Southwords

SOUTHWORDS

Sticky Fingers

Confessions of a cookie dough thief

By Emilee Phillips

Around the holidays, my mother is known for baking her days away. Even with all of her kids grown and (mostly) gone she still churns out the sugary treats as if Bobby Flay were going to walk in at any moment to pass judgment on the selection.

Like most master chefs, she had specific dishware for specific things. Regular plates versus fancy plates, plastic cups versus glassware, and a collection of mixing bowls as stackable as Russian nesting dolls. There was one item, however, that came with spoonfuls of family chronicles — the granddaddy of them all — the cookie dough bowl.

When that heavy beige and blue ceramic bowl came out, we knew a spread of precisely shaped and elegantly frosted sugar cookies was on its way. But that wasn’t the best part. Oh, no. The best part was the dough.

All of us — and by us I mean her feral children — stuck our grubby fingers in that dough at least once a day, for as long as it sat in the fridge, before any of it ever landed on a cookie sheet. We weren’t afraid of salmonella, we were afraid of not seeing the bowl in time. It’s a good thing we didn’t have many guests during the holidays — it’s doubtful their constitutions would have been as hardy as ours.

My mother always wondered why her recipes never produced quite the cookie count she thought they should yield. We did our best to be discreet but eventually, my mom put two and two together and came up with three — children, that is. In the end we were betrayed by the aluminum foil that never seemed to go back as snugly as it went on and, of course, the fistful of finger divots.

Not that my brother and I were entirely innocent, but my sister, Megan, was the main culprit. And yes, that matters. The year Megan came home from college on Thanksgiving break is the year “the incident” happened. Whether or not it was on purpose has yet to be discovered.

It was late in the evening and Megan was loitering in the light of the fridge in search of a midnight snack. I can only imagine her delight when she saw the bowl. Not that I was on a cookie dough prowl myself — I have always been something of a night owl — but when I walked into the kitchen, my timing couldn’t have been better. I witnessed Megan popping a dough-laden finger into her mouth. Or so we both thought.

“Blech!” she exclaimed. Her head shook and her body shivered as she stuck out her tongue in disgust. I could see her mentally wrestling the urge to summon our mother at the top of her lungs to get to bottom of this vile pile. But of course, that would have given her up as the main cookie dough thief. Hoisted on her own petard, she couldn’t say a word.

Megan looked at me, confused. I calmly, and innocently, surveyed the scene. The cookie cutters weren’t out on the counter. Conspicuous by their absence, I knew what had happened. I reached past my sister and peeled back the foil. The bowl — not just any bowl but THE bowl — was full of potato salad.

It was as though our mother had defied the laws of nature that night. “It was even on the right shelf,” Megan whispered as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and trudged up to her room. I was just glad it wasn’t me.

The next morning at the breakfast table, Mom asked no one in particular, “So, how was the cookie dough?”

My sister lifted her gaze from her plate of pancakes with the look and sting of betrayal. To this day she swears I gave her up, but I think Mom saw the once smooth foil rumpled and decided to run with it, regardless of who the actual victim was. They exchanged a quick look full of mental gymnastics.

“That was cold,” said Megan, eyes narrowing. I was holding my breath waiting for Mom’s comeback — a lecture, or perhaps a revenge story.

Instead, the corners of her mouth turned upward as she stood to clear the breakfast plates. “Well, yeah,” she said on her way out of the room, “it was in the fridge.”

Almanac November 2024

ALMANAC NOVEMBER 2024

Almanac November 2024

By Jim Dodson

Generations of Americans who were schoolchildren during the Ozzie and Harriet years from the 1950s through 1960s have keen memories of singing an ancient hymn long associated with Thanksgiving titled “We Gather Together.” In fact, the hymn had nothing to do with the mythologized first Thanksgiving held by the Pilgrims in November 1621. Based on a Dutch folk tune, the hymn was written in 1597 to celebrate the Dutch victory over the Spanish forces at the Battle of Turnhout. Prior to that, Dutch protestants were forbidden to gather for religious observances. It first appeared in American hymnals around 1903 and rapidly gained popularity as the Thanksgiving hymn sung at church services and in public schools during the week of the November holiday. In 1992, comedian Adam Sandler performed his own mocking version of the holiday standard on Saturday Night Live that more or less coincided with “We Gather Together” being removed forever from public schools and gatherings. The hymn is still a staple in churches across America at Thanksgiving.

The holiday itself has something of a checkered and violent history. The highly mythologized account of the first Thanksgiving “harvest feast” shared by English Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people in 1621 generally ignores the fact that disease brought by the colonists to North America wiped out 90 percent of New England’s native populations. Following a major Patriot victory in the Revolutionary War, George Washington proclaimed the first nationwide Thanksgiving celebration in America, marking Nov. 26, 1789, “as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” He was then upstaged by Abraham Lincoln 74 years later, who formally established the national holiday when he issued a proclamation for a National Day of Thanksgiving in October 1863, following the Battle of Gettysburg, in which 50,000 soldiers died. In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt moved the Thanksgiving holiday one week earlier than normal to the second-to-last Thursday in November, believing that doing so would help bolster retail sales during the final years of the Great Depression. 

