonfiction of the South serves as a valuable resource for scholars, students, writers, and general readers interested in creative nonfiction both from specific areas of the South and across the region as a whole. The writers included in each volume come from diverse backgrounds, generations, and artistic traditions. Most, if not all, volumes in the series indirectly reflect literary changes over time and/or how literary variations have manifested themselves in a given state. In some cases, publisher permissions and other factors have prevented the editors from including the work of deserving writers. Nevertheless, the abundant literary talent across the South has lessened the impact of the occasional unfortunate omission. The various states of the South keep evolving, as do their cultures and arts. The Best Creative Nonfiction of the South series offers provocative glimpses both of Southern literary tradition and change in the twenty-first century.                                           —Casey Clabough, Series Editor

BEST

CREATIVE NONFICTION OF THE SOUTH

Volume II:

North Carolina

Thomas Rain Crowe Native Tongue Love of place and love of language go hand in hand. Or as Zoro has said, “Who you are is all about where you are from.” As a boy in Graham County my first language was what has been called Southern Mountain Speech—a complex blend of Scots, traces of Chaucerian and Elizabethan English, elements of the speech of seventeenth-century immigrants from the British Isles, a witty Irish lyricism, and numerous other forebears. This Appalachian dialect was rich with poetic idioms and colloquialisms, lyrical inflections and rhythms, making it unique as well as almost incomprehensible to any outsider. I can still remember a rainy Saturday in the Snowbird Supply General Store in Robbinsville and an old fella calling the summer thunderstorm that had me and my buddies holed up inside drinking RC Colas and eating Moon Pies a “sizzly sod-soaker,” and later during those years hearing references to such “thundery weather” as a “Devil’s footwasher” and a “nubbin’ stretcher.” There was no lack of colorful speech. Surrounded by such language, it’s no wonder that as early as the third grade I became interested in poetry and by the fourth grade was attempting to write my own. But during the summer of 1962, my parents moved our family out of Milltown in Robbinsville to the northern end of the Blue Ridge Parkway just west of Charlottesville, Virginia—thus separating me from the culture and the 1

language I had grown up with. Moving away from the place where I had consciously begun to identify and know myself was my own trail of tears. As I said my good-byes to my Cherokee and Scots-Irish friends and to my life along Snowbird Creek in Graham County and the particular, if not peculiar, culture there, little did I know that I was also saying good-bye to the way I linguistically viewed the world. As my father uprooted our family time and time again in a march of migration farther and farther north, I lost more and more of my contact and association with my cultural roots. By the time I finished high school in the steel town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I had become little more than the proverbial rolling stone—one that had not had time enough in any one place to gather moss. As years went by and I moved myself farther and farther west on my own, I learned to distance myself from any semblance of a southern accent—so strong were the prejudices I encountered in other parts of the country against southern speech. Tired of being castigated and denigrated, I taught myself a generic American speech that was without dialect and therefore without character—a final act of acculturation. Even though I continued to write poetry, it had become a poetry whose language was unaffected by place. Instead of the organic lyrical and idiomatic poetry that might have come easily had I remained in Graham County, I was, by the time I was twenty-five, writing in rhetorical rhythms a kind of message-based poetry more influenced by Russia and France than by the Appalachian South. People who met me were astonished that I had come from the South, so well had I hidden my past in my newly formed speech. Only once can I recall slipping and falling back into grace—when I was living an apprentice’s life in San Francisco surrounded by many of my Beat generation idols—on the occasion of meeting in a North Beach café a young musician named Wayde 2

Blair from Berea, Kentucky. Because of his strong southern drawl, I reverted to old speech patterns that had become buried in my subconscious but broke ground upon hearing his voice and the familiar language. I would, I was told (for I was unaware of the shift), lapse into dialect and even old Appalachian metaphoric idioms when I ran into Wayde and we talked casually about home and the past. Aside from these few San Francisco slips, I remained dialect free. Now that I am back in western North Carolina many years after leaving the region as a young teenager I find that the cultural life, as well as the language, is dying out, as more and more of my generation have moved to larger towns in the region or farther to search for prosperity. One can hear good old Southern Mountain Speech only from the elderly, who decrease in number each year. This being the case, upon returning to the western North Carolina mountains I found myself gravitating toward elders: Zoro and Bessie Guice, Mose Bradley, Mac . . . But now, in my early thirties, my recall of my native tongue is faulty, almost nonexistent. I taught myself too well, over the years while I was gone, how to speak sans dialect. And no matter how hard I try to converse on an equal basis with my septuagenarian and octogenarian friends, I am able to give only lip service to my former language. Here in my cabin at Zoro’s field I have been moved to try to return to my cultural and linguistic roots and to incorporate these back into my daily speech as well as into my writing. Since moving to Polk County, I have continued my habit of spending time with the elder generation as well as the remaining few of my own age who have held tight to traditions, culture, and speech harkening back to the past. In addition to conversations I’ve had with my Saluda neighbors, there have been many memorable conversations with characters such as the now deceased Cherokee medicine man 3

Amoneeta Sequoyah and the historian and arts dealer Tom Underwood over on the Qualla Boundary. I remember a conversation that took place on the back porch of an old mountain sawmill shack looking out into the woods, not long after I had arrived in Polk County fresh from the West Coast. The talk was about gardening, mountain farming, and the old days—of garden sass and wild greens, bird’s toe, fiddleheads, speckled dick and lamb’s-quarter, mouse’s ear, blue root, hen pepper, and wooly breeches. Of cans and pokes. Of sour sop, chitlins, churn rags, and clabber. Of pawpaws, mayapples, wildfish, and ramps. Of coal oil and coal-of-fire. Of broom corn and blackstrap. Of bedbugs and rapscallions, rounders, swap slobbers, and swangs. I’ve had many colorful conversations over the years with younger generation yarnspinners such as Paul Rhodes, whose lickety cut mind and quick wit, coupled with his mountain drawl, have caused me to rar back in my boots with laughter. Since the beginning of my sojourn in the Green River cabin I’ve worked to reestablish my identity, my sense of belonging to a particular place and culture, by utilizing Southern Mountain Speech as much as I can, mainly through my writing. While it may be true, metaphorically and metaphysically, that you can’t go home again, the fact is that I have come home again and am finding that I can call up the past in bits and pieces and bring it into the present-day voice in which I write. Can pull up Chaucer-era canticles—the triple negatives, the likes of “don’t make no nevermind” and “not nary a any”—to grace the images of my poems and fictions. During the winter months, when I have concentrated time and energy to read and write at length, in poems with titles such as “A Beatnik Wanders into Appalachia and Learns the Language of Earth and Sky,” “Crack-Light,” and “Who-Shot-John,” I’ve been able to relive the past as well as to bring it to light (life) and into the present for myself. 4

When I write “Dig the Big-Eyed Bird in swag or hollow / of locust and locked wood” (which when translated means: “you can see God in nature”), I am back in Graham County on the mountain behind my family’s house in the Milltown community along Snowbird Creek, and, at the same time, I am here in Zoro’s field experiencing a kind of time travel generated by language. A leap of more than twenty years. Or when I write, “couldn’t hold a candle to this wick of words” or “where in tarnation,” I can feel strength and satisfaction coming from the heart. In these moments it seems as if I’ve got the best of both worlds: past and present. As a gardener of both legumes and language, I know that a time will come when I’ll have to lay down my hoe, and my pen, forever. But until that day comes I aim to keep on diggin’. Harvesting the bounty afforded me by good organic food and this beautiful Southern Mountain Speech.

5

Hal Crowther But Now I See “I have seen the David, seen the Mona Lisa too And I have heard Doc Watson play Columbus Stockade Blues.”                        —Guy Clark, “Dublin Blues” The Merle Watson Festival is a four-day celebration that stops only to sleep, and not for long either. By day four, a Sunday, even younger people try to pace themselves. But one promising Sunday several years ago, we committed ourselves to a sunrise gospel session, which meant coffee in the dark and a long drive down the mountain in the fog. Our commitment was rewarded, beyond all mortal expectations, by a once-in-a-lifetime gospel trio of Doc Watson, Ralph Stanley, and Emmylou Harris. We came in on “Heaven’s Bright Shore,” followed by “Rank Stranger,” and “I’ll Pass Over Thee.” For an hour or so, 40 lucky pilgrims shared a privileged preview of Hillbilly Heaven. I feel sorry for ticketholders who actually went to church that Sunday morning. I’m afraid they were cheated, because there in the corner of the gospel tent—singing along in a soft clear bass—was a big old mountaineer with a saltand-pepper ponytail who looked an awful lot like God. The trio wound up their set with “Amazing Grace.” Harris wore her church face and sang the high notes like a 6

bourbon-frosted angel. Stanley stood ramrod straight like he does, like he’s standing to hear his sentence in the court of Final Judgment. When they reached “I once was blind, but now I see,” I took a hard look at Doc Watson to see if I could pick up anything wistful or ironic on his face. Doc just looked comfortable and spiritual, the same as he looked when he played at my college in 1963, in the heat of the great folk revival. New England had never seen anything like Doc. For weeks after, preppies from Connecticut with expensive Martin guitars were trying to lower their voices and flat-pick their own way through “Tennessee Stud.” A year earlier, half of them had been listening to Fabian. I was stunned by Doc’s performance, and suspected for the first time that those mountains, which I’d been trying to escape all my life, might be harboring things I ought to be proud of. In those days it was still possible, I think, for an unsophisticated person to be ambushed by sheer authenticity, to be knocked flat and left in the road by something undeniably real. I never imagined that he’d be my neighbor someday, that I’d buy a house just two ridges over from the Watson homeplace and get to hear Doc play for free at his cousin’s 12-table fish restaurant on the road to Boone, N.C., under a sign that says “Friends Gather Here.” I suppose I’ve seen him perform 100 times. Most worthwhile people know that Doc Watson is a blind guitarist, blind not quite from birth but from infancy. Over the years Doc’s almost convinced me that blindness is no obstacle for a born musician. “Music is sound,” Watson told one interviewer. “You learn where the notes are because of the sound of them. You don’t have to see to play the guitar.” From watching Doc, I’ll even argue that there’s a different quality to a blind musician’s performance, often a 7

superior quality. When he makes the connection with his audience, it’s all-consuming. He’s so much with them because it’s his one moment, his chance—because when the connection is broken he’s so much alone. Backstage, Doc sits immobile, supernaturally patient, with what I interpret as exquisitely tuned attention. I believe he could hear a string break or a note misplayed three tents away, over the roar of the multitude. The ears of blind musicians are the finest instruments they own. Ray Charles recently heard the Rolling Stones live and declared their decibel level unbearable. “I thought I’d gone deaf,” said Charles, “and God, I’m already blind.” My wife had a great uncle, Blind Bill Smith of Buchanan County, Virginia, who was a locally famous piano player. Like Doc Watson, Blind Bill sometimes tuned pianos for a living. He was notoriously hard-living, for a man with such a disability, until he found Jesus late in life. It was an experience he related to his brother in a series of letters I’m still reading. “It is true that I have missed the beauties of this world,” Blind Bill wrote home, “but it is great to know that I will see in a world that is more beautiful than this one.” Blind Bill’s letters made me reconsider Doc Watson. Does Doc feel that he’s missed the beauties of this world? To me Doc Watson is one of the beauties of this world. I’d never mention his handicap—Doc prefers to call it “a hindrance”—if I didn’t feel a trace of guilt. A great blind musician may be one of the few members of the human race who gives a lot more to the world than he ever gets back. We’re a selfish audience. We’re the ones who benefit because Doc Watson had so much time to practice, so few distractions and temptations compared with Hank Williams or George Jones. Watson was born the same year as Hank Williams— Doc was six months older. Country music has a history of 8

cautionary tales, of stars who killed or lobotomized themselves with whiskey and drugs, or peaked early and spent their last 40 years impersonating themselves on the Grand Ole Opry, singing the same three songs. So many of the great ones left us wishing they could have left us more. As much as he hated the life on the road (“the loneliness...but I had a family to feed”), Doc paid his dues and minded his music, and now he’s outlasting them all. We got our money’s worth out of Doc Watson. Does Doc think it’s been a fair exchange, all things considered? I never asked him. I’m shy around people I admire, and musical geniuses make me, a non-musician, feel like a tourist. I only introduced myself, and shook Doc’s hand, on one occasion. He was in Greensboro to receive one of his many folk arts awards, and I found him sitting alone in a classroom behind the stage area, waiting for an escort. I don’t think he heard me come in. It was an unfair advantage to take, but I watched him for five minutes before I spoke. It wasn’t much of a conversation—two polite strangers, each caught out of his element in a different way. If you want to hear Doc wax effusive, I’ve been told, start by praising Merle. Doc Watson’s long, much-honored late career is an Indian summer any artist would envy, but it followed a hard, hard frost. The defining tragedy of Doc’s life was the death in 1985 of his only son Merle, a superb slide guitar player who rolled a tractor over on himself one night up in Watauga County. It was Doc’s relentless grief that generated the Merle Watson Festival, which has convened in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, every April since 1988. Though it’s grown tremendously in size and renown—crowds reach 50,000 now—Doc has never let his huge picnic lose its focus as a memorial to his son. In four days at Wilkesboro, you’ll hear the name Merle a thousand times. 9

Merlefest, as they call it, is unique. It’s not a fiddler’s convention or a folk festival. It’s more of a family reunion, a gathering of the clans where the names of the dear departed—not only Merle Watson but Bill Monroe and Carter Stanley and Mother Maybelle—are heard far more often than any names from the charts. Merlefest is about remembering, about respect for your elders. It’s inspiring to watch kids like Iris Dement and Alison Krauss sing with Doc for the first time ever. Or to hear Guy Clark—looking none too well-preserved himself—sing the songs he’s written in honor of Doc Watson and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, legends of a previous generation who are sitting in back of him, grinning. Up on his mountain, Doc is still the man. Every April the country aristocracy, the best musicians from Nashville and the bluegrass circuit, come to the mountain to say “We love you, Doc.” And God knows to hear him perform. A musician can tell you whether Doc Watson is still unchallenged king of the flat-pickers. The miracle, to me, is that Doc is singing better now than he was 20 years ago. Whatever it took to temper and refine that warm honey baritone—age, grief, singing in the dark—the big voice we’re hearing now is often the best one on the program. “A voice pure as mountain water,” a critic wrote last year. Flatlanders come up to Wilkesboro to buy nostalgia— ”Is he still performing?”—and go away raving about Doc’s voice and the incredible range of his repertoire. Doc loves to rock, they’re surprised to learn. He spent the ‘50s playing electric guitar in a dance band, and rockabilly suits him fine, especially Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes.” He’s never sounded better. He has more friends than The Library, and folklorists call him “a national treasure,” which is no exaggeration. People might think that Doc Watson has everything he could reasonably ask for, at this 10

stage of his life. But we can’t ever know how another man feels about his luck, any more than we can know how he feels playing for 10,000 people he can’t see. Maybe these festivals we love just remind him of how much it hurt to lose his boy. These are only a fan’s notes—but I despise the word “fan.” It’s a low-country, Disneyland kind of word, spawned by mass entertainment. They don’t talk about fans in Deep Gap. Dock Boggs and Tommy Jarrell, Clarence Ashley, they had friends, neighbors and appreciative audiences. They didn’t have “fans.” Hank Williams had fans, and Elvis Presley—and look what happened to them. Just call this a personal appreciation. I never cared about celebrities; I’m fascinated by people who do something difficult incredibly well. I’ve become attached to just a few, and I’ve praised too many of them after they were dead. Doc, alive and kicking over in Deep Gap, is probably feeling better than I do, maybe humming “Wildwood Flower” and tuning his guitar as we speak. If someone should read this to him, I hope he understands that it isn’t a story some reporter was assigned to write. It’s a personal appreciation by an admirer who’s invading Doc’s privacy the only way he dares, and saying thank you the only way he knows how.

11

Jan DeBlieu An Imperfect Marriage It was a lovely August afternoon, one of those rare summer days when the southwest winds drop out and the Outer Banks surf catches the light like a great, liquid gem. We had been on the beach for a couple of hours, reading and slipping into the jade-and-sapphire sea, when Jeff noticed an inky stain drifting just beyond the breakers. We stood on the beach, watching. The dark swirl hung in the water, changing shape slightly when waves rolled by but staying in roughly the same place. “I think they’re fish,” Jeff said, grabbing his snorkel, “but I can’t tell what kind.” He slipped the mask over his face and plunged into the surf. I hung back. After all, this was the wild ocean. But there were other swimmers in the water, and no one seemed alarmed. So I drew in a breath, picked up my snorkel, and followed my husband. Jeff surfaced and called to me. “They’re menhaden, I think. They’re beautiful when you get . . . ” A wave broke over his head. I reached his side just as he came back up. “I swam into them,” he said, “and they all stayed together and swirled around me. It was like being in an aquarium.” He left the next sentence unsaid: You should try it. He didn’t want me to miss the chance. I didn’t tell him I wouldn’t mind missing it, that just then I wasn’t feeling very adventurous. I simply pulled on my mask and headed for the fish. The water felt silky cool as it combed back my hair. 12

I swam away from shore, breathing through the snorkel in a slow rhythm that mimicked the passage of the waves. The school was only ten yards away now, a dark cylinder undulating on the edges. I hovered in the water, watching. I found it hard to believe it was hundreds of organisms, rather than one joined being. Their bodies flickered with light. I took several slow breaths, gathered my courage, and swam into their midst. Around me, gray and silver, vermillion and blue. They were small disks perhaps four inches across, packed together as closely as nickels. It was as if I had entered a swirling funnel of coins, all balanced on their rims. As I pushed further into them their ranks split and they closed around my back, locking me into their world. Goosebumps ran up my arms as I felt them pass. Colors flashed and disappeared. I was inside a vial of mercury. I was balanced on a prism, treading water on the edge where light bends. The fish appeared to be looking straight ahead, not seeing me, but they parted around me in fluid curtains. Above us sunlight stabbed into the verdant sea. I treaded water carefully, moving my arms and legs slowly to keep from spooking them, and watched as legions of fish wheeled toward me, giving way at the last instant, their bodies brushing lightly by.     I live in a world of miracles, on ground bordered by waters. On these sandy North Carolina reefs, the ocean and coastal sounds mark the limits of where settlements can be built, where birds nest, where I walk. During storms wind and waves redraw the land, taking huge bites from the dunes and smearing sediment through the marshes. Water gives shape to our landscape, and also to our lives. I moved here more than three decades ago, never expecting that I would be able to stay, or that I would want to. 13

But for the first time in my life I felt as if I was where I fit. The landscape itself welcomed me, nurtured me, and brought out my best. Year round I walk the beaches, studying the ocean, hoping for another chance to look it full in the face. I watch for dolphins, whales, sea turtles, shorebirds, and yes, schools of menhaden. I don’t know that I would again swim into their midst. I’ve since learned that they attract predators, including sharks. But I’m glad I rose to Jeff’s challenge that long-ago afternoon. I belong here in a way I’ve never belonged anywhere else. I think of myself as married to this landscape, bound to it like a lover. Each morning I lie still for a moment, taking in the feel of Jeff’s body next to me, the shape of our room, the play of light through the trees, the sound of the wind, and the unseen, encompassing presence of water. Whenever I wake to find myself at home, I feel complete. I’d like you to think that my relationship with this place, my place, is always harmonious, like the perfect marriage. If I were to leave you with that impression, though, I’d be lying.     The SUV from Ohio neglected to signal as it pushed its way into the right lane and suddenly applied the brakes. I stood on my own brake pedal and leaned on the horn. On the left, cars zipped by us; I watched in vain for a break in traffic. Belatedly the SUV put on its right turn signal and crept into the parking lot for a big box store specializing in low-end beach gear. It was another afternoon in August, but it might have been anytime in peak season, from mid-June to Labor Day. In summer it’s not just the traffic that brings Outer Banks locals to the point of sputtering rage; it’s the erratic behavior of the drivers, many of whom seem incapable of making decisions. If I had cared to venture into a grocery store that 14

afternoon, I would have encountered a delay of perhaps an hour at the check-out line. Jeff and I might have been able to catch a quick meal out, if we’d been willing to settle for burgers from a drive-in. Braving the wait for a table in a crowded, noisy restaurant would have been beyond the limits of our patience. This is life in a modern ocean paradise—which looks a lot like suburbia outfitted with storm shutters and cedar shakes. I can’t blame people for being drawn to these islands. I don’t mind the crowds nearly as much as the patterns of development that have followed them to the Outer Banks. Why must this community be like everywhere else? Each year more houses spring up on lots that seem too tiny to hold them. A few more locally owned businesses sell out to chains. This transformation from quiet beach outpost has been a bit like watching your lover turn into someone you don’t know. A lover, or a spouse. Our first summer here, when we swam with the menhaden and fell in love with the Outer Banks, I pledged myself to the land the way a wife pledges herself to a husband. I meant my vow to be lasting, and still do. But what exactly does that mean? Sad to say, we tend to approach marriage without much faithfulness—or so it appears from our incidence of divorce. But at least we pay homage to the concept. I’ve never heard of anyone taking vows to forever love and stand by a place, even though we’re deeply affected by the landscapes where we live. We move whenever it suits us, breaking off our ties rather thoughtlessly, regretful perhaps but also certain it’s what we must do for the good of our careers, our families. This mobility has distinct costs. Whenever you settle somewhere new, you cease to worry about social ills like pollution, crime, or teenage delinquency in your old town. You’re going to a fresh locale, without major problems—as far as you know. When life doesn’t work out for us in one town, we move on. No reason to stay put in a country as big as ours! 15

But when you reside in the same place for many years, you become an integral part of that community. You come to savor the cycle of seasons, when the trees bud in spring, how the light slants in late summer. You learn the faces you see in the post office, where the best restaurants are, which mechanics and doctors to use. A deep relationship with place also poses challenges. Suppose crack addicts take over an older house a few doors away from where you live, or some corporation announces plans to build an industrial facility that will bring in new jobs but irreparably harm the natural system. Your tight-knit world suddenly starts to unravel. Should you give up and leave? I’ve found that it’s well worthwhile to stay and fight. In my decades in eastern North Carolina, I’ve seen community groups defeat plans to build a hazardous waste incinerator, a peat burning plant that would have marred thousands of acres of wetlands, and a large complex of oil and gas wells that were to be sunk in the Atlantic Ocean. Slaying the beasts that threaten our homes is difficult work and chancy strategy. But it’s the only course that strengthens our common bonds and honors our sense of place. Of course, before you can make a pledge to a place you love, you need to find the place and make sure you belong there. This is not always easy. Is it possible in these times to keep a vow of fidelity to a place? I’d like to think so, though I know it sounds naïve and dreamy. What would it entail? What would be the price?     I’ve always been deeply affected by the places where I spend my time. Even as a child I fell in love with details of landscape: the autumn colors of my Delaware home, the patterns of light and shade on the lake where my family vacationed in New England, and in Florida, the feel of sand 16

through my fingers when I sat on a beach with my grandfather, digging a hole to be filled by the waves. The surface sand was tan and fine. But three inches down we always hit a layer of crushed shell, shards of color that tickled my fingers as I scooped them up. Once I finished college I began searching for a landscape where I could happily spend my life. I soon found it, or so I thought. The spring I turned twenty-two I took an extended trip out West and arrived on the Oregon coast in the middle of a drought. Fathomless blue skies stood above the thickly forested mountains and seaside cliffs. I walked trails that wound through groves of moss-covered oak and shaggy Douglas fir. In their midst light and darkness met and fused into shifting blades. On the grassy hills above the ocean, I watched waves push endlessly against the rocks. The ringing sky, the crashing turquoise surf, the blackish-green firs and yellow petals of Scotch broom: Oregon’s colors wrapped themselves around my mind. I dreamed of them at night. The scenery was too beautiful to seem entirely real—so beautiful that it hurt to look at it. It made a nameless part of me ache. Still, I couldn’t get enough. I traveled the Oregon and Washington coasts for weeks, then moved inland to the great spine of the Cascade Mountains. After a while my money ran out and I went back to Delaware, to a job that was waiting for me at a newspaper. Welcomed back by friends, embraced by family, I found a pleasant, affordable house in a college town—and tried not to feel like I’d taken up residence in a dark box. I had been brash enough to travel the country alone, but I was wary of moving out West without a job. So I worked, enjoyed a vigorous social life, and banked as much money as I could. To all appearances I had it made. And I liked my life, more or less. If only I could transport it to Oregon! Occasionally I would make phone calls to newspapers in the 17

Pacific Northwest, inquiring about jobs. I courted editors with clips of the stories I had written. After a year, when I had almost given up, a phone call came from the newspaper in Eugene. I moved to in Oregon in early September, under skies that were brilliantly blue. As I carried my few boxes into the two-bedroom cottage I’d rented on a wooded hillside, I felt dizzy with luck. I had a few qualms about being so far from everything I’d ever known, but I was living somewhere I loved and working a good job. What could be better? A few weeks later it began to rain. Every day it rained. That didn’t surprise me. But I hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to meet people in wet weather. I wasn’t inclined to frequent restaurants or bars, and outside the constant drizzle extinguished any spark of conversation. I had hoped to make friends through my job but found I had little in common with the other reporters. On weekends I took trips alone to the coast or into the Cascades. One afternoon I struck up a conversation with a lively clerk in a bookstore, and made my first Oregon friend. One wasn’t enough. Trying not to pester my single comrade, I spent most evenings alone, struggling to keep a fire lit in my cranky wood stove. Many nights I was too tired to do anything besides sit and brood. My job demanded almost all my energy but gave me little satisfaction. And I was always cold. Accustomed to the bitter but dry winters of the Northeast, I found that Oregon’s constant dampness chilled me beyond warmth. It also sapped my resolve to do what I had come to the Northwest to do—spend time outdoors.     Happiness is a complex mix of elements, and its recipe differs from person to person. For me, the three most basic ingredients seem to be a deep sense of home, thriving relationships with a mate and friends, and fulfilling work. In 18

