If You Can Call It a Game

By Ed Southern

If you can call it a game, my buddies and I have begun to play: no points or score, no goals or winners, no final horn, no written rules.

Our field of play is a text thread. Our game time is whenever the spirit moves one of us, trusting each other not to be the guy who texts in the middle of the night.

How do we play? Simple: Name an Atlantic Coast Conference men’s basketball player who played between 1982 and 1998.

Why do we play? That might be simple, too.

Malcolm Mackey. John Crotty.
Elden Campbell. Tom Sheehey.

The player can’t be too obscure — no checking the internet for walk-ons and benchwarmers — but they can’t be too well-known, either. There’s no fun in naming the first players everyone thinks of when they think of that era of ACC basketball: Michael Jordan, Ralph Sampson, Len Bias, Christian Laettner, Tim Duncan, Vince Carter. Those guys entered the consciousness enough to stick around long after their last March Madness. Their highlights still show up on TV, whenever the ACC or their school or some other advertiser wants to weaponize nostalgia and the idea of tradition. Remember them? Remember that dunk, that shot, that One Shining Moment? Remember how long and how much you have enjoyed this sport, this product?

Our game’s goal is to trigger memories, too. Our point is to call up a name that spent three to four years at or near the forefront of our minds, and then left. To play our game, we name a player whose name and face and number and motion we once thought about a lot, and since haven’t thought of once.

Walt Williams. Kelsey Weems.
Pete Chilcutt. Bruce Dalrymple.

Why 1982 to 1998? Those aren’t strict limits, but for us they mark an era. In 1982, UNC won the national title, its first since 1957 and the ACC’s first since NC State’s in 1974, when some of us were toddlers and some of us weren’t yet born. By 1982, we were old enough to remember not just the championship game — Patrick Ewing’s goaltending, Michael Jordan’s jumper, poor Fred Brown’s errant pass to James Worthy — and where we were when we watched it, but that season. We were old enough to be aware of basketball as more than bright, fast colors; the carnival sounds of cheering fans and pep bands; and “Sail with the Pilot,” the ubiquitous jingle of the Jefferson Pilot Corporation, lead sponsor of regional ACC telecasts. We were old enough to know something about how to play basketball. We were old enough to be aware of ACC basketball as a thing unto itself, to begin to absorb something of its weight and meaning in the suburbanizing Sun-Belt North Carolina where we all were born and were growing up.

I was old enough to have had a friend come home with me from school on Quarterfinal Friday of the ACC Tournament, when the teachers fought over the big TV carts from the A/V room, so they and we could watch the games in class. As we waited in our kitchen for his mom to pick him up, he mentioned that his dad was at the Tournament, and had invited him to come, too, but he’d said he’d rather come hang out with me.

“You did!?” my mother, my father and I all exclaimed, shocked, even a little appalled.

Jeremy Hyatt. Timo Makkonen.
Olden Polynice. Anthony Teachey.

In 1998, the youngest among us graduated from college, from Wake Forest, from the ACC. UNC made the Final Four; Duke, the Elite Eight. By 1998, their rivalry had established its hegemony over the conference, in results but more so in media coverage. A new or casual fan could watch an entire season on ESPN, and be forgiven for failing to realize that Tobacco Road was far longer than the 10 miles of U.S. 15-501 between Chapel Hill and Durham. In 1998 Antawn Jamison, who years before had been a Charlotte summer league teammate of my brother’s, won the Naismith, Wooden, and practically every other Player of the Year award. Between Wake’s 1996 ACC title, and Florida State’s in 2012, either UNC or Duke won the Tournament every single year but one. Between 1982 and 2019, ACC teams won 13 national titles, but only 3 of those were won by a team other than the Tar Heels or the Blue Devils. Those famous miles between the Dean Dome and Cameron Indoor sucked all the oxygen out of ACC basketball.

In 1998, Wake Forest’s back-to-back Tournament titles were fresh in our minds, and the Heels/Devils dominance didn’t seem so assured. The ACC hadn’t expanded beyond nine teams, in a fairly cohesive regional spread between College Park and Tallahassee, and so every team still played every other team twice, home and away, each regular season. The Tournament was still only four days, Quarterfinal Friday still intact. Maryland hadn’t left for the Big Ten’s football-driven TV money. Our corner of college basketball still felt like a community, the season like a ritual, a reminder, an assurance through the winters, which still were cold.

Sam Ivy. Keith Gatlin. Mark West. Cal Boyd.

The goal is that spark of recognition, yes, and the quick trip down Memory Lane (which in this case is a spur off Tobacco Road). This little game of ours, though, also serves to strengthen bonds, sustain connections, and — sure — show off a bit. We started playing the week before the 2020-2021 college basketball season began, nine months after the pandemic had shut down the ACC Tournament and cancelled March Madness. We’d seen each other some, at a distance and outdoors, but for the first time in more than a decade none of us had tailgated together, sat in the stands together, watched any games together. We didn’t expect to do so again any time soon, certainly not that basketball season, a season that might not play out to the end, a season they might should not play at all.

We’re a homogenous group of seven, with two pairs of brothers who all went to Wake Forest, plus three Tar Heels. We all are North Carolinians, with roots going back generations. Four have known each other since their teens, when they were counselors together at a Baptist summer camp. Two of those roomed together during graduate school at Duke, and were looking for a third. One of them had a younger brother who knew my younger brother at Wake, and knew he was going to Duke for graduate school, and connected them. I’d hang out when I came to the Triangle for work, and crash on a sofa they still can’t believe I was brave or foolish enough to sleep on.

Four of us now live in Winston-Salem, one in Raleigh, one in Tryon, one outside Goldsboro. All of us are white, straight, cis, middle class, professional.

All of us are sports fans. We have other interests, even passions, and often have long and deep conversations about books, music, movies, whatever: Part of what I value about these friends is their taste, their intellect, their ability to talk about Walker Percy, Ron Rash, Rhiannon Giddens, Superchunk, Terrence Malick, and Mike Krzyzewski, over multiple beers in a single gathering, or over the miles of a day hike.