Regardless of these inconvenient truths — and Adam Sandler’s buffoonery — the overwhelming majority of us in a wonderfully diverse America embrace Thanksgiving as a welcome opportunity to gather with family and friends and celebrate however we see fit with food, football and a nice afternoon nap.

“Let us give thanks for this beautiful day.
Let us give thanks for this life. Let us give thanks for the water without which
life would not be possible.
Let us give thanks for Grandmother Earth,
who protects and nourishes us.”

— Traditional daily prayer of the American Lakota people

When the Year Grows Old

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old —
October — November —
How she disliked the cold!

She used to watch the swallows
Go down across the sky,
And turn from the window
With a little sharp sigh.

And often when the brown leaves
Were brittle on the ground,
And the wind in the chimney
Made a melancholy sound,

She had a look about her
That I wish I could forget —
The look of a scared thing
Sitting in a net!

Oh, beautiful at nightfall
The soft spitting snow!
And beautiful the bare boughs
Rubbing to and fro!

But the roaring of the fire,
And the warmth of fur,
And the boiling of the kettle
Were beautiful to her!

I cannot but remember
When the year grows old —
October — November —
How she disliked the cold!

Here’s to 30 Years

HERE'S TO 30 YEARS

Here's to 30 Years

Celebrating the Artists League of the Sandhills

By Jenna Biter     Photographs by John Gessner

Dozens of guests swirl about a long, rectangular room. A vase of sherbet roses and powder blue hydrangeas anchors the space on a table in the center. It’s a cool dusk outside, but inside the walls, the atmosphere is warm. It’s heated by the chatter of old and new friends, or at least friendly strangers. They flit in and out of conversations, gabbing and howling like they’re enjoying one last party at the end of the world.

They aren’t, of course. The Artists League of the Sandhills begins most months like this, with a gallery opening held the first Friday evening in that slender room in the not-for-profit organization’s headquarters. The building is situated not at the end of the world but at the end of Exchange Street, with its rear wall kissing the main train tracks that slice through historic Aberdeen.

A woman leans toward a friend while pointing at a small portrait of a lady peering through a monocle on the opposite wall. “We’re getting . . . ” she begins, but her voice trails off as she gets lost in the art. She walks across the room, magnetized. A red sticker on the artwork’s label marks it sold not long into the event.

The time of the gallery openings is always the same — 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. — but the theme varies from one show to the next. In August it was small art. In September viewers with reading glasses were grateful to see the works return to regular size. In October, the gallery showcased figures and faces, and November boasts the biggest event of the year, the annual fall exhibit and sale, which opens with a public reception Friday, Nov. 8, and hangs through Dec. 20.

The sprawling gallery show features somewhere around 150 new pieces of art, with works for sale by many of the league’s dozens of members. If you wander across the one-story building, through two large classrooms, past a framing station and a library of catalogued art books and into a maze of cubicle-like studios, you’ll find an additional 300 or so pieces for sale. With a pocketful of dollars and a can-do spirit, you could easily redecorate your entire house with an evening’s offerings.

The November opening is an art lover’s delight, but this year it’s something more — the exhibit marks a milestone anniversary, too. Originally the Workshop of the Sandhills, 2024 marks 30 years since the Artists League opened shop in the same old Aberdeen Rockfish railroad warehouse that it occupies today.

As if on command, a train roars past, releasing a protracted honk into the graying night sky. The blast is a visceral reminder of the league’s modest beginnings, when a pair of retired executives scrubbed through oil and grime to transform a century-old train depot into a gathering place for artists of all calibers and kinds.

The Sandhills knew Chuck Lunney as the audacious and distinguished World War II pilot who swooped his B-29 bomber under the Golden Gate Bridge on a dare, but he’s also remembered as an advertising professional and lifelong artist with an interest in art education and community, driven to create an organization for likeminded folks. Lunney found one such mind in retired sales manager and watercolorist Mike D’Andrea at a Campbell House Galleries reception sometime in the 1980s. After a half-decade’s search for the perfect location for their artists’ haven, the men opened the Artists League of the Sandhills on Oct. 26, 1994, in one-half of a dirty train terminal. When the town of Aberdeen offered to rent them the building for a dollar per year, the word “perfect” suddenly seemed to describe the broken building tucked all the way back on a forgotten side street.

“Their goal, I think initially, was to have 20 artists just so they could pay the bills,” says Pam Griner, the league’s office manager of 14 years. Sure, rent was dirt cheap, but they still had to keep the lights on.

The initial goal was immediately surpassed. According to a Nov. 10, 1994 article in the Moore County Citizen News-Record, 28 local artists signed up the very first day.

Thirty years later, both founders have since passed — Lunney, 93, in 2012, and D’Andrea, 89, in 2018 — but their legacy lives on in the organization they scrubbed into existence. The Artists League now occupies the entire warehouse, and membership bumps its head against 200, with tens of artists able to key into studios 24/7.

There’s always a waitlist for those 34 cheap-as-bananas workspaces.

In a typical week, members teach art classes Monday through Friday on media that run the full artistic gamut from oil to watercolor. Nationally known professional artists visit to host multiday intensives several times per year. With the fees from those classes and workshops, memberships and generous donations, as well as a small percentage of sales from the monthly art shows, the league stays up and running.