Oregon I was rich in money for my young age and awash in passion for the Northwest landscape, but impoverished when it came to fulfillment and love. I still explored the coast and the mountains. I hiked alone through old-growth forests with crashing rivers. But where were the colors that had drawn me to Oregon? With no sun, they had faded to watery greens and grays—cheerless colors, empty colors. Friendless colors. If the rains briefly stopped I might stare into an aqua stream, losing myself in the smoothness of water racing over the cobbled bed. Light and shadow, blues and browns, the quiet rippling of the current: These elements bathed my mind and brought me a momentary peace. When my thoughts were pulled back to land, though, when I glanced up to the shaggy trees and the distant sawtooth peaks, I ached. The landscape was too big for me. It was defeating my spirit. My struggle to create a home for myself in Oregon lasted two years. It’s funny—once I quit thinking I would stay in the Northwest forever, I did make a few friends, including my future husband. But by then I was thoroughly beaten. At 25, lacking even the prospect of a job, I loaded my car and drove back East toward a dubious future. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, a cherished relationship falls apart. That’s how I feel about Oregon. The chemistry between us just wasn’t right. Or maybe it was the family influence. Remember that old saying about marrying not just a person (or a place), but a family? For whatever reason, Oregon’s relations didn’t accept me. If I’d been able to recreate the busy social circle I’d taken for granted back East, it may have dispelled the weather’s oppressing grayness. But I couldn’t. So I fled. Time has blunted the emptiness and sense of failure I felt during my years in Oregon. Once in a while, though, I’ll stumble across something that refreshes my grief. 19

Some years ago on a visit to Marin County, California, I spent a sunny spring morning with a local naturalist named Claire. As we walked along a creek in the Point Reyes National Seashore, Claire mentioned that she found the local landscape to have immense healing powers. Around us warblers called and flitted through the trees. Beyond the thin wedge of forest, grassy hills rose like kneaded loaves. The air was sweet and clear. “I was very shut down when I came here,” Claire said, “but it drew me out. The place itself nurtured me.” “It’s amazing how that can happen,” I said. “Yes,” she said, turning toward me. I thought I caught a glimpse of a warning in her eyes. “But it doesn’t happen to everyone. I’ve seen this landscape reject people. They come here looking for something they never manage to find.” We continued our walk and did not speak again about place. As we searched among the hardwoods for birds— wrentit, black-headed grosbeak, warbling vireo—I winced at the thought of being rejected by a gorgeous, seductive landscape. I knew all too well how that would feel.     What is it about the human makeup that causes some of us to love the desert, others the beach, others the city or the mountains? To my knowledge this question has not been answered, not with any scientific rigor. Maybe it’s partly the shape of the land. To me the open horizons of the coast suggest freedom and adventure, while they leave many people feeling exposed and vulnerable. Jeff loves the sheltered niches of the mountains, which seems to suit his quiet, reflective temperament. Or maybe it’s something more ephemeral. A couple I know is moving from the Outer Banks, where they never settled in, to the North Carolina Blue Ridge. “We drove over 20

to look for a house,” the man said, “and the closer we got to the mountains, the better we felt. We’re just more alive in the mountains.” I asked why they thought that might be. “Vibrations,” said the woman with great confidence. “Every place has vibrations, and it depends whether your personal energy fits with them If it doesn’t . . . ” She didn’t finish the sentence. I can’t tell you anything useful about the invisible vibrations of landscapes. I can say, though, that when we moved to the Outer Banks in 1985 Jeff and I intended to stay only a year or two, just long enough for me to write a book. Once I was finished we planned to move on, preferably back out west. With Jeff as a companion I thought I might be able to find peace in Oregon. That spring we settled into a small house on Hatteras Island and started trying to earn a living. Jeff ran a string of crab pots and worked long, late hours unloading the catch from fishing boats. I got a part-time job as a waitress and tried to write. This arrangement lasted only three months, until Jeff unexpectedly landed a job as an editor in Atlanta. He left the following week. I stayed behind to finish my book. When I wasn’t waiting tables, I spent almost all my time wandering the sloped beaches and sulfur-smelling marshes of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. Once again I was in expansive country, alone. But this time I had a purpose and someone dear to talk to about it, even if it was over the phone. This time, for some reason, everything seemed right. The islands of the Outer Banks are not among the world’s most beautiful or hospitable landscapes. They are, in fact, little more than eroding reefs of sand with narrow beaches and ragged wetlands. The towns sprawl shamefully from ocean to sound. There’s plenty of open land within the 21

national seashore, but it’s home to relentless clouds of mosquitoes and biting flies. I didn’t care. Somehow I managed to ignore the bugs and see only the boundless horizons and the crystal waves burnishing the sand. I swam in all kinds of surf, the gentle green rollers of midsummer and the mountainous waves kicked up by northeasters. I put on loose-fitting clothes and walked the marshes, stalking night herons and stilts, casually removing ticks when I got back home. My parents came for a visit and went home puzzled by my obsession. I still don’t know why it happened. But living in a drafty, swaybacked house in an insular town, I lost myself in the land—and began to understand who I was and what I should do. I felt alive and infused with light. And I found that I loved the local lifestyle. Back then there were few amenities on Hatteras Island. Most beach cottages were small and rustic. Electric service was spotty; I learned to leave candles and flashlights within easy reach. The people of Hatteras understood that in any confrontation, nature was (and is) going to win. They paid close attention to the natural system—the shifting winds, the weather fronts, the day-to-day changes in the color of the water. Hatteras residents didn’t care much about shopping or dining out. They cared about what was happening outside. Among them I felt at home. When I finished my book, a job suddenly opened for Jeff here, and I convinced him to settle down with me on the Outer Banks. Our love of place became also a love of community, until one was inseparable from the other. Still, I have to wonder: If you marry a person, you vow to stay with him until parted by death. But when might a place die? Even the Outer Banks, which are said to be in a state of geologic collapse because of erosion, will likely outlive me. But if my beloved home loses the elements that bring 22

it alive for me, if the landscape and culture become frayed like an old jacket, or—perhaps most important now—if the people who make up my circle leave or die, can I walk away and not look back? Then again, where else could we go and not find problems just as severe?     When you stay married to someone for many years, you come to know the shape of your beloved’s body—the curve of belly and hip, the length of each finger and spread of the hands—with a depth that exceeds anything else in the human range of experience. You watch your mate age and grow more worn, but he or she never becomes less beautiful to you, or less worthy of your love. The same is true of the landscapes to which we are most bonded. And when you take a vow of marriage, you promise to cherish your chosen one through sickness and health. Now that I know the Outer Banks so thoroughly, I see their beauty and also their blemishes. I recognize all too well how they might have kept their simple charm, had they not been so abused. Driving down the main highway one day, I spot a vanity license plate from Virginia that says O2BNOBX. OBX: the tourist’s abbreviation for my home. Why? I thought, looking around at the t-shirt shops, the real estate offices, the blocky drug stores on every corner. Why would you rather be here than in, say, Peoria? What difference does it make anymore? But then I remember: This is not like other places. The water sets us apart. On winter days I walk the beach and count gannets falling into the ocean like hurled knives. On summer nights I sit in the dunes and watch heat lightning explode in blue and orange bursts over the sea. But am I married to the Outer Banks? Despite my passion, despite my willingness to work as hard as I can to keep 23

the natural system and community from sickening any more, I can only say I am married to them in the modern sense— meaning there is always a possibility of divorce. Several years ago a dear friend of mine, a woman who had lived on the Outer Banks for twenty-five years, moved inland. She had no choice. Her son suffered from dyslexia, and the teachers in his small island school lacked the skills to help him. My friend and her husband sold their house (the home they had built on seven acres in a maritime forest) and resettled in Durham. They purchased another piece of land on Hatteras so they could come back. Now their son is prospering. This final factor, the imperfect human body, may be the one that finally shatters my vow of fidelity. I think of elderly Outer Banks residents I’ve known who have left the islands because of medical needs. We have a small hospital here, but care for life-threatening illnesses is patchy. Knowing this, knowing we would have done the same for our son, gone from us now, as my friend with her dyslexic son, my pledge to the Outer Banks takes on a provisional sincerity. I hope to cherish and stay with you. That is my dearest intent. But should my husband fall ill, should we need to move for his well being, I’ll be leaving town as soon as I can pack. What if I get sick myself? Would I move away for medical treatment, or stay where I might be healed by the land? The question catches me off guard and leaves me speechless, staring out my study window.     I wish to pledge myself to the Outer Banks forever— and I can’t. When you marry a person, really marry them, when you have children in this day, in this society, it’s not wise to also take a landscape as a mate. In the mornings I wake in our bedroom and look up through the skylight to 24

Outer Banks clouds, and out through the window to the familiar trees in our yard. I am always, always happy to have them greet me another day. I am not entirely fickle, dear islands. I can make and keep a few solid promises. I know Jeff and I will not dissolve our bonds with this place simply to pursue wealth. We’d much rather live here, frugally. Isn’t that a vow that honors the land? I know we will continue to fight pollution, crime, even such mundane affronts to our community as litter. We’ll celebrate the passage of seasons by watching change—the budding and blooming of plants, the sliding of water masses against the coast, the great bursts of birds and fish that come with each migration. We can make a pledge to pay attention. That in itself is one of the most vital gifts to be offered to any beloved. “We are gathered here today to witness.” This is our truncated vow, and it is enough. We are man and woman in union, each of us giving testimony to place. Our love for the Outer Banks is real, our desire to protect the islands sincere and lasting. Let the bond deepen, the celebrations continue. God, or life, or whatever you wish to call the forces that shape humanity’s time on Earth, has joined us here. We pray that we may not be torn asunder.

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Clyde Edgerton A Story (Well Several Stories, About a Graveyard and Cousins and some Cut-off Fingers and Wisteria and Driving Backwards and Did I Mention the Graveyard?) At sometime in the late 1800s or early 1900s, a field hand named Stanley pitched over, dying, in a cotton patch belonging to my grandfather (born 1865). Then he lay dead between rows. Nobody knew where he was from. So he was buried behind the home place in a field. Soon a cousin was born dead and buried beside Stanley. A family graveyard was thus underway. Uneven letters apparently carved with a rough tool into the baby cousin’s small gravestone say this: “Born Ded.” When I was a child, sixty, sixty-five years ago, visiting the graveyard, the “Born Ded” could be traced with fingers, read clearly. Now, it is barely visible. This graveyard, from my mother’s side, sits about two miles south of the visitor’s center in William B. Umstead State Park, between Durham and Raleigh, North Carolina, off highway 70. Twenty-six graves, resting in a square about the size of a big house foundation, sit off a trail that is graveled and wide enough for auto traffic, a trail used by hikers and bikers these days. Most of the park is gated—no cars or trucks. Ah, a memory about that trail—but first a fact: during 26

the Civil War it was a part the Hillsborough-Raleigh Road. In my youth—the nineteen-fifties and sixties—when the park was wide open and you could drive through it, that road was a normal gravel road. Another fact (I am getting to that memory in just a minute): It was the road that Union troops used late in the war when they were headed to Durham to accept Confederate General Johnston’s surrender, and that brings me to a second memory before I get to the first. That second memory is the memory of hearing a certain family story at least twenty times, maybe fifty, from family members who are dead and gone (I’m so sorry, but that brings to mind the memory of a story Eudora Welty once told of a man born during the Civil war. His last name was Floyd, and his full name was Elder Brother Come To Tell You All Your Friends Are Dead And Gone Floyd. They called him El)—so now, back to that that second memory: But now that I’m onto my great grand-mother, and prior to going back to that first memory, I have to tell you my great-grandmother’s name and just a tiny bit about her. Please remember that what I’m writing about a graveyard and the road beside it—a graveyard under tall pines, pines that are no longer ragged and dying because of the great vines of wisteria that ran all through them like anger, vines with vine-descendants that covered acres, wisteria that started, as my mother used to say, pointing from the graveyard, rake handle in her other hand, “. . . right over there, where grandma planted a little wisteria vine, and I remember the trellis it grew on.” That vine and its descendants had spread all through the woods and up into trees around the graveyard and vacant home site until sometime in the 1990s when workers cut them back in order to save choked trees. So her name, my great-grandmother’s, was Elizabeth Darbee Barbara Ferebee Caroline Jane Keith Warren. Her 27

husband, my great-granddaddy William Pinkney Warren, a millwright (b. 1822) called her “Puss.” Their grandson, my great-uncle Alfred, his wife, Nora, and their ten children lived in the home place when the fieldhand, Stanley, was buried out back, the original grave. He’s the only non-family member in the graveyard. (You don’t have to remember these names.) In 1936, the federal government bought up the whole area (5000 acres) of what is now Umstead Park, tore down all stores and farm buildings and churches and sold the land to North Carolina for a dollar. The land was depleted, farmed out. Now it’s just woods where you can find occasional rock remnants of home foundations and piles of rocks from the clearing of fields for plowing, and if an early or late sun is at the right angle you can make out cotton rows beneath pine straw from trees that are almost eighty years old. When I see the place in my mind—that graveyard, that road—the stories start coming, as you’ve no doubt noticed. That’s because my people had a habit of telling stories about the place, about nearby creeks, Crabtree and Sycamore. About the Sorrell store, the Adams store. About people: Uncle Alfred, Aunt Scrap, Mellie, Aunt Sara who had a black dog named Sailor in her one room house and when she told him to get out the door, he’d get under the table and she’d say, “Well, get under the table then.” Stories told about the schoolhouse, the Moravian church, called the “Marvin” church by a relative whose name I’ve forgotten. She had a way with words, I’ve been told. Called a miracle a “mackerel.” “It was just a mackerel he even got out of bed.” She was fuzzy on Columbus’s name, but she was clear on his bravery. She’d say to someone who was reluctant about something, “Aw, come on, take a chance—Columbia did.” I will immediately get back to that first memory, I promise, but first I must tell you about the baby fingers. Elizabeth (the great-grandmother with all the names) was a 28

midwife. She once birthed a baby who had six fingers on each hand. She cut off the two extras and put them in a little jar of alcohol which she hid behind a clock on the mantle for many years, and the children, including my mother (b. 1904), stood on a chair, delicately retrieved the jar, sat on the floor and looked into it the way kids today sit on the couch and stare into an iPod. I can’t say “kids” without thinking of Uncle Alfred’s. The great-uncle with the ten kids, married to Nora. He was my granddaddy’s brother (again, don’t worry about keeping up with the family names—we are talking memory and place). I’ve heard so many stories about Uncle Alfred that he was one of my favorite uncles even though he died before I was born. About place: only recently have I begun to understand that place helps makes people into who they become; and that people, norms, habits, religion, goodness and badness are all woven into a particular physical community, or place. And thus when you, late in life, discover a place that feels like where you lived when you were a child, you may conclude that there are ways that time exists outside a chronological line. Pictures of the home place and the graveyard and stories of people and places as they existed in the community (Cedar Fork Township) of the graveyard, can be found in a detailed book called Stories in Stone, written by historian Tom Webber and published by the Umstead Coalition (umsteadcoalition.org), a group that watches over the park nowadays. If you want to see Umstead Park from above, go to Raleigh on your Google Map. Look to the northeast, toward Durham. See that giant green area between Durham and Raleigh? That’s Umstead Park—it’s what the Umstead Coalition (and our state government) is protecting and if you think attacks have not been (and are being) plotted by hungry entrepreneurs, then keep watching. I just this minute saw 29

the park on Google map for the first time. I thought about the aunts and uncles—long gone—who cleaned the graves, and somehow the sight of the place from above, preserved to a degree, almost brought tears of sadness. Then I thought about my children, and the children of cousins, and I felt better, knowing they would have this place, these stories, preserved, like those tiny baby fingers. At the annual family graveyard cleaning in May, I can always find a youngin who’s not heard some of the stories. Remembering the ones who told them to me, looking at the tall pines and the red clay and tombstones, smelling the woods, and listening to the breeze through the pine needles— all this makes me begin to understand why people sometimes fight tooth and nail, finger and bone, for a place—a river, an island, a wall. But about Uncle Alfred’s family. There in the kitchen of the old house with the graveyard out back, the kids, Alfred, and Aunt Nora ate meals around a log, wooden table with benches. And Uncle Alfred, before coming in from the fields, would holler to Nora, “Muh, put on the coffee.” Nora would put on the coffee, and as Uncle Bob (b. 1896), a main family story teller, would say to me, “And Clyde, he’d come in in a little while and get that coffee pot from over the fireplace and it’d be going ba-lup, ba-lup, ba-lup, perking you know, and he’d put it to his lips and . . . and sip. Yessir. And that’s a true fact.” The road by the graveyard, the one that spurred that first memory up at the top of this essay that I’m getting very close to—that road has a hill rising to the graveyard from the south, and Uncle Bob, about a hundred years ago, when he came home in the Model-T Ford, the gas tank almost on empty, couldn’t drive forward up the hill lest the gravity-fed fuel system would fail. So he’d drive up the hill backwards. Or that’s the story. 30

We are back in the road, and that brings me back to that first memory way up top: Aunt Oma (b. 1899) stood in that road one day—this was probably about 1988. She said, “Come here.” I walked to her. She said, “See in the woods there?” She pointed into the woods across from the graveyard. “See that ditch in there running along parallel to the road like it belongs to another road?” “Yes ma’am.” “Well, can you kind of see what was a road in there—see how it kind of has a bank and a ditch along in some places?” “I sure can.” “That’s where the old plank road was. From back before the Civil War. They used to talk about it.” The old plank road. Before the Civil War. And right now, because it’s in a state park, no strip mall parking lot lies over the old plank road site. What you saw on your Google Map, if you looked, what lies outside the green, will remain outside the green if those of us who believe in green conservation themes (how conservative is that?) keep our voices and have our way. Our government saved my place, my family graveyard. Family stories would have survived without that graveyard and the old home site, but there would now be no place to hold the stories. And so many of the stories—reshaped, the memories redefined, the memories of memories (sometimes re-shaped a little, sometimes a lot)—thread through much of the fiction I’ve written—like a wisteria vine through pines. One more memory about that trail by the graveyard: About 100 yards to the northwest, from the grave yard on past the sight of of the home place, in the woods just off the trail—and across from the homesite—is an indention. If you look carefully, you will see big rocks around the edges. The indention was once an open well, lined with rocks. That well 31

was the sight of the demise of Piddle Diddle, Uncle Bob’s pet rooster. One day Piddle Diddle chased a hen that flew over the well opening. Piddle Diddle followed, but didn’t quite make it. He fell into the well and drowned. End of story. We must adopt an abrupt stop; else this may go on forever. To have a place is to have yourself and a story . . . in spite of the uncertainty and void of the universe.

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Georgann Eubanks Of Navigation and Place In 2004, when I began research for a guidebook series called Literary Trails of North Carolina, there were no Androids or iPhones or an app known as Google Maps. Photographer Donna Campbell and I set out in the state’s western mountains with nothing more than a back seat full of novels, poetry, essays, and short story collections. The books were festooned with the confetti of dozens of colored notes jutting from their pages. I had already marked passages that were associated with places we planned to explore. Later I’d string these excerpts together with driving directions and a narrative about the authors, their works, and their contributions to our cultural understanding of this wide place we call North Carolina. Of course, place is critical in Southern writing and in all writing for that matter. As Eudora Welty put it: “I think the sense of place is as essential to good and honest writing as a logical mind; surely they are somewhere related. It is by knowing where you stand that you grow able to judge where you are.” I aimed in Literary Trails to draw attention to those especially descriptive passages about place in North Carolina that would help newcomers and natives know more about the sites and scenery that had inspired four centuries of extraordinary literature, both from writers born here and writers who came to the state for inspiration and sometimes escape. 33

Naturally we would visit Thomas Wolfe’s mother’s boarding house in Asheville and the ante bellum home in Flat Rock where poet Carl Sandburg spent the last two decades of his life. But we also found a number of less wellknown literary sites: the house in the village of Norwood in Stanly County where poet Eleanor Ross Taylor was born and the houses in Hillsborough and Greensboro where she lived with her husband, the short story master Peter Taylor. We found the grave of Alex Haley’s enslaved kinsman who had been related to Chicken George and who proved to be the last link in the author’s Roots research to his family line. We visited the pleasant hillside where a cabin once stood beneath monumental maple trees in Banner Elk. Here Florida writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings holed up one autumn to draft her masterpiece, The Yearling. Down in Gastonia, near the South Carolina line, we marveled at the hulking textile mill where a workers’ strike turned deadly in 1929 and inspired no fewer than four novels in a decade by different authors. We also searched for much more obscure sites—a grassy bank in the Smoky Mountains, now under the waters of Fontana Lake, where wild strawberries once grew and evoked a brilliant story by playwright, social activist, and fiction writer Olive Tilford Dargan. Often the destinations required that we imagine what once had been. No there there, as Gertrude Stein would say. Only in literature had these places prevailed. By 2004 some drivers had begun navigating road trips with portable GPS devices mounted on their dashboards. Donna and I did not rely on GPS for Literary Trails. I’d traveled with such devices on occasion, but even if I’d had such a tool, I’m afraid it would not have functioned when I needed it most. Who can forget that feeling after turning onto a narrow country road, when suddenly the GPS image is showing 34

that you are traveling with no markings whatsoever, no road illustrated ahead or behind, only that cartoon blue sedan meandering across the small screen, alone in beige landscape. For guidance, Donna and I instead carried DeLorme’s North Carolina Atlas and Gazetteer. At fifteen inches tall, this ample collection of seventy-eight maps, which are still being updated and published today, offers incredible topographic details, including icons that mark fishing locations, hiking trails, deep forests, and camping sites. The atlas was as low tech as the library books it sat among in the back seat of my truck. We began in Black Mountain, at the revered site where an eclectic and bohemian group of artists and thinkers— many writers among them—launched a progressive experiment in liberal arts education. Black Mountain College began in 1933. Faculty and students prepared meals together and shared living quarters. Their curriculum was cross disciplinary and wide ranging. Albert Einstein served on the board of the college, and Buckminster Fuller built his first geodesic dome on the grounds. The list of literary luminaries who visited or taught at Black Mountain is long—Thornton Wilder, Henry Miller, Francine du Plessix Gray, and Robert Creeley, among others. Dancer Merce Cunningham, painters Willem de Kooning and Jacob Lawrence, and composer John Cage were also part of the Black Mountain community. The Studies Building, a Bauhaus edifice that looks oddly modern against the ancient Black Mountains, still remains. Worn stone stairs set in a steep hill recall the footsteps of those who must have climbed them time and again, coming and going to classes and guest lectures.     It would take ten years, more than 50,000 miles, and two vehicles before we completed our tour of the 100 counties that comprise North Carolina. We finished our journey at the 35

site of the Lost Colony in Manteo on the Outer Banks, ending, as it were, at the beginning of the colonization of North Carolina and the diminishment of the indigenous tribes that had been stewards of the region for thousands of years. The story of the Lost Colony has puzzled scholars for centuries. What happened to that hardy band of English settlers—men, women, and children—most notably the infant Virginia Dare, the first English child born in what would become the United States? The souls who occupied Fort Raleigh on Roanoke Island had already disappeared when their leader, John White, finally returned with provisions. His trip back from England had taken three years due to the vicissitudes of war and the ill-tempered queen. The colony’s disappearance eventually inspired the creation of a new theatrical form—the symphonic drama—devised by the distinguished North Carolina playwright Paul Green. The Lost Colony opened on July 4, 1937, and except for the blackouts of World War II, has run continuously in summer for more than seventy-five years in an amphitheater built on the Fort Raleigh site. The production also bolstered the careers of innumerable actors, including North Carolina’s own Andy Griffith. Even Betty Smith, the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, took a turn playing an Indian maiden in the production after launching her literary career at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill under Paul Green’s tutelage.     Commissioned by the North Carolina Arts Council and organized by region, the three volumes of Literary Trails are embroidered with beautiful full-page maps, one for each of the fifty-four tours, created by Michael Southern, an architectural historian and cartographer. The maps are stunningly compact, efficient, and detailed. They were obviously 36

challenging to create; some tours cover great stretches of geography. Particularly in eastern North Carolina, it is often necessary to meander a long way around our state’s enormous sounds—some 12,000 miles of estuarine coastline. As it turns out, readers, especially older folks, have used the three books as much for armchair travel as for actual road trips. I suppose, if we were starting the project now, however, a clever coder could take the coordinates for each destination and translate the tours into a downloadable app that would follow along with the narrative. Or the book itself could simply give latitude and longitude for each destination, and travelers could plug these numbers into their handheld devices. But looking back, I must ask, what are we missing now with such new convenience in navigation?     It is bittersweet to remember the frustration I had as a child trying to fold an enormous road map, as big as the hood of our vehicle, back into its proper nesting sections so that it would fit into the glove box of the family station wagon. Glove box and station wagon—quaint terms associated with what was once called motoring in the Esso gas stations where we stopped. The rack was usually placed next to a squat Coca-Cola machine that dispensed eight-ounce glass bottles of the brown elixir that we favored along with peanuts for a snack when we traveled. The blue veins and red arteries that crisscrossed the countryside on those big maps were always of unfolding amazement to me as I was first learning to read them. And every year for our family vacation we’d get a crisp, new map smelling of fresh ink and snapping like a flag as we flung it open to check our progress along the route. This was still the era before long stretches of the interstate highways commissioned by President Eisenhower were 37

completed in the South, roads slowly carved out of the countryside to spare us the variable speed limits, stop signs, and traffic lights of small, rural towns. The summer before my fourth grade school year, we drove straight up U.S. Highway 1 to New York City—two lanes most of the way—to deliver my brother to his lowly cabin on the Queen Elizabeth I. He was a college sophomore headed to Europe for a year’s study in Vienna. I was only nine years old and much more taken with the fact that the ship had an elevator than any speculation about his romantic destination. My mother had already fanned my enthusiasm for the new forms of conveyance I would experience on this trip. We rode in the subway, a taxicab, a train, and even on a moving walk that passed alongside Michelangelo’s Pietá, on loan from the Vatican for an exhibition at the 1964 World’s Fair. One day we ate in an automat and rode to the top of the Empire State Building. That night I was transfixed by the view out the window of our room in the Hotel Astor, where a billboard displayed the head of a handsome man whose open lips sent perfectly round smoke rings into the chill night air while he held a Camel cigarette in his elegant fingers as if he’d just taken a deep drag. The world seemed so big and full of remarkable sites. To my child’s eyes, the size of our road maps suggested great distance and complexity, especially compared to the amount of real estate that can be meaningfully captured on a handheld screen today. But more significantly, because we can now plug in an address and follow every turn on the little screen, never bothering to look up at what we are passing, we don’t have to know how to get anywhere. We don’t have to navigate the bigger picture. Wanting to see and know more, however, is innate in a child. Before I was old enough to go to school, I spent many days and nights with my grandparents while both of my 38

parents were at work. My grandfather taught me “to tell time” before I went to kindergarten. My grandmother taught me to identify birds. And on my own, somehow, I began to study the flagstones that my grandfather had laid out along the paths through their gardens. To me, the stones looked like maps. I followed these paths every day, my stride barely long enough to get me from one stone island to the next, for they were laid out with gaps for adult legs. In them I saw the distinctive outlines of Georgia, Tennessee, Montana, and Florida. Two smaller stones set side by side looked like Vermont and New Hampshire. Back at home with my parents, I studied my box of “Flash Cards of the Fifty States.” I loved this collection so much that my parents followed it with a set of global flash cards. I can still remember that Brazil was green and Peru was yellow. The colors imprinted on my mind as indelibly as the shapes. Chile was a bold orange. My brother, already in high school then, owned a globe that spun on its axis. I envied this treasure, and he occasionally let me touch and spin it, though he told me with authority and a hint of boredom that it was already out of date, because Germany and Korea had split in two after the wars, and now Vietnam was doing the same thing. Though I didn’t know it, that globe was also teaching me something about the affairs of humans.     Some years later, when a friend’s mother finished raising her children, she decided to join President Carter’s Friendship Force and travel the world. The first thing she did in preparation was to order a wall-sized world map from National Geographic. The map was so large, it came in sections that had to be carefully overlapped and mounted, floor to ceiling. Her daughters installed the map. It took up the 39

entire wall of one recently empty bedroom in their house. Sara Helen wanted to study this image of the world well in advance of her trip so that she could picture in her mind exactly where she was going. Her daughters only made one error in the installation, at a seam where the map did not overlap properly. Forever thereafter the family joked about BoBolivia, as it read on the bedroom wall. The point is we don’t even need to study maps anymore before we leave on a journey. We are not required to cultivate a sense of direction. I am grateful to have grown up in a time when maps were essential tools that came in a size and form that resembled something closer to the true scale of grand distances. The maps of my childhood provided context—the relationship of one place nestled up against another, county by county, state by state, mountain by mountain, land reaching water. They showed the boundaries of our human making and the shapes from God’s hand. Much has already been made about our current preoccupation with staring into cell phones, the hazards of texting while driving, and the sad isolation of couples in restaurants who seldom, if ever, look at their dinner companions or acknowledge their meal only when preparing to hoist a fork to their lips, still focused on the device in the other hand. Consider the hazards to young people of never having a larger perspective and sense of scale, the context that large, printed maps once offered us. If all we ever know of going somewhere is writ smaller than the size of one hand, the road pictured as running only as far as the next turn ahead, we have lost something essential. Eudora Welty never had a cell phone, but she understood how to navigate the human heart: “There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant 40

nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed.”