Most of us, in fact, hardly follow ACC basketball anymore. The four Deacons have suffered through a decade of dreadfulness, Wake fielding teams who played with so little balance or spacing that they looked like pickup players who’d ended up together at random, not even knowing one another’s names. Conference expansion has made college basketball feel reduced, ditched the home-and-away ritual of the season, made Tobacco Road feel like a cul-de-sac. The one-and-done rule has stolen any sense of connection to the biggest stars: I sometimes forget that Zion Williamson and Kyrie Irving spent a season at Duke.

The other five, in fact, follow European football, particularly the English Premier League, as avidly as any sport now, and spend the winter watching more NBA than ACC. (Four of us grew up playing soccer; one went to a Division II school on a soccer scholarship.)

Still and always, though, ACC basketball conjures up our childhoods, calls back to where we came from. We all still live in North Carolina, each an easy drive from the place where we grew up. Where we grew up, though, is as gone from us as if we had come from overseas.

Craig Neal. Alaa Abdelnaby. Delaney Rudd.

You probably think I’m thinking of where we cheered on The Dukes of Hazzard, tearing around the backroads in a souped-up Dodge they called the “General Lee,” the Confederate battle flag painted on the roof, the opening bars of “Dixie” blaring when they blew the horn. You might think I’m thinking of where Dad went to work while Mom stayed home and had dinner ready by 6.

But I, speaking only for myself, am thinking of the place where we cheered on The Dukes of Hazzard, each of them “just a good ol’ boy . . . fightin’ the system like a true modern-day Robin Hood.” I’m thinking of the woods and fields and creeks that that friend and I played in after school, in between games on Quarterfinal Friday, and how they’re long since cleared and leveled and culverted for McMansions.

I don’t blame you. Lots of people have confused the one for the other, the loss of the one for the loss of the other. Most of the North Carolina we grew up in should be gone — but it’s not. Some of that North Carolina we should have kept — but it’s gone.

Robert Brickey. Billy King.
Cozell McQueen. Tony Massenburg.

If we wanted to remember the highlights, the indelible moments, we’d text each other those: Lorenzo’s put-back, Laettner’s turnaround, Randolph’s crossover 3. If we wanted to remember the highlights, we’d text each other YouTube links.

We already remember the highlights — the thrills, the shocks — and will until our memories fail, which is why they’re highlights in the first place. We want to remember more. We want to remember the shag carpet we sat on in front of the console TVs. We want to remember the urgent squeak of those lumbering A/V carts when our teachers wheeled them into the room at a trot, triumphant and eager and a little worried someone might hijack the TV in the hall. We want to remember our whole families gathered around, hanging on every bounce. We want to remember when ACC basketball seemed wondrous, and vital, and ours, belonging to our own backyards.

Scholars and artists recognize and revere this capacity for transportation in other means, food and music and visual representation and rituals of culture and religion. We accept and respect that some media can take us beyond nostalgia and into deep memory, where our animating narratives reside and sometimes re-arrange.

Sports, too, perform this function, serve as a vessel for memory, a comfort for the present, a hope for the future. If W. H. Auden was right that “Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance,” then what else does a game-winning free throw do? If art is the beautiful expression of human creativity, with the power to stir deep feelings and thoughts, then how can a 360 dunk, a step-back 3, a no-look assist in traffic not be art?

Art demands creativity but also discipline, inspiration and dogged practice, perseverance and courage. So do sports: the courage of a 6-foot-tall guard driving the lane against a 7-foot center, of a player setting his feet to take a charge, of a young person who steps to the line with the game on the line and the eyes of millions upon them.

Maya Angelou once wrote, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.”

Dr. Angelou also lived the last 32 years of her life in Winston-Salem, teaching at Wake Forest, and in a 2012 letter described herself as “a Tar Heel (but not a Tar Heel).”

Take that, Carolina. You got trash-talked by Maya Angelou.

Tom Hammonds. Joe Smith.
Buck Williams. Marc Blucas.

Here, now, I’m supposed to tell you What It Means, tie up all these threads I’ve unwound, make my closing argument that this is more than a flimsy anecdote I’ve overloaded, and our texts are more than a silly game of nostalgia, if we can call them a game at all.

I’m supposed to, but I don’t know that I can. Or, rather, I could, but I don’t know that I want to.

Maybe we started playing this game — if you can call it a game — not just to keep present what we missed and were missing in that year of pandemic, but to remember and even celebrate the courage, the perseverance, the grind of those players who wouldn’t go on to NBA stardom, to shoe deals and sponsorships. Maybe we’re reflecting our privilege. Maybe we just want the smiles of warm nostalgia, like the mid-life men we are. Maybe we want a break from the here, now, and its demands. Maybe we just need the distraction.

Brian Oliver. Bryant Stith.
Robert Siler. Chucky Brown.

I don’t know how long we’ll keep it going, this silly game of ours, if you can call it a game. Our lineup, so to speak, is large but not limitless. At some point our memories or the team rosters will run out, nothing left but the all-timers and the internet.

We might stop when the pandemic does, when we can expect to go to games again, or gather together to watch. We might stop when my buddies read this, and give me a hard time for taking something fun and overthinking it.

“Dammit, Ed,” the text will read, “if we wanted to think, we’d send each other the names of professors.”

Steve Hale. Serge Zwikker.
Todd Fuller. Junior Burrough.

Or we might keep going for as long as we can. We’re as close now to retirement age as we are to college age, which seems both yesterday and lifetimes ago. Before we know it, then, we might be old men, with canes and Depends, fumbling with our now-unimaginable communications devices, using the names of other men to keep alive our friendships and our memories. I hope those other men will be old, then, too. I hope that we’ll all have the chance to be old.  PS

Ed Southern is the executive director of the North Carolina Writers’ Network, as well as is the author of Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South. It’s available wherever good books are sold.