As more guests shuffle in, more red stickers claim ownership. The show led off with a large work of art, a reinterpretation of Gustav Klimt’s Lady with a Fan — a dove has been added in an upper corner. A blurb on the wall explains why. Beyond the Klimt-alike more paintings, a scratchboard engraving of a goat, and mixed media of all types ranging in size from postcard to poster, snake around the room like a boa constrictor squeezing onlookers into a tight-knit group.

Most of the league’s artists are amateurs — stay-at-home moms or refugees and retirees from their day jobs — while others have taught or made art their entire lives. It doesn’t really matter who they are, the members bond over art. Learning it, loving it, making it. They exchange Christmas cards during the holidays, often crafted in a special December class, offer bedside company when ER visits become a sad reality, and grab lunch together even when it isn’t in the Artists League’s break room.

The spirit of community bubbles over, into the corners of the gallery space and out the front doors like an uncorked bottle of champagne. Even in the dim light of evening when the last guests are walking to their cars, the atmosphere is as bright as the roses and hydrangeas still on the center table.

“The new community facility offers artists, from the beginner to the accomplished, the opportunity to share their knowledge, gather inspiration and improve their skills,” the News-Record said in 1994.

Besides the word “new,” the same sentence could be printed today.

Tea Leaf Astrologer

TEA LEAF ASTROLOGER

Scorpio

(October 23 – November 21)

Nothing like an old sweater, huh? So comfy and familiar. But so not doing you any favors. This month, self-worth is the name of the game. And here’s the thing: You’re destined to win. It’s simply a matter of ditching the security blanket — be that a threadbare sweater or an outdated (read, self-effacing) MO. Oh, and when Juno enters your sign on Nov. 3, get ready for a next-level soul connection. We’re talking oceanic depths. How do you feel about whale songs?

Tea leaf “fortunes” for the rest of you:

Sagittarius (November 22 – December 21)

Throw out the candy.

Capricorn (December 22 – January 19)

Get ready for a boon.

Aquarius (January 20 – February 18)

Turn the dial just a hair.

Pisces (February 19 – March 20)

More root vegetables.

Aries (March 21 – April 19) 

Try softening your gaze.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20)

Just ask for directions.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20)

Lay off the caffeine for a bit.

Cancer (June 21 – July 22)

Someone’s got your back.

Leo (July 23 – August 22)

Get cozy with the silence.

Virgo (August 23 – September 22)

Worrying won’t help.

Libra (September 23 – October 22)

Don’t be a doormat.

NC Surround Sound

NC SURROUND SOUND

A Giant Legacy in a Small Town

Nina Simone, Crys Armbrust and Tryon

By Tom Maxwell

At first glance, Tryon isn’t too different from most small North Carolina towns: Its people are genuinely friendly instead of merely polite; a snug line of mostly brick buildings make up its diminutive downtown; residential housing is a typical mix of stately homes on one side of town and forgotten shacks vanishing into the encroaching kudzu on the other. It’s the kind of place real estate agents describe as “nestled,” situated as it is at the southernmost edge of Polk County, where the great Blue Ridge begins to rise like a crumbling wall. But culturally, the town has distinguished itself in ways that have put a brighter shine on North Carolina’s starry crown.

In 1939, you probably wouldn’t have taken a second look at 6-year-old Eunice Waymon as she walked across the railroad tracks along Trade Street, unless you thought it unusual to see a poor Black kid heading to that part of town. Most everybody in Tryon knew Eunice as a child prodigy, on her way up the hill to Glengarnock Road to take piano lessons from Muriel Mazzanovich, better known as Miss Mazzy. In every sense, Eunice was headed for big things.

Even though many Tryon townsfolk — white and Black — recognized and contributed to Eunice’s artistic development, racism was baked into the Jim Crow South. Before a recital at Lanier Library, a teenaged Eunice saw her parents quietly ushered to the back of the room so white people could take their place in the front row. The young pianist refused to perform until her mother and father were returned to their rightful place.

If systemic racism wasn’t enough to drive ambitious young musicians of color out of the South, professional necessity was. Opportunity was located where the music industry was largely based, either New York or Los Angeles. As her journey into adulthood began, Eunice first attended Asheville’s exclusive Allen Home School, where she befriended Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. Then it was on to New York’s Juilliard School of Music, and after that, a failed audition for a scholarship to Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. This was an experience that Eunice remembered for the rest of her life with some bitterness.

Denied a career in classical music, Eunice took a nightclub gig in Atlantic City, where she was informed that she would have to be the featured vocalist as well as the piano accompanist. Soon afterward, she adopted the stage name Nina Simone to protect her family’s reputation. The artist’s new identity and career path would go on to change the world of popular music in ways that defy description: Nina Simone’s music contains elements of jazz, gospel, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues — and still the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

“Nina Simone was one of the key artists who grew up here and fled at the earliest opportunity,” David Menconi says. “But North Carolina left a mark, as it does.” Menconi has spent a lifetime writing about music — first as a critic who spent a couple of decades at Raleigh’s News & Observer; now as an editor and author, most recently of Oh, Didn’t They Ramble: Rounder Records and the Transformation of American Roots Music.

The list of North Carolina-based musicians who joined that Jim Crow-era Black diaspora is extraordinary: jazz legends John Coltrane, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk; soul singer Roberta Flack; and funk pioneers George Clinton, Maceo Parker and Betty Davis comprise only a partial list.