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Marianne Gingher Horses and Boys In the spring of 1960, I boarded my first horse, Cherokee, at the Hill‘n’Dale Hack Shack. Burt Spruill owned the Hack Shack and managed it as a boarding facility and riding school. He was probably in his late thirties, divorced (or getting there), and frequently you could smell liquor on his breath. His style of management was that he was everybody’s pal. A group of teenage girls, older than I, hung out at the Hack Shack. A couple of them owned horses which they boarded there, but the majority had a more ambiguous purpose. They mucked out stalls for Burt Spruill and exercised his horses, and I don’t think they got paid. They did the work because they were devoted to the place: my mother speculated that they did it because they were devoted to Burt. They were lithe and fearless girls, the bravest riders I ever knew, utterly relaxed on horseback, their bones astutely floppy. Burt had taught them everything they knew about horses, and they rode with slit-eyed smugness, so confident that they looked sleepy. If a horse refused a jump and nearly threw them off, they sagged upon the horse’s neck and laughed in its face. If they fell, they bounced nimbly upright from the dust, like fallen acrobats springing from a safety net. When the girls weren’t riding or shoveling out stalls, they enthroned themselves on bales of straw, telling dirty jokes. Or they saddle-soaped tack. Or they leaned dreamily 42

on fence posts and sucked in the daze-making air of the place. They satisfied themselves with simply being there. I saw enthrallment in their faces when they talked to Burt. They competed for his attention the way pupils of a favored teacher might. But if any of them went slinking into the hayloft with him—as my mother suspected—nobody bragged or cried or whispered about it. I viewed them all as girls foremost in love with horses. Burt, who owned some of the horses they loved, was their means of access. That he was a cowboy and spoke their language, that he loved the horses, too, and was keen around animals, even when he was drinking, made him kindred. They thought of him, perhaps, as half-man and half-horse. It would have been a natural extension of their love for the horses if the girls had admitted Burt into their hearts as well. They watched him stroke his ruddy man’s hand down the neck of a troubled horse and listened raptly to his kindly, confidential voice, and they believed in the sort of man who probably does not exist except in lulls and snatches. I never felt included in the camaraderie of the Hack Shack. I was wary around Burt Spruill because of my mother’s suspicions. I felt intimidated by the older girls, their daredevilry, their hotshot riding skills, the sensual drapery they made of themselves whenever they embraced a horse. When the weather turned steamy, they rode in their bathing suits and Burt squirted them with a hose. They called manure “shit.” The stable itself was a squat, grubby shelter; there were tree stumps in the yard that we used for mounting blocks. There were no riding trails close by, no streams or woods. The surrounding land had the exhausted, weedy look of lapsed maintenance. Above the barn and riding ring slanted one small, bleak, briar-stubbled field that always made me think of the fabled cemetery in old westerns, Boot Hill. If you left 43

the stable grounds and rode your horse along the narrow shoulders of either Lawndale Drive or Battleground Road, you contended with heavy traffic. The Hack Shack property, squeezed by development, had no rural context. It was more of a hangout than a genuine farm, my mother said. She didn’t approve of Burt’s loose supervision. The name Hack Shack sounded sleazy, she said. I wasn’t yet thirteen—a totally guileless, stringylimbed, horse-crazy tomboy. My notion of Paradise was spending a weekend with my girlfriend who lived on a dairy farm and rolling around in the silage. I had nothing in common with the Hack Shack girls who were on the verge of giving up their horses for men, who lit their cigarettes with big wooden kitchen matches that, now and again, they struck against one leg of Burt Spruill’s tight jeans. Yet my parents feared for my innocence. There was too much fecundity adrift at the Hack Shack: too much animal breath, cats birthing kittens in straw, the feverish copulation of green flies in dung. High up in the barn rafters, cobwebs floated as silkily as tossed-off lingerie. And so my parents made arrangements to board Cherokee elsewhere. Normally docile, Cherokee was a stocky, compact, easily managed horse. The white blaze on his forehead, as bright and friendly as a search beam, gave him a bedazzled look. His shaggy fetlocks fringed tough, platter-shaped hooves that went unshod. Molasses-colored, with a blonde mane and tail, he gave evidence of having Belgian workhorse in his mixedup blood. He was considered a pleasure horse because he never said no, but there he stood on moving day, a massive block of rootedness, telling Burt Spruill No. As Burt tried to tug him toward the horse transport, Cherokee snorted and balked. Resistance enlarged him. No, he would not clomp onto that strange little stall on wheels—and go where? I interpreted Cherokee’s fear as some awareness, similar 44

to a wave of encroaching homesickness, that he was about to be parted from familiar ground. I imagined that tears glimmered in his eyes. When I stepped forward to comfort him, Burt briskly directed me out of the way and produced from his pocket the dreadful twitch. It was a simple tool: a blunt wooden paddle with a cord of thick rope looped through one end. The rope lassoed an animal’s top lip and, when twisted, cinched it. I watched as Burt applied the twitch while the dispassionate Hack Shack girls smacked Cherokee’s flanks with sticks. “Get into the damn trailer, you son of a bitch,” one of them snarled—and in front of my father. I was nearly crying. I was years from experiencing an inkling of what the Hack Shack girls knew about timely assertions against brute force. They were not, these girls, in as much danger as my parents supposed; a precocious toughness carapaced their hearts, a toughness that would elude me for decades and only arrive in miserly increments. Perhaps this is what my parents knew about me: that I needed time to love my horse in my own sprawling and unprotected way and that they were moving us to a place where I could do just that—be a softhearted child for as long as I could, love my horse on my own silly terms, not anybody else’s, humanize him, let him break my heart, make a fool of me with his orneriness. I was an eager, sacrificial kind of young girl. I could only learn to be master by first offering myself as slave. I would not be ready to move past my idolatrous love of a horse into other phases of rapturous preoccupation—writing poetry, painting, searching for a boyfriend—until, like the Hack Shack girls, I could view Cherokee as an obstacle and bully him out of my way with a stick.     Mr. Tom Lambeth, the retired owner of a Greensboro construction company, lived just outside the city limits on 45

nearly fifteen acres of unspoiled countryside wedged between Westridge and Jefferson Roads. His vista included lawns as pampered as golf greens, sloping pastures, a scrubby field or two fringed by woods, flower and vegetable gardens, an arbor of scuppernong grapes, and down a sandy lane that led from his house and through a gate, a tidy red-and-white-painted Dutch Colonial barn with a corral. His farm was one of the last well-kept expanses of verdure between Greensboro and Guilford College. Mr. Lambeth’s own house, set back from Westridge among a huddle of shade trees, was an unaffected but spacious ranch with the assertive modern gaze of crank-style windows. The house had yellow shutters—a woman’s sunny touch, I always thought, probably because Mr. Lambeth was so hard-boiled. But I do not recall meeting his wife and seem to remember that she was an invalid. The household was welltended by people in uniform: a cook, a maid, perhaps nurses bustled in and out. On occasion, when I needed to use the telephone and entered the back door as I’d been instructed to do, I observed a meticulous order. A spotless kitchen was always redolent of someone’s supper preparations. Sometimes I spied a pie, set on a trivet to cool. Deep within the mahogany shadows of the house, I could hear a mantle clock ticking. A young, neatly dressed handyman named Willie— polite in a simmering way, like Sidney Poitier—mowed the yard and fields, repaired fences, tended the garden, stacked firewood, and generally did whatever Mr. Lambeth required to ensure the farm’s upkeep. Mr. Lambeth himself was done laboring. I suppose I believed he was a task-master, adept at barking orders and keeping his help busy. I never observed Willie lounging on a bale of straw, day-dreaming like the Hack Shack girls. Mr. Lambeth was a small, taut man with a flushed and veiny face. He had a full head of whitening hair that reared 46

stiffly back from his tall forehead. He was slight enough to have been a jockey and gave the impression of having sat atop many a horse in the winner’s circle. I recall that he wore jodhpurs, but I think it was his stance: slightly bowlegged and sporty. I never saw him ride a horse, nor did he own any animals. He smoked cigars, ventured not a syllable of small talk, carried a walking stick, possessed a skeweringly judgmental blue-eyed gaze. I was, of course, afraid of him. As a landlord, he loomed over the pleasure we took from his property as a kind of gentrified Oz. I don’t know why he opened his farm to us. He didn’t need rental money. He could have kept its pastoral serenity intact. Perhaps he missed the commotion of his long-grown children. He had been a family man. My father had found out about Mr. Lambeth’s barn through a patient whose daughter boarded her horse there. Stall and pasture rental was $15 a month. We were required to order and pay for our grain and hay and to share feeding duties with the other boarders.     Assailed by the sweet languid fragrance of pasture grass and honeysuckle, my father and I drove together into Mr. Lambeth’s kingdom on the morning of our move. Burt Spruill’s truck, towing the trailer on which Cherokee had bravely borne his journey across town, rumbled close behind. Mr. Lambeth was waiting at the pasture gate. Beyond him unfurled acres of shining pastureland bordered by woods and swamps of shade. A froth of wildflowers floated atop the tall grass, and all manner of insects and birds swooped in giddy trajectory, as if carrying love notes from one end of the land to the other. My impulse was to leap out of the car before it stopped, to rush for the gate and slip into that lush country, unimpeded by the nice skirt my mother had insisted that 47

I wear and the protocol of introductions. My mother had wanted me to make a good impression on Mr. Lambeth, not to appear to be too much of a ruffian. A girl emerged from the woods as if she were a dream of my freed self. She was my age, brown as cider, with a cap of ginger-colored sunlit hair. She wore shorts, a t-shirt, and holey sneakers without socks. She was leading a plump blackand-white-spotted mare by a halter, and she arced her free arm in a broad and friendly wave. “That’s Sunny,” Mr. Lambeth said. Burt Spruill had parked his truck, preparing to unload Cherokee. I watched Mr. Lambeth sizing him up as a ruffian— glad I had worn my skirt—then I moseyed over to the gate to talk with Sunny. “It’s a beautiful place you’ve got here, Mr. Lambeth,” my father said. “Yes indeed,” said Mr. Lambeth, puffing his cigar. “Horse heaven,” my father said, grinning at me. “Girl and horse heaven,” amended Sunny. “That’s right,” said Mr. Lambeth. “Girl and horse heaven.” He swept the land with a proprietary gaze. He studied Sunny and me, too, as if searching for proof that we had not misrepresented our intentions. We were a couple of good, trustworthy innocents, weren’t we? He seemed to peer into our very hearts as if into arenas where fences might need mending or reinforcement. “There’s one rule here,” he said. “No boys allowed.”     Owning a horse—the physical requirements of such a venture—was an acceptable way for me to disengage from purely female things: skirts, perfume, stockings and garter belts, training bras, the prissy hygiene of shaved legs and tweezered eyebrows. To stomp around in a pair of loud muddy 48

boots, to dig and shovel manure, to stink of horse sweat and the linseed oil we massaged into leather to keep it supple, to get rained on and not change clothes, to scoff at bedraggledness and keep wearing the wet jeans that rubbed against stirrups and pressed damp skids of chafing denim against your legs, to suck blood from an injury, to smash a horsefly with your bare fist, feel the sudden splatter of its putty innards, to watch a male horse urinate, to scale fly eggs out of a horse’s mane, to detect the burning fruit-punch scent of a mare in heat, to get rubbed off on trees, stepped on, stung, bitten, to smack a switch against the flank of a beast ten times larger than yourself—these were not dainty enterprises. I loved the rollicking dirtiness, the thin black rinds of filth under my fingernails, the way horse hair and sweat mingled and dried lacily on the insides of my calves and thighs, if I’d gone riding bareback. In summertime, we rode in shorts. If we used saddles, the stirrup leathers bruised and pinched our legs, leaving welts the size of raspberries. None of it hurt. I once stepped into my mother’s car—she was transporting a freshly baked pie to my grandmother—and planted one sludgy boot in the middle of the pie. It was clumsy of me, ruinous and knavish, but I laughed. What did a bit of nastiness matter? I was immune to the nitpickery of cleanliness and caution. I remember thinking that my mother was fussy not to try and salvage the pie. I would have eaten around the bootprint.     Time spent at the barn in the company of horses and dogs and field mice and black snakes and spiders who strung webs the size of hammocks and wanton stray cats who furtively dropped their litters in the hayloft introduced me to the seductive righteousness of the vulnerable, the brutal, the ugly and forgotten. In the livid flare of a horse’s nostril 49

I glimpsed something as secretively visceral as an organ. My little piano practicing palms grew callused. I could poke a dead bird with a stick and not wince at the maggots stitching in and out. Time spent breathing the smokeless smoke above fermenting piles of dung steeping in warm grass (a scent not unlike the fragrance of my father’s whiskey sours) and time spent showboating, riding backward, sidesaddle, provoking Cherokee to buck me off, daring him, goading without mercy, clanging against earth, landing in thorns and mud and jumping back on—this wild, lucky, violent rush toward life transformed me into some dusty, wayward creature midway between child and pest: part girl, part crust, more spit than dewdrop. I turned tawny, shucked off my pearly indoors skin and tanned the colors of Cherokee himself, the better to fuse with him and disappear. When I was at the barn, I did not want to separate myself from a single mote or splinter of it. We rode rowdily, without helmets, cowgirls in English saddles (mine was actually an old cavalry saddle that a relative had donated to my horsey cause). Sometimes we mounted our horses from the rear, at a run, then whooped across the big pasture as startled birds flapped out of the weeds. We were still young enough to play gypsies or Indian girls. We made costumes and painted our horses and braided their tails with feathers. When it snowed and schools closed, we’d head for the barn with our sleds. Attaching them to our saddles with long swags of rope, we’d journey into the suburbs to sell horse-drawn sled rides to the kids. Each summer morning, before the day grew hot, we took trail rides. Beyond Mr. Lambeth’s fences, woods and fields were plentiful. We discovered an old logging path that twisted through vacant land between Jefferson Road and Guilford College. There was a Phillips 66 station at our end of Jefferson. We’d stop off whenever we got thirsty, hitching our horses to a picket fence, splurging on bottled drinks 50

that were so cold they contained blades of amber ice. We cut branches off trees and fanned the flies away as we rode. We knew where there was a ravaged apple orchard, never harvested, and we took advantage of the fruit that bowed the tree limbs by midsummer. Our horses grazed whatever had fallen on the ground while we lolled on their backs in the buzzing shade, eating apples so tart they made our teeth chime. We took the horses swimming in the Guilford College Lake. The movement of a horse in deep water is the distinctly lilting upand-down rhythm of a carousel animal. Up and down they pumped, with astonishment on their faces, snorting at the water, tricked into it but trembling with the thrill of buoyancy and cool. Their dung rose and bobbed plumply on the water’s surface. We investigated all open and wooded land, posted or unposted, within a five-mile radius of Mr. Lambeth’s barn. Of course we weren’t foolish enough to jump our horses over barbed-wire fences, but where we found breaks in the wire, we trespassed, possessed by a pioneer’s sense of entitlement. The terrain that we crossed on horseback seemed as varied as continents, and we named each parcel for its distinctive traits, like explorers would have done. We called a sun-blasted barren field “Wester.” A lush acreage bordered by tall black cedars that floated above the land like unbottled genies we named “Greenfields” after a popular wistful song by the Kingston Trio. The fact that we were smitten by the nearly holy loveliness of these places—so much so that we were compelled to lavish lyrical titles upon them—suggests to me that at twelve or thirteen we not only cherished but feared losing them. Naming the fields and woods that we traversed gave them permanence. How could a young, reckless girl, cometing her horse across a meadow, foresee the end of such completely healthy wildness, bring her horse to a halt, and for an instant grieve for the delicacy of her joy and what 51

might become of it? But I say that more than once, this happened to us. We were nostalgic for our girlhoods even before we began to lose them. It was 1960. Ours may have been the last uncynical girlhoods possible in America. We took risks, imperiled ourselves in a thousand ways, might have killed ourselves a time or two but for luck or good timing. Daring had nothing to do with our boldness; freedom did. We ordered and dispensed all our own grain and hay; we phoned the vets and farriers. Sometimes the horses broke out of their fences and we chased them down Westridge Road, stopping traffic, racing through people’s yards, ducking clotheslines, sweet-talking to lure them back. Once, in a run-away, somebody was nearly beheaded when her horse dashed under the grape arbor. Once we found newborn kittens who had been cannibalized by wasps. At the barn we entered a world more harrowing and unsparing in its lessons in brutality and coarseness than our parents ever suspected. We saturated ourselves with it, yielded entirely to its roughness, its flashes of grace. On school mornings, when it was my turn to feed, my father drove me to the barn. I remember entering the feed room in my pristine school clothes, sensing the barn’s trove of squalor and longing to stay. I felt like an imposter in the clothes. I imagined the horses would laugh jeerfully when they saw me. My father waited patiently in the warm car, listening to Bob Poole’s radio show, while I vanished into a dusk of odor and chore, smashing skins of ice off the water troughs with my bare hands, marveling at the freeze-swollen hoofprints in the muddy corral. Early sun hazed through dusty panes in the hayloft windows, and the room gleamed like a vault stacked with gold, not straw. Downstairs, snug in their stalls, our horses stomped and nickered. As they chewed the oats and corn that I’d poured into their bins, the crunch of their big jaws made me swallow with longing, made me 52

sniff deeply, nose-wallowingly for the steam-grainy scent of their breaths pluming brownly into the cold air. I wanted to eat my own cereal that loud. At school, I felt like the Clark Kent version of my Superman self. My hands looked awkward in repose, scratched and bruised, the insides of my palms and fingers waxy-tough from tugging off baling wire and jerking reins. I clunked around, tall, gawky, and flat-chested. I wore powderblue harlequin glasses and big fat biscuit-looking tie-shoes for arch support because I had pronated ankles. Everybody else scooted around the hallways in slim loafers. On rare occasion I was invited to a make-out party by some loser boy who had mysteriously deemed me worth of a try; but I was not interested in making out. I seemed to be permanently encased in a protective aura of Barnness. If there had been a boy who looked like Cherokee, I might have been tempted. Young teenage boys are only physically dissimilar from horses: they are human versions, behaving with the same plodding indifference and erratic civility toward a young girl’s worshipfulness. I turned thirteen, fourteen; I entered eighth grade. Some afternoons, after school, I rode a different bus—not home, but to the barn. I didn’t know many of the kids I sat with. One cocky, older high school boy named Kenny rode the Westridge Road bus, and he began to pay attention to me. His stop was farther down the road, but he frequently threatened to disembark at mine and follow me up to the barn. He had a lank flag of oaky blonde hair and wet, pouty rock-singer lips. He wore dark glasses, but whenever he slid them down the bridge of his nose to peer more closely at me I saw that his eyes were the icy blue of breath mints. He carried a rabbit’s foot on a chain for good luck, and he was always taking it out and trying to swing it in front of some girl’s face to hypnotize her. 53

“Where’s it at?” he said, craning his neck to try to see the barn through the trees. “I don’t see no barn.” “It’s way back behind Mr. Lambeth’s house. You can’t see it from the road,” I told him, hastily gathering up my books. “Is there a hayloft? I sure do love a hayloft.” “It’s private property,” I told him sternly. His lackeys, toad-shaped younger boys, would laugh. “I want to see the hayloft, Blondie.” “I already told you it’s private property, no boys allowed.” “Well, maybe I forgot you told me that,” Kenny said, grinning. “Or maybe I just happened to be out for a walk one day and got lost and accidentally wandered into the private property that I forgot you told me about. Next I found the hayloft and you were up inside it. What would you do then?” I couldn’t judge his intentions or the narrow distance between flirtation and meanness. I didn’t know what I would do if he surprised me in the hayloft. I only hoped he was teasing. “I’d scream if I was her,” said one of the toad boys, and everybody laughed, including me. “Hey, Blondie!” they shouted out the bus windows as I scurried off the bus and down Mr. Lambeth’s driveway. “Invite Kenny to go riding with you some day. Hey, girl!” By twilight on such an afternoon, if I were the only girl up at the barn, if I were scooping out feed, every muted creak, as the barn shifted and settled in the evening cool, every wind-jittered pane spooked me. I jumped if a horse snorted or pawed. I imagined Kenny’s loose, oily shadow spilling down the stairs from the loft into the feed and tack room where I worked, and my heart pounded with the dread of reckoning. He never came, but I listened for him, and I tried to determine what I would say when he finally detached himself from the shadows. If by his teasing he had diminished the haven I’d always believed the barn provided, then I owed 54

him anger. Yet a part of me was made restive by his threats of invasion, tantalized. I even thought I understood his bluster. It was similar to our charging our horses at fences too high to jump or entering brooding posted land, snarly with vines, daring something perilous, pushing beyond our means of easy gain. I began to think of Kenny when I brushed and curried Cherokee. I had too much time to think. I imagined him slipping up on me and fastening his hand over my mouth like a gag. I imagined myself screaming. But Sunny and I were always screaming and laughing and hollering over something, and who might distinguish one sort of scream from another? I imagined myself going limp, perhaps fainting, and Kenny leading or carrying me into the loft and kissing me there. I imagined that his lips would be warm and soft, not brutal. I imagined Mr. Lambeth, who couldn’t hear the scream, hearing the kiss and rushing up to the barn, bursting in on us, furious at my betrayal, and how shabby I would feel for breaking the long-held taboo, NO BOYS ALLOWED. I pictured my unstoppable leakage of tears as I tried to explain myself, knowing full well that what I had done was irrevocable. Whatever was happening to me felt dire and skulking, panicky and profuse. In the months that followed, I was not unhappy, not bored. I felt vaguely uneasy, as if I had mislaid something vital. The barn felt vacuous, my chores mechanical. The windows at sundown flamed unbearably luminous; the moon seemed too full and Cherokee too simple. I could not stop thinking about the benefits of being elsewhere. Was it boys I gave up my girlhood for—or was it ambition? Was it mistaking one for the other? Soon I would sell Cherokee to a cowboy who wanted to show him Western Pleasure. I had misgivings. To an English rider like myself, the thought of dressing a horse in the heavy, ornate gear of 55

western tack seemed the clodhopper equivalent of outfitting him for the Grand Ole Opry. I felt as if I were selling Cherokee to a foreign country, betraying our manners and style, but on the day the man led him away my heart didn’t lurch. He was, after all, just a horse.