Out of the Blue

Short on Days

But loooong on celebrations

By Deborah Salomon

February is laden with holidays — maybe more than any other month, beginning with Chinese New Year on Feb. 1, followed by Groundhog Day on Feb. 2. Then, Valentine’s Day on the 14th, with Presidents Day on the 21st. The entire month has been designated American Heart Month and Black History Month.

Every month has its sillies with February no exception: National Toothache Day, Crab-stuffed Flounder Day, Public Sleeping Day. Notable birthdays, too: George Harrison and James Dean were born in February, but so was Hitler.

Besides being the most mispronounced month, February is also the shortest. Somehow, this evens things out cosmically while messing up the birthdays of those “leaplings” born on the 29th.

Most Western nations live by the Gregorian (solar) calendar with 365.2425 days, as opposed to the Julian calendar of 365.25, which faded from fashion in 1582. Moveable religious feasts like Easter and Passover are determined by . . . well, it’s complicated.

Obviously, Gregory and Julius didn’t have to deal with National Dog Biscuit Day, which falls on Feb. 23.

Hmmm. I’m enjoying the extrapolation, starting with the Chinese Year of the Tiger on the 1st. No matter how you feel about President Xi Jinping, the food is sensational, especially holiday specialties which include a whole fish for luck, long noodles for long life and the yummiest dumplings. For background music, cue up Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” from Rocky III.

Lincoln set forth the Emancipation Proclamation in September; it took effect in January. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in January; MLK Day is celebrated in January but Black History Month (love the soul food banquets) is observed in February. Why? Though it took decades to arrive at the month-long celebration, the seed was planted in February because of the proximity of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on Feb. 12 and Frederick Douglass’ on Feb. 14.

Lincoln’s birthday used to be a separate holiday, followed by George Washington’s birthday (cherry pie) on Feb. 22. Then the ski resorts figured out that by combining the two and adding all the other presidents — noteworthy or not — they could institute a midwinter ski jaunt, fueled by French onion soup topped with melted Gruyère. The government then instituted the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, designating the third Monday in February (glorious skiing, not too cold) as Presidents Day.

On Presidents Day, I imagine John Adams commiserating with George H.W. Bush about stuff their sons messed up while in office. Or hear JFK and WJC blog about White House hanky-panky. American voters should know that LBJ was hooked on Fresca and that James Polk, the single-term president born in Pineville, North Carolina, graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill and invented the mullet, with photos to prove it.

As for Heart Month playing off the Valentine symbol, I’ve yet to see a romantic menu lacking fat, cholesterol and lots of sugar.

Speaking of St. Valentine, how sad that the patron saint of lovers came to such a gruesome end. Seems emperor Claudius had him beaten to death, then decapitated for defiance on Feb. 14. Legend adds that Valentine fell in love with his jailer’s daughter, smuggling her a card bearing his name before his execution. Lordy, don’t tell Hallmark. Or Godiva, Russell Stover and Hershey.

Groundhog Day sports a complicated history, from the ancient Celts’ pagan observance midway between the winter and summer solstices, to Candlemas, marking the presentation of Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem. Germans added the groundhog (originally badger) element when they settled in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania — as unspellable as Coach Krzyzewski, who was born Feb. 13.

This year we are spared, barely, Mardi Gras, which happens March 1.

I just couldn’t stomach gumbo after dumplings, chocolate, cherry pie and chitlins.   PS

Deborah Salomon is a writer for PineStraw and The Pilot. She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.

Good Natured

The Season of Love

One day is just the beginning

By Karen Frye

We think of love as we celebrate Valentine’s Day on the 14th but, hopefully, we focus on it the other 364 days as well, creating a lifestyle for ourselves. Start your day with feelings of love and spread it everywhere with everyone. End your day with gratitude for all the love you’ve received. Tune in to these feelings and reap the incredible benefits it brings to your life.

We are born into the world with immense love. This force within us can be nourished and grow more powerful with practice. Life can be challenging, but its lessons can be opportunities to use our hearts to find a way through obstacles and grow stronger. When we understand that love can resolve so many of the confrontations and challenges life brings, we become more loving, even in the most difficult times.

Each morning before you get out of bed, connect to your heart center. Be grateful that your heart is beating and sending feelings of compassion, empathy and love to every cell in your body. Open yourself to the good things happening to you. Sharing the love you feel with others will open their hearts as well. We must embrace, and even love, those who have hurt us.

Love has the power to change many things. It can end anger, strife, resentment and emotional pain. Everything improves with practicing love, but the person who benefits the most is you. What footprint will you leave on this world? Walk the path of love. Uplift others. You will be happier, healthier and more content with your life, and the world will be a better place.  PS

Karen Frye is the owner and founder of Nature’s Own and teaches yoga at the Bikram
Yoga Studio.

Hometown

One Degree of Separation

And other brushes with greatness

By Bill Fields

The first celebrities I saw in the flesh weighed about 2,000 pounds apiece.

They were the Budweiser Clydesdales, parading down Broad Street in Southern Pines in the 1960s, and they didn’t yield to the left if they didn’t want to. To a 60-pound kid, a one-ton horse seemed as big as a brontosaurus.

My celebrity encounters veered from the equine over the years, but star sightings outside the golf world — on which I’ve reported for four decades — have been few and far between.

Sadly, Meryl Streep never looked forward to commuting on a train to Grand Central Terminal with me as she did as Molly to Robert De Niro’s Frank in Falling in Love. I did get a hello from Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis on a 1988 flight to Boston. Friendly, lots of hair, not a lot of height. In a long check-in line at LaGuardia Airport, Chris Farley, in sunglasses and a hoodie, nodded in my direction when we made eye contact. On a flight to London, Robin Givens, sans Mike Tyson, sat a few rows away.