“Branford Marsalis told me that people like Nina Simone and Thelonious Monk, who left here at a young age, are still identifiable as Southern because of just how deep a mark church puts on everybody,” Menconi says. “That’s what all these artists have in common: They’re not playing gospel, but church is what’s in there if you dig deep enough.”

In 1996, when Crys Armbrust’s dad told him that Nina Simone was born in Tryon, he was met with disbelief. “I actually stood him down for a liar,” Armbrust said when I met him in 2019. “Because any other town in the world that could claim Nina Simone as a local daughter would have it plastered on every building — on every street — in order to build the reputation of that community.” But this was the mid-1990s, and North Carolina had yet to publicly embrace most, if not all, of its distinguished African American sons and daughters. Armbrust, a fan of Nina Simone since his teenage years, spent much of the rest of his life correcting that mistake.

Dr. Joseph Crystal Armbrust was born and raised in South Carolina but summered in Tryon for 45 consecutive years before making it his home. Precious few people can legitimately be called a polymath, but Crys Armbrust is near the top of the list. After earning two Ph.D.s in literature at the University of South Carolina, he taught English literature and in the school of business, later serving as assistant principal at USC’s prestigious Preston Residential College. Once ensconced in Tryon, Armbrust served as the town’s economic development director, commissioner and mayor pro tempore emeritus. As a musician, he performed recitals at Kings Oxford and Westminster Abbey, while serving back home as master of choristers and music director for Tryon’s Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross. An accomplished composer, Armbrust was commissioned to write several works for eminent clients like Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Vatican.

“My parents wanted a Renaissance man,” Armbrust said, “and they made one.”

None of this would have been immediately obvious to somebody like Menconi if he happened to see Armbrust puttering in the yard of Nina Simone’s birthplace — which he often did. Menconi visited Tryon in 2017, a year before Simone was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Everyone in town told him he had to talk to Crys Armbrust. “I discovered that he was the guy who knew everything about everyone, but especially her and the cabin where she grew up,” Menconi says. “He was the on-site caretaker of the place.”

The Nina Simone House, saved from obscurity or destruction by a group of artists in 2017, was declared a National Treasure by the National Trust for Historic Preservation a few years later. One of the groups the trust worked closely with when crowdsourcing funds for the house’s rehabilitation was Crys Armbrust’s Nina Simone Project.

“I knew I had the skill set to make a pretty strong impact with respect to creating the Nina Simone Project, so I began in earnest after my father’s death in 2008,” Armbrust said. He conceived a three-phase nonprofit, incorporating a statue, a scholarship and a music festival. When I met Armbrust in 2019, the Nina Simone Project had already bestowed over a dozen general scholarships to local kids.

Despite the economic crash of 2008, Armbrust and the NSP were able to raise enough money to create a statue honoring Simone. It’s situated in a little park on Trade Street, near the railroad tracks Eunice used to cross on her way to take piano lessons. The statue, of Simone seated at a floating, undulating keyboard, contains some of the musician’s ashes in its bronze heart. It was conceived and created by Zenos Frudakis, the same sculptor who did the Payne Stewart likeness behind Pinehurst No. 2’s 18th green.

According to Armbrust, Simone often returned to Tryon. “She left at about 15 and came back quite often,” he told Menconi. “Early on, any and all hours of the day — usually later at night with no fanfare so she wouldn’t have to deal with people. My friend James Payne — who lives a block up the road — would pick her up at the airport, whisk her back here, the door would open, and in she’d walk.” Simone’s last visit to Tryon was to attend her mother’s funeral in 2001.

Crys Armbrust died in August. The Nina Simone Project appears to have gone dormant with his passing, but both he and Simone are very much woven into the fabric of modern-day Tryon. Through his relentless advocacy, Armbrust contributed to a new wave of cultural recognition and reconciliation across the state. In 2006, High Point erected their own bronze statue to “distinguished citizen” John Coltrane. Now there’s a highway marker in the tiny Yancey County seat of Burnsville celebrating Lesley Riddle, an African American native son who, along with the Carter family, helped invent country music. Legendary Piedmont blues artist Elizabeth Cotten is featured in a large mural in her hometown of Carrboro. That list, happily, expands with each passing year.

Hurricane Helene wreaked unimaginable destruction across all of Western North Carolina. Tryon wasn’t spared. The day after, her people did what all tight-knit communities do: They came together. While dazed residents checked in on neighbors and loved ones, the Trade Street Diner set up a generator and offered free coffee and Wi-Fi to all including evacuees sheltering in Polk County High School. Nearby, at 54 N. Trade St., there’s a bench in Nina Simone Plaza where those who need a break can sit across from the statue of Tryon’s most famous daughter and rest before continuing the work of saving their town. Like a simple act of recognition, a moment’s respite is a small thing that can make a huge difference.

Not the Last Waltz

NOT THE LAST WALTZ

Not the Last Waltz

After a brief and soul-crushing hiatus, the Sunrise Theater in downtown Southern Pines will once again show the ultimate tryptophan antidote, The Last Waltz, on Thanksgiving night. The award-winning rock documentary of what was billed as The Band’s farewell performance was filmed on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 25, 1976, by director Martin Scorsese. Released in 1978, the film is so highly regarded it was selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the United States National Film Registry in 2019.