56

Judy Goldman Love in North Carolina Henry and I are at the kitchen table, finishing our breakfast. Grape Nuts, sliced banana, milk for him. Oatmeal for me, fresh blueberries and chopped walnuts. The Charlotte Observer is spread over the table. Henry picks up the Sports section, folds it in half, then half again. I’ve got the Living section. It’s mid-February. Outside: wintry and windy. And wet. “Doesn’t this sound like a good idea?” he says, pointing to an ad I can’t read from where I’m sitting. “A non-surgical procedure by a physiatrist to treat back pain.” “But what’s a physiatrist?” I ask, scooting my chair closer so that I can read even the fine print. “According to the ad, physiatrists are MDs,” he says. “It says here they take care of acute and chronic disorders of the spine.” Barrel-chested, bruiser Henry—I’ve always loved that he’s so big and strong and brave. Sensitive and kindhearted, yes, but if you met him, your first impression would be sturdiness. Sturdy is what I was after when I married him. Not consciously, of course. But it must have been on my checklist. I was slight, not athletic, not known for physical strength, not brave. My grandpa called me “Flimely,” a Yiddish word meaning little bird. I used to joke I did the same thing Patty Hearst did—married my bodyguard. Six years ago, Henry had surgery for spinal stenosis (narrowing of the spinal canal), which helped. But his back 57

is hurting again. He’s stiff when he gets out of bed in the morning. Can’t stand for long, finds a chair pretty quickly wherever he happens to be. He lives a normal life though. A normal life with backaches. What he’d really like is to be able to jog again, play racquetball, tennis. “The physiatrist is in practice with the neurosurgeon who operated on me,” Henry adds. “So we know he’s reputable.” Yes, I say, that does sound like a good idea.     The physiatrist tells Henry he believes he can help. Using fluoroscopy for guidance, he’ll inject steroids and an anesthetic into the epidural space—between the spine and the spinal cord. The procedure will take about thirty minutes, followed by maybe forty-five minutes recovery time. Henry will be monitored for an additional fifteen to twenty minutes before being discharged to go home. An hour and a half—total! Compare this to hours on an operating table, days in the hospital, and the long recuperation that surgery entails! The injection is so common, it’s routinely given to women during childbirth. The physiatrist explains that an epidural steroid injection can be highly effective because it delivers anti-inflammatory medication and pain relief directly to the source of the problem. He recommends two injections, spaced three weeks apart; he needs to inject two different areas. As with all invasive procedures, there are risks. Generally, though, the risks are few and tend to be rare: headache, infection, bleeding, nerve damage. Henry signs the consent form.     March 1, we report to the hospital outpatient clinic for the epidural. Afterwards, Henry’s right leg is numb. He can .

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move it; the leg just has no feeling. The physiatrist tells us, “The numbness is a great sign. It means the epidural is working.” Henry’s leg is so numb I have to practically walk him from the car into our house to our bed. He goes right to sleep. I check the handout: If numbness persists longer than eight hours, call the office. Every hour, I ask Henry about the numbness. Every hour, he says his leg is still numb. The eighth hour, I have my hand on the phone, ready to dial. I ask Henry one last time. Numbness finally gone. No need to call. The second epidural is scheduled for March 24.     March 13—17, our vacation—planned months ago— on the French side of the island of St. Martin: The ardor of spending long days in two chaises pulled close, how warm we are from the sun, lost in our books. Our lunch place jutting out over the sea, the smoky grill, smell of fresh-caught fish cooking. Every evening we stroll the rutted mile from our small resort to the row of Caribbean-colored, gingerbread-cottage restaurants. We stop every now and then for Henry to stretch— backwards, forward, bend way over, hands on knees—but back pain is not going to keep him from what he wants to do. Soft light from the moon catches the sea grape leaves, and we debate the menus posted on the little front porches. Our main concern: Are we in the mood for mussels or sole?     Seven days after St. Martin, March 24, at one-fortyfive, we arrive at the same hospital outpatient clinic as before. It’s one of those golden North Carolina days that make me wonder why anyone would want to live anywhere else. Pure sunlight, air fragrant. When the nurse comes to take Henry back, she says she’ll call for me in a few minutes, after they get him ready; I 59

can keep him company while he waits for the doctor. I find a chair in the waiting room. At first, I’m content to read People magazine, even though I don’t recognize the names of any of the celebrities. Who are these people? And why are they so young? Such babies! I glance at my watch. Almost three o’clock. Why aren’t they coming for me? At three forty-five, a nurse—not the same one who took him back—appears and says that my husband has had the epidural. “Oh,” I say, “I thought somebody was going to come get me so I could be with him before—” “Well,” she says, “we’re real busy today and things got sorta’ hectic back there and then the doctor was all of a sudden ready for him around three o’clock and we never had a chance to come get you.” I walk behind her down the long hall. She’s repeating, brightly, “Your husband’s verrry numb! Verrry numb!” as though she’s marveling over some unusual turn of events, more charming, really, than anything to worry about. “He’s numb?” I ask, trying to match her brightness, wondering why her great cheer is scaring me, why my little laugh is coming out shaky. She stops outside a closed door. Pauses. Then opens it. I follow her in. When she moves to the side and Henry is in full view, I see that he’s flat on his back on a gurney, a sheet pulled up around his neck, the way you’d tuck in a child. His expression is stark. Contorted. His whole face an agonized flinch. As though he has absorbed a blow. As though he took the world head-on and lost. “Judy,” he whispers, his eyes clutching at mine, “I can’t feel a thing from my waist down. I can’t move my legs.” I turn to the nurse. “Where’s the doctor?” My voice 60

rises with each word. It’s going some place totally unfamiliar. “Does the doctor know?” “Well,” she says, “not exactly.” “He needs to see this!” My voice verges on shrill. My hand brushes the air. “Go get him!” She’s backing out of the room. I’m shivering.     I sit down beside Henry, put my hand on his arm. I don’t know where to touch him, if it’s even okay to touch him. “Tell me,” I say. He says that when the doctor was giving the injection, he felt severe pain. He must have groaned, because the doctor asked him, Are you okay? He told the doctor, No, I’m in excruciating pain. The doctor said, We’re almost done. That’s when he emptied the hypodermic. He tells me that his back, where the needle went in, is still hurting.     Maybe it’s not as bad as I’m terrified that it is. Maybe he’s really okay. Maybe I can help him be okay. Maybe what’s been taken away can be brought back. I just have to figure this out. But I need to hurry. Before it—whatever it is—locks into place. I loosen the sheet around his feet. “Can you feel this?” His toes. “No,” he says. “Not at all.” He sounds as though he’s grown tired somewhere deep in his body “Can you wiggle your toes?” “I’m trying. Are they moving?” They aren’t. I wiggle them myself, to get them started. But then, nothing. 61

“Can you flex this foot? Or this one?” “I can’t make either one move.” “How about your leg? Can you lift it? Can you lift it just a little? This one? Or this one?” “I’m trying, I’m trying as hard as I can.” I stroke the top of his feet, then his soles, with my fingers. For a second, I think how another time, another place, I might run my hand down his calf to his foot. Maybe in the morning, on my way to the bathroom, rounding the bed, I might reach under the sheet and touch the bottom of his foot. That careless, offhanded thing married people do. “What about this?” I ask, massaging his ankles. “Can you feel me doing this?” “I can’t.” I rub his calves. No. I touch his knees, thighs, groin, buttocks. No, no, no, no. He feels nothing. I feel everything. Each no is a needle going into my spine.     Days after the injection, sensation returns to his left leg, though spotty. His right leg remains paralyzed. He spends a total of eighteen days in the hospital and rehab hospital. Mid-April, I bring him home, in a wheelchair. Over time, he progresses to a walker, then a four-prong cane. Finally, the burl-handled cane. He has a “drop foot,” which makes his walk a slapping motion. His proprioception (ability to feel the position of his feet) is affected, so it’s hard for him to maintain balance. Many medical emergencies—falls, blood clots, middle-of-the-night runs to the ER, hospital infections, gout, neurogenic bladder, surgeries, loss of blood and shock, pneumonia. 62

I come to believe that I alone am responsible, that only with fierce determination and a brain that never goes on automatic can I steer this ship, put it on an easy, bright course, bring my husband safely back to shore. Part of me is dead-tired from having to be so responsible, and part of me does not want to hand over the responsibility to anyone. Not even Henry. Being in charge feels, in some ways, like an ascendancy. As though I’m suddenly six feet tall. A world-class expert. I hear myself telling friends self-aggrandizing stories of how I stopped some nurse from giving the wrong pill, demanded a test that ended up providing valuable information, recognized an infection before a doctor did, suggested treatment, refused treatment—a thousand different instances in which my quick thinking kept Henry from further harm. As though I’m in the running for some major prize for alertness.     So, if I became the strong one, Henry became—what? How dramatic was our role reversal? I took over; he gave in. He let go of something we both held dear: that air of autonomy he always gave off. I am now breathing it in. Which leads to eye-rolling (him). And sighs (me). How dare he threaten to fail physically! Even obliquely threaten to die! As though his medical condition is a betrayal. He was supposed to be the strong one. We both counted on that. And oh, how tired he grows of relying on me, tired of my bossiness, tired of the role reversal. He’s ready to switch back. I’m ready, too. But neither of us can figure out how to reverse a reversal.     Remember us? Proud Young Wife, standing outside the racquetball court at the Charlotte Y, along with twenty-some 63

other people, watching Sturdy Young Husband through the plate-glass wall. Henry was playing Garl Wildes from Winston Salem in the semi-finals of the open division of the North Carolina state tournament. The two of them hit the ball so hard—that loud thwack—it seemed they could slice the thick, sweaty air in half. Through their T-shirts, you could see waves of muscle in their backs. Wildes won the first game, 21-19. Henry won the second, 21-19. Third game, Wildes, 21-19. Who could ever hope to beat somebody named Garl Wildes? Such a mythologicalsounding name. Almost biblical. The next day Wildes easily won the finals and took home the championship. Henry won his consolation match and ended up with a ranking of third in the state.     This many years later—especially now—I love to tell the story. Why do I love to tell the story? I’m thinking of the word, pentimento: I scratch down through the layers, beneath the current portrait of Henry, looking for the original image— him in his youth. Surely, the current version is an overlay that is not really him. (How did he get painted over?) I want to still see my husband as vibrant and compelling, all that masculine passion, jawline sharp as ever, strong down to his fingertips. I don’t lay claim to special knowledge, but here’s what I’m catching on to: We never forget the particulars of the person we fell in love with. We just have to understand they weren’t ours—or his—to possess.     Nobody is immune to change. Husbands and wives end up surprising each other. Of course, it may not be a 64

sudden and dramatic change, a kitchen sink kind of change. (Everything but . . . ) Changes can also be slow and ordinary: I now wear glasses. Henry has a beard. A beard that’s mostly white. I’ve always been a worrier; now I worry even more. He snores more. I sleep less. He sleeps more. His jokes, once pristine, now go on too long; I keep telling him to cut the nonessential parts. Life’s forward momentum. Bringing with it a natural part of maturing, aging. Like the oaks in the yard that do nothing but stand there and change just a little every day. Late at night, though, when one of us whispers good night against the other’s shoulder, none of this matters. It’s just new love turning into old love.

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Stephanie Elizondo Griest Chiefing in Cherokee By the time we rolled into Cherokee, North Carolina, Nick and I had been crisscrossing the country for three months straight, scouting for stories for an educational website called the Odyssey. Because it was the year 2000—that is, when cell phones were mostly used for urgent matters— we had filled our endless road hours with conversation. But neither of us said a word as we cruised down Tsali Boulevard, the town’s main strip. We just stared and shuddered. Practically every storefront sign featured a Native American rendered in caricature above a business name like MIZ-CHIEF, SUNDANCER CRAFTS, or REDSKIN MOTEL. Store pillars had been carved and painted as totem poles. Teepees crested the rooftops. Souvenir shops advertised two-for-one dream catchers. Mannequins dressed in warbonnets waved from the windows. Nick and I had traveled here to research Andrew Jackson’s forced relocation, in 1836, of the Cherokee from their ancestral lands to territories out West. At least 4,000 Cherokee died from hunger and exposure along the way. We wanted to learn how the tribe had processed this tragedy, how they explained it to their children. Indigenous Disneyland wasn’t what we’d had in mind. Up ahead, a billboard touted LIVE INDIAN DANCERS in a tawdry font. Nick pulled over so we could join a flock of tourists gathered around a teepee propped on the side of the road. Two men wearing elaborately feathered 66

headdresses were midway through a performance. The younger one was playing a drum; the elder was telling a story about the Titanic. Too many people had crowded into the life raft, he said. They were sinking. Three brave men needed to make the ultimate sacrifice. A French man shouted, “Vive la France!” and jumped overboard. Then a Brit yelled, “Long live the Queen!” and jumped overboard. Finally, a Cherokee stood up. He looked around at all of the passengers and said, “Remember the Trail of Tears!” Then he grabbed a white boy and threw him overboard. I laughed. The white tourists did, too. Nick, an Oglala Lakota Sioux from the Pine Ridge Nation in South Dakota, did not, which altered how I might otherwise have reacted to the next joke, and the one after that. Again and again the storyteller mocked his audience, and again and again they chuckled on cue. I didn’t know what to make of this. Were these jokes undermining the significance of the tribe’s calamities or intensifying them? And was laughing a sign of our complicity, or was it a strange way of seeking karmic forgiveness for the atrocities that some of our ancestors had committed against theirs? No time to contemplate: Live Indian Dancing had begun. The storyteller took over the drum and started chanting while his younger partner stepped into the center of the circle of listeners. He wore regalia—war paint, dozens of beaded necklaces, a headdress and bustle made of turkey feathers—over faded Levi’s and sneakers. For about a minute, he shuffled his feet and bobbed his bustle as the tourists took pictures. When he bowed, the storyteller passed around a basket, which the audience filled with bills and coins. I had witnessed touristic practices ranging from the questionable to the degrading the world over, but this struck me as something dangerously complex. Self-exploitation? I turned to Nick for guidance, as he was my de facto barometer 67

for what was morally acceptable in Native America. He clenched his jaw in anger. When the last tourist departed, we marched over to the performers. Though just nineteen years old, Nick had inherited formidable oratorical skills from his grandfather (who provided legal counsel for the American Indian Movement) and mother (who won the 1993 Goldman Environmental Prize), so he did our talking. One by one, he ticked off every instance of cultural misappropriation we had encountered there: how, historically, the Cherokee had never lived in teepees, raised totem poles, or performed the Sun Dance, and how they had certainly never worn that style of headdress. What gave these men the right to profit from traditions not their own? The storyteller shook his tip basket. He fed his kids with this money, he said. White people, they didn’t know anything about Indians. He was educating them.  “How are you doing that? You are totally misrepresenting your history.” He looked Nick in the eye. “You say you’re Lakota, eh? Do you speak the language? Do you know the dances and the ceremonies? I do. But I don’t do them here. They’re too sacred.”  And just like that, our righteous indignation fizzled. No, Nick did not speak Lakota—for the same reason that I, a Chicana from South Texas, did not speak Spanish. Our elders had suffered so much discrimination for using their mother tongues that they’d declined to pass them on to us. Although Nick and I had been hired by the Odyssey to represent our communities, we couldn’t actually talk with many of our elders. What, then, gave us the right to question these men? They knew their culture, which was more than we could say about our own. Sensing that he’d hit a nerve, the storyteller invited Nick to sit with him, then picked up a drum and started 68

singing. After a while, Nick joined in. They sang song after song together, until the next flock of tourists arrived. When the storyteller rose from the bench to open a new show, we slinked away.  In the year that followed, I drove more than 45,000 miles across the United States with Nick and other colleagues. Nothing affected me like that Cherokee trip. From that day forward, whenever I began another essay about Chicanidad, or wore a rebozo to a reading, I thought of those buskers dancing for tourists on the side of the street. Was I also commoditizing my culture when I performed my identity, or was I offering reverence to my ancestors? Could anything profitable be authentic? Did any of this matter if you were simply trying to survive?     About a year ago, I returned to Cherokee to continue the conversation that had troubled me since that first visit. The timing was auspicious: The town was celebrating its 103rd annual fair, a five-day homecoming festival complete with parades, stickball matches, a Ferris wheel, and a late-night “Pretty Legs” contest featuring scantily clad men in drag. Along Tsali Boulevard, all the teepees were gone, swept from the rooftops and plucked off the streets. The Old Squaw Moccasin Shop had been replaced by a string of upscale stores promoting “authentic Cherokee crafts.” Only one or two bonneted mannequins were left. These changes were yet another instance of the remarkable agility of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. This nation was founded by some of the hundreds of Cherokee who escaped Jackson’s death march by fleeing into the mountains, as well as by those who’d been granted the right to stay through treaties. In the 1870s, they bought back their ancestral territory from the US government, via a land trust called 69

the Qualla Boundary. White outsiders arrived a few decades later, looking to invest in baskets and blowguns. Sensing an opportunity, the white-run Bureau of Indian Affairs organized the tribe’s first fair in 1912, which drew even more visitors. Once the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway opened in the 1930s, cabals of federal, state, and county officials, local businessmen, and a handful of Eastern Cherokee decided to capitalize on the tribe’s heritage. First came an outdoor theatrical production called Unto These Hills that, according to an early promo, dramatized “the epic clash of the red man and the white man,” from colonization to the Trail of Tears. The show reeled in more than 100,000 spectators during its 1950 inaugural season, and has run every summer since. Next came the Oconaluftee Indian Village, where historical reenactors portrayed daily life circa 1759 for clusters of camera-wielding tourists. Competition started brewing on the other side of the Smokies when Tennessee towns like Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge began to hype up their own heritage. White, middle-class families came in droves for the moonshine stills, wax museums, and attractions like Rebel Railroad (now Dollywood), which at the time offered train rides culminating in “wild Indian attacks.” Refusing to be outdone, the Eastern Band sanctioned Frontier Land, a Wild West theme park that also featured Indian raids. By the early 1960s, the town of Cherokee was awash with tomahawk shops, campgrounds lined with teepees, petting zoos where kids could play tic-tac-toe with roosters, and roundthe-clock Live Indian Dancing. Whereas earlier ventures like the Oconaluftee Village aimed for historical accuracy, these newer businesses touted the Hollywood version of the American Indian. Totem poles abounded. Not only did this satisfy tourists, it enabled the Eastern Band to keep their real 70

traditions private and therefore sacred. Once the Red Power civil-rights movement elevated Native consciousness in the late 1960s, however, more and more Eastern Cherokee questioned the persona the tribe had put forward, worried about the psychic harm it could cause. Tourism also changed, with heritage seekers wanting to learn more, say, about their greatgreat-grandma rumored to have been a Cherokee princess. Then, in the eighties, air travel became more affordable, triggering a nationwide decline in family road trips that parched the tribe’s economy. The time had come for reinvention. In 1997, the Eastern Band launched their most ambitious transformation yet: On the grounds where Frontier Land once stood, they erected Harrah’s Cherokee, North Carolina’s first casino. Suddenly, the Eastern Band had the cash flow not only to fortify their infrastructure—education, health care, housing, public safety—but to revamp their image as well. The Museum of the Cherokee Indian underwent a $3.5 million renovation the following year. In 2006, the tribe hired a Kiowa playwright, Hanay Geiogamah, to revise Unto These Hills according to Native storytelling traditions and to write better roles for community members. (The original script was composed by a white graduate student at the University of North Carolina.) A few years later, the tribal government began offering incentives to local businesses to more accurately represent Cherokee culture. This explained the dearth of teepees along Tsali Boulevard, replaced by new facades hewn of wood and stone. Vintage Cherokee lives on, though, in the buskers who pose for tourist photographs. Known locally as “chiefing,” this profession dates back to 1930, when a souvenir shop called Lloyd’s asked its employees to stand outside in their regalia to draw in customers. After Polaroid popularized instant cameras in the late 1940s, some Eastern Cherokee (as well as members of other tribes) began dressing up and 71

standing along the thoroughfare, beckoning motorists to stop for photos. The first buskers saw a direct correlation between the ostentation of their outfits and how much tourists tipped them, so they abandoned the modest, traditional dress of the Cherokee in favor of the splendid warbonnets of the Plains Indians. Although chiefing soon became one of the town’s biggest attractions—one busker, Henry “Chief Henry” Lambert, claimed to be “The World’s Most Photographed Indian” after posing by his roadside teepee for almost six decades—it was also one of the most controversial, with some members challenging the profession’s dignity. Over the years, the tribal government has tried curtailing the practice through increasingly stringent regulations, allowing only enrolled members to chief inside the Qualla Boundary, requiring annual permits, and, most recently, restricting busking to a handful of three-sided huts equipped with a raised stage, a ceiling fan, and benches. Anyone caught busking outside these huts can be slapped with fines, even arrested.     At 9 a.m. all the huts around town were still empty. Over by the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, two members of Cherokee Friends—the museum’s ambassadorial wing— stood in a shady alcove, knapping flint and whittling wood. Both men had shaved their heads smooth except for short ponytails at their napes. The younger of the two was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt; the other, who introduced himself as Sonny Ledford Usquetsiwo, wore a belted white trade shirt over red leggings. They both wore metal bands around their wrists and coin-sized gauges in their earlobes. “The reason we are here is to answer questions,” Usquetsiwo said grandly, drawing out each vowel in Appalachian fashion. “Here, we are in our culture 24-7.” I complimented his regalia, and he nodded, rubbing 72

the red-and-black engravings that covered his arms. “My markings, it is earned. It is not a fad. I’m not just going to the tattoo parlor and getting it done. It is between me and the elders. They are called warrior marks. Real warriors give us that status because we are fighting for our culture. Lots of what is written about us is wrong, like the way we look. You see us on the internet, but that’s Plains Indians, not us.” I asked Usquetsiwo whether chiefing had contributed to the public’s misperception of his tribe. He stared at me for a moment before resuming his flint work. “Gradually, they are easing them out. In a way I agree with [chiefing] because I know the people who do it. Yet another way I don’t because they are using warbonnets of another tribe. Our elders will not let us stand on the side of the street trying to get people to take a picture for a tip. We have been told, ‘We don’t want to see you out there.’ ” At that, the younger man, Mike Crowe, looked up. “My dad chiefed on the side of the road, didn’t he?” he asked.  Usquetsiwo nodded. “They do what they had to do,” Crowe said. “It was a smaller job market then. They just tried to make cash to feed themselves. This day and age, I’d rather see them take the time to research our people and give an authentic view. If they are trying to make an honest living, I can’t be mad at that.” Usquetsiwo’s diplomacy was one of many examples of how the Eastern Cherokee practice what’s called a “harmony ethic,” which values consensus and not causing offense. I’d learned about it in the time between my visits here, and noticed how it manifested not just in the people but in the attractions, too. The Museum of the Cherokee Indian, for instance, is said to be one of the first in the United States to require visitors to contemplate human suffering. And certainly its mural of the Trail of Tears—of families trudging through snow in mournfully blue strokes—was proof that there is no 73

painless way to tell the story of Native-American displacement. But I sensed, too, how the harmony ethic tempered other displays, like one about Cherokee firepower, where a placard listed various excuses as to why the colonists had traded weapons to the Cherokee that were “cheaply made, required special shot, and broke easily” before landing on what made the most sense—namely that “the colonists did not want the Indians to have equal firepower.” A timeline of the Cherokee school system, meanwhile, spared you from the horrors of a century and a half of “Indian residential schools”—during which 100,000 indigenous children were forced to attend Christian boarding schools, where they were beaten for speaking their mother tongues and berated for professing their traditional beliefs— by solely noting how, in the 1930s, American public opinion shifted to support the idea that “removing five and six year olds from their families was inhumane.” This was, in essence, a museum about an attempted genocide, but you couldn’t tell from its rhetorical restraint. I found a more wrenching experience at the Cherokee Bear Zoo. For decades, animals played a large role in Cherokee tourism in the form of trained-chicken acts and pose-with-abear-cub stands, most of which have been phased out. One of the zoos in Cherokee, Chief Saunooke’s Bear Park, was shuttered in 2013 after the USDA fined it $20,000 for deplorable conditions. Tribal elders have sued the Cherokee Bear Zoo as well, contending it violates the Endangered Species Act. (A court ruled otherwise in March 2016, but a PETA campaign against the zoo continues.) At the entrance were the sounds of more prerecorded flutes and a vendor selling paper trays arranged with apple slices, a piece of white bread, and a leaf of iceberg lettuce. I sidestepped a trash can with a sign that read DON’T SPIT IN THE BUCKET, then peered over the railing. Twenty feet below, bears paced inside tiny concrete pits. Black bears, 74

brown bears—nine in all. The closest one, a grizzly, was standing on his hind legs and staring up at a couple of kids with cell phones. “Lookit!” one shouted, laughing and snapping a photo before dropping an apple slice into the bear’s open mouth. The animal’s teeth were jagged and yellow. His mate stretched out beside a stack of tires that held aloft a log topped by an overturned garbage can. A few feet away, a dripping pipe replenished a tub of water. That was it, in terms of amenities: no plants or grass or even dirt. The kids tossed down a lettuce leaf that alighted by the paw of the prostrate bear, which batted at it listlessly while they laughed and took her photo. Over by the ticket counter was a caged baby tiger wearing a purple collar. His sign advertised pictures for twenty dollars. As I watched, the cub climbed onto the log in the middle of his cage, walked up its incline, lost balance, and fell, landing hard on his side. Picking himself up, he shook his fur and tried again. Here was the devastation missing from the museum. Only someone profoundly pained could rationalize treating creatures like this. Many Native people have traditionally believed they carry their ancestors’ suffering inside them, and researchers like Harvard’s LeManuel Bitsoi say that epigenetics is starting to agree—finding that historical traumas could be woven into DNA. If abuse begets more abuse, the Cherokee Bear Zoo is a paradigmatic example of colonialism’s brutality.     By noon, the streets had filled with fairgoers, but the huts were still empty. On Paint Town Road, I noticed a tattoo parlor flanked by a two-story fiberglass Indian wearing half a headdress and white streaks on his cheeks. I walked inside. A bald man with a goatee looked up from behind the counter. I confessed that I’d driven 300 miles to meet some roadside chiefs but hadn’t found one yet. 75