It wasn’t unusual for folks to see Paul Newman out and about in Connecticut. I walked past him once on a sidewalk in Westport, and his eyes were as blue as you thought they were.

Covering a PGA Tour Champions event at Pebble Beach, I needed a few minutes from Bernhard Langer for an interview after his round, which concluded on the ninth hole a long way from the Lodge. Langer asked me to join him in the shuttle van so we could talk during the short ride back to civilization. Clint Eastwood, who had played in Langer’s group, was in the front passenger seat, and seeing an interloper clamber into the vehicle didn’t make his day.

“You can take the next one,” Eastwood said to me.

“Bernhard told me to come with him,” I replied.

“It’s OK, Clint,” Langer interjected.

Eastwood still seemed peeved when we reached the clubhouse. His demeanor to a stranger was much different from that of another Hollywood A-lister, Jack Lemmon, with whom I had crossed paths at a golf tournament at Pebble Beach years earlier. Lemmon was walking his standard poodle across a parking lot and offered a smile and a friendly hello.

Lemmon was a fixture each winter on the Monterey Peninsula, where he tried in vain to make the amateur cut and play on Sunday in the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the old Bing Crosby Pro-Am. I didn’t expect to see Glenn Frey of the Eagles under the big live oak at Augusta National Golf Club on Masters Wednesday in 1997. But Frey loved golf and was there, in a white caddie jumpsuit, to loop for pal Brad Faxon in the Par-3 Contest. I lament having not seen the Eagles in concert during the band’s heyday, but I got to meet Frey and shake his hand that day.

Two iconic figures in sports and entertainment, John Madden and Betty White, passed away within a couple of days of each other near the end of 2021. Tributes focused not only on how much they accomplished during their respective careers but how well they treated people throughout their long lives. I never met either icon — saw Madden dining in a California restaurant once — but the coverage made me think of the time I met one of my childhood baseball heroes, Brooks Robinson.

Back in the late 1980s, I knew the former Baltimore Orioles third baseman was going to be playing in a celebrity golf event in Florida that I was covering. Once on-site, a lot of people were paying attention to the former New York Jets receiver Don Maynard, a Texan who was teeing it up in shorts and spiked cowboy boots. I prioritized finding the baseball Hall of Famer who had worn No. 5 and won 16 Gold Glove Awards.

If Robinson had grown tired of grown men asking him to sign a baseball while hearing about how he inspired them to play the hot corner in Little League, he sure didn’t show it. He was gracious and genuine, and as he signed the brand-new Rawlings baseball I’d brought along, I was 29 going on 12.   PS

Southern Pines native Bill Fields, who writes about golf and other things, moved north in 1986 but hasn’t lost his accent.

Bookshelf

February Books

FICTION

Carolina Built, by Kianna Alexander

Based on the life of real estate magnate Josephine N. Leary, Carolina Built tells the story of a woman born into slavery who gained her freedom at the age of 9 and succeeds in building a real estate empire in Edenton, North Carolina. Striving to create a legacy for her two daughters, Josephine teaches herself to be a businesswoman, to manage her finances, and to make smart investments. But with each passing year, it grows more and more difficult to juggle work and family obligations. Alexander brings Leary to life in her page-turning book of historical fiction as Josephine becomes a wife, landowner, business partner and visionary.

Love and Saffron, by Kim Fay

This witty and tender novel follows two women in 1960s America as they discover that food really does connect us all, and that friendship and laughter are the best medicine. When 27-year-old Joan Bergstrom sends a fan letter — and a gift of saffron — to 59-year-old Imogen Fortier, a life-changing friendship begins. Joan lives in Los Angeles and is just starting out as a food writer. Imogen lives on Camano Island outside Seattle, writing a monthly column for a Pacific Northwest magazine. While she can hunt elk and dig for clams, she’s never tasted fresh garlic. The two women bond through their letters, building a closeness that sustains them through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the unexpected events in their own lives. Told in three parts, this tender and honest book is a reminder that we are never finished growing, changing and loving.

The Christie Affair, by Nina de Gramont

“A long time ago, in another country, I nearly killed a woman . . . ” So begins The Christie Affair, a stunning new novel that reimagines the unexplained 11-day disappearance of Agatha Christie that captivated the world. The story is narrated by Miss Nan O’Dea, a fictional character based on a real person who infiltrated the wealthy, rarified world of author Christie and her husband, Archie — a world of London townhomes, country houses, shooting parties and tennis matches. First, she became part of their world, and then she became Archie’s mistress. What did it have to do with the mysterious 11 days that Agatha Christie went missing? The answer takes you back in time, to Ireland, to a young girl in love, to a time before The Great War, to a star-crossed couple destined to be together until war and their shameful secrets tore them apart.

Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson

In this moving debut novel, two estranged siblings must set aside their differences to deal with their mother’s death and her hidden past — a journey of discovery that takes them from the Caribbean to London to California, beginning and ending with her famous black cake. Eleanor Bennett passes away in present-day California, leaving behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a traditional Caribbean black cake — made from a family recipe — and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking journey that unfolds challenges everything the siblings thought they knew about their family, the secrets their mother held back, and the mystery of a long-lost child.

CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Love You By Heart, by Peter H. Reynolds

Triumphs, joys, fumbles, falls, when you truly love someone, you love all of them. The perfect little gem for Valentine’s Day, or any day, because when you love someone, you love them warts and all. (All ages.)

Bob Ross, Peapod the Squirrel, and the Happy Accident, by Robb Pearlman

Mistakes are just happy accidents when Bob Ross and Peapod are in the art studio. Celebrate art! Creativity! Fun! This little book encourages young artists to go with the flow. (Ages 4-7.)

Smooch!: A Celebration of the Enduring Power of Love, by Karen Kilpatrick

Whether you’re in the pool, the tub, or get licked by your furry friend, nothing can wipe away the kiss of someone who loves you. For family members who cannot be together this Valentine’s Day, this adorable title is the perfect way to say, “I love you.” (Ages 3-6.)