The members of The Band were Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson. At 87, Hudson is the only member still living. The venue was Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, where The Band debuted as a group in 1969. Starting at 5 p.m. the audience of some 5,000 was served turkey dinners. There was an orchestra for ballroom dancing, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti was among a group of poets who gave readings. The Band began performing around 9 p.m.

And what a concert it was.

When the idea of a farewell performance was hatched, mostly by Robertson, who wanted to quit the touring life, the idea was to invite Bob Dylan and Ronnie Hawkins — their original employers — to join them. The guest list exploded from there, eventually including both Dylan and Hawkins, Bobby Charles, Ronnie Wood, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, Paul Butterfield, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Dr. John, Neil Diamond, Eric Clapton and more. They were backed by a large horn section. Later, sound stage work that included Emmylou Harris and the Staple Singers was added to the film.

The documentary begins with The Band performing what was, in fact, their last song of the night, “Don’t Do It.” From there the film progresses more or less in chronological order of play — songs like “Stage Fright,” “Up on Cripple Creek,” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” — mixed in with the studio sessions and interviews with the members of The Band, conducted by Scorsese.

In one anecdote, Robertson explains that the classically trained Hudson would join the group only if every member would pay him $10 a week for music lessons so that he could tell his parents back in Canada that he was a music teacher and not just a rock and roll musician.

The Last Waltz begins on Thursday, Nov. 28, at 7 p.m., and admission is free. The leftovers will keep until morning.

Poem November 2024

POEM NOVEMBER 2024

Great Blue Heron

He looked like an old man hunkered down
in a faded blue overcoat, his collar turned up,
shoulders hunched. He didn’t seem bothered

by the shallow water his feet were covered

by, nor the chill winter air blowing around
his bare pate. But then his narrow head rose

like a periscope, higher and higher — swiveled
in the direction of a hardly perceptible splash.

Slowly, he moved toward the sound on legs
as skinny as walking sticks, to the place where
dinner was served and eaten so fast, any cook

would wonder if he tasted it. It was enough,
however, to restore his quiet contemplations.

Hunger sated, he curled his long neck into its
warm collar, and stood as still as a painting

while the sun sank and the snow moon kept

rising like a white balloon over the darkening
lake, the stark tree branches, and a lone heron
blending, bit by bit, into the blue light of dusk.

                           — Terri Kirby Erickson

Omnivorous Reader

OMNIVOROUS READER

After the Amber

A novel of disappearance and guilt

By Stephen E. Smith

A startling buzzing blasts from your phone or TV, followed by a high-pitched whine, and a detailed description of a missing child inching across the screen. It’s an active Amber Alert — a child abduction emergency. We experience these alerts too often, but we rarely learn what becomes of the missing child or how such a disappearance affects the child’s family, friends and the community in which the child lives.

Marybeth Mayhew Whalen’s 10th novel, Every Moment Since, is a fictional exploration of the emotional forces that wear on those who knew and loved 11-year-old Davy Malcor, who went missing for over two decades. The narrative opens with an early morning phone call informing Sheriff Lancaster that Davy’s favorite jacket was found in an abandoned building near the small North Carolina town of Wynotte. The burden of Davy’s disappearance is still very much in the public consciousness, fixed there by a bestselling memoir written by Davy’s older brother, Thaddeus, who had been responsible for watching over Davy on the night he vanished. On that tragic evening, Davy’s parents were attending a cocktail party, and Thaddeus ditched Davy so he could drink beer with his buddies. Davy wandered in the darkness with a mysterious new friend until headlights flickered through the neighborhood and Davy was gone. What happened that night transformed the characters’ lives and, years later, one question haunts them all: What might I have done differently?

Whalen has provided an intriguing cast of characters. Tabitha, Davy’s mother, is divorced (a byproduct of her son’s disappearance) and lives alone in the house where Davy was raised. She devotes her time to advocating for the families of missing children. Thaddeus is profiting from his family’s misfortune with a bestselling memoir. Aniss Weaver, the last person to see Davy alive, works as a public information officer for the local police. Gordon Swift, a local sculptor, is the prime suspect in Davy’s disappearance, although there has never been adequate evidence to bring charges against him. We have all the ingredients for a suspenseful mystery.

But Every Moment Since isn’t your typical whodunnit. The plot is a trifle too straightforward: a boy goes missing, his family suffers, the community agonizes, a body is eventually found, and the mystery, albeit a slight one, is solved. There are too few plot twists or complications in the early stages of the narrative, and much of the expository information in the first 180 pages of the 363-page novel focuses on the minutia of the characters’ day-to-day lives. Throughout the story, there is a nagging need to “bring on the bear.”

Whalen’s focus, the moving force in the novel, is guilt, which the characters suffer to various degrees. Tabitha rebukes herself for having left Davy in Thaddeus’ care so she could spend an evening socializing. Aniss Weaver is troubled by her specific knowledge that Thaddeus is blameless. And Thaddeus, more than any of the characters, is troubled by the financial success of his memoir about his brother’s disappearance. Gordon Swift, although innocent, suffers from doubts about his sexuality and the community’s suspicion that focuses on him as the likely culprit.

Whalen employs various third-person points of view that are not arranged chronologically (think Pulp Fiction). And the chapters range from excerpts taken from Thaddeus’ memoir to Tabitha’s daily bouts of regret to pure narrative segments that nudge the story forward. Even Davy, who has long since disappeared from the immediate action, has a third-person limited view in parts of the novel.