“I did it when I was ten,” he offered, adjusting his glasses. “I tanned a lot better then.” His name was Robin Lambert, and he hailed from three generations of chiefs: His grandfather, his uncle, and he and his brother all busked at one point or another—his uncle, in fact, was none other than Chief Henry. Was it true that the famed showman had put five kids through college by chiefing? Indeed it was, Lambert said, and not only that, but one of those sons—Patrick Lambert—had just been elected “real chief,” or the Principal Chief of the Eastern Band, by a landslide last month.  “So, I guess that makes you an advocate?”  “When you go to Disney, you want to see Mickey Mouse. When you come here, you want to see Indians,” he said with a shrug.  Lambert stepped out from behind the counter. His arms, legs, and neck were so intricately tattooed that I couldn’t help asking which mark had come first. An eagle, he said, but it got covered a while back. His clients, Native and white alike, tended to request animals, feathers, or portraits of Indians. But not every request was honored. “[White] people will come in and say their great-grandmother is Cherokee and they want a tribal seal, but I won’t do it,” Lambert said. “Some will get offended, but then I’ll tell them that to do that, I’d need to make markings on their face. And then they’ll say no.” Lambert didn’t do this out of rudeness; for many tribes, refusal is a political stance, a way of asserting sovereignty. Here in Cherokee, it can even trump harmony. Down by the Burger King, I met Mark Hollis Stover Jr., another legacy roadside chief, whose great-grandfather, grandfather, and mother had all been in the business. A tall and slender man, Stover wore an orange ribbon shirt topped by a breastplate of beads shaped like elk bones. An otter pelt was slung across his back and his head was crowned with a 76

“porky roach” (a headdress bristling with porcupine and deer hair). He’d just opened his hut for business and was still arranging beaded bracelets for sale, but he took a moment to tell his story. He grew up in Atlanta—“the only Indian I knew,” he said—then “got in a little bit of trouble” before moving to Cherokee and finding his passion: dancing. A champion in the Men’s Southern Strait Dance on the powwow circuit, Stover said he enjoyed chiefing because it allowed him to live by his art. “That’s all I want to do, is dance.” The hardest part of his profession was, as he put it, the “stupid questions. They gawk at you. They say woh-wohwoh,” he said, padding his palm against his mouth. “They ask, ‘Are you a real Indian?’ They think we still live in teepees.” He tried to view these annoyances as opportunities. “I get to educate ignorant people who watch TV all day. Kids come up all scared of me, and I show them my jewelry and say, ‘If you take a picture with me, you can pick a piece.’ They see we are just like everybody else.”  Listening to Stover, it seemed the Eastern Band’s biggest obstacle to promoting a more accurate view of their culture might be that their fabricated attributes had become tradition in and of themselves. When Unto These Hills made its revisionist debut, for instance, some community members protested, saying they liked the old version better, despite its inaccuracies. And if a roadside chief was donning the same style of porky roach that three generations of family members wore before him, couldn’t he legitimately claim it as part of his heritage? I shared this notion with Stover. He thought about it for a moment. “I am just doing what I can to keep it alive,” he said.     Unto These Hills had closed for the season by the time I arrived, but the Oconaluftee Indian Village, an expanse 77

of woods and streams and cabins that recreated eighteenthcentury Cherokee life (pizza-and-hot-dog kiosk notwithstanding), was still open. Six hundred schoolchildren were somewhere on the premises, observing live dioramas, blowgun demonstrations, and basket weaving. Smoke curled from a hearth. Women pounded corn into meal. Men in leggings sharpened metal tools. An accompanying placard epitomized diplomacy: “Cherokee had a cure for every sickness and disease known until the introduction of smallpox,” as if the disease miraculously appeared on its own before annihilating 90 percent of the first Americans. The village’s central feature was a ceremonial square marked by low walls of sand. The surrounding bleachers were named after the seven clans: Bird, Blue, Deer, Long Hair, Paint, Wild Potato, and Wolf. A performance was underway; every seat was taken. Historical reenactors danced until the ringleader gave the cue, whereupon they hopped up and down and said, “ribbit.” The spectators, mostly schoolchildren, shrieked with delight. “This hurts me worse than it hurts you,” the ringleader joked before speeding up his chants, making the dancers hop in double time. Afterward, he stressed that the Frog Dance we’d just witnessed was a social dance, not a ceremonial one. As with most Cherokee traditions, the latter were too sacred to share with outsiders.  Once the show ended, I joined the children mothing around the ringleader, whose name was Freddy. Like the Cherokee Friends at the museum, he’d shaved his head bald but for a ponytail at the nape and had decorated his earlobes with gauges. A pair of bear paws dangled from his neck. Such striking features were likely why he was emblazoned on postcards sold across town, but he also radiated a luminous kindness. Finally the crowd cleared out, which gave Freddy and me a chance to talk. I learned that he was the first in his 78

family to graduate not just high school but college, and that he’d chosen the University of North Carolina because, when he was a boy, he found a Tar Heels raincoat in a box of clothes that a church had sent. He told me that he loved making art (mostly stone and wood work, but abstract art, too); that some of his family were “bad on drugs” but that his grandparents had “stayed me straight.” He also said that October 17 was his last day here, because he had stomach cancer, and he would soon be undergoing chemotherapy treatment. Freddy was twenty-five years old.  Other reenactors gathered around. I asked them how they liked working at the village. Quite a bit, they said, though one grumbled about his wife greeting him in the morning with, “You going to go play Indian today?” They agreed that the hardest part was answering the same questions day in and day out: Where are the teepees? Do you have a car? Do you have a house? Where is the reservation? Missing from this list were, of course, the equally insipid questions I myself was asking. For there are three kinds of tourists who visit Cherokee: those who know nothing about Indians; those who think they know everything about Indians; and those who are aware of how little they know about Indians and want to be enlightened. What impressed me about the Eastern Band was how patient they were with us. Granted, they have an economic incentive to be tolerant, but so do plenty of other tribes, and I couldn’t think of another one that offered visitors half as many opportunities for connection. True, these interactions were highly contrived, but hopefully we were learning a little more about one another than if we’d all just stayed at home. At one point a blond, blue-eyed boy raced up to a wall of sand and kicked it, causing a mini-avalanche. “Please don’t touch that mound!” a reenactor shouted, rushing over. The child darted away but was soon dragged back by his father. 79

“Say you’re sorry,” he demanded, pushing the child at the reenactor’s feet. Bending down on one knee, the reenactor looked the little boy in the eye and explained how the sand “is like the walls of our church. Would you want me going into your church and breaking something? No, you wouldn’t, because it is your sacred space. The way our people would traditionally handle something like this is, the mom and dad would be held responsible. They would be tied to a post. I know you are really young, but that is why I am telling you this. I want you to respect things.” The father gripped his son by the top of the head and led him away. As they disappeared around the corner, he smacked him.     However jarring it felt to exit an eighteenth-century Indian village and, twelve minutes later, saunter inside an Indian casino, the two are arguably equally authentic. Games of chance have long roots in Native America (some European travelogues describe tribes throwing bones for horses and weapons). Ever since the Seminoles initiated Hollywood Bingo in Florida, in 1979, tribes have opened more than 470 gaming establishments nationwide—businesses that generated nearly $30 billion in revenue in 2015. Yet gambling has been contentious for many nations. In 1989, the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne nearly erupted into a civil war over the issue, with car bombings and shoot-outs that left two men dead. The consensus among the Eastern Cherokee I met was this: They appreciated their dividend checks—which lately had been averaging $12,000 per member per year—and benefits like attending any college in the world entirely on the tribe’s dime. Yet they regretted how the casino had transformed their community from a family destination into a 80

gambling haven. Nonetheless, the Eastern Band had recently opened a second casino, near Murphy, North Carolina. The casino in Cherokee was posh but not flagrantly so, which seemed appropriate given the local poverty rate (around 25 percent). The entire complex boasted a twentyone-story hotel and a 3,000-seat event center, but kept the outdoor fountains and flashing lights to a minimum. The ringing, pinging machines on the lower level were mostly operated by an elderly crowd, an alarming number of whom were using oxygen tanks. Middle-aged players, many of them in sunglasses, packed the high-stakes poker tables on the second floor. The only Cherokee-specific item I could find anywhere was in the back of a gift shop, where a cabinet displayed the same kind of beaded bracelets that Stover sold, only for fifty dollars instead of five. At Swarovski, I saw a crystal that seemed buffalo-shaped, but when I asked the attendant, she pointed at its tiny bell and called it a cow. On the way out, however, I noticed a massive Cherokee tribal seal hanging in the grand entrance. Something about it reminded me of a dazzling moment in 2006 when Seminoles dressed in traditional patchwork announced from a Times Square marquee that they had just acquired Hard Rock International for $965 million. “Our ancestors sold Manhattan for trinkets,” one quipped. “We’re going to buy Manhattan back, one burger at a time.”     That weekend in Cherokee, there were roadside chiefs performing the Hoop Dance, the Fancy Dance, and the Friendship Dance beside a stuffed buffalo named Bill. There were roadside chiefs juggling the needs of twenty tourists at once—some who wanted their kid’s face painted, some who wanted a photograph, and all of whom wanted to see Live Indian Dancing and to know when did it start and was there time to run to the restroom first. 81

Most memorable was the chief in his early forties who presided over the hut by the post office. His name was Mike Grant. A compact man, he had painted his face black from his eyes down and slung a deerskin over his shirt. A fox pelt crested his head, its furry face inches above his own. He was busily displaying tomahawks while his partner, Tony Walkingstick, painted his own face green behind a drum. “I want to project different periods of time, and not be like a powwow chicken having a seizure on a dance field,” Grant said with a low drawl. “We try to bring back the original. Gourd dances. Rattles. Our historical society doesn’t want us to bring it back because it is too sacred, but horse feathers! How are the young supposed to learn their culture?” His grandfather was Lakota, he added, and he hoped to bring their ceremonial dances down to Cherokee someday.  “Isn’t that controversial?” I asked. With a grin, he pointed to a nearby Ford F-150, where a Confederate flag strung on a pole dangled out of the truck bed. “We have family who died under them colors. We fly that flag proudly.” Indeed, a white Cherokee chief named William Holland Thomas led the 69th North Carolina Regiment of the Confederate Army, and many of his infantry were fellow Cherokee (who owned more black slaves than any other tribe). Although the rebel flag is flown by just a fringe group these days, I saw several during my visit—stitched on a teenager’s denim jacket, plastered on a Cadillac, even used as the backdrop of a giant dream catcher hanging in a store.  Grant introduced me to his sons. The ten-year-old wore a deerskin, while the twelve-year-old sported a T-shirt depicting a potbellied crocodile that said SEND MORE YANKEES THE LAST ONES TASTED GREAT. Both were absorbed in the same cell phone. Grant explained that chiefing was a big part of their homeschooling, since they 82

could learn singing, dancing, and culture “all in one fell swoop.” “They make all these knives and tomahawks for sale,” he said. “They owe me four dollars or five dollars for cutting and a little more for materials, and not only do they learn culture, but math and business.” At that, the sky released a downpour, sending a dozen tourists in brightly colored ponchos scurrying into the hut. Grant glanced over at Walkingstick, who had just donned a gustoweh—the feathered headgear traditionally associated with the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy—and announced that the show would now begin. No photos would be allowed during the opening ceremony because “we want you to witness with this”—he touched his eyes—“and feel it with this”—he touched his heart. Walkingstick popped in a CD of wooden-flute music, lit a prayer bowl, and scattered a handful of tobacco atop the drum. As soon as he played it, more tourists entered the hut, cell phones raised and recording. He asked for blessings “for babies . . . for veterans . . . for Leonard Peltier.” The deerskin-clad son was called up and given two eagle feathers. Grasping one in each hand, the boy soared around the hut in bare feet, raising the feathers skyward in each of the four cardinal directions. Then he grabbed a tomahawk and stomped about, his torso parallel to the ground, his head turning side to side. I had no idea what—if any—of this was traditionally Cherokee, but I did know that, for nearly three-quarters of a century, the United States and Canada outlawed most Native ceremonies. Those that survived were conducted in secret by Indians willing to risk imprisonment. A few songs later, Walkingstick rose to his feet. Scanning the crowd, he delivered a monologue about “Our Holocaust,” sharing how “there were 3,500 who were never captured, killed off, or conquered by the white man. We are their descendants. My relatives, my clan, our nation, we have 83

never been tamed.” Across from me sat a man wearing overalls and a backward baseball cap that said MOONSHINE. His eyes welled with emotion. The woman beside me also looked transfixed, leaning forward on her knee-high moccasins. She later told me she lived six hours away but visited Cherokee whenever she could to learn more about her heritage. “We kinda reached the middle part of the show,” Grant said. “We are not paid by any entity. We will just pass the donation basket.” One by one, the tourists shook his hand and filled his basket. They seemed satisfied for having witnessed something “Indian,” and Grant and Walkingstick seemed satisfied for getting compensated.     I left Cherokee feeling as conflicted as ever about the ramifications of capitalizing on a culture. Yet I was reminded that, as preoccupations go, this one was mighty privileged, right up there with worrying about whether your touristic experience was authentic or not. Such matters generally become pressing only after a community has been freed from such crises as devastatingly high rates of domestic violence, unemployment, alcohol and drug addiction, and youth suicide—all of which ravage much of Native America today. Perhaps the most authentic thing to witness in Cherokee is how—despite their catastrophic losses during the Trail of Tears; despite their centuries-long struggles to retain their land, status, and dignity—the Eastern Band has managed not only to survive but to thrive, thanks in part to their willingness to reinvent themselves as needed. Indeed, their readiness to share so much with their former tormentors might be one of the most radical acts of forgiveness I know.

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Allen Gurganus A Torrent of Kindness My hometown’s traffic signals are blinking underwater. You can see brown river currents go red, yellow, green. This intersection’s sole conveyances: foam rubber couches, a Chippendale side-chair I swear is my great-aunt’s, beach balls—plus one flood-liberated coffin. I see it, bronze, the narrow end foremost, sharking due east submarine-like, moving right along. Since Hurricane Floyd, local police advisories warn: “Do not try to secure drifting coffins yourself. Phone us with their last known whereabouts. (Embalmed bodies do not constitute major health risks).” Not compared to everything else. Two weeks past the first stunning surge, the rains still come. Most all the childhood homes I played in—even the house where I experienced what I believed to be the first French kiss ever invented by humankind—now stand darkened under water. Rocky Mount is, alas, a river town. Now, literally. It was built to utilize one waterfall that energized an 1840’s cotton mill, and its poorest black residents and some of the richest white ones still live in sight of the Tar River. It’s usually so friendly, so “don’t say-nothin’ ,” that our local joke has fondly teased it as “the mighty Tar.” Never make fun of anything. A child studying the map will worry how North Carolina juts, inviting, out into the Gulf Stream—some 85

masochistic taunt and dare of Southern hospitality. Where would every hurricane choose to spend its inland holiday? We natives date our lives this way: “Before Hazel,” “After Fran.” Storms here make tree surgery nearly as profitable as brain surgery. The usual wind damage at least has a short attention span, grazing hard at our salad bar but basically just picking. Floyd’s waters, more democratic, have noticed everything, and from the bottom up. Our mild river rose so quickly: folks who went uneasily to bed at 11 P.M., worried over the black water flirting with their porch’s bottom step, were wakened at 3 A.M. by the sound effects record of a torrent; found their whole first floor submerged. To dive from a great height can be daunting to people over 50. To dive into dark water off the roof of your nest-egg home, to try and swim to safety, means a terrible contest: should you resist your own death or never again trust the assurance we call Home? What makes this even scarier, black water itself is pure pollution—from bloating livestock, sewage, the chemicals washed free of warehouses, factories. You need tetanus and typhoid shots to even wade in it. (To even look at it long.) Our town’s overtended side streets and watchful sweetness are, the local Latin teacher tells me, “as altered by Before and After as, say, Pompeii.” Eastern North Carolina, forever isolated—a day’s drive between all major places—was only just beginning to find a belated half-prosperity. This flood will press our region even farther back into its stubborn 19th century. Major industry must rebuild or move at last to Mexico. If Mom and Pop stores and farms were always provisional here, they’re now literally sunk. But local department stores, as soon as the insurance boys say those magic words, “total loss,” give away their clothes! Folks with washing machines do their part and pass 86

clothes right along to the thousands in sudden need (and in last night’s pajamas, now smelling like the entire history of North Carolina hog farming). We stand around a lot. Without access to television and radio, we are now no more than what we owned, and simply what we say we are. A leading citizen is reported missing. Rumors insist that the ice truck parked behind Nash General Hospital—the one guarded by the National Guard?—hides 150 corpses piled under service station ice. Really. Without electricity, we can’t even benefit from being, our first time ever, the lead item on Dan Rather’s list of earthly woes. Help! Our sky is full of buzzards and of Army helicopters. Need and media here, so unbecoming. We feel awful. But, TV-less, we can’t know how we look. This late in our century, we’re inured to real squeamishness. And yet, so safe, we can’t help wonder how we’d do during something really terrible. Wearing department store hand-me-downs, us locals must look rough; but many have behaved in ways quite worthy of our 60 sunken church steeples. The Bible Belt doesn’t expect a landscape quite so Plagued. Was it our growing that tobacco, Lord? Don’t we, God-fearing to start with, get a little extra credit? We now deserve some. There’s little left but self-respect. Still, that part’s dry, safe.     We have found: when those people jeopardized are our friends and neighbors, whatever class or color, when we see them stranded screaming in treetops, and if we happily own a boat that hasn’t left our garage for eight months, and if there is gas sloshing in its outboard, we still know—not why this happened—but what to sort of do. Heroic response has somehow simply risen to the storm’s high-water mark. When a student representative on 87

the board of the University of North Carolina passed his baseball cap around the table, after a plea for flood victims, that cap came back full of folding money and a check for $100,000. So much voluntary food arrives, mounds of cans make Stonehenges of our mall lots. Even the bank that holds my mortgage sends this unbidden: “If [Floyd] has caused you a severe financial hardship . . . our officers are available to discuss new possible payment options.” We Southerners invented the phrase “the kindness of strangers” (one of our boys did, anyway.) But nobody ever talks about—the strangeness of kindness. I mean the curious intuition that lets one person imagine what might, right this second, help others the very most. Such odd in-kindness offers what little is left here of quantum joy. True story: Since pets could not be taken into rescue boats, they were left on roofs. Soon as the winds stopped, one man circulated around our schoolhouse shelters; he jotted the (first) names and addresses of such stranded animals. Aided by his motorboat, a fishing net and a whole heap of kibbles, he set about retrieving pets. Imagine a fiberglass craft Evinruded along, loaded with collies, mutts, caged canaries and three indolent Persian cats decidedly unpleased to be this wet this publicly, sneezing in broad daylight, generously not looking at each other. Animals forgot their usual warring; all in one boat, they aimed a single direction, forward, toward whatever land, holy land. (Each would soon significantly lift the morale of owners who’d otherwise have lost everything.) Princeville is the oldest incorporated black township in the United States; and its dam finally broke. The older homeowners, proud people, had ignored all early evacuation orders. They hid. Most elderly people fight anything that feels too institutional, and they’re naturally suspicious of group activities involving bullhorns. These folks believed the 88

water must go down. They’d prayed over it. Once the neighborhood was considered cleared, many holdouts were left to climb onto their kitchen tabletops. As bilge rose several feet an hour, they took final suicidal refuge in their windowless attics. Folks soon found themselves trapped up there by 22 feet of sewage water. True story: One young man somehow guessed the oldfashioned ways of such stay-at-homes. He climbed into a rowboat, paddled out among Princeville’s rooftops. He bellowed unofficially, not “Your attention please, all citizens must . . . “ He just screamed, “Where are you?” And whenever he heard muted hollering, he tied his boat to that roof’s edge and yelled for occupants to back way off; he chain-sawed straight through shingles. He grappled aged residents—head-first— free of their own suffocating homes. Then they all arked off to the next house and the next. . . . In our millennial paranoia, we suspect that the Book of Revelation’s last days are now quaking up among us, faultfinding. If you’re scared the world is ending in fire, reconsider. May we, the waders of North Carolina, (all these snakes!) half-reassure you? It’ll probably be water. But, even in this catastrophe’s toxic wake, we’re inching toward the high ground of a glum communal hope. Some 19th-century willingness to act is yet there, if called upon. People are still imagining each other so they can rescue each other. A strange, radical thing, kindness. May we continually pray for a citizenry that, epic as the horrors visited on it, still finds itself able to row right off, to guess a quiet neighbor’s whereabouts, to save that neighbor. Heaven keep us afloat and worthy of saving each other. And, as a nation, kindly keep us worth saving. Amen. (And, incidentally, Lord, when was your last vacation?)

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Scott Huler Hospitality A single fact renders pointless all debate about whether to live north or south of the Mason-Dixon Line. You can talk about college basketball or NASCAR or barbecue or grits until the metaphorical cows come home—you’ll alienate as many people as you convince, I’m sure of it. Those are all topics that prompt debate, that profit from debate. But when I moved to North Carolina from Philadelphia, within a week I realized I had come home. My awakening involved soda pop. In a cozy booth with coworkers, I decided to give myself the treat of a second Diet Pepsi as I lingered over lunch with these newfound friends. The waitress refilled my glass and did an amazing thing—she did not pick up the bill and scrawl in another drink, the way Philadelphia waitresses did to my lunch checks for a decade. I thought I’d found a special restaurant I’d return to for years. That happened to be true, but by the end of the first week of those welcome-to-town lunches, I realized something: That’s just how it works here in the South. You get as many sodas—or iced teas—as you want with lunch. You can get involved in a good conversation, decide the heck with work, and sit there until 3 p.m. And the drinks just keep coming. To me, that tastes a lot like heaven. Of course, I soon realized: That’s not heaven; it’s just the perfect expression of Southern hospitality. The endless soda pop refill is “Go on, set a spell” made flesh. The free 90

refill says, “You had enough, Sug? You sure? Lemme just get you a little more. Stick around. Don’t hurry off. Be comfortable. Stay.” But hospitality has another side, of course, and soon after I moved to the South—20 years ago, mind you—I experienced that, too. I went to dinner at a nationally known Durham restaurant one evening and emerged four hours later, glassy eyed, with the Northern members of my party delighted: “Now that,” they said, “was Southern hospitality.”  “No,” I said. “That was a hostage drama.” That wasn’t, Welcome. That was, Stick around whether you like it or not; you are going to sit there and claw your way through our food performance and our three different dessert services, and we’ ll tell you when you’re full. That wasn’t hospitality—that was showing off. It was manipulation served on a bed of grits. “Oh, no, folks, you ain’t done yet,” that restaurant said. “Stay.”     Stay: that ultimate expression of hospitality, somewhere between request and command, not only the urge to a beloved guest, but also the rebuke to a misbehaving child or dog. In the lunch booth, with the free soda pop and the ceiling fans and the chummy waitress, Southern hospitality is all it’s chalked up to be: It’s 12-molar, 190-proof distilled essence of welcome, and aren’t you sweet? But at the restaurant where you can’t leave until they bring you a bill, and they won’t bring it until they’re good and done with you, it’s about control, not welcome. It’s a little bit more like Grandma’s insistence on red velvet cake and seven-layer cake and chocolate cake after Sunday dinner—but everybody has to make one and bring it, and don’t even think about getting up from the table until you’ve tried all three, and, meanwhile, greens turn to glop on the stove and dressing dries out in the oven and Grandma accidentally lays the potatoes down on the settee, 91

a case of nerves brought on by the strain of all these guests that she demanded come over. I have endured this kind of hospitality in the family of my beloved wife, a native of this state, and I have seen the toll it takes on host and guest alike. “A tyrannical Southern insistence on hospitality” is how David Denby described it in a recent New Yorker review. “Graciousness,” he concluded, “is both armor and a weapon.” Denby is far from the first to note that Southern hospitality has its dark side. Roy Blount Jr. discussed it in his famous essay “The Lowdown on Southern Hospitality.” “The truth is, irritation is involved in Southern hospitality,” Blount writes. “Nothing … is sweeter than mounting irritation prolongedly held close to the bosom.” Good point, but I have to ask: That applies to all hospitality, does it not? I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and although I welcome guests and love to share bed, board, and company, I’m usually tired of the visitors almost from the moment they take off their coats. In any case, I’m internally rehearsing my many sacrifices on their behalf and looking forward to when they leave. I think that irritation attends all hospitality, and it highlights the complexity of the human condition rather than anything particularly Southern. Not so the free soda pop—that is definitely a Southern thing. Seriously—I return to this time after time because it has real meaning to me. I have encouraged people to move to North Carolina for the free soda pop alone. I have grown so familiar with the free refills at some of my favorite haunts that I have been welcomed to go behind the bar and get it myself, like a houseguest finally, after a prolonged stay, no longer waited on but given free rein to the fridge and cupboards. Now that is hospitality. I came to the South as a journalist, so from the start, I was showing up on people’s porches and doorsteps, imposing on their hospitality, and let me say straightforwardly: 92