Bold Words from Black Women: Inspiration and Truths from 50 Leaders Who Helped Shape Our World, by Dr. Tamara Pizzoli

From Alice Walker to Zora Neale Hurston, this stunning collection features quotes and portraits of 50 amazing Black women. An absolute must-have for young readers. (Age 6 to adult.)  PS

Compiled by Kimberly Daniels Taws and Angie Tally.

Crossroads

Moonshine Murder

The legacy of the Big Swamp meltdown

By Lisa Weiss

Every family has its secrets. Sometimes they’re taken to the grave or held close to the heart for safekeeping. And sometimes, as was the case for my family, the secret — Granddaddy landing in the gas chamber at Central Prison — made an indelible mark on the soul of a skinny 8-year-old boy who would later become my daddy.

Granddaddy Palmer was a so-called tobacco farmer from North Carolina, although he had never plowed a field that Daddy could remember. Instead, he let his son (my daddy) ride shotgun in the old Ford pickup while he delivered homemade whiskey to the locals. Palmer and his uncle by marriage, George Allen, were two of the biggest bootleggers in the county, and the two of them fought for bragging rights to the Big Swamp distillery business. Uncle George owned the 15-by-15-foot store at the intersection of Seventh Street and Singletary Church Road in Robeson County, so he had a natural distribution point for his product. But Palmer had the most prized asset: a reliable and abundant supply of sugar. In fact, he had 3,300 pounds of it in the backwoods of the Big Swamp, which ensured a constant flow of his moonshine mash.

Sugar during this time was rationed due to the war. Palmer’s secret stash, which in his mind was his patent, always kept him one step ahead of Uncle George. When he refused again and again to reveal his sugar source, Uncle George’s greed got the better of him, and he snitched to the local sheriff, spilling the location of Palmer’s stills. Naturally, festering contempt came stomping out of the backwoods. And with a loaded shotgun.

Walking a mile to Uncle George’s house that morning did not tamp Palmer’s temper, but rather gave rise to it. When he stormed into Uncle George’s house, George leapt from the breakfast table and fled out back, screaming for his wife to get his gun. Not intending to kill anyone — although he surely wanted to make his point — Palmer fired several shots between the siding of the barn where Uncle George went to hide. 

Daddy and his siblings had scattered that morning when they witnessed their own father’s rage and their mother’s pleading. Crouched low and staring bug-eyed at the edge of the cotton field where a split in the path led either to the swamp or Uncle George’s, they waited. It did not take long. The sound of gunshots, paired with the frenzied resolve on Palmer’s face when he returned, kept them as silent as Uncle George’s barn.

Palmer rummaged through the house with a burlap sack as he prepared his getaway into the Big Swamp. He called for Blackeye, the family bulldog, who had a black ring the size of a hickory nut around his left eye, marking his reputation as a fighter. Palmer had paid $5 for him as a pup but when someone later offered $100 for him, he didn’t consider it. He loved that dog.

And so, with his dog, a quilt, a cast-iron skillet and a 5-gallon demijohn of moonshine, Palmer set out into the dark swamp to ride out the manhunt. As the minutes turned to hours, and then days, a sense of self-satisfaction and pride grew. Man and dog survived the elements. But while the moonshine soothed Palmer’s soul, Blackeye grew weary. Over the years, that dog had fought off rowdy strays, snarled at drunkards — would have done anything to protect his master. But Blackeye did not growl, budge or even nudge Palmer as six men in uniform approached them through the dark muck. Like most things in a swamp, the dregs rise up or their stench gives them away. The dog sighed. Granddaddy went to jail.

Uncle George had been carted off to the hospital in the back of a pickup truck. Gunshot wounds to the shoulder, leg and lower abdomen complicated by pneumonia sealed his fate. Following a two-day trial, Grandaddy Palmer was charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to the gas chamber. Some folks tasted sweet revenge, while others puckered from the sourness of it all.

When facing certain death, some men become remorseful and discover a sense of purpose. During the eight months it took Palmer to walk the green mile, he learned a little French, sought out the forgiveness of God and his family, and wrote letters . . . lots of letters. His conversion story was covered widely by the local and regional press. His letters were published and used in sermons across North Carolina and Virginia. He was fighting for his soul while his lawyer fought for his life. Despite his remorse, including a petition signed by all but two of the jurors, he was denied an appeal by the State Supreme Court. Daddy used to say, “I don’t think he hated to die as much as he hated to see what he had caused.”

On Feb. 19, 1943, a farmer turned bootlegger walked into the gas chamber at 10:01 a.m. in Raleigh, North Carolina. He smiled and nodded to the sheriff. His arms and legs were strapped to the wooden chair with a high back, a brown leather mask adjusted over his face. Any hopes and dreams were sealed in the airtight chamber.

I can’t say they thrived, but all six of his children survived to tell — or not — their own stories of Palmer. The tragic tale became family lore. Creased, worn letters and press clippings from this born-again inmate passed down from generation to generation. Stories and memories of Palmer fell into the crevices of time, aged and somewhat forgotten; yet, they had the power to expose a gnawing urge to seek out “the unarmed truth and unconditional love”* desperately craved by a family, and particularly, by a fatherless 8-year-old boy, tender and sweet, despite the lack of sugar in his life.  PS

*From Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech

A North Carolina native, Lisa Weiss is an interior designer and artist. She and her husband, Richard, live in the Charlotte area. Charles Meares, her father, served 41 years in the North Carolina Department of Corrections and was superintendent of the Gaston Correctional Center. He was twice the recipient of the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, granted by the office of Gov. Jim Hunt and again by the office of Gov. James Holshouser.

Boundless Beauty

Stephen Hayes and the African American experience

By Jim Moriarty

Photo: Stephen Hayes in front of his sculpture Flying W by Samantha Everette

We’re sitting in a mostly empty museum gallery, face to face, almost kneecap to kneecap. He has his mask on. I have my mask on. His words echo off the walls and high ceiling, but not with the plain thunder of his work surrounding us.