If this sounds like a lot to keep straight, it is, and the reader is required to focus his or her attention on what is happening to whom and when. The only question that needs answering is why the narrative is presented in this disjointed fashion, which becomes apparent in the novel’s final chapters.

The reader might reasonably conclude that the novel was written with the audiobook in mind (available as a digital download through Kindle). Chapters featuring the various personas written in the limited third person achieve degrees of separation and distinction when read by voice actors representing the various characters. For example, book chapters about Tabitha contain too few distinctive hooks that the reader can employ to establish an ongoing connection with the character, and one’s attention must remain fixed on who is doing what and when. Read aloud, the connection is immediate and continuous.

Every Moment Since is not recommended for anyone suffering from ADHD or for casual readers who will likely put the novel aside for days and expect to pick up the narrative line without rereading. The shifting points of view will not detract from the novel’s impact if the reader remains focused.

Whalen creates believable characters and has a true talent for dialogue — and she is to be congratulated for taking on a challenging and complex subject. The disappearance of a child is a horrifying possibility for any parent, and the crippling emotions suffered by a family that has experienced such a loss are almost inconceivable. Every Moment Since is a reminder that we should take careful notice of the Amber Alerts that come blaring across our TVs and phones. They aren’t works of fiction.

Preserving a Historic Graveyard

PRESERVING A HISTORIC GRAVEYARD

Preserving a Historic Graveyard

Woodlawn Cemetery is hallowed ground in West Southern Pines

By Elizabeth Norfleet Sugg     Photographs by Laura Gingerich

In a quiet acreage filled with arching, magnificent pines rest the memorials to a multitude of lives well spent. Woodlawn Cemetery, a historically African American burial ground, is on the corner of West New York Avenue and South Pine Street in West Southern Pines, surrounded by neighborhood streets carved out by families who came to this budding town to seize opportunity and put down deep roots.

A year after Southern Pines incorporated in 1887, the Seaboard Air Line Railroad began its route through the town, a desirable East Coast midpoint. With nearby Pinehurst opening its resort in 1895, the two municipalities were in the early stages of developing a tourist economy as fair-weather resorts, in the process generating a range of service jobs that lured workers to the area. Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, opened in 1918, and a continued migration to West Southern Pines came from men and women who served in the military. They met others in this close-knit community and began second careers becoming teachers, principals, nurses, opening an auto repair shop, corner stores, and ministering at a growing cluster of churches — living lives that would inspire generations to come. It’s both striking and humbling to learn that over 170 veterans from conflicts as far apart as World War I and the Persian Gulf War are buried at Woodlawn.

“Woodlawn Cemetery is a home to so many who gave to this nation, and their descendants continue to give,” says retired Col. Morris Goins, whose family has deep roots in West Southern Pines beginning  with his grandparents, Theadore Roosevelt and Marie Goins. His father, Thomas Theadore Goins, and four uncles served in the U.S. Army in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, collectively. Two of his uncles, Master Sgt. Henry Lewis Wooten Jr. (1925-1963) and Command Sgt. Maj. Fredrick Robinson (1933-2009), received the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.

Goins’ uncle Cecil Roosevelt Goins (1926-2000) served in World War II when the Army was still segregated and became one of the few African American officers in the 1st Infantry Division during the Korean War. Later, in the U.S. Marshals Service, Cecil Goins went to Selma, Alabama, following the violence of Bloody Sunday. Another historic assignment took him to Houston, where he protected Muhammad Ali during his trial for refusing to be drafted in 1967 during the Vietnam War. Another uncle, retired Maj. Allen Thurman Goins (1935-1997), was a Cobra helicopter pilot in Vietnam. On a flying mission making a “gun run” into a small village, his helicopter — call sign Panther 6 — was hit by ground fire. A bullet burrowed between Goins’ cheek and flight helmet, another between his temple and helmet. He woke up in a hospital. The injuries caused periodic seizures, ending his flying career. Decades later Morris Goins was walking in Washington, D.C., dressed in his uniform, when an older gentleman stopped him, read the name on his chest and asked if there were any aviators in his family. Given away by a strong family resemblance, Goins confirmed that the person the gentleman served with was his Uncle Allen.

In 1923 West Southern Pines became one of the first incorporated Black townships in North Carolina, and even after it was annexed by the municipality of Southern Pines in 1931, the community maintained its significant rooted heritage. Woodlawn Cemetery began on land that belonged to the Buchan family, about 6 -7 acres that backed up to the Rosenwald School built by the West Southern Pines township in 1925. As the neighborhood grew, the heart of the community was its school and the tree-lined burial ground that abutted it.

Retired Lt. Col. Vincent Gordan, one of four sons of a school principal and an elementary school teacher, grew up in a Sears and Roebuck house around the corner from West Southern Pines High School. Gordan was working as a senior trainer at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. After American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon’s west side, Gordan immediately began knocking on doors to help evacuate the building. The next day cots were brought in for Gordan and his colleagues to begin orchestrating the multi-level U.S. response to the attack by al-Qaida. Gordan’s final career move was as a division chief for the U.S. Census Bureau managing a $200 million budget. The experience proved invaluable when the late Rev. Fred Walden asked him to take over a nonprofit to help reinvigorate the West Southern Pines community — the Southern Pines Land & Housing Trust.