That hospitality never failed. I would ask shocking questions about their organ transplants and their murdered children, their strange customs and their perplexing works of art. They would share their stories with me, and we would laugh together, cry together, eat together. I used to drive home from one tidy farm or another, heading back to Raleigh, sun dipping low, and remind myself: Every person I met that day— every person who cooked me hot dogs or brought me cookies from the pot luck or, yes, endlessly refilled my glass—every one of those people probably voted for … for someone for whom I would never vote. But there I went, and they opened their homes and their lives to me, and sent me on my way with not just a good story but, chances are, a plate covered with foil for my wife. Remember this, I would say to myself. This is where you live. This is how people do here.     So, OK, there’s something to this hospitality business. But from where? And since when? If you go to the books—I always go to the books—you quickly learn that like many things perceived as stereotypically Southern, hospitality has a flavor more rural than simply Southern. That is, the roots of this famous hospitality probably stem from the fact that the South, unlike the citified North, was a community of mostly farms, large and small. In A History of the South, Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland say “the cult of Southern hospitality” expressed “a means of relieving the loneliness of those living far from each other.” A new friend once pressed hospitality on me on Malta, the island at the belly button of the Mediterranean. When I suggested I could not possibly be as welcome a guest as he made me seem, he explained: “We live on an island. We wait for people like you.” Loneliness powerfully motivates hospitality. On a more basic level, when it 93

took half a day to get to the neighbors, you’d better get more than a ladle of water and a nod from the porch when you rode up. On the other hand, Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled throughout the South before the Civil War and wrote of his experiences, expected to pay 75 cents or more each night for the hospitality he received. Hospitality had become a myth even before then. Jacob Abbott’s 1835 New England, and Her Institutions describes a traveler riding “through Virginia or Carolina” who is all but kidnapped for no other reason than for the householder he visits to shower him with hospitality. Abbott claims that such hospitality explains why the taverns of the South were so poor: “so they must continue, as long as Southerners are as free, and generous, and open-hearted as they now are.” Apocryphal stories abounded of plantation owners who had slaves waylay strangers into their clutches, the better to demonstrate hospitality. The slaves, meanwhile, presumably knew what it felt like to be required to stay rather longer than they might have wished. The competitive hospitality macho of, say, the Twelve Oaks barbecue in Gone with the Wind is long gone, and with it the perceived need to try to dress up the overzealous hospitality of slavery. The “cult of hospitality,” however, remains. As late as 1972, Simkins and Roland explained that in the Old South “the forests, the fields, and the streams gave abundantly of their produce,” and even a small Southern farm encouraged hospitality by providing its owner with “nearly all the vegetables known to the American housekeeper of the twentieth century.” In some ways that seems to predict the modern Southern gardener creeping to the neighbor’s door in dark of night to “hospitably” abandon a bushel of excess zucchini. More important, of course, it seems highly optimistic, as does their claim that frugality was unnecessary because “everything was plentiful and inexpensive.” On the other 94

hand, it seems reasonable that “vegetables and eggs were perishable”—every Carolina child less than a couple of generations from the fields knows that pound cake was just a way to find a way to store a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. Still, with hungry family and farmhands—to say nothing of slaves—it seems unlikely that farmers were inveigling unwary passersby to their overburdened groaning boards just to avoid throwing away good food.     Whatever its origins and however extreme its exaggerations, only a fool would claim that hospitality has vanished from the modern South. If you think I was thrilled when I first discovered the Miracle of the Endless Soda Pop, I only wish you could have seen me at my first NASCAR race, wandering the infield at Charlotte Motor Speedway from grill to grill, from cooler to cooler, getting fuller and more hospitable with every step. One almost had to duck to avoid the constantly proffered beer, the beckoning burger or barbecue. And if the cries at bikini-clad women in the infield strained propriety, nobody who has walked the infield trails can deny that in the face of such rudeness many a young woman has been moved nonetheless to show her . . . hospitality. An even greater modern expression of Southern hospitality comes at the end of a pickup tailgate in the parking lot around, say, Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh any time after 10 a.m. on a home Saturday in the fall (although the stadium could just as easily be Dowdy-Ficklen in Greenville, or Kidd Brewer in Boone; this tradition spreads over the state like red clay runoff from a construction site). In these pregame parking rituals, that antebellum competitive hospitality has returned: Graciousness, Denby said, is both armor and weapon. The clang of battle rings, with SUVs rocking cookware that would make the chef at that restaurant that once held 95

me hostage weep with envy. And high-end bourbon whiskey? You don’t even have to bring your own cup. These people want you to have a good time—and to admit how much better their Bloody Mary or barbecue sauce is than the one across the lane. Yes, graciousness is armor and weapon. But it’s also, simply, gracious. Southern hospitality may have started because Southerners were a rural people, and it may have codified into a fierce code and a laughable myth—how many steps from Scarlett to Clampett? It may cover our greatest sins and enable our most manipulative behaviors. But it also lets us, as a group, agree on something. Down here, in the South, we’re nice to each other. We’re nice to whoever shows up. We share; we’ve got enough. Stick around and enjoy a little more. Don’t hurry off. Sure, you’re a Yankee, but here you are, and here we are, and have a little more soda pop, and tell me something I don’t know yet. Be with us—be one of us. Be comfortable. We’re glad you’re here. Stay.

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Randall Kenan North Carolina “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”                                             —Winston Churchill The rural North Carolina world in which I grew up has largely gone. Farms were small and plentiful, and country boys like me learned so much about life from livestock—especially, in North Carolina, from hogs. My cousin Norman lived directly across the dirt road from my mother and me. Along with his other farm concerns—tobacco, corn, soybeans, chickens—he raised scores of hogs, killing a number in December for their meat, and selling the prized ones a bit later for cash money. An old man when I was born, he had the air of an Old Testament figure, and seemed to know everything there was to know about coaxing plants from the ground and the feed and care of animals. His grandsons, Harry and Larry, were daily fixtures on his farm, and my best buddies in the whole wide world. Then in high school, they were a few years older than me, and they were my educators about all those things grownups were never going to explain to me. Grown-up things. The birds and the bees sorts of things. Subterranean, hidden things were our major topics, after basketball and comic books. So much of the good stuff about adult human society seemed off-limits to me, which made me even hungrier to 97

know about them. The world was an endlessly fascinating, alluring, deadly, promising place, and they had the vocabulary to describe it all, and the opinions to make it make more sense. They had a knack about making the salacious seem routine, yet still somehow magical. As far as I was concerned they knew everything. Their grandfather kept his hogs in a two-story barn: It held corn in a great room and had an open cavity where the tractor slept. Above that was the tall, wide room with large double doors in front—the belfry, where the dried tobacco was stored. To the south were stalls for the hogs. Their pens extended from their wooden chambers out into the fenced-in cornfields where they rooted and rutted and went about their hog business. One early spring afternoon after school we awaited the arrival of a particular hog star the way a crowd of fans awaits the arrival of the UNC basketball team after winning an away game. There was much talk of what would occur between boar and sow—between boar and many sows in fact, one by one. About how that boar was a right lucky fellow: a true stud. I had a vague notion of what was about to happen: a boar hog was to impregnate each sow so that Cousin Norman could have more hogs to raise and butcher or sell. This part made sense. The fuzzy part, in my eight-year-old mind, was the act itself. Thanks to Harry and Larry’s impeccable tutelage, as well as the R-rated films they took me to, I had learned about the congress between a man and a woman. But the mechanics of hog sex boggled my mind. I kept trying to figure out how it was done, and I was too proud to ask the right questions: What went where? Does the boar ask permission? This was an event I had to witness to complete my education as a North Carolina farm boy. For my cousins—well, this was basically country-boy porn. The headliner boar hog arrived in a massive wagon 98

towed by an over-sized truck. The hog itself did not disappoint: When the slats were removed, he lumbered out like a creature from a nightmare. It was huge in every direction, dark brown and much hairier than the workaday porkers I slopped in the twilight after supper. I’ve never seen a hog that big. It stood taller than me, almost as tall as a grown man. The wideness of him, the heft of him, the length of him . . . he was a real-life monster. His head was the stuff of horror movies: Its giant size was matched with mean eyes and woolly mammoth tusks. (Who knew that domestic hogs grew tusks?) I’d never seen such a thing. His cavernous mouth dripped white, frothing ropes of drool. When he snorted I could see the air, like steam but thicker, heavier: The hog looked like pure evil. And, yes, his testicles were outrageous— mighty: pendulous, bulging, spherical things, clearly potent. But he did disappoint with his seeming indifference to his first intended. A few attempts were made—now I saw how they did it: The impossibly large beast clambered on top of the female hog, herself no sylph, his hooves insistently drawing his great weight across her back, and then his red business attempted to invade her red business. The entire activity was clumsy yet riveting to behold. Suddenly the word “hump” had an entirely new meaning. Piglets were to be the outcome, by and by, by some mysterious process that I still accorded to magic. How else could you explain it? We leered. Me, Harry, Larry, Cousin Norman, who had the most interest in seeing that the deed was done, for what seemed several hours, until boredom overtook us, and we retreated to watch something far less titillating: Charlie’s Angels. But all that night my curiosity pricked at me like fire ants. Are they doing it? What does it look like? The next morning, while everyone else chewed their bacon, I slipped outside. I couldn’t stand it anymore, I had hog sex on the brain: I had to see. I walked across the road, under 99

the great oak, to Cousin Norman’s big barn, past the tractor and corn crib, to the rear stall where the great boar hog entertained his hog lady—wow! He was atop her. Penetration had not only been achieved, but was occurring right before my prepubescent eyes. His sighs and grunts sounded like the air being slowly released from a great engine. And the motions he was making were, frankly, obscene. Like a shot I ran back across the road, into the house, into the dining room—the eight-year-old herald of pig fornication. “They’re doing it!” I ran back to the barn followed by two horny teenagers whose interest in the matter held different curiosities than my own. We witnessed. Larry made some nasty, Rudy Ray Moore-like observations. Harry told me something then that I did not believe, but have come to learn is true: Male hogs have a corkscrew-shaped penis, and their sex act goes on longer than most mammal’s. And for me, something momentous had occurred. My mind had been expanded in some mysterious way. I was seeing through a glass a little less darkly. We sauntered back across the road to finish breakfast, our eyes and ears satiated by having witnessed something primordial, something that felt even forbidden to have beheld. My mother stood on the porch. Arms akimbo. A look upon her face: I imagined Jack’s mother looked the same when he told her he had sold their only cow for some dadgummed magic beans. “Don’t you ever—ever—do something like that again!” she said. I had never, nor have I since, seen her so close to apoplectic rage. Her fury seemed to loom above her like a towering phoenix afire, her tone like a pissed-off biblical prophet. “You just don’t do things like that! You don’t talk about such things! Have you lost your mind?” Her disappointment, her disapproval, bewildered me, and I felt dirty 100

and ashamed. “That’s not information you broadcast to people. Polite people don’t speak of such things. What kind of person do you want to be?” She retreated into the house to get ready for school. Harry and Larry slapped me on the back and laughed. “Don’t worry about it,” Larry said to me, “it’s natural.” The business of hogs.” The eminent historian Charles Reagan Wilson has joked that the South began when Hernando DeSoto brought hogs with him on his treks through Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana— the land that would become the heart of the Confederacy a few centuries later. The ease of raising and feeding hogs, and their adaptability, led to their wholesale adoption. Native Americans took to the domesticated meat swiftly. Pork products of all types came to form a solid core at the center of Southern culture: hams and bacon and sausages and loins, not to mention chitlins and pig feet and neckbones, as well as lard and headcheese, which takes a true connoisseur to appreciate. In North Carolina, passion for pork is a birth-right. Smokehouses were ubiquitous, dotting the rural landscape along with the tobacco barns and cotton fields. Most of the pork consumed by North Carolinians was raised and butchered locally by individual farmers, like my Cousin Norman, long after Carl Sandburg declared Chicago “Hog Butcher to the World,” long after the invention of refrigerated trucks and train cars. The identity of most North Carolinians was bound up in the homegrown hog. But in the course of a few decades the entire pork industry has changed more than it has in centuries. And Duplin County has become the epicenter of this new and improved hog husbandry in one of America’s most swine-happy states thanks largely to Wendell H. Murphy, from Rose Hill, about nineteen miles from where I grew up. Forbes magazine once 101

called Murphy “the Ray Kroc of pigsties.” Murphy pioneered ways to dramatically increase the numbers and weights and quality of his pigs, thus—like Kroc—changing our eating habits and our landscape. In 1964, a few years after graduating from North Carolina State University in agriculture, Murphy and his father started a feed manufacturing operation in a town near Raleigh. In 1979 they began what is called sow and farrowing operations, borrowing a practice used by poultry producers: contract other farmers to raise the animals. Murphy would provide them with fences, food, and piglets, and the farmers would receive $1 per hog at fifteen weeks, when Murphy would take the developed pigs. This benefited farmers who were too short on funds to make investments on their own, and allowed Murphy Farms to grow at a meteoric rate. Eager to increase yield, Murphy Farms discovered that younger hogs easily catch diseases from older hogs. So their pigs were separated by age, over three periods of their brief lives (15 days, 50 days, 21 weeks), reducing the chances of passing on disease, until they reached 250 pounds—the desired weight for slaughter. This methodology increased numbers dramatically. Murphy Farms and its contractors also began to raise hogs in confined areas. Computers monitored practically everything in the pig barns, from temperature to ventilation to when a sow is ready to be mated, and if the mating was successful. The Murphy main feed mill, the largest in the USA, delivered over twenty-one thousand tons of feed each week. That improvement added to disease control and, when coupled with new feed formulations engineered through Murphy-subsidized nutritionists and technicians, helped his hog populations explode. The Murphy operation also discovered a way to goose up the number of piglet births. The average number of piglets a sow bears is less than fifteen. Murphy Farms’ specially-cared-for sows (they have separate 102

operations for breeding and birthing) average more than twenty-two piglets. There are now more hogs than humans in North Carolina, and Murphy Farms has helped make Smithfield Foods, the multinational to which it was sold in 1999, the biggest producer of pork products in the world. All great changes tend to have great side effects, and the effects of this new super-duper hog production are altering the North Carolina land. Almost everything about North Carolina seems gentle. Even though the tallest peaks on the East Coast rise in the North Carolina Blue Ridge (Mount Mitchell: 6,684 feet), those mountains seem to comfort, to invite, to soothe, when compared to the Rockies’ craggy God-like insistence upon their own majesty, or the Brooks and Alaska Ranges’ operatic claim of equality with the sky and Denali divinity. Perhaps this gentility is why George Vanderbilt chose the North Carolina mountains to build the largest private residence in the country—so the mountains wouldn’t compete with his ego. Biltmore House: It’s not big, it’s large. Rattlesnakes can kill you, mountain lions can maim you, bears can scare you out of your wits, but not much threatens the average North Carolinian other than other North Carolinians—and that is usually behind the wheel of an SUV these days, or the point of a gun. Piedmont, coastal plain, mountains, all are crisscrossed by rivers. Cape Fear, Neuse, Pamlico, Haw, Eno, Pee Dee, Yadkin, Catawba. Not grand rivers, nothing like the Mississippi or the Colorado. Gentle rivers, very like the state. But those rivers in the East are dying. In 1996, the state’s largest newspaper, the Charlotte News and Observer, won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles, collectively entitled “Boss Hog,” on the burgeoning neo-pork industry, its methods, and the effects upon the state’s ecology. The largest 103

problem was the millions of gallons of hog waste. The vast lagoons where the waste is stored—some as large as ten acres— were found to be leaking into the ground water, contaminating it with nitrates among other chemicals. The lagoons also were known to spill their contents, in good weather and bad, finding their way to creeks and rivers. The run-offs were found to increase algae blooms in the rivers, along with high levels of ammonia, which resulted in disastrous fish kills. In one case state officials reckoned that between 3,500 to 5,000 fish were killed after a ruptured dike released over twentyfive million gallons of swine sewage into the New River in Onslow County. I will leave the problems of odor to your imagination, but do imagine living near a multi-acre open hog sewer. The reporters at the News and Observer also pointed toward a troubling relationship between the state legislature, the governor, and Wendell H. Murphy, who served in the state house from 1983 until 1988. He also served as a North Carolina state senator from 1989 to 1992. The articles pointed to political contributions made by the Murphy family and their concerns, to a seeming laxity among the North Carolina General Assembly when it came to enforcing regulations governing hog farming, to favorable legislation made toward them, and to general foot-dragging about the ecological problems such practices were causing, problems that in some cases appeared to be irreversible. A decade later the situation has not improved. Today North Carolina’s hog population is well over ten million (the state’s human population is under nine million). Small hog farms decreased from around twenty-four thousand in the mid-1980s to under six thousand by the year 2000. According to the USDA small farms are known to produce less harmful waste, because what happens to pig poop is relatively organic in a small farm, but goes largely untreated 104

when the waste is piled up in such vast quantities. Nitrates, copper, antibiotics, and other chemicals harmful to humans accumulate in these lagoons at alarming rates. Due to the fish kills and algae blooms and other compounded diseases directly related to corporate hog farming, North Carolina’s commercial fish populations have dropped by 60 percent in the last decade. Yet enforcement of hog waste management and violations remain stagnant. According to one study, in 1997, 88 percent of all factory hog farms had at least one permit or waste management plan violation. The study suggests those statistics were conservative. Once upon a time I lived in Memphis, Tennessee. A lovely river town built on high bluffs over the great Mississippi. The food there is good. But, alas, those good people suffer from a serious delusion. For some reason they believe barbecue (and for a Southerner barbecue is a noun not a verb) comes from a pork shoulder and is smothered in some sweet, tomato-based muck. Though we agree on the delectability of short ribs, we part company on practically everything else. My four years in Memphis was akin to living among beautiful barbarians when it came to pork. North Carolinians are fiercely attached to their barbecue. Whether its name comes from the Taino word for sacred fire pit (barbicoa) or from a French joke about how the early sailors cooked the entire beast from beard to tail (“barbe à queue”)—discounted by many historians—a tradition of cooking the whole pig over an open fire has endured. (The term “buccaneer” comes from the act of slowly curing pork over a smoldering fire—“boucan” in French—hence “boucaniers.”) North Carolina passions run high when getting down to the nitty and the gritty of how BBQ should be done. I am as partisan as they come and do not apologize to any man, woman, or child. The best barbecue in the world 105

comes from North Carolina. And not just anywhere in North Carolina: from the eastern part of the state. I make no apologies, therefore, in stating with great emphatic zeal and extreme prejudice that a hog should be cooked over a pit, over choice wood, for at least half a day, preferably twice that long. Whole. The tender meat then should be disarticulated from the bones, skin and all, which, in this case, will be a cakewalk as the flesh has been rendered into a state of tender, moist, near-gelatinous compliance, the smell of which should cause mild hallucinations. Next the cooked meat should be chopped—not pulled, plucked, sliced, or otherwise mishandled—chopped. Then it should be mixed with a vinegar-based solution of such clarity and spiciness as to augment but not detract from the suzerainty of slowly roasted hog flesh: The beast gave up its life for your delectation. That should be honored. A meal, then: preferably served on the simplest dinnerware available—some choose paper plates, some just paper— to be accompanied by white bread, a mound of slaw or potato salad, corn bread (hush puppies actually, but that’s another tale), and copious quantities of sweetened ice tea. Lemons optional. Oh yes, and with plenty of Texas Pete Hot Sauce available. The hot sauce of champions. My brethren and sisteren in the Piedmont and the Mountains will vehemently disagree with this scenario, I assure you. But they are heathens on such matters and should be attended as one would attend a young child: They know not what they do. Whatever happens in this humble state, as tobacco slowly becomes a memory with banking and bio-tech taking its place at the center of things, hogs will remain nearest and dearest to our hearts. For better or for worse, pigs are us.

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Jill McCorkle Summer My earliest childhood memories of summer are anchored at one end by my grandmother’s garden—the adjoining lot she single handedly manned, producing enough bounty to keep everyone filled with field peas and tomatoes and corn all through the year—and the other by my family’s annual pilgrimage for a week at the beach. As is often the case, a large part of the trip was the getting ready and anticipation of all to come.  My mother always had baked a big ham and my grandmother sent us off with pound cake and vegetables. There were always new coloring books and comics (later novels and needlework projects that may or may not get done) spread there on the backseat where my sister and I sat for what seemed the endless drive that would get us there. I have now at times, spent as long commuting to work, but then the journey seemed long and the week was an endless stretch of sun and sand, fishing and collecting shells. There was the quest to be the first to see the ocean; we rolled down the windows and could smell it long before we crossed the bridge and could see dunes and sea oats and a sliver of green. The years all run together in my mind. Sunburns and minigolf and sparklers lit and twirled most nights. There was always one night spent at the Myrtle Beach pavilion: riding The Swamp Fox or wanting to ride The Swamp Fox but chickening out and watching from the sidelines, the bells and calls of those throwing darts or baseballs to win the large 107

stuffed bears dangling from booths; there was homemade ice-cream from a place called Painters. But the bulk of the time was just spent on the beach, long lazy days. I was an adult before I saw any beach other than those of the Carolinas and I think the first word in my mind was really?  Had I really spent a lifetime taking for granted what was just an hour and a half down the road? The wide white sandy beaches, often sparsely populated, the large dunes and sea oats, water just the right temperature. From a kid’s point of view, it was a week of heaven even though in those earliest years, most houses didn’t have air conditioning and so windows were left wide open, everything glazed in a fine coat of sand and salt. We had to take our own drinking water and so by the end of the week, that final jug was often reserved for brushing teeth. There usually wasn’t a washer and dryer and so by Friday, my mother was starting to gather up everything and talking about how good it was going to feel to get home to clean cool sheets and no sand. And sure enough, as much as I hated to leave, I was always amazed to get home and see how green our yard looked, how different the air smelled, how good it did feel to stretch out on clean sandless sheets. I would find my grandmother just where we had left her, picking and cooking and canning and freezing the vegetables that would keep summer close all through the year. In choosing memories to anchor summer, I would put my grandmother in her side yard in a chair I still own, a big colander on her lap as she shelled endless amounts of butterbeans and field peas, the lull of the adult conversation and cars passing on the street in front of her house, as soothing as the rhythmic sounds of the ocean I was already missing. When I think of summer, I immediately do go back to childhood and the enormous sense of freedom that came with that last day of school. And before my mind is able to fully fill in the blanks of all other aspects of life—difficulties 108

and hardships of a particular time—I can conjure the adults around me—alive and engaged with daily life in a way that is all too easy to overlook. My dad would often sit on the beach in a sand chair, his fishing pole anchored in a holder so all he had to do was sip a beer, puff on his pipe and watch the line for action, and he would say: “It just doesn’t get any better than this.” I would have to agree.

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Michael McFee Pickett Road  

1.

  I’m lucky to have been born and raised in and near Asheville, a place I return to often in my writing. I’m very lucky to have worked in Chapel Hill for over a quarter-century, at such an excellent university with such smart, talented and delightful students. But I may be luckiest of all to have lived in Durham for the past 36 years, in the same little house, on a road named for my wife’s family. My writing desk faces that quiet thoroughfare, twenty or so yards away; one of its paperweights is a heavy palm-sized blob of yellow center-stripe paint left behind out front, decades ago, by a DOT crew. I sit and work in the bright windowed room that was our son’s nursery. When we moved to this place, in May 1979, I had no earthly idea we’d still be living here in August 2015, but I’m delighted we are, and I hope we always will be. Pickett Road is a pleasant state route, starting in Duke Forest at the eastern edge of Orange County, then gently rising and curving and rolling through former farm land for nearly four miles, until it tees into Chapel Hill Street, well inside the city limits. It looks like many rural-to-urban twolane Piedmont North Carolina blacktops. I love it not just because I’ve made such a happy life beside this modest road, but because it embodies many of the changes to the city of 110