To my right, his left, is Cash Crop! He made it 12 years ago on his way to his Master of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. It’s wood and cement and steel. Fifteen naked figures, pockmarked, burnt in places, arranged in a triangle, standing against 15 wooden pallets. On the back of the pallets is the drawing of the infamous Brookes slave ship plan, its cruelty accentuated by its simplicity, a barbaric commoditization of kidnapped humans laid end to end, elbow to elbow, head to toe, row by row, to endure the inhumanity of the middle passage. The figures — casts of friends, family, even one of himself — are linked together by rusted steel chain all gathering at a square wooden block.

“It took me five months to create everything, start to finish. I did all the castings, the blacksmithing, the forging. Did all the carvings,” Stephen Hayes says of Cash Crop! “Five months, day and night, not thinking about anything but making.” He calls it his “machine mode.” The figures are upright so you can look them in the eye, then walk around and imagine them as a mark on a diagram, an entry in a ledger, given barely enough room to survive, sometimes not even that. Walking between the figures “you might hit a chain,” says Hayes. “Always stumbling over the past.”

The Stephen Hayes art at Cameron Art Museum. Photo by Alan Cradick, November 13, 2021.

Two weeks after he first showed Cash Crop! in Atlanta, Hayes was interviewed by CNN. “I didn’t know the weight of what I had created. I had an apartment but I didn’t have heat. I had electricity but I didn’t have cable. I couldn’t watch it,” says Hayes. He went to an AT&T store to see himself on the news.

Making sculpture is a pricey endeavor for a student, even a gifted one. “I knew how to penny-pinch,” he says. “My mom helped me out with money here and there.” Hayes grew up in Durham, where his mother, Lender, worked at the Durham County Department of Social Services on Duke Street. At night she cleaned the building as a second job. “She was everything,” he says.

You might think that the line from CNN to a commercially successful career as an artist would be a more or less straight one, but you would be wrong. Hayes knew how to create, but he didn’t know how to market. When he was an undergrad student at North Carolina Central University, one of his teachers, Isabel Chicquor, went to his house, took photos of all his ceramic work, built him a portfolio and got him his first residency at Alfred University in upstate New York. He knew art — though he didn’t call it that — he just didn’t know how to navigate the system. When someone suggested he apply to SCAD, he “stayed on the porch of my house and built a bunch of stuff and took photos of it.” To his own surprise, he was accepted, left New York and went to Atlanta. That got him on TV but it didn’t get him a living.

The Stephen Hayes art at Cameron Art Museum. Photo by Alan Cradick, November 13, 2021.

While Cash Crop! spent the next decade-plus touring museums from Montgomery, Alabama, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Hayes got teaching gigs here and there. He returned to Durham and, at one point, worked in a shipping container yard. He was on the precipice of giving up on the business of art altogether the night he got a residency at the Halcyon Arts Lab in Washington, D.C., leading indirectly to another highly acclaimed work, Voices of Future’s Past, exhibited at the National Cathedral and currently on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art along with another of his works, 5 lbs. In Voices, Hayes recorded young Black men talking about their lives, their feelings, their experiences, and placed their words inside the busts of older African American men. “When you walk by you have to get up close and kind of lean in to hear what the kid inside him is saying,” says Hayes.

After D.C., Hayes, who now teaches at Duke University, was named the 2020 recipient of the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art.

The exhibition hall where we’re sitting is in the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, where Hayes has a one-man show closing March 20. The exhibition of his work coincided with the unveiling of Boundless, his sculpture honoring the United States Colored Troops who fought in the Battle of Forks Road. The remnants of the old road and the vestiges of eroding Confederate revetments are a few yards from the museum’s parking lot. On that day, a section of the sculpture was being reinstalled after it was removed to add a plaque engraved with the names of 1,820 Black soldiers who fought there. Since 2006, the Cameron has hosted a re-enactment of the battle that took place on its property on Feb. 20-21, 1865, when a brigade of over 2,000 USCT soldiers assaulted well-entrenched Confederate infantry and artillery through a narrow gap between swampy Carolina bays. Re-enactors representing the Ohio 5th, a USCT regiment that included two recipients of the Medal of Honor and was known to have fought in the 34-hour engagement, are annual participants.

In his book Glory at Wilmington, The Battle of Forks Road, historian Chris E. Fonvielle Jr. writes, “The headlong assault by the bravest of the brave African American soldiers and their comrades at Forks Road was a ‘brilliant little charge,’ reported one journalist. But the concentrated Confederate rifle-musket and light artillery fire along the narrow front doomed the attack . . . The 5th U.S. Colored Troops at the head of the attacking column, suffered far more casualties than any other unit. The regiment’s 39 dead and wounded soldiers accounted for 74 percent of the total Union losses in the battle.”

Photograph by Samantha Everette

In 2019, after the museum’s deputy director, Heather Wilson, successfully wrote a grant securing funding for the sculpture, the Cameron commissioned Hayes to create Boundless. The museum’s executive director, Anne Brennan, invited him to attend the re-enactment of the battle that February. “He was captivated by imagining the sound of their marching boots,” says Brennan of Hayes. “He’s hearing their boots coming up the road. They’re chanting. He’s a brilliant sculptor but it was the dimensionality of sound that first struck Stephen. Those boots. Those boots.”

The DNA of Boundless stretches in two directions, toward Cash Crop! inside the museum and toward Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ 19th century sculpture of Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts 54th on the Boston Common, 800 miles away. The story of the 54th was most recently retold in the 1989 movie Glory.

“We took away the commanding general. Took away that beautiful horse and focused on the infantry,” says Brennan. “There had to be ranks marching. The drummer and the color bearer advancing in full three dimensions activates the work. It’s an homage. It’s an inspiration. Stephen brings that contemporaneity to it.”