Walden was a beloved figure in Southern Pines, a veteran himself having served as an Army chaplain assistant. When he moved his young family back to Moore County in 1973 he continued a legacy begun by his great-grandparents, followed by his grandparents, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and their children. Taking over from his uncle, A.C. Walden, he ran the West Side Garage for 45 years, balancing faith ministries, serving on the Southern Pines Town Council, membership at the Rufus McLaughlin American Legion Post No. 177, and becoming a founding member of the Rotary Club of the Sandhills. Walden established the nonprofit Southern Pines Land & Housing Trust (SPLHT) to help protect property for the African American community and others in Southern Pines, and to aid people in keeping their land to foster the creation of generational wealth so vital to sustained financial well-being. In 2018, Walden called Gordan to come home and help reinvigorate the organization and its mission. His words were, “Vince, I need you.”

“My original reason (for taking the position as board chair) was because Fred saw his community going down,” says Gordan. “When I came home from the military West Southern Pines was a totally different atmosphere and environment than the one I left. There were changes that needed to be made, and I now, too, wanted to make them.”

The organization is headquartered in the former schoolhouse that in the 1940s became the segregated West Southern Pines High School and that in the 1960s evolved into the desegregated Southern Pines Elementary School. The Land & Housing Trust campus includes a playground named for an adored school principal, Blanchie Carter Discovery Park, the school gymnasium and auditorium — both of which can be rented out through the West Southern Pines Center, an entity under the umbrella of the SPLHT. In recent years Woodlawn Cemetery has also been overseen by the SPLHT with the Buchan family formally deeding the land to the Trust. The cemetery’s point person is yet another veteran, retired Staff Sgt. Bill Ross, who was a special populations coordinator with the Moore County Schools until his retirement there.

“Woodlawn was the only place to bury African Americans up to the 1970s,” says Ross, who like Gordan grew up in West Southern Pines, walking to school in the family-oriented neighborhood. Ross’ maternal grandparents were Claude and Essie Strickland, who moved from the Dunn area to West Southern Pines in the late 1800s. Claude Strickland opened a popular corner grocery and also worked for Hayes Book Shop delivering newspapers. What spurs Ross’ volunteer service is a desire to bring back “the camaraderie that I grew up with, that family connection, our community.” Once a star basketball player in the nearby gym, Ross watches over his family members buried in Woodlawn, his father Lucius Ross, a WWII veteran, mother Edith and, tragically, his daughter Barbra, who died in 1998.

Bringing much needed structure to the care and landscape of Woodlawn Cemetery has been a goal of the SPLHT board. In 2023 Gordan and Ross reached out to the Southern Pines Garden Club for its assistance updating the landscaping at both the front and side entrance gates. With funds raised from their annual Home & Garden Tour, the Southern Pines Garden Club also committed to building the recently completed brick memorial wall where brass nameplates will honor the veterans buried there. Patrick Kujawski of RK Masonry donated the labor.

Morris Goins and his wife, Yolanda, a mathematics professor pursuing a Ph.D. in higher education and the daughter of retired U.S. Army veterans Leon and Pearline Pempleston of Petersburg, Virginia, also plan to contribute to the restoration of Woodlawn. Plans in the works include irrigation installation, sodding the entire cemetery, employing ground-penetrating radar to locate old graves without markers, installing markers where there are none or where they’ve been lost, and creating a fund where the SPLHT can regularly contract with a landscaper for weekly maintenance.

For decades the maintenance was done by family members and volunteers like longtime friends Peggie Caple and Joyce Jackson, who joined the West Southern Pines Garden Club Cemetery Committee. Annual Memorial Day celebrations were held through 2019 to help raise money for landscaping and to pay Woodlawn’s longstanding caretaker Halbert Kearns. The group planned Woodlawn Cemetery Days with special speakers in addition to music events at area churches called “Woodlawn Day in Song.” The effort was aided by twice-a-year cleanup days conducted by the Pinecrest Air Force Junior ROTC. The cemetery committee was dedicated to the cause, even outlasting the garden club itself. Originally from Virginia, Jackson was the clerk in the Southern Pines Water Department during the week and worked evenings and weekends in the Carolina Dining Room at the Pinehurst Resort. Caple is a West Southern Pines native who has never lived more than a few blocks away from her childhood school and Woodlawn Cemetery. A longtime director of financial aid at Sandhills Community College, she finished her career there as the disabilities and placement testing coordinator.

“In our area Woodlawn is the resting place of African American descent,” says Caple.

The renewed spirit to preserve West Southern Pines is special to Matthew Walden, Fred Walden’s son, who is also a minister. Under the leadership of executive director Sandra L. Dales, he serves on the SPLHT board, which is securing funding to convert the former school and its campus into a multipurpose community and business center with an incubator kitchen and workspace for area entrepreneurs. Nora Bowman is chief operating officer of the West Southern Pines Center and handles the renting of the gymnasium and auditorium as well as the development of local events. Bob Smith is the curator of the future museum at the SPLHT dedicated to preserving the history of the area’s remarkable citizenry. Walden’s involvement with the organization his father began is born of the same desire to bring back the family-oriented community that he believes has been so vital to grounding his life. On walks through Woodlawn, he’s with family.