Durham, my chosen and much-loved home, through the years. In many ways, Pickett Road is Durham, what it was and what it has become.   2.   September 25, 1995, is a fine Monday for a drive, the midmorning clear and mild. I’m piloting my father-in-law— seventy-three-year-old Hubert Washington Pickett, Jr., who’s lived in this part of Durham County all his life—from one end of Pickett Road to the other. I hold a cassette mini-recorder in my right hand and drive with my left: though I’m no oral historian, I hope I can coax Mr. Pickett (as I have always addressed him) to tell me stories about what this area used to be like. In recent years, it feels like a big change has begun hereabouts, and I’d like to save some of the historical and geographical details before they vanish. But for half an hour or so, his conversation is all acreage and direction and ownership: “This over here was owned by Ella Pickett Watson, one of the children of Mark Pickett [for whom the road is named], and her children still own a piece of land further up here and on the left.” It’s useful information, something I could map or chart clearly; but it’s not giving me a very vivid picture of day-to-day life on this road, earlier in the twentieth century. I’m not too surprised, given that Mr. Pickett is not a sentimental or nostalgic man, and that he was a civil engineer before retiring from the City of Durham as Director of General Services. Still, I’d hoped that his account might include a little more color and texture and period particulars. And then it happens, about two-thirds of the way along this 3.8-mile road, as we approach the most unmissable unmistakable local landmark for many miles around, the 17-story University Tower skyscraper, built in 1986 between 111

leisurely Pickett Road and parallel hectic four-lane Chapel Hill Boulevard. (This homely misplaced post-modern glass high-rise, Durham’s tallest building, looming solo above the trees and one-story buildings, was immediately reviled as The Crystal Pickle or The Green Weenie or The Dallas Phallus— it was erected by a Texas developer, whose son played soccer at Duke.) Mr. Pickett and I are still moving slowly, surveying the land on either side of the road, stopping occasionally so he can elaborate. He points to the right, where University Tower rises, and says, “That used to be farmed and I remember raising sweet potatoes. It was a big sweet potato field.” “Right where the Tower is?” I ask, surprised. “Right. We’d go down to Sand Creek to get the water to water the plants as we set them out. Put a couple of barrels on the wagon, go down to the creek, fill the barrels, come back up here and water the plants. And I mean, it grew good sweet potatoes.” And then he moves on, to other facts. But now his story feels a bit more personal. Looking at the anonymous modern skyscraper, and thinking about that long-gone sweet potato field, I can begin to imagine the transformation of Pickett Road over the past three-quarters century: from a dirt passage between farms, owned and worked by sons and daughters and kin, whose vegetables or tobacco were eaten or hauled to market, to a busy road which, because of death and partition and development, is becoming more commercial and institutional, part of the affluent Research Triangle future and not the hardscrabble agricultural past. Mr. Pickett provides a few more evocative details during our drive—“Water used to flood over Pickett Road here. It would get up almost to the floorboard of the buggies”; “There used to be a good pear tree back there behind the house”; “I would go from my paper route on Pickett Road to Jim Pickett’s and work in tobacco all day, for a dollar a 112

day”—but mostly he recounts names and dates and locations, which is how he remembers the past. Which is fine. Any place is composed of historical data and strata, and I’m grateful to have this level of the map, his precise engineer’s take on his corner of the world, recorded.   3.   But it’s not quite enough, for me. So I drive Pickett Road solo a few months later, on Tuesday, December 12, 1995, taking inventory of what’s actually there while keeping in mind Mr. Pickett’s background version of the landscape, that fertile layer of extended family. At its western origin, where it tees into Erwin Road, Pickett is just a country gravel road for a half-mile or so, passing through hardwood forest, up a steepish hill, and past an old farmhouse on the left. Trash has been dumped at the edge of the woods, including an upside-down sleeper couch near the Orange/Durham County sign. It’s quiet, dusty, and woodsy here. Except for the contemporary litter, this part of Pickett Road probably looks much like it did when my father-in-law was young, back when its entire length was gravel, graded by the state now and then: not until the late 1940s, when Governor Kerr Scott fulfilled a campaign promise by paving farm-to-market roads across North Carolina, did most of it become a hard-surface road. Once the asphalt starts, so do the houses, mostly small brick ranches and clapboard homes on generous lots. There are several ponds on either side (I’ve seen anglers trying their luck a few times), and I cross the first of two bridged creeks passing under Pickett Road: the first is named Mud, and the second Sandy, which Mr. Pickett called “Sand,” as the older maps do. Things are still pretty quiet: I could be driving in the country at 35 miles per hour, through former 113

tobacco fields or truck farms, almost anywhere in central North Carolina. After a mile and a half, Garrett Road tees into Pickett from the right: if I turned onto it, I’d pass Cresset Christian Academy (pre-K through high school) and soon reach US 15501 business, the “boulevard” between Durham and Chapel Hill, where I could shop at T.J. Maxx, eat a Bojangles cajun filet chicken biscuit, and buy a car, if the commercial mood struck me. But I stay straight, and pass a two-story farmhouse on the left before coming to the Hill Center for students with learning disabilities (in yet another family farmhouse) and Durham Academy’s upper-school campus, located here for nearly a quarter-century. DA’s buildings are modern, handsome, and the first institutional presence on Pickett heading east. But hardly the last. The road rises from Sandy Creek past a former Baptist church building on the left, which has become a Duke Primary Care facility; past the Woodstream Glen apartments and Pickett Square office park, with a police substation; past the Structure House weight reduction center and campus; and past the Durham Regent retirement residences. (Durham has attracted retirees for years, and dieters even longer, since Dr. Kempner started his Rice Diet Program in the 1930s; I remember watching them labor past our house in zipped-tight track suits, huffing, sweating, trying to walk off some weight, and possibly detouring for a secret treat at a nearby shop.) At the top of the hill, a bridge crosses US 15-501 bypass, whose four lanes route high-speed traffic more efficiently to Duke University and points north: its 60 miles-per-hour whooshing can be heard for quite a distance, here in leafless December. The second half of Pickett Road east is a similar mix of the old (abandoned farmhouses and fields) and the new— the Herald-Sun newspaper office building (moved here from downtown), University Tower, the enormous gated Forest 114

at Duke retirement campus (nowhere near Duke U.), the Caring House (for the Duke cancer center’s outpatients and caregivers), and St. Paul’s Lutheran Church (built on land sold to them by Mr. Pickett’s father and uncle). Duke Forest crops up again, at Pickett’s intersection with NC 751/ Academy Drive. And smallish homes, including ours, persist on either side, to the so-called Cow Store at the road’s eastern terminus, one of several drive-through “dairy farm stores” built in Durham by Pine State Creameries decades ago, each little mart featuring a full-size fiberglass bovine on top. I’ve heard what Pickett Road was, from a member of the namesake clan. I’ve seen what it is, from forest and farmstead to state-of-the-art educational, medical, and retirement facilities, a not-unfamiliar developmental transition in this part of the newest New South. And I wonder: how will my home road change, as it enters the 21st century? What will it become?   4.   I drive Pickett Road by myself one last time, on Wednesday, July 15, 2015, taking notes on the notes I took twenty years ago. I had a contract then to write a 3000-word essay for DoubleTake magazine—“I want to read this road,” I said: “I want to tell its story”—but I never got around to it, or did anything later with that 1995 material. I think it’s time to reconsider it, in the light of local changes during the past two decades. Pickett still looks like a country road at its western end, but there’s a fresh footpath into the woods toward New Hope Creek, and a sign that says: “FUTURE HOLLOW ROCK ACCESS AREA, NEW HOPE PRESERVE.” Which is to say: a public park may be coming to this part of the forest, on either side of Pickett, “a community low-impact recreational area, with facilities and amenities that blend in with 115

the natural setting”—parking areas, trails for pedestrians and bikes, interpretive signage and kiosks. In one proposal, Pickett Road will be closed, for safety and aesthetic reasons, even though it is a state-maintained and -classified “minor thoroughfare,” and a numbered North Carolina route has never been shut down before. I deeply love a good park, and the Eno River State Park on the far side of town is one of Durham’s glories; but even so, this possibility—Pickett Road as dead end—is unsettling. The paved road starts a bit sooner now, and has the tall word SCHOOL painted on it, because the Trinity School of Durham and Chapel Hill (whose mission is “to educate students in transitional kindergarten to grade twelve within the framework of Christian faith and conviction”) has built a big neo-colonial campus to the right of Pickett—classroom buildings, parking lots, playgrounds, playing fields, picnic tables, sidewalks, and fancy brick entrance gates. In 2015, Pickett Road has four substantial schools in its less-thanfour miles, with the recent construction of the low-slung Montessori Children’s House of Durham, just across the road from the ever-expanding Forest at Duke retirement empire. Most of the ponds and fields are gone, and all but one of the family farmhouses, hidden by trees on a small wedge of land. There’s much more traffic, impatient with my pace. Besides the older Colony Hill and Duke Forest neighborhoods, there are several new housing subdivisions, Hopewell and Cameron Woods, with huge expensive houses on tiny lots, as well as three large apartment complexes, including Pickett Crossing (with copper accent roofs on its townhomes) and, behind gates, The Parc at University Tower. With all these rental units and private homes, as well as the retirement communities, how many more people live on Pickett Road in 2015 than in 1995, or in 1979, when we moved here, or in the early 1930s, when Hube Pickett the 116

boy was hauling water up to the sweet potato field? Many many many thousands, natives of the North or elsewhere, with no particular ties here. And how many people drive to their jobs, and park, and work alongside this road every day? How much are they paid? How much money do they make their employers? The Hill Center tore down the farmhouse it started in, and constructed a massive brick building on the corner of Ridge and Pickett, part of which is on a lot sold to them by my father-in-law. Across the road is Emerald Pond Retirement Residence Community, the third large domain of retirees along the road, its cottages and three-story buildings curved around a body of not-really-emerald water. Sandy Creek has become, according to a sizable sign, the “Sandy Creek Trail of the New Hope Greenway System,” part of the Durham Parks and Recreation Department. Its flat asphalt path parallels the shallow stream and heads back to Sandy Creek Park, which was a waste treatment plant for Duke and then the city before being converted to its present use. The bottom half of the yellow sign provides Informacion in Spanish. Durham Primary Care is still there, though signage emphasizes that it’s A Duke Medicine Facility, part of “a worldclass academic and health care system that strives to transform medicine and health locally and globally.” Duke is an inevitable presence—in this medical practice, in the Caring House for its cancer patients, in the as-yet undeveloped stands of Duke Forest—here and wherever you go in Durham. Just before the bypass bridge, which replaced the older narrower one in 1996, I turn left and pull into the upper parking lot of Colony Road Professional Center, to see if the stone of Page Pickett—my wife’s great great uncle, who died in October of 1863—is still there. It is, a 12” x 6” x 2” granite slab in surprisingly good shape, at the front of a 117

tiny pine-straw island, closely surrounded on three sides by asphalt and parking spaces. The Durham Cemetery Census says there are three marked graves here, “endangered by open exposure”: I only see the undated C.P.P. stone. How many other kin are buried along Pickett Road, with or without markers, in such family cemeteries? Just after the bridge, there’s a stoplight, one of three on this ever-busier road: when we moved here, there was a single stop-sign intersection on Pickett, and no traffic signal anywhere. The biggish Herald-Sun building to the left is empty, For Sale. Our hometown newspaper has suffered a too-familiar journalistic fate, shrinking in staff and dailyissue size and relevance till it’s almost an embarrassment, and can be run out of an office suite near Northgate Mall. At the eastern end of Pickett, what was once John Sherron’s Market, a local vegetable stand, is now La Vaquita Fresh Produce, with several Spanish-language publications by the door, and signs like ACEPTAMOS VIC Y FOOD STAMPS or ENVIOS DE DINERO. And the Cow Store has become La Vaquita Tacqueria, offering tacos, tortas, huaraches, platillos y cocktelles for take-away, though there are four picnic tables available. Across Chapel Hill Street from La Vaquita is Four Square Restaurant, an upscale eatery opened in 1998 and housed in the 1908 Bartlett-Mangum mansion, a National Register site once the seat of an 80-acre farm. Durham has a reputation for fine dining, with restaurants like Four Square and Nana’s and the late truly great Magnolia Grill; it has also recently develop a thriving food truck scene and a number of tasty tacquerias, like La Vaquita. I like that Pickett Road starts in the rural 19th century South, and passes through various versions of 20th century America, and concludes in the 21st century world at these two diverse places. My city has always been a cultural melting pot.   118

5.

  This road-focused approach doesn’t tell the whole Durham story, of course, especially the tale of the city’s longawaited downtown renaissance in recent years, its American Tobacco campus and Farmer’s Market and Central Park, its booming food and beer and art and drama and music scene. (How many times can the New York Times discover us?) It doesn’t mention the prominent deep-rooted AfricanAmerican presence in Durham, such a crucial part of its present and past. It doesn’t include anything about the Civil War, whose final surrender was at Bennett Place not far from Pickett Road, or the Bull City’s gritty legacy of mills and factories. It doesn’t allow for a look at the Durham Bulls, particularly their post-Bull Durham move from the agrarian old DAP to the upscale DBAP and near-major-league baseball. It doesn’t let me praise Durham as the most raffish and funky corner of the Triangle, much more so than dull governmental Raleigh or rich collegiate Chapel Hill: as with James Joyce and his “dear dirty Dublin,” I’ve always thought of this city as my “dear dirty Durham,” and loved it that way long before bumper stickers and t-shirts urged us to “KEEP IT DIRTY, DURHAM.” But I hope this survey of Pickett Road through the decades manages to capture something of Durham past, present, and future. As with Mr. Pickett, it’s personal for me, after so many years. I’ve been rooted here for a long time, by contemporary standards: this is my place, and that is my road. When I look at it, I don’t just see a way to get from here to there, as drivers would: I see my adult life along its length. I see my young son, walking with me down the middle of the road after a tremendous snow, not a car to be heard or another person to be seen: that felt like heaven, his hand in mine. I see my wife beside me on the sidewalk, as we take one of 119

our dogs down the sidewalk to Cornwallis Road Park, chatting and laughing. I see my late father-in-law in the passenger seat, reaching far back into his memory to share names and places with me: that was the most time I ever spent with him on my own, and it was lovely. I see the little field where I went with my friend Greg, who’d brought his telescope and plenty of cold beer so we could drink and look up in perfect silence at the stars, in darkness as yet unpolluted by light. I see that steepish hill near the gravel end of the road, rising up before me as I fishtailed toward it, a thick wake of dust pouring out behind me, until I crested it blind and left the roadbed briefly and landed hard on the other side. And I see the poems that have rolled down Pickett Road to me, where I waited at the windows of this sunny corner room, where I’ve tried to put the best words in the best possible order, and where I may, like my wife’s grandfather, draw the last breath of my life someday, grateful beyond language to have stayed here for so long.

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Robert Morgan Introduction to Boone Forget the coonskin cap; he never wore one. Daniel Boone thought coonskin caps uncouth, heavy, and uncomfortable. He always wore a beaver felt hat to protect him from sun and rain. The coonskin-topped Boone is the image from Hollywood and television. In fact, much that the public thinks it knows about Boone is fiction. He was neither the discoverer of Kentucky nor the first settler in the Bluegrass region. He did not discover the Cumberland Gap, known to the Indians as Ouasiota, nor was he the first white man to dig ginseng in the North American wilderness. And though he held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the militia more than once, he was for the most part a reluctant soldier and Indian fighter. As one of his first biographers said, “He never delighted in shedding human blood, even that of his enemies in war, and avoided it whenever he could.” The real story of Daniel Boone is more complicated than the fiction, stranger, and far more interesting. It was Emerson who said, “All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.” Certainly Boone was one of those stout and earnest individuals. Even in his own time Boone had a number of detractors, debunkers, and critics. He was at different times accused of treason, fraud, and hypocrisy and was once courtmartialed, only to be exonerated and given a promotion by the board of presiding officers. He was blamed for dishonest 121

and incompetent land surveying, and sued again and again for debt. Yet surviving records show he was a competent surveyor, though sometimes careless with clerical and legal work. By the end of his life he had paid off all that his accusers said he owed. He was also blamed for siding with Indians, accused of being a “white Indian,” yet he fortified and defended Boonesborough against an attack led by his adopted father, the Shawnee chief Blackfish. Boone was also accused of being a Tory, a British sympathizer, during the American Revolution, yet he fought the British-led Indian attacks on Kentucky forts again and again. “For me, the most striking and surprising result of a closer look at Boone is the way his sterling moral character shines steadily through all the vicissitudes of his remarkable life,” the scholar Nelson L. Dawson wrote in 1998. Known as a scout and hunter, Boone became a patriarch, serving in legislatures and militias and on boards of trustees. A humble person who described himself as “a common man,” Boone was famous in both America and Europe. At one time he may have owned upward of thirty thousand acres of land in Kentucky; he ran a tavern, a store, and a warehouse, and he traded furs, hides, ginseng, horses, even slaves, and land. He lost it all. A recognized leader all his life, he moved often as a gypsy. With little formal education and uncertain spelling, he read a number of books and had a flair for language, even eloquence. Like most great figures in American history, Boone has been both lucky and unlucky in his biographers. The schoolmaster  and sometime surveyor and land speculator John Filson (ca. 1747–88) made Boone famous when Boone turned fifty in 1784. Filson’s Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke included a long chapter called “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon,” written in the first person as though it was autobiography. The little book, destined to become a 122

classic, was translated into French and German and pirated and paraphrased by a number of other authors. Reprinted by Gilbert Imlay in A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, published in London in 1793, the narrative made Boone famous in Britain and helped inspire such budding Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey. Only recently have we come to appreciate how much American Romanticism may have influenced British Romanticism.  But the impact of Boone’s story and legend on William Bartram, Wordsworth, Byron, and other writers of the Romantic era is only the beginning of the story of the Boone legend and biography. Few other Americans have had their lives told  so often and in such a wide range of styles, combining truth, insight, myth, hearsay, and outright fabrication. Because he became a figure of American folklore even while alive, Boone has been thought by many to be virtually a fictional character, subject of tall tales like Mike Fink the Keelboatman, or even Paul Bunyan. A professor with a PhD in English and tenure at a major university once said to me, “I never realized Daniel Boone was an actual person; I thought he was a creation of folklore.” I told her that even though she was wrong she was  also half right, because the Boone most people know about is largely the creation of folklore. It is hard to rescue figures like Daniel Boone and Johnny Appleseed from the distortions of television and Walt Disney. The folklore and legends are part of the story too but should be identified and separated from the facts. When viewed in the larger context of the colonial age, the Boone legend is in many ways typical of the way stories and figures of quest and conquest were romanticized, as Europeans conquered lands and peoples. Yet many aspects of Boone’s character are atypical, virtually unique. While Boone more than once told visitors that Filson’s account of his life was “true, every word truth,” he was not 123

so  pleased with Daniel Bryan’s would-be epic poem The Mountain Muse published in 1813, which portrayed him as a ridiculously heroic figure, a kind of American Moses. “Such productions ought to be left until the person was put in the ground,” he is reported to have said. Of the rumor that he still went hunting at the age of eighty, he observed to Rev. John Mason Peck, “I would not believe that tale if I told it myself. I have not watched the deer’s lick for ten years. My eyesight is too far gone to hunt.” During Boone’s later years many accounts of his exploits  and adventures were published in newspapers in America and  Britain. Most took their details and rhetoric from Filson, and some contained an element of truth but also included rumors and fancy, often portraying the old woodsman as a fierce Indian killer, wrestling bears and panthers in hand-to-hand combat. More than once he read accounts of his own death in newspapers. The stories that formed around Boone’s name while he was  alive were only the seeds of what would come later. The Reverend Timothy Flint, who had visited Boone in 1816, published the first book-length biography, Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, in 1833. The book was very popular and for its time a  best seller. But while it contained some valuable information it  was also filled with colorful yarns, such as the improbable story of young Daniel almost shooting his future bride, Rebecca, while hunting on the Yadkin. When questioned about some of the exaggerations in his narrative, Flint is supposed to have answered he was not writing a book “for use but to sell.” It was Flint who gave to the world the most famous Boone quote about wanting “more elbow room.” Another itinerant minister who wrote about the western frontier, Rev. John Mason Peck, visited Boone in December of 1818, two years before the woodsman’s death. Expecting 124

to find a rough backwoodsman, Peck was surprised by Boone’s calm good manners, his modesty and cheerfulness. Peck was struck by the affection in which Boone was held by his children and grandchildren and neighbors. When Peck published his Life of Boone in 1847, he stressed the image of Boone as peacemaker, diplomat, reluctant Indian fighter, and instrument of Manifest Destiny. Boone’s descendants much preferred Peck’s account to Flint’s. It was Peck who told the story of Boone’s journey back to Kentucky to pay his debts after he sold the land Congress had awarded him in Missouri. According to Peck, Boone  then returned to Missouri with only fifty cents in his pocket. “No one will say, when I am gone, ‘Boone was a dishonest man,’” he quipped. Boone was most fortunate of all in attracting the scholar and writer Lyman Copeland Draper, who never finished or published his Life of Daniel Boone. A native of upstate New York, Draper (1815–91) worked as a clerk, editor, and journalist but devoted his life to collecting information and documents for  the study of the western frontier and the Revolutionary War era. He borrowed, bought, begged, copied—some said stole—thousands of documents and interviewed hundreds of survivors and descendants. He corresponded with hundreds more and seemingly came in contact with everyone who ever lived in the frontier Ohio Valley or was descended from the pioneers there. Draper interviewed Daniel Boone’s youngest son, Nathan,  and Nathan’s wife, Olive Van Bibber Boone, at length in 1851, at their home in Greene County, Missouri. As secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison, Draper collected and hoarded documents and transcripts, rather than completing his projected biographies of Boone and George Rogers Clark and other pioneers. At his death he left an ocean of interviews and papers scholars have 125

been struggling through and sifting ever since. Draper was small in stature but a giant of American historical scholarship. “I am a small bit of a fellow,” he wrote to one correspondent. “Yet small as I am, and as ‘good for nothing’ as I often think myself, I yet feel that I have something to do.” One of the assistants Draper trained at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin was Reuben Gold Thwaites (1853–1913). When Draper retired, Thwaites succeeded him as director of  the society and became one of the most important editors and writers on frontier history of his time. In 1902 Thwaites published his own biography of Boone, called simply Daniel Boone. It was the first published life of Boone to make use of the hoard of documents Draper had collected. In 1920 a professor of mathematics at the University of  North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Archibald Henderson, published  The Conquest of the Old Southwest to much acclaim. Henderson was a descendant of Judge Richard Henderson,  founder of the Transylvania Company and Boone’s employer,  and he stressed the significance of the Transylvania venture in  the founding of Kentucky and Tennessee. Henderson planned  to follow that history with a life of Daniel Boone, but a peculiar  chemistry began to work on the professor as he proceeded with his project. He decided that his ancestor Richard Henderson was the real hero of the story of Kentucky and that  Daniel Boone was little more than a hired hand. He became a  debunker of Boone, and at Fourth of July celebrations and memorial ceremonies he made a spectacle of himself attempting to build up the reputation of his ancestor and belittle the scout and hunter who had hacked Boone’s Trace and given his name to Boonesborough. In the end Archibald Henderson was  unable to write the biography, and his research material was left to the University of North Carolina as the Henderson Papers, a valuable resource in the North Carolina Collection. 126

Probably the most successful biography of Boone ever published was John Bakeless’s 1939 volume, Master of the Wilderness: Daniel Boone. Bakeless, a historian and professor of journalism at New York University, drew heavily on modern research of the frontier period and made extensive use of the  Draper Collection at Madison. The book went through several  editions and is still in print. Many Boone enthusiasts still consider it the best Boone biography ever written. However, Bakeless had little interest in Indians and Indian culture, except to portray them usually as savages, or in the slaves who were present in so much of the activity of the frontier. Implicit in much of Bakeless’s narrative is the assumption of the superiority of white culture destined to subdue and transform the wilderness into the ideal of American civilization. In 1992 John Mack Faragher published Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer and brought to his study of Boone a formidable knowledge and insight about Indian culture and the impact of Indian culture on white culture. Faragher took Boone studies up to a new level with his sensitivity and erudition concerning Native American history. He also included in his portrait of Boone the rumor that Boone was not the father of one of his children, begotten while Boone was away hunting or in the militia in January 1762. Faragher makes the story exciting and plausible, a significant element in drawing the characters of Boone and his wife, Rebecca. Yet most Boone scholars have considered the story as little more than a composite of contradictory rumors, passed on by elderly informants with vague memories, improbable if not impossible. A major service to Boone scholarship has been performed in  recent years by the scholar Ted Franklin Belue. In 1998 he published a transcribed and annotated edition of Draper’s  unfinished Life of Daniel Boone. Only those who 127

have tried to read Draper’s notes and documents on microfilm can appreciate the value and difficulty of Belue’s achievement. With this  volume Belue put at our fingertips the heart of Draper’s work on Boone and, through his notes and chronology, provided an invaluable resource for further study. In 1999 the Kentucky architect and Boone scholar Neal O. Hammon published My Father, Daniel Boone, a compilation of the interviews Draper conducted with Boone’s youngest son, Nathan, and Nathan’s wife, Olive, in 1851. Gathering the material from several locations in the Draper Collection, Hammon arranged the pieces into a coherent narrative, making easily accessible the words of our most reliable informant about Daniel Boone. Michael A. Lofaro published Daniel Boone: An American Life,  a short biography for popular audiences, in 2003. Lofaro’s book presents the Boone narrative in thrilling, condensed form, yet also provides one of the most useful bibliographic and scholarly resources we have to date. Among the younger historians, I have learned the most from Stephen Aron, author of How the West Was Lost and American  Confluence. Aron is especially adept at showing the complexity and flux of events on the American frontier and placing those events in the context of continental and even world history. It requires a certain bravado to enter a field as crowded as Boone biography. Of major figures in early American history, only Washington and Franklin and Jefferson have had their stories told more often and in greater detail. What recklessness or delusion could tempt a writer to take on a subject so often studied, attacked, dramatized? My fascination with Boone goes back to boyhood. My father, who was a wonderful storyteller, had a lifelong interest in Daniel Boone and loved to quote the hunter and explorer. Since Daniel’s mother was Sarah Morgan, my father thought we were related by blood. Though I have not found 128

more than a distant family connection, I always felt a kinship with the hunter and trapper and scout. The classic author I struggled with and learned most from as a young writer was Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s observation, knowledge, wisdom, integrity, artistry, and stubbornness remain unsurpassed in American literature and culture. And more than any other single author Thoreau expresses much that was likely the experience and aspiration and genius of Boone. Thoreau put into sentences the poetry and thought Boone had lived. Many boys, both old and young, feel a connection with  Boone, but growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s, hunting and trapping, fishing and wandering the mountain trails, I may have felt the kinship more literally than most. Living on a small farm, without a truck or  tractor or car, plowing our fields with a horse, keeping milk and  butter in the springhouse, listening to stories about the old days by the fireplace or on the porch in summer, I always felt an intimate contact with the past, with the Indians, with the frontier. Working in the creek bottoms day after day, I turned  up arrowheads and pieces of pottery. The Indians seemed to haunt the ground beneath my feet, and the laurel thickets, and the mutter of creek and waterfall. Once after a flood scoured away several feet of alluvial soil in the field by the river, I found  the charred remains of a campfire perhaps a thousand years old. It was writing the novel Brave Enemies, set in the American  Revolution and culminating at the Battle of Cowpens in South  Carolina in 1781, that led me back to Boone. As I did my research on the Revolutionary period in the Carolinas, I grew more and more preoccupied with life on the frontier, where white settlers mingled and fought with and learned from the Native populations. I came to see what an extraordinary story  that was, the collision of different 129

worlds right in my own  backyard, as British confronted French, Indians fought Indians, white Regulators confronted the colonial government, and finally Americans fought the Crown. And through it all the thread of slavery stretched like a poison filament from earliest colonial  times to the nineteenth century and Civil War. I found Boone a much more complex person than I had noticed before. Why was he remembered, romanticized, revered, and written about when many other figures on the Kentucky frontier were pretty much forgotten? I wanted to find out what  it was about Daniel Boone that made him lodge in the memory of all who knew him and made so many want to tell his story.  How was a scout and hunter turned into such an icon of American culture? In the course of my research I discovered that Boone had been a Freemason and that his membership in that society connected him in unexpected ways with leading figures of the American Revolution, such as Benjamin Franklin and Washington, and with the new spirit of brotherhood, liberty, and reason spreading through Europe and North America. No other Boone scholar seemed to have noticed Boone’s association with Masonry. I also found that Boone was a great dreamer, and a significant part of his dream was a vision of hunting and living at peace with the Indians, in the wilderness over the mountains. It was a vision and a longing that set him apart from many other hunters of the time. Boone many times referred to himself as a woodsman. It  was the description he seemed to prefer, the identity he chose to claim. When he wrote to Gov. Isaac Shelby in 1796 asking for the contract to rebuild the Wilderness Road, Boone said, “I am no Statesman I am a Woodsman and think My Self . . . Capable of Marking and Cutting that Rode.” When young I studied engineering and wanted to build roads also. Many of the narratives I have written concern path blazing 130

and road building. That was another aspect of Boone I felt a deep connection with: Boone the artisan and artificer, Boone the road maker. Some have said the name Boone comes from the Norman  Bohun, from the nobleman Henry de Bohun (1176–1220). The Boones had lived in Devonshire for centuries, working as weavers and blacksmiths, before they immigrated to Pennsylvania. Boone’s mother was Sarah Morgan, descended from Welsh Quakers from Merionethshire in the mountains of North Wales. In one of the happiest accidents of punning etymologies  known, Americans acquired the word boondocks from Tagalog in the Philippines, and from that wonderful word, meaning “mountains,” derived the term boonies, referring to the hinterlands, the backcountry. Many wrongly assume boonies comes to us from the name Boone, explorer of hinterlands and back-country. And we also have the Old French word boon as in “boon companion” from the Latin bonus, meaning “good.” And from Old Norse we have boon, meaning a “blessing or benefit,” coming from a word that meant “prayer.” Boon is also an Old English word for the rough fiber taken out of flax as it is prepared for spinning into thread. The Boones had been weavers for generations in Devonshire. Boone was fortunate in his name, if not in his business enterprises. “They may say what they please of Daniel Boone, he acted with wisdom in that matter,” Simon Kenton remarked about rumors of Boone’s dishonesty and treachery once when he surrendered some salt boilers in 1778. Kenton meant that the truth of the man’s deeds and character would rise above all the clouds of rumor spread by detractors. And for more than two centuries it has.