For Boundless, Hayes did castings of the faces of seven USCT descendants and four USCT re-enactors for the 11 figures — a color bearer, a drummer and nine soldiers joined together in rows of three. “They’re moving forward. They’re in motion,” says Hayes. “Boundless is on the ground these soldiers actually marched on. I wanted it to be on the ground so people could walk through it and experience it — not be on a pedestal. They weren’t on horseback or anything. How did their footsteps sound? What did they sing? What’s going on in this man’s head?”

Photographs by Samantha Everette

Hayes’ sculpture has more contemporary artistic roots than Saint-Gaudens, linking to the tradition of Black sculpture of the 1960s and ’70s and, in particular, to the work of William Ellisworth Artis, who was born in Washington, North Carolina. “Hayes is following that tradition of humanizing the Black experience and really bringing it out in this figurative way,” says Maya Brooks, the Mellon Foundation assistant curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art. “He’s using symbols from across African American history to really think about the themes that he wants to present in terms of how an identity is created, how an identity is formed within a community.”

Hayes says, “Everything I’ve done is thematically joined. Cash Crop! is talking about the transporting of people, but if you take the roof off you can look at it like a sweat shop in a third world country with just enough room to produce as much goods as possible to ship to America. Boundless talks about freeing people of being slaves and talks about how we’re still fighting for that kind of freedom.” Fighting for the freedom proffered by the slave owner who wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …”

Boundless, unveiled on the grounds of Cameron Art Museum. Photo by Alan Cradick, November 17, 2021.
The sculpture highlights the effort of US Colored Troops in the Civil War. Includes casts made from the decedents of US Colored Troops who participated in the battle of Forks Road. Photo by Alan Cradick

The day after the Battle of Forks Road, the Confederate Army abandoned Wilmington, its last link to supplies from the outside world, and the Union troops marched into the city. “Come daybreak these men bury their dead and advance 3 miles to city hall,” says Brennan. “The USCT was on the front lines for Forks Road and then, come the victory march, they are in the back of the parade.”

Hayes’ next big commission is in Charleston, South Carolina, where he’ll help create a memorial for 36 bodies of the poor and enslaved found in a mass grave nine years ago. “Every project holds a place in my heart,” he says. “I’m still pushing along, trying to make a name for myself. I’ve got to move on to the next thing.”

Stumbling over the past, in machine mode.  PS

Jim Moriarty is the Editor of PineStraw and can be reached at jjmpinestraw@gmail.com.

Story of a House

Rooms With a View

Getting a lift by the lake

By Deborah Salomon     Photographs by John Gessner

Time was, before video games and apps, every kid wanted a tree house — a place to daydream, to pretend, to lick drippy popsicles on a summer evening. It’s not too late.

John Lennon built a beauty in Hollywood. Winston Churchill had one constructed on his estate, for the grandchildren. And, for $115 — less than the rack rate at a covey of hotels and motels — four people can stay in a little gem overlooking Lake Pinehurst, with a full magazine-worthy kitchen plus two bedrooms, a loft, a living/dining area, a bath and a half, three TVs, WiFi, heat, AC, a wraparound deck and built-in relaxation.

Sound like an infomercial? More like a PSA (public service announcement), since who isn’t soothed by a water view while greeting squirrels eyeball to eyeball?

From a distance, these octagons on stilts — they’re not actually attached to trees — resemble intergalactic pods preparing to blast off for home. Surely, everybody who has driven by this cluster on the way to Lake Pinehurst wonders what lies within.

The curiosity may be primordial. Earliest humanoids could well have slept in trees, unreachable by wild animals — though any archeological evidence of it would never have survived. Stilted structures, for storage and for living, were built in the Amazon region, all through the Indo-Pacific and in Africa. In the Arctic, stilts raise houses above the permafrost. And beach houses crowding the seashore and barrier islands up and down the Atlantic coastline have more stilts than YouTube has videos. You can find resort clusters in the Blue Ridge Mountains lifted off the ground and Rocky Mountain ski-in, ski-out chalets built into snow-packed slopes.

Backyard tree houses can be status symbols for artists, poets, philosophers and wealthy Peter Pans. An International Tree House Architecture Competition draws wild entries from Denmark to Switzerland, France to Long Island, New York.

Tree houses as vacation properties gained popularity in the 1970s — the Diamondhead era in Pinehurst — and were incorporated as part of the new lake community near the No. 3 course. The houses, ordered from catalogs (including Sears), arrived as kits to be assembled on-site. Their unusual shapes provoked mixed reactions from village traditionalists. Most of the original units have been remodeled, often glamorized beyond recognition. Some are owner-occupied seasonal vacation homes. Others are investment properties rented to golfers, wedding guests, family reunion out-of-towners, and businessfolk on retreat through Airbnb, Vrbo and local agents, including Sandhills Rentals.

Perfect, when the in-laws visit — but do advise them to bring sensible shoes, because this house-on-stilts rises nearly 20 feet, accessed by an exterior stairway.

Inside, the scale of this example in the Brae Burn enclave, at 800 square feet, feels compact except for the generous kitchen, with granite countertops, a full-sized fridge, built-in cooktop and oven, dishwasher, microwave, breakfast bar with adjoining dining table seating six, facing a living room with sofa and upholstered side chairs. Two bedrooms sleep four. Between the kitchen and sitting area, a desk accommodates the ubiquitous laptop. With COVID still restricting office attendance, what’s not to like about a tranquil, private work getaway?

The floors are easy-clean stained bamboo. Furnishings throughout blend a soothing grassy green with cream upholstery and dark woods. Tableware and linens are high quality. Curtains offer privacy since most of the tree houses are built in clusters. Every inch appears tasteful, spotless, well-maintained.

For pretty obvious reasons, barbecue grills are not allowed on the decks. As consolation, this tree house comes with a kayak, facilitating an escape when the tigers and gorillas drop by for appetizers.