“When I see their names, memories come alive,” he says.

To learn more about the SPLHT or to contribute financially or as a volunteer, visit splandandhousingtrust.org.

Simple Life

SIMPLE LIFE

The Sacred Month

A time to go inside

By Jim Dodson

Long ago, I decided that November is the most sacred month.

To my way of thinking, on so many levels, no other holds as much mystery, beauty and spiritual meaning as the 11th month of the calendar.

The landscape gardener in me is always relieved when the weather turns sharply cooler and there’s an end to the constant fever of pruning and weeding, plus fretting over plants struggling from the heat and drought of a summer that seems to grow more punishing each year.

Once the leaves are gathered up, and everything is cut back and mulched for the winter, not only does my planning “mind” kick in with what’s to be done for next year, but the beautifully bare contours of the earth around me become a living symbol — and annual reminder — of life’s bittersweet circularity and the relative brevity of our journey through it.

The hilly old neighborhood where we reside is called Starmount Forest for good reason, owing to the mammoth oaks and sprawling maples that kindly shelter us with shade in summer and stand like druid guardians throughout the year, season after season. Beginning this month, the skies become clearer and the nighttime stars glimmer like diamonds on black velvet through their bare and mighty arms, hence the neighborhood’s name: a “mount” where the “stars” shine at night.

Of course, there is risk living among such monarchs of the forest. Every now and then, one of these elderly giants drops a large limb or, worse, topples over, proving their own mortality, sometimes taking out part of a house or a garage, or just blocking the street until work crews arrive with chainsaws. As far as I know, no one has ever been seriously injured or killed by our neighborhood trees, though the growing intensity of summer storms seems to elevate the danger. Lately, some neighborhood newcomers, prefiguring catastrophe, have taken to cutting down their largest oaks as an extra measure of security in a world where, as actuaries and sages agree, there really is no guaranteed thing. In the meantime, the rest of us have made something of a Faustian bargain with these soulful giants for the privilege of living among them. We care for them and (sometimes) they don’t fall on us.

Speaking of “soul,” no month spiritually embodies it better than November.

All Souls Day, also called The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, comes on the second day of the eleventh month, a day of prayer and remembrance for the faithful departed observed by Christians for centuries. The day before All Souls’ is All Saints Day, also known as All Hallows Day or the Feast of All Saints, a celebration in honor of all the saints of the church, whether they are known or unknown.

Every four years, the first Tuesday that follows the first Monday of November is our national Election Day, a day considered sacred by citizens who believe in the right to vote their conscience and tend the garden of democracy.

Congress established this curious weekday of voting in 1845 on the theory that, since a majority of Americans were (at that moment) farmers or residents of rural communities, their harvests would generally have been completed, with severe winter weather yet to arrive that could impede travel. Tuesday was also chosen so that voters could attend church on Sunday and have a full day to travel to and from their polling place on Monday, arriving home on Wednesday, just in time for traditional market day across America.

Like daylight saving time (which, by the way, ends Sunday, Nov. 3) some critics believe “Tuesday voting” is a relic of a bygone time, requiring modern voters to balance a busy workday with the sacred obligation of voting. For what it’s worth, I tend to fall into the camp that advocates a newly established voting “holiday weekend” that would begin with the first Friday that follows the first Thursday of November, allowing three full days to exercise one’s civic obligation, throw a nice neighborhood cookout and mow the lawn for the last time.

While we’re in the spirit of reforming the calendar, would someone please ditch daylight saving time, a genuine relic of the past that totally wrecks the human body’s natural circadian rhythms? Farmers had it right: Rise with the sun and go to bed when it sets.

Next up in November’s parade of sacred moments is Veterans Day, which arrives on the 11th, a historic federal holiday that honors military veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces, established in the aftermath of World War I with the signing of the Armistice with Germany that went into effect at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. In 1954, Armistice Day was renamed Veterans Day at the urging of major U.S. military organizations. 

November’s gentler sunlight — at least here in the Northern Hemisphere — feels like a benediction falling across the leafless landscape, quite fitting for a month where we go “inside” literally and figuratively to celebrate the bounty of living on Earth. In the Celtic mind, late autumn is the time of the “inner harvest,” when gratitude and memory yield their own kind of fertility.

“Correspondingly, when it is autumn in your life, the things that happened in the past, the experiences that were sown in the clay of your heart, almost unknown to you, now yield their fruit,” writes the late Irish poet John O’Donohue.

First shared by Squanto and the pilgrims in 1621, Thanksgiving was decreed  “a day of public Thanksgiving and Prayer” on November  26, 1789, by George Washington. Then it was proclaimed a national holiday on the last Thursday of November by Abe Lincoln. Finally, during the Great Depression in 1939, it was moved to the third Thursday of the month by Franklin Roosevelt to extend Christmas shopping days. But for most folks, the observance of Thanksgiving embodies, I suspect, many of the things we hold sacred in life:

The gathering of families, memories of loved ones, lots of laughter, good food and friendly debates over football and politics.

I give extra thanks for Thanksgiving every year, especially the day after when some who hold bargain-hunting on “Black Friday” a sacred ritual thankfully disappear and I am free to enjoy my favorite “loaded” turkey sandwich and take a nice long afternoon nap by the fire to celebrate my favorite holiday.