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Michael Parker I Could See for Miles The theory that the earth is in fact round—first suggested by some ancient Greek, and proven, they claim, by Magellan—seemed as ridiculous to me at age eight as it must have been to those who first heard it. I grew up in the coastal plain, in a town 157 feet above sea level. If, down in Clinton, you were looking for elevation, you’d best search for an anthill. My family lived a couple of miles outside of town, in a ranch house across the street from two farms. The view from our living room plate glass window was of a field of tobacco in summer, just waiting to be cropped and suckered, and, in winter, a ravaged stretch of stalk. The farm just to the left, also visible from the window, was planted with corn. Corn grew much higher than tobacco and after harvest left an even more ungainly stubble. Though there were woods at the far end of each field—and behind those woods, swampland— the line of pines might as well have been in Duplin County, so far away across the denuded earth did they appear. There was, for me, an epicenter of flatness: a field just to the left of our house. We always called it the Beaunit Field. Beaunit was the name of the textile firm that operated the factory that owned the field, though at some point in the 80’s, Beaunit, along with most of the other textile concerns in our area, moved its production to points foreign and given to cheaper wages and lesser taxes. Between the plant and 132

our house, separated by a thin row of pines and a sandy two track, was the field. I am no good at estimating acreage, and like most people with subpar math skills, I measure distance in terms of gridirons. But here football fields did not apply. In memory the field is the size of Great Smokey Mountains National Park—infinite, endless, nearly un-crossable. A three day journey by stagecoach, two weeks by foot. I was six when I first encountered it, eighteen when I last stood in it, and of all the clichés of childhood, the adage that everything from your past is smaller when revisited in adulthood is certainly true of the Beaunit field. But memory is not about truth. In truth, the field was not that remarkable. That it was free of produce, tobacco or corn made it invisible to the mostly farmers and sharecroppers who traveled back and forth on Seven Bridges Road. Often it went un-mown for months, and the grass could reach head-high before some maintenance man from the plant bushhogged it back to stubble. Its single characteristic, other than its mythic-in-my-memory expansiveness, was its flatness. Seeing as how man, since the origin of the species, has adapted both work and play to the landscape they inhabit, flatness was required of the things we did there. These things evolved as we grew older and our interests shifted. When we first encountered the field, it was the perfect place, when the grass was high, to play hide-and-go seek. Later, if mown, it was suitable for throwing a football or improvising bases out of purloined place mats and getting in a game of softball. When my friends down at the intersection all got mini-bikes, it became a race track. Out of all the boys in the neighborhood gang, I was the only one who did not own a mini-bike, though honestly I never wanted one. Even though later I would learn to drive in that field, careering around the edges in the last-leg Galaxy 500 my father bought for the last three of us still in high school to share (my most prominent 133

memory of this car was going on a first date with a girl who said she was a little chilly and who seemed even chillier after I pulled a wrench from under the seat and cranked up the heat, the knobs on everything that could be turned on or off long since lost) I did not like to see my field corrupted by anything with a motor. To me it was sacred, to be explored only on foot. During the jogging craze that swept the country in the mid-70’s, my mother, who has always been athletic, took to exercising in the field in the late afternoons when she got home from her job at the community college. I can’t imagine what the neighbors thought at the sight of her power-walking the perimeter, her arms flying as high as her shoulders with each footfall. I am sure she did not use the tracks carved by the mini-bikes as my mother has always been known to cut her own path. Once, during the Watergate scandal, when my mother heard on the nightly news that, despite his blatant violations, Nixon’s approval rate had not significantly dropped, she got up from the supper table to call the White House to try and lower his approval rate. I am sure it never bothered her to be thought of as odd for turning a field into a place to get in her after-work laps. Due to its size and its flatness, the field was perfect for her power walking, drive-by gawkers be damned. The most exciting thing that ever happened in the Beaunit field was the convening of the Tuscarora Council of the boy scouts on their annual jamboree. Though the council was comprised of troops from the southeastern counties, it seemed to us that all the boy scouts in the state had descended upon our field. Everywhere were tents and elaborate rope bridges and totem poles and tarps strung from bamboo poles. My older sister, then in high school, must have had advance warning, as she and two of her friends joined the Explorer branch of the Scouts and got their photo in the 134

paper for breaking the gender barrier. (When, while writing this, I asked her why she joined, she said she and her friends wanted to participate rather than view the Jamboree from the sidelines. I am wise enough now not to ask her what she meant by participate.) By late Sunday afternoon the field was cleared, but for weeks the remnants of campfires—burnt patches of grass, charred logs—scarred my refuge. From the day we moved into our house until the time, twelve years later, when I left for college, the field was my place. All of us had, in childhood, our secret places where we went to be alone with our confusion and desire, to escape— or attempt to—the often intolerable oppression of adolescence. Most people I have queried on this subject preferred cover: closets, attics, basements, haylofts, storage sheds, popup campers. I’ve never considered myself claustrophobic, but I have always favored open spaces in which to hide. I spent part of my freshman year in high school in Black Mountain, high in the Blue Ridge, and one of the things I missed most was my field. And yet—true to the contradictory desires that claim us in our teens—when I was there, I did not want to be there. Already, at age sixteen, I wanted out. I wanted to travel the country, to see and experience the vastness beyond the field. I thought my life was limited by my surroundings; I thought, like many the restless teenager, that living down east, in a county where years later I would learn, from NPR, that the number of hogs exceeded the number of humans, would not define—or for heaven’s sake, refine—but only confine me. Just beyond my field, partially hidden by the factory, was the highway. Interstate 40 at that time was just a proposal on a page. Route 421 was the quickest way for travelers from the Triangle and the Triad to reach the mainland beaches. There were trucks galore, and I would lie in the field and listen to their throaty gear grinding. On holiday weekends the 135

thrum of traffic was audible, and I was keenly conscious of what lay beyond the field: bright lights, big cities, beautiful women, Baltimore—and I am just up to the B’s. But of course I wasn’t going anywhere until I graduated, so I stuck to my field, the perfect space to dream of elsewhere, of the future. When you are young you lack experience, but experience of course cannot be rushed without consequence. What is far more lacking, and more important, is perspective. Everything that happened to me, at home or at school, seemed dramatic, and the nascent fiction writer in me tended to make it melodramatic. It was only in that field— flat and invisible to everyone but me—that I felt I could see beyond the moment at hand. Growing up, the beauty of Eastern North Carolina— its unchecked wild greenness in summer, the beautiful bleakness of what passed for winter—was lost on me. It took me a decade at least to appreciate the sandy two tracks leading off into the pines, the abandoned tobacco barns, made of logs chinked with flaking concrete, surrendering to kudzu and wisteria in the middle of barren fields, the slow black rivers disrupted by the roots of giant cypress trees. But in the Beaunit field I understand, always if innately, the wideness of the vista down east. My understanding of it was so specific to that field, so associated and colored by desire, that I failed to extend it beyond the ditches that bordered it. My favorite time to be there was night. If the grass was high, I’d part it with my hands and trample a path deep in its middle and sit for hours in the so-called Indian style, sometimes sneaking a cigarette, contemplating what lay above and ahead. I listened to the chirp of crickets and to the throaty de-acceleration of the tractor-trailers, stopping for gas or a pack of Nabs at one of the corner stores down at the intersection. Where were they headed? Would I ever travel beyond the mountain cottage where we spent two weeks 136

in summer or the Topsail Island rental where we went when we could afford it? Nightly did I turn my field into a wide open Ouija board. Answers sometimes came to me, as if the grass surrounding me were moving my dreams with the tips of blades, guiding my desire not across the creased and fake terrain of a board game, but straight up into the sky, so huge and alive above my field with planet and star.

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Ron Rash The Gift of Silence When readers ask how I came to be a writer, I usually mention several influences: my parents’ teaching by example the importance of reading; a grandfather who, though illiterate, was a wonderful storyteller; and, as I grew older, an awareness that my region had produced an inordinate number of excellent writers and that I might find a place in that tradition. Nevertheless, I believe what most made me a writer was my early difficulty with language. My mother tells me that certain words were impossible for me to pronounce, especially those with j’s and g’s. Those hard consonants were like tripwires in my mouth, causing me to stumble over words such as “jungle” and “generous.” My parents hoped I would grow out of this problem, but by the time I was five, I’d made no improvement. There was no speech therapist in the county, but one did drive in from the closest city once a week. That once a week was a Saturday morning at the local high school. For an hour the therapist worked with me. I don’t remember much of what we did in those sessions, except that several times she held my hands to her face as she pronounced a word. I do remember how large and empty the classroom seemed with just the two of us in it, and how small I felt sitting in a desk made for teenagers. I improved, enough so that by summer’s end the therapist said I needed no further sessions. I still had trouble with 138

certain words (one that bedevils me even today is “gesture”), but not enough that when I entered first grade my classmates and teacher appeared to notice. Nevertheless, certain habits of silence had taken hold. It was not just self-consciousness. Even before my sessions with the speech therapist, I had convinced myself that if I listened attentively enough to others my own tongue would be able to mimic their words. So I listened more than I spoke. I became comfortable with silence, and, not surprisingly, spent a lot of time alone wandering nearby woods and creeks. I entertained myself with stories I made up, transporting myself into different places, different selves. I was in training to be a writer, though of course at that time I had yet to write more than my name. Yet my most vivid memory of that summer is not the Saturday morning sessions at the high school but one night at my grandmother’s farmhouse. After dinner, my parents, grandmother and several other older relatives gathered on the front porch. I sat on the steps as the night slowly enveloped us, listening intently as their tongues set free words I could not master. Then it appeared. A bright-green moth big as an adult’s hand fluttered over my head and onto the porch, drawn by the light filtering through the screen door. The grown-ups quit talking as it brushed against the screen, circled overhead, and disappeared back into the night. It was a luna moth, I learned later, but in my mind that night became indelibly connected to the way I viewed language—something magical that I grasped at but that was just out of reach. In first grade, I began learning that loops and lines made from lead and ink could be as communicative as sound. Now, almost five decades later, language, spoken or written, is no longer out of reach, but it remains just as magical as that bright-green moth. What writer would wish it otherwise.

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Bland Simpson The Christmas Kayaker Just before Christmas in the late 1990s, when Elizabeth City’s blue watertower had holiday lights zigzagging festively about its tanktop, a young man came to town and stashed his red kayak at the Pasquotank River wharf near the old R.C. Abbott warehouse, planning to return for it later that day. He then drove his truck down to Morehead City, a hundred ten miles away, and left it in that more southerly port, locking his wallet, money, i.d. and all in the glovebox, carrying only what he needed, then catching a northbound bus to get him back to Elizabeth City where he would begin his real adventure: kayaking alone in winter halfway down the North Carolina coast. At The Narrows in Elizabeth City the kayaker put in, and made his late afternoon way down the great, dark, now baylike river—passing in turn the points Cottage, Cobb, Brickhouse, Pool, Bluff, and Bank on the Pasquotank County side—toward Wade Point and the mouth of the Pasquotank, where it meets and joins the legendarily rough waters we have called, variously, the Carolina River, the Sea of Roanoke, the Albemarle Sound. It was late, and he had had a full day, so the kayaker looked for a downriver spot to camp, finding one on shore within sight of a small cruising boat that was anchored out. In the morning he took off, passing the anchored craft, the wind at his back, the confident north wind rising at his back as he skipped and skittered along toward God’s own 140

open waters and, then, as much as he was enjoying himself near the beginning of his ten or twelve mile crossing toward the mouth of Alligator River, he dumped. Off went the kayak, still on holiday, without him. Even in his sleek, efficient craft, the kayaker had only gone so far before this misfortune befell him—he was still within sight of the anchored cruiser, and so swam for it, against the rising wind and the waters running hard at him, and only after a long hard time did he near the craft. The pair aboard, a man and woman, were ready for him. They had been watching his southerly progress, his swamping, and his swimming back their way in distress. Certainly they should have fired up their engine and gone to his aid, and they would have, too, were they not stuck on this sandbar, as they had been for a day and a night. When the swimming kayaker, his own red craft and orange drybag long since out of sight, reached the cruiser, the boaters pulled him in, helped his hypothermic self as best they could, and called the Coast Guard. Now, the Elizabeth City Coast Guard Air Station is one of the maritime treasures of eastern America—it comprises the Hollowell family’s old Bayside Plantation on the south and west shore of the Pasquotank River, possibly the first place in America to grow an exotic bean named soja, or soy. From this open spot many rescues-at-sea are staged, launched, effected. Its lumbering C-130s, its orange-andwhite copters, its lit-up runways and flashing riverside tower beacon all bespeak safety and good sense. When the boaters called the Coast Guard, they were doing so for the second time in twenty-four hours. They had already made an appeal the previous day, but the Coast Guard, having ascertained that the boaters were safe, though stuck, couldn’t come out in high winds for a mere grounding and thus left the boaters and their craft high, though not dry—the kayaker, after all, had judged them to be anchored. 141

This time, though, they had a genuine emergency— the kayaker was suffering from exposure. The Coast Guard must come. A helicopter appeared at once—the Coast Guard Air Station was less than five miles upriver. The airmen dropped a rescue line and lifted the kayaker into the copter, and in the process the propwash felicitously blew the cruising boat off the shoal where it had sat forlornly and set it free—into churning and bombastic winter waters, mind, but still free. Upriver to the hospital flew the copter carrying the near-frozen kayaker, and, because he had nothing other than his blanket-enshrouded self, no wallet, no identification, certainly no money nor insurance card, to the emergency room where the medics were thawing him out and back into the human race, there to help him came a woman who was the hospital’s Patients’ Advocate. And if ever anyone needed patience and advocacy—why, it was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon, now, on Christmas Eve!—here was that man. She sized him up, literally—the first thing he would need once he returned to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit would be clothing, for the kayaker’s dry clothes, though safe, were somewhere not immediately accessible, way downriver. Where does one shop for clothes in Elizabeth City as the afternoon wanes on Christmas eve? Don’t ever do this, she thought, even as she did it, later saying to all and sundry, “I don’t advise it.” In the melee that was Wal-Mart on Christmas Eve, the Patients’ Advocate found for the kayaker the only thing left in his size, a lime-green jumpsuit. Beggars, we know, cannot be choosers, and must by needs thank heaven for small favors. Gratefully he donned his holiday vestments, and then she checked him out of the hospital and found him a room at the Holiday Inn and drove him there. And there she left him and drove on home to join her 142

husband and change to go out for a traditional Christmas Eve dinner with friends. Something tugged at her, though, something decidedly uncheerful—it was the sight of the adventurer as she had left him, hunkering down in his motel room, a lime-green warrior now on crusade touring the yellowpages looking for rental vehicles, u-hauls, buses, something to get him back to Morehead City, to his truck, his money, his identification on this earth. But it being Christmas Eve with an ice-storm brewing, there was nothing for rent, and no buses were running south down the Carolina coast. When she finally broke through the kayaker’s cascade of hapless, hopeless outgoing calls with a call of her own, the Patients’ Advocate found him discouraged, though comfortable, and so ventured a bit of holiday cheer by inviting him to come along to the Christmas Eve dinner and join in. Would he? He would! At the dinner, the kayaker was a hit—he had the most unusual story, and he certainly had the most unusual outfit. All of the folks at the table were boaters, experienced on these their home waters, and if there be one thing that mariners love to do and must love to do, it is to speculate upon the wonders of wind and wave. Where would his unsinkable red kayak and his orange drybag finally wind up? The Coast Guard had suggested that the kayaker might best search for his goods at one point or another at the mouth of the Pasquotank, but the talk flowed strong on this matter, and the boaters all agreed that, given the blow they were having, this gear would most likely fetch up somewhere on the south side of Albemarle Sound, somewhere near the mouth of the Alligator River, most probably on the long north shore of Durant Island. This was all very interesting to the kayaker, though 143

somewhat theoretical just then, given his isolation in Elizabeth City and his separation from his truck and wherewithal down in Morehead City. “Oh!” a sister-in-law of the host spoke up. “Is that where you need to go? Morehead’s my home, and I’m driving back down in the morning, once the ice’s melted. Would you like a ride?” Life in the sound country was starting to look up for the kayaker—new clothes, new friends, new home for a night, a portage in the offing from one rivertown to another in the car and company of a lovely woman. One might almost begin to think him lucky for having been dumped down the river, but let us not go overboard just yet. Christmas Day in Carolina, and the roads were clear! The woman from the dinner party called at the Holiday Inn for the kayaker, and off they went. Three hours later and the pilgrim was reunited with his truck, whereupon he turned around and drove back up to Elizabeth City and began his new life as a searcher and a salvor. Once he realized that he could not drive his truck to any of the potential places where the dinner guests had suggested he might find his boat, his heart sank, for he also realized that the task of locating it in this big, wide, wet territory was going to require an aircraft, and he could scarcely afford to hire one for the job. A miracle was occurring, though—his story was going around Elizabeth City, ahead of him, as it were. This fact of smalltown life gave him pause, though, as he began to fear that word might get beyond the borders of the sound country and hurt his livelihood—he was a whitewater kayaking guide up in the North Carolina mountains. Then someone got the kayaker in touch with a pilot who worked out at the Coast Guard air station. The pilot needed to keep his flying hours up, and, when they spoke, he offered to take the 144

kayaker along with him and they would fly around for a few hours and see what they saw, and the pilot would only charge him for the gas they used. This was a good deal, to which the kayaker agreed. When could they do this? he wondered. “Well, I get off today at noon,” said the pilot. “How about meeting me at the airport, beside the base, say about twelve-thirty?” Up and away they flew, right down the river and, seeing nothing there, right on over the Sound, where, on the north shore of Durant Island, exactly where on the night before Christmas, the dinner guests had predicted they would be, lay the red kayak and the orange drybag. The two men had been aloft less than twenty minutes, and when the pilot returned the excited kayaker to the ground, he said, “We were hardly up anytime at all—I’m not going to charge you for the gas after all—go on and see about getting your boat.” How would he do that, though? There were no roads to, or on, Durant’s Island. Well, he knew that he would have to get near it, for starters, so he lit out in his truck, driving east from Elizabeth City to Camden, Bellcross, Barco, Coinjock, Grandy, Jarvisburg, Powells Point, Mamie, Harbinger, Point Harbor, Kitty Hawk, Kill Devil Hills, Nags Head, Whalebone, Manteo, Manns Harbor, East Lake! Which is way out yonder where there ain’t nobody never is. Especially in the dead of winter, when all the backcountry shacks and cabins are boarded up and closed. What was the kayaker thinking as he drove up a long lane to the north of U.S. 64 toward the body of water, East Lake itself? The nearest commercial establishments, the nearest places he could even talk to someone about where and from whom to rent a boat, were back in Manns Harbor, or on across the other side of the broad, three-mile Alligator River. He didn’t know what he was driving toward, only that the 145

general direction was correct—he might or might not even get a glimpse of Durant Island from the end of this lane. And if he did, he would be looking at the south side of it, the wrong side. At the end of the sandy lane there sat, as one might have expected, a cabin. The surprise was that the owners were in. When they heard the kayaker’s tale, they said, “Why, take the skiff there, it’s all gassed up, you just go on out the cut and—” Not five minutes after he’d arrived, the kayaker was on his way again, bobbing and boating about East Lake, the well-known epicenter of white-liquor-making ninety years ago. East Lake, where a drunken moonshiner once happened upon a river baptism and got grabbed by the preacher conducting the service and sure enough got baptised, though he had no notion of what was going on, the preacher shouting at him as he pulled the moonshiner up from beneath the water, “Have you found Jesus?” Then dunking him again before he could respond, then pulling him up, “Say, have you found Jesus?” Slamming him back under rapidly yet again, yanking him up, “Tell me have you found JESUS?” To which the moonshiner asked desperately, “No, preacher, hold it, hold it—are you sure this is where he fell in?” Now over this same legendary East Lake coursed the kayaker, cutting now through the shoal thoroughfare, the Haulover, and on out to Albemarle Sound where, in short order, he found his quarry on the north side of Durant Island, the red kayak and the orange bag, which he loaded into the skiff and started back. 146

By the time he made it down the sound shore and through the cut at the Haulover and on into the canal back to the little cabin, it was late that December afternoon. He tied up the skiff, got his goods to his truck, and turned to thank the cabin owner. And then it was that the kayaker truly felt the full power of eastern Carolina generosity and fellowship and helpfulness toward the troubled traveler—the enduring spirit of the Albemarle was abroad in the land. Because the kayaker then saw the firebarrel and smelled the fruits of the sound and sea and the next words he heard were these: “Found your kayak, good . . . good . . . good—now, come on, we’re just taking the first oysters off, and we got aplenty, a whole bushel and a half—so dig in. And the cooler’s right over there - go on get yourself something to drink! Pilgrim, you have come to the right place!”

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Contributor Biographies Thomas Rain Crowe is a poet and an internationally-published author of thirty books, including the multi-award winning book of nonfiction Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods. His is founder and publisher of New Native Press and lives in rural western North Carolina. Hal Crowther, an essayist and critic who lives in Hillsborough, is author of four collections of essays, including Cathedrals of Kudzu, which won the Lillian Smith Award for commentary and the Fellowship Prize (Fellowship of Southern Writers) for nonfiction. A former magazine editor at Time and Newsweek, Crowther also won the Baltimore Sun’s H.L. Mencken Writing Award. Jan DeBlieu has written extensively about the North Carolina coast. Her third book, Wind, won the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing, the highest national award in the genre. Clyde Edgerton has written 12 books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Raney, The Bible Salesman and The Night Train. In 1997, he was awarded the North Carolina Award for Literature, the state’s highest honor in the literary arts. Georgann Eubanks is a writer and documentary film producer in Carrboro, North Carolina. She is author of the guidebook series The Literary Trails of North Carolina and her next book, due out in 2018, is on North Carolina heritage foods. 148

Marianne Gingher writes both fiction and nonfiction, including Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hits, Teen Angel and Other Stories of Wayward Love and A Girl’s Life: Horses, Boys, Weddings and Luck. She also edited the collection Long Story Short: Flash Fiction by 65 of North Carolina’s Finest Writers. Judy Goldman is a poet, fiction and nonfiction writer whose work includes Wanting to Know the End, Losing My Sister, Early Leaving and The Slow Way Back. Her book reviews have appeared in numerous national publications and literary journals. She lives with her husband in Charlotte, North Carolina. Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the award-winning author of All the Agents & Saints (UNC Press, 2017), Mexican Enough (Washington Square Press/Simon & Schuster, 2008), and Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004). Allan Gurganus’s books include White People and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Gurganus is a Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Scott Huler has written several books, including On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood and the Systems that make Our World Work. He served as the 2011 North Carolina Piedmont Laureate and lives in Raleigh with his wife and two children. Randall Kenan writes fiction, both novels and short stories, as well as nonfiction. His books include A Visitation of Spirits, Let the Dead Bury the Dead, The Fire Next Time as well as a biography of James Baldwin. He has been awarded 149

the Sherwood Anderson Award and John Dos Passos Award, among numerous other accolades. Jill McCorkle simultaneously published her first two novels The Cheerleader and July 7th. Since then she has produced four more novels and four short story collections and has received the John Dos Passos Prize, the New England Book Award and the North Carolina Award for Literature among others. Michael McFee is author of 7 full-length collections of poetry, including That Was Oasis, Shinemaster and Earthly as well as two chapbooks. He has edited two anthologies of North Carolina writers, one in poetry and one in fiction, and published a book of essays, The Napkin Manuscripts. Robert Morgan was raised on his family’s farm in the North Carolina mountains. Author of eleven books of poetry and eight books of fiction, including the bestselling Gap Creek, he now lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Cornell University. Michael Parker’s six novels and two short story collections include Hello Down There, If You Want Me to Stay and Don’t Make Me Stop Now. He is Vacc Distinguished Professor in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Ron Rash is a poet, short story writer, novelist and children’s book author. His collection Burning Bright was awarded the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and his novel Serena was made into a major motion picture. He is Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. 150

Bland Simpson is a novelist and naturalist whose work includes The Great Dismal, A Carolinian’s Swamp Memoir; The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey, A Nonfiction Novel and The Inner Islands: A Carolinian’s Sound Country Chronical. He is also a member of the Tony-award winning band The Red Clay Ramblers.

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