Tree House

A tree house, a free house,

A secret you and me house,

A high up in the leafy branches

Cozy as can be house.

A street house, a neat house,

Be sure and wipe your feet house

Is not my kind of house at all —

Let’s go live in a tree house.

                   — Shel Silverstein  PS

The Omnivorous Reader

Mastering the Monsters

A sci-fi novel for our surreal world

By Anne Blythe

If the past couple of years have proven anything, it’s to expect the unexpected.

We’ve battled a virus that has shown its ability to morph and shape-shift. Some people accepted it as real. Others chose not to believe.

The world imagined by Cadwell Turnbull, a creative writing professor at N.C. State University, in his latest work of fiction, No Gods, No Monsters, gives us a similar choice.

There are monsters, gods and humans living together and living apart throughout his book. They force readers to reconsider what is real and what is not, to look at others with a sense that they might be more like you than different — or more different than you know.

Introduced as the first in a trilogy, No Gods, No Monsters opens with a professor sitting at a restaurant in Cameron Village in Raleigh, saying goodbye to his friend Tanya, and his academic life. As Tanya sits across from him, he tells her he has decided to leave his job and go home to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands (Turnbull’s childhood home), where the professor has unresolved issues over the death of his brother.

Initially, we don’t know the professor’s name or how he’s connected to the characters in the pages ahead. He drops in and out of chapters, sometimes interjecting a jarring and puzzling voice, leaving readers to wonder who he really is and how the many storylines that Turnbull is juggling will come together.

Along the way, we meet a wild variety of characters: bookstore workers who can turn into werewolves; a character named Dragon (a child who can sprout wings and fly); a senator from the Virgin Islands who can become a dog; an invisible sibling; a witch; and more. It’s not until the very end that we can see the novel’s worlds merging. Even then, much remains unanswered, leaving readers to wonder what the next book in the trilogy has in store.

“I’m going to tell you a story,” the narrator says. “And like so many stories, it begins with a body.”

That body belongs to Lincoln, a naked Black man, dead in the street, shot by police.

Laina, Lincoln’s sister, picks up the storytelling. We learn from her that Lincoln had been hooked on drugs and living on the streets, estranged from his family.

At first, it might seem as if this will be another story about an unarmed Black man being shot by police. While that theme pulses through the book, we quickly find out that this story is going to be different.

Suppressed bodycam footage surfaces, and with its release comes a tale of monsters, werewolves and gods on Earth and beyond.

Initially, Laina is in disbelief as she watches the bodycam footage of her brother’s shooting. It’s dark at first, difficult to make anything out. Then she hears the cop say, “I see it. It’s big.”

Then she sees the creature, too. It’s doglike, she says, but “bigger than doglike.” It snarls at the cop and he fires his gun. His target falls to the ground.

As residents from the houses along the street come out to see the aftermath of the shooting, the creature the cop saw lunging at him has become simply a naked man, left slain between two cars.

“I don’t understand,” the cop says.

The bodycam shows that Laina’s brother, at least for a moment, was a werewolf. Turnbull calls that moment “the Fracture.” It’s the instant when someone’s world opens to the realization that monsters are among them. Some people take notice. Others look away.

“Most people outgrew true belief in monsters by adulthood, but even adults knew not to go outside at night during a power outage, go past a certain house or respond to whispers in the dark,” the senator from St. Thomas tells us after we meet her in the Virgin Islands. “Monsters existed in the liminal space of half-belief and practical superstition. Even folks who claimed not to believe in God knew not to tempt devils. Superstition allowed a certain kind of freedom, allowed a certain kind of power.”

The arc of the story can be disjointed at times, adding a touch of mystery, as readers go on a spellbinding journey from North Carolina to Massachusetts to the U.S. Virgin Islands and places in between.

The characters are good and evil, lovable and at times abominable. We see humans transform into werewolves as they shed their clothes and go on four-legged runs in the woods, chasing squirrels and other small critters. We meet a woman who drinks the blood of her sister and can pull her skin off and on. Others lead mundane lives while battling monsters of their own.

Many of these characters eventually come together at a monster march, depicted as a kind of otherworldly Black Lives Matter rally when a large crowd marches through the Boston streets after Lincoln’s death, chanting, “No gods, no monsters!”

By using the sci-fi genre, Turnbull tempts his readers to explore tough and touchy topics such as drug addiction, police shootings, societal divisions and the monsters that can be created when neither side explores the motivation of the other.

Laina introduces us to Ridley, her asexual, transgender, anarchist husband who moved from Harrisonburg, Virginia, where his parents still live, to Massachusetts to open a co-op bookstore. We meet Rebecca, Laina’s girlfriend, who knew Lincoln, and Sarah, her housemate. Both Rebecca and Sarah have the ability to transform into sturdy-legged werewolves.

Throughout Turnbull’s book, we end up wondering whether monsters are people or people are monsters.

“You think monsters are dangerous? Or you think people who believe in them are? Which one? Both?” Sarah asks Ridley after he tells her he might not go to the monster march in Boston because he’s worried about the potential for violence.

“People need to be protected, too,” Ridley tells Sarah.

The book tugs and pulls its characters through inner wars as they deal with a fractured world around them and their own splintered lives. At one point, Ridley sees the Earth open up below a circle of glowing red ants while on a retreat at a collective peanut farm in Virginia. He tumbles into an abyss with monsters so jarring that he stays mum about his experience. What are the consequences of speaking out or the cost of staying silent?

Turnbull’s complex story takes readers across the surface of the Earth and into the many dimensions of the mind as his characters carom through a multitude of societies — some secret from long ago, some modern and seemingly ordinary but very destructive.

Even for people not typically drawn to sci-fi or fantasy novels, settling in with this story is well worth it.  PS

Anne Blythe has been a reporter in North Carolina for more than three decades. She has covered city halls, higher education, the courts, crime, hurricanes, ice storms, droughts, floods, college sports, health care and many wonderful characters who make this state such an interesting